Some observations on developments towards the Semantic Web for Wittgenstein scholarship
The nature of Wittgenstein's Nachlass makes it perhaps particularly well suited for the development of digital tools enabling scholars to navigate (browse, search, reference) a vast collection of material "criss cross in every direction" in an informed and efficient manner. (The Bergen Electronic Edition of the Nachlass is an example of such a tool. The advantage of an online digital platform is being able to do so on different hardware and software systems whenand wherever. And an advantage of Open Access, Open Source solutions is that these resources are available for free and the underlying code and datasets open to scrutiny by all (see e.g. Wittgenstein Source and the Agora platform) A valuable addition to current technology will be lemmatized searching, enabling search for different forms of terms across both the English and German. Moreover, the development of semantically driven tools promises opportunities, yet presents challenges. 1. A possible future scenario? Imagine a future scholar doing research on, say, Wittgenstein's Brown Book. Having read the Blackwell paperback edition thoroughly, filling its margins with pencilled notes she now wishes to systematize them into a study of the notion of "grammar" within the Brown Book as well as its relation to the remaining Nachlass. She accesses the interactive digital Wittgenstein portal and instructs her computer to run a search for all occurrences of "grammar" and its derivates in the Brown Book. Using an integrated tool she annotates the resulting relevant remarks and annotates them with her selected notes. Meanwhile a message pops up on the screen indicating additional information potentially relevant to her: "My information suggests that the Brown Book, TS 310, is related to the German MS115, "Eine philosophische Betrachtung" Would you like me to include results for that as well?" The scholar replies, "Yes, and if applicable, please give me an overview of instances where the one version has an occurrence of the concept of 'grammar' while the other does not in the matching remarks, both from the English to the German and vice versa." Making particular note of one of the results, she continues, "I would like to see which notes other scholars have made on this remark." "Would you like to see results both for the primary source and from secondary literature?" the computer asks. "Annotations of the primary source will do for now" she replies. She also decides to narrow down her selection to notes from those who have argued for a contrast between the occurrences in the Brown Book and elsewhere in the Nachlass. "This should be plenty for now I'll deal with the arguments for continuity later on" she says to herself, making a mental note. (Our example is inspired by Szeltner 2013. 2. Browsing and searching Wittgenstein sources today While some of this is possible already, the reality of today is admittedly far more mundane and irksome than in the above description. Having said that, the Wittgenstein scholar interested in utilizing digital or online tools already has helpful opportunities at her disposal, and additional ones are not far off. After more than a decade since its publication the Bergen Electronic Edition is still a comparably powerful application. Featuring close to the entire Nachlass and a varied set of fine tuned search functions allowing for detailed access to all 20,000 pages, for the "digital Wittgenstein scholar" it still presents a tool the likes of which are largely unavailable to most other scholars in the humanities. It is undoubtedly a useful application: Consider for instance Peter Hacker's report on his use of it in his revised edition of the commentary volumes on the Philosophical Investigations (Hacker 2009, p. xi) Now, with the publication of the Bergen edition of the Nachlass in electronic form, and the consequent availability of a search engine, I have endeavoured to give all the relevant sources of a given section in the table of sources annexed to each introduction to a chapter of exegesis. However, the BEE in its current shape does face challenges due to technological development and compatibility issues brought with it. Fortunately, the underlying datasets maintained by the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen are not proprietary and so lend themselves easily to publication on the web. The next logical step in such a development, therefore, is making these resources available online along with supplementary functionality for powerful navigation (see Pichler 2010) Indeed, parts of the Nachlass were published online on http:/www.wittgensteinsource.org in 2009 (see also Pichler al. 2012 and Pichler Smith 2013) While it does not (yet) feature the search capabilities of the BEE, it does offer 5,000 pages available in a browser friendly environment. And while it does not represent a complete edition of Wittgenstein's work, it does have value in making parts of the Nachlass available Open Access (contrary to both the BEE and the Intelex Past Masters edition) It also represents a fruitful resource for joint collaboration with several other projects: a Munich group around Max Hadersbeck (see Hadersbeck et al. 2012 and http:/wittfind.cis.uni muenchen.de/ develops solutions for "lemmatized" searching; the Agora project (http:/www.projectagora.org/ creates online solutions for the publication of secondary (textual and audio visual) Wittgenstein sources; and in connection with a range of digital library platforms Net7 are developing the online annotation tool Pundit (http:/thepund.it/ Moreover, the Brown Book was chosen as the data set for the ongoing "Wittgenstein incubator" experiment (http:/dm2e.eu/newsletter march2013/ within which both philosophers and computer scientists have joined in order to work with tools for online Wittgenstein research. When sufficiently developed and brought together these efforts will produce a helpful digital research environment for the Wittgenstein scholar. The scholar in the introductory example wants to study the notion of "grammar" in Wittgenstein's Nachlass, the Brown Book in particular. Today, the Brown Book material is available in its entirety on Wittgenstein Source in both its English (TS310) and German (MS 115, second part) versions. For "our" scholar, one important task will consist in finding the occurrences of the term "grammar" and its derivates. A truncated search for "gramma*" will yield, among results from other parts of the Nachlass, all occurrences of "grammar" in TS 310 or "Grammatik" in MS 115 and their different grammatical forms. For this task, then, a standard search function as we know it from e.g. current browsers will do well enough. Due to the simple fact that "grammar" and its different forms are all covered by "gramma*" in both English and German, a lemmatized search for that term would add little; but if she were to search for other, related terms, e.g. "sprechen" a truncated search would leave out relevant results, while a lemmatized search for the same word would produce a list also including inflections like "gesprochen" Fig. 1: Screenshot of lemmatized search for "sprechen" in the Big Typescript. But there is also the issue of delimitation here: We do want all the relevant results, but we might also want to leave out those considered irrelevant; and we might want to be guided towards related concepts. Consider if we were to search for instances of 'thinking' or 'learning' Here, there would be a number of variants in both English and German, some which would be philosophically relevant, others not. The very first sentence of the Brown Book reads like this: "Augustine, in describing his learning of language, says that he was taught to speak by learning the names of things." (http:/www.wittgensteinsource.org/Ts 310,1[1]_n; our emphases) Here we have instances of 'learning' which will presumably be philosophically relevant, and we also have an instance of the related concept of 'teaching' In another remark a bit later on (http:/www.wittgensteinsource.org/Ts310,1[2]et2[1]_n) Wittgenstein introduces the concept of 'training' In interpreting Wittgenstein these concepts seldom go one without the other. In the last sentence of the first paragraph, "[Augustine] does not primarily think of such words as "today" "not" "but" "perhaps" (our emphasis) however, we have an instance of 'thinking' which is probably not as relevant for a study of the philosophical concept of thinking in Wittgenstein. If all "philosophical instances" of English or German terms expressing central concepts like 'thinking' 'learning' 'understanding' 'teaching' and so on were "tagged" or "marked up" as such, this would represent a navigational function of a semantic nature. Fig. 2: Screenshot showing Wittgenstein Source within the SwickyNotes annotation tool. The contextual graph shows TS 310,147[3]et148[1] selected as the central "node" Here we see several "relations" between the remark and other nodes, among them the concept of thinking. Semantic search: benefits and challenges We have proceeded from simple string search to lemmatized search and, ultimately, reached semantic search. A fully fleshed "Semantic Web" tool would permit the computer to make the sort of suggestions we introduced this paper with. The idea of "semantic" navigation is the upshot of a vision proposed by the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee (2001) Roughly, the idea is that while the WWW connects web pages to each other, a Semantic Web will interconnect (simple) data (within or between those pages) at a much more granulated level. Taken to its conclusion, a future Semantic Web would amount to one large database where all data can be connected to each other and thereby queried. (Berners Lee termed it the "Giant Global Graph" (ibid. imagine an unlimited extension of the graph in figure 2 above. Such interconnection is to be achieved by "tagging" or "marking up" resources (text, pictures