What is Pliny?
Welcome to the Pliny project homepage.
The Pliny project was primarily active from 2005 to 2015, and during that time aimed to promote some thinking that would look broadly at the provision of tools to support what I called “traditional” humanities scholarship. One of its products was a piece of software, also called Pliny, which facilitated note-taking and annotation – a key element of Humanities research for many scholars. It went further than this, however, by providing a set of facilities which allowed its user to integrate these initial notes into a representation of an evolving personal interpretation – perhaps one of the key goals of scholarly research. Some recent work since 2015 has taken a further step to focus on models for how materials created in Pliny could most effectively facilitate the writing of a research article.
Further information about the project can be found at Pliny's GitHub repository, on its associated wiki page. The publications tab showing here (below) contains a list of publications that the Pliny project generated.
Pliny was free software, but is no longer available. Although I keep a personal operating copy of Pliny for personal use, keeping it alive and working as an operating environment for others stopped being practical some time ago. Nonetheless, if you are interesting in trying out Pliny, get in touch with me and I’d be glad to set you up with a working version of the software. In addition, the code (in Java) is open-source and is available from GitHub at https://github.com/johnBradley501/pliny-repo
If you'd like to comment on Pliny, please get in touch with me at my email address john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk.
Why "Pliny"?
Why is this project and software called Pliny? As will become evident from the rest of this website, the Pliny project was about some of the impacts that could arise from the digital handling of notetaking. In this light, I am beholden to Willard McCarty for the name, who pointed me at Pliny the Elder -- an individual who was famous in classical Roman times as someone who expressed his curiosity about all things by constantly recording notes about them. Apparently, he seems to have written quite a few works (Michel Barran says the number of works is 75 in his article about Pliny in Eric Weisstein's World of Biography), but the only one to survive is his encyclopaedic Historia Naturalis, which orders and presents his collected notes under a large number of topics. It is perhaps characteristic of his curiosity that he collapsed and died while travelling to see Vesuvius first-hand (and to rescue friends) during its eruption in 79 C.E.
Looking further into Pliny
Pliny software is built in Java with the Eclipse RCP platform.
- Please contact john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk if you are interested in getting a runnable version for yourself.
- Pliny's code is available from GitHub at https://github.com/johnBradley501/pliny-repo
- There is considerable more about Pliny at it's wiki at https://github.com/johnBradley501/pliny-repo/wiki
- The Pliny project has generated a number of publications. See a list of them under the "Publications" tag below.
Publications
Pliny code is in GitHub, and the wiki there describes Pliny in some detail.
- Pliny-repo: the GitHub wiki pages.
The following academic articles and posters have been published that explain more about Pliny and the ideas behind it:
- Bradley, John (2006). "A Response to the B2C 'Cultural Hegemony' in Humanities Computing : Pliny". Peer reviewed poster for Digital Humanities Conference 2006. Paris: Sorbonne. (winner of first prize for best poster at DH 2006: Paris).
- Bradley, John (2007). "Pliny: Making a contribution; Modularity, Integration and Collaboration between Tools in Pliny". Peer reviewed poster for Digital Humanities Conference 2007. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois.
- Bradley, John (2008). "Pliny: A model for digital support of scholarship". In Journal of Digital Information (JoDI). Texas A&M University. Vol 9, No 1 (formally No 26).
- Bradley, John (2008). "Thinking about Interpretation: Pliny and Scholarship in the Humanities". In Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol. 23 No, 3, 2008, pp. 263-79. doi: 10.1093/llc/fqn021. A preprint version is here.
- Bradley, John (2008). "Playing together: modular tools and Pliny". draft of paper, given at DH 2008 (University of Oulu, Finland), June 2008.
- John Bradley (2008). "Pliny - A Tool for the Digital Humanities". Interview Podcast with Gerry Bayne as interviewer. In Educause Connect. December 2008.
- Bradley, John (2009). "Can Pliny be one of the muses?". Peer reviewed poster for Digital Humanities Conference 2009. University of Maryland.
- Bradley, John (2010). Pliny: Four Perspectives. Presentation given in the University Illinois GSLIS "Metadata roundtable", 21 July, 2010.
- Bradley, John and Timothy Hill (2011). When WordHoard met Pliny: breaking down of interaction silos between applications. Peer reviewed poster for Digital Humanities Conference 2011, Stanford University, June 19-22, 2011.
- Bradley, John and Michele Pasin (2012). Annotation and Ontology in most Humanities research: accommodating a more informal interpretation context. Abstract of paper given at the NeDiMaH workshop, DH2012, Hamburg, July 2012.
- Bradley, John (2012). Towards a Richer Sense of Digital Annotation: Moving Beyond a "Media" Orientation of the Annotation of Digital Objects. Digital Humanities Quarterly 2012: 6.2
- Bradley, John and Michele Pasin (2013). Fitting Personal Interpretations with the Semantic Web. Presentation sides and notes for paper given at DH2013, University of Nebraska, 18 July, 2013
- Bradley, John (2015). “Annotation and Scholarship: how might they connect in a digital world?” Invited keynote presentation in DARIAH workshop Practices and Context in Contemporary Annotation Activities. University of Hamburg, 29 October, 2015.
- Bradley, John and Michele Pasin (2017). Fitting Personal Interpretations with the Semantic Web: lessons learned from Pliny. Published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol 2017.11.1. Derived in part from DH2013 paper, above.
Awards
Pliny was one of the projects awarded some funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation MATC 2008 competition. The money has made it possible to explore some of what was called Pliny's second agenda: to explore how the Pliny structures could interact with other pieces of software that are useful for Humanities research. To this end, the major piece of work was exploring how Pliny could fit with Northwestern University's WordHoard platform. To see what that is and what was done, please visit the site on the GitHub wiki that entitled Pliny and WordHoard. I'd like to thank the Mellon Foundation for running the MATC competition, and the judges who found Pliny interesting enough to allot it some funds,
Pliny's first announcement, a poster at the DH Paris conference at the Sorbonne in 2006, was awarded first prize for best poster of the conference.
Screenshots
Much of the Pliny project work involved building software to demonstrate and explore the basic ideas behind the project itself: what aspects of humanities scholarship could benefit from computing support? Thus, a few screen shots will give some idea of what Pliny was about.
First, during the early phases of the project Pliny was one of the first pieces of work to demonstrate how digital annotation, focusing on how annotation was currently being done in traditional scholarship and could usefully be represented digitally. Here one can see Pliny being used to annotate an image -- in this case the frontispiece of Giambattista Vico's New Science. Pliny "out of the box" also supported the digital annotation of web pages and PDF files, and provided support for notetaking of non-digital objects like printed books.
More information about the early focus on annotation and notetaking and how, from Pliny's perspective, these digital acts could fit with the broader work of digital scholarship can be found in Bradley 2006, 2008 and 2008a.
As a part of the Pliny project, there was some thought put into considering what digital annotation of this kind was for. How did it support subsequent scholarly research work? As a consequence, Pliny contained mechanisms that enabled its user to fit annotations into an evolving interpretative structure. Here is an example of the kind of thing Pliny could support: the structures here assisted the user in sorting out a perspective on the uses to which 2D space was put in research:
The connection between Pliny and scholarly interpretation continued throughout the project. See an early discussion in Bradley 2008 (or the preprint), and some later ideas, centered on interpretation as process, in Bradley and Pasin 2017.
A little later in the project the focus shifted to how the ideas about scholarship support that were a part of Pliny could usefully fit with other digital tools and media beyond just basic webpages, digital images and PDF files. Demonstration tools were built for Pliny annotation of Google Maps, for the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection API, and (shown here) Northwestern University's WordHoard software:
Thoughts about how Pliny demonstrated a useful way to think about tool integration in the context of annotation and scholarly research can be found at Bradley 2007, Bradley 2008b, Bradley and Hill 2011 and Bradley 2012.
Later work on the Pliny project explored how Semantic Web technologies might apply to Pliny's representation of an understanding of scholarship in the humanities. Pliny tools were created not only to support the expression of Pliny material into RDF, but also to explore how Semantic Web sites like triple stores could, themselves, be made into objects for scholarly thinking and annotation:
More can be seen about this at Bradley and Pasin 2012 and 2017.
The Pliny project developed a plausible model of how a digital form of traditional scholarly annotation could be integrated into a unified environment that would support a range of humanities research aspects: including developing ideas, and writing about them. The most recent work in the project involves working to enhance the support for scholarly writing: developing a prototype platform which would help a Pliny user draw on material stored in Pliny to write an article. A screen shot for this prototype tool is shown here:
There have been no publications as of yet about this aspect of the work, but some early thinking about scholarly writing and Pliny can be found at Bradley 2009.
Publications
Pliny code is in GitHub, and the wiki there describes Pliny in some detail.
- Pliny-repo: the GitHub wiki pages.
The following academic articles and posters have been published that explain more about Pliny and the ideas behind it:
- Bradley, John (2006). "A Response to the B2C 'Cultural Hegemony' in Humanities Computing : Pliny". Peer reviewed poster for Digital Humanities Conference 2006. Paris: Sorbonne. (winner of first prize for best poster at DH 2006: Paris).
- Bradley, John (2007). "Pliny: Making a contribution; Modularity, Integration and Collaboration between Tools in Pliny". Peer reviewed poster for Digital Humanities Conference 2007. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois.
- Bradley, John (2008). "Pliny: A model for digital support of scholarship". In Journal of Digital Information (JoDI). Texas A&M University. Vol 9, No 1 (formally No 26).
- Bradley, John (2008). "Thinking about Interpretation: Pliny and Scholarship in the Humanities". In Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol. 23 No, 3, 2008, pp. 263-79. doi: 10.1093/llc/fqn021. A preprint version is here.
- Bradley, John (2008). "Playing together: modular tools and Pliny". draft of paper, given at DH 2008 (University of Oulu, Finland), June 2008.
- John Bradley (2008). "Pliny - A Tool for the Digital Humanities". Interview Podcast with Gerry Bayne as interviewer. In Educause Connect. December 2008.
- Bradley, John (2009). "Can Pliny be one of the muses?". Peer reviewed poster for Digital Humanities Conference 2009. University of Maryland.
- Bradley, John (2010). Pliny: Four Perspectives. Presentation given in the University Illinois GSLIS "Metadata roundtable", 21 July, 2010.
- Bradley, John and Timothy Hill (2011). When WordHoard met Pliny: breaking down of interaction silos between applications. Peer reviewed poster for Digital Humanities Conference 2011, Stanford University, June 19-22, 2011.
- Bradley, John and Michele Pasin (2012). Annotation and Ontology in most Humanities research: accommodating a more informal interpretation context. Abstract of paper given at the NeDiMaH workshop, DH2012, Hamburg, July 2012.
- Bradley, John (2012). Towards a Richer Sense of Digital Annotation: Moving Beyond a "Media" Orientation of the Annotation of Digital Objects. Digital Humanities Quarterly 2012: 6.2
- Bradley, John and Michele Pasin (2013). Fitting Personal Interpretations with the Semantic Web. Presentation sides and notes for paper given at DH2013, University of Nebraska, 18 July, 2013
- Bradley, John (2015). “Annotation and Scholarship: how might they connect in a digital world?” Invited keynote presentation in DARIAH workshop Practices and Context in Contemporary Annotation Activities. University of Hamburg, 29 October, 2015.
- Bradley, John and Michele Pasin (2017). Fitting Personal Interpretations with the Semantic Web: lessons learned from Pliny. Published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol 2017.11.1. Derived in part from DH2013 paper, above.
Awards
Pliny was one of the projects awarded some funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation MATC 2008 competition. The money has made it possible to explore some of what was called Pliny's second agenda: to explore how the Pliny structures could interact with other pieces of software that are useful for Humanities research. To this end, the major piece of work was exploring how Pliny could fit with Northwestern University's WordHoard platform. To see what that is and what was done, please visit the site on the GitHub wiki that entitled Pliny and WordHoard. I'd like to thank the Mellon Foundation for running the MATC competition, and the judges who found Pliny interesting enough to allot it some funds,
Pliny's first announcement, a poster at the DH Paris conference at the Sorbonne in 2006, was awarded first prize for best poster of the conference.
Screenshots
Much of the Pliny project work involved building software to demonstrate and explore the basic ideas behind the project itself: what aspects of humanities scholarship could benefit from computing support? Thus, a few screen shots will give some idea of what Pliny was about.
First, during the early phases of the project Pliny was one of the first pieces of work to demonstrate how digital annotation, focusing on how annotation was currently being done in traditional scholarship and could usefully be represented digitally. Here one can see Pliny being used to annotate an image -- in this case the frontispiece of Giambattista Vico's New Science. Pliny "out of the box" also supported the digital annotation of web pages and PDF files, and provided support for notetaking of non-digital objects like printed books.
More information about the early focus on annotation and notetaking and how, from Pliny's perspective, these digital acts could fit with the broader work of digital scholarship can be found in Bradley 2006, 2008 and 2008a.
As a part of the Pliny project, there was some thought put into considering what digital annotation of this kind was for. How did it support subsequent scholarly research work? As a consequence, Pliny contained mechanisms that enabled its user to fit annotations into an evolving interpretative structure. Here is an example of the kind of thing Pliny could support: the structures here assisted the user in sorting out a perspective on the uses to which 2D space was put in research:
The connection between Pliny and scholarly interpretation continued throughout the project. See an early discussion in Bradley 2008 (or the preprint), and some later ideas, centered on interpretation as process, in Bradley and Pasin 2017.
A little later in the project the focus shifted to how the ideas about scholarship support that were a part of Pliny could usefully fit with other digital tools and media beyond just basic webpages, digital images and PDF files. Demonstration tools were built for Pliny annotation of Google Maps, for the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection API, and (shown here) Northwestern University's WordHoard software:
Thoughts about how Pliny demonstrated a useful way to think about tool integration in the context of annotation and scholarly research can be found at Bradley 2007, Bradley 2008b, Bradley and Hill 2011 and Bradley 2012.
Later work on the Pliny project explored how Semantic Web technologies might apply to Pliny's representation of an understanding of scholarship in the humanities. Pliny tools were created not only to support the expression of Pliny material into RDF, but also to explore how Semantic Web sites like triple stores could, themselves, be made into objects for scholarly thinking and annotation:
More can be seen about this at Bradley and Pasin 2012 and 2017.
The Pliny project developed a plausible model of how a digital form of traditional scholarly annotation could be integrated into a unified environment that would support a range of humanities research aspects: including developing ideas, and writing about them. The most recent work in the project involves working to enhance the support for scholarly writing: developing a prototype platform which would help a Pliny user draw on material stored in Pliny to write an article. A screen shot for this prototype tool is shown here:
There have been no publications as of yet about this aspect of the work, but some early thinking about scholarly writing and Pliny can be found at Bradley 2009.
Contact us
John Bradley can be contacted about Pliny at john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk