"Capturing and leveraging the phenomenology of musical and reading experiences in data-driven Digital Humanities”

## Abstract
A great deal of research effort in data semantics focuses on the ontology of beings, i.e. on capturing, categorising and modelling worldly things. What benefits the most from it is the representation of entities that are tangible or are otherwise easy to catalogue. As the interest in generating and using structured data grows across domains, there is an arising need for models of the phenomenology of things. Digital Humanities in particular are concerned with capturing various degrees of events, effects on human consciousness, and experience. Music history and literature are prominent domains showing such interest: how can one represent a musician's response to hearing their own composition being played by others? Can we make it possible to infer how the context in which a book is read, or the state of the book itself, influences the corresponding experience? Has ontological modelling gone far enough in capturing the intangible while still keeping the resulting data usable? This talk will elaborate on the state of the art in research and technology for representing the semantics of experiential responses and other phenomena, and provide insights as to the possible novel directions towards a vision of Linked Digital Humanities.

## Speaker's Biography
Alessandro Adamou is a Research Fellow at the Data Science Institute, NUI Galway. He has previously worked as a Research Assistant an ISTC-CNR, Italy and a Research Associate at The Open University, UK. His core research interests are in the Semantic Web, the lifecycle of data and formal knowledge, and how to use them to harmonise data access across several domains. Some application domains he works on are Digital Humanities, Smart Cities, education and self-directed learning. Between 2013 and 2017, Alessandro was the lead developer and knowledge engineer of the Listening Experience Database, a crowd-sourced Linked Data resource in music history, and still collaborates with research communities on semantic data for music and literature. Alessandro is also co-organiser and chair of the WHiSe (Humanities in the Semantic Web) workshop series that is co-located with the largest conferences in the Semantic Web.