DATA MODELING FOR MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The relationship between cultural heritage, digital technologies and visual models involves an increasingly wide area of research, oriented towards the renewal of archives and museums for the preservation and promotion of culture. Recent research activities are the result of the progressive strengthening of digital technologies and the needs of a new generation of “digital” users, which requires museums to update their means of communication using Semantic Web languages and technologies shaped by a social conceptualization of a graph-based representation of information.</p><p>The growth of several digitized heritage collections increases the necessity of proper methodologies to develop a structured system able to access to these collections and the large amount of data, metadata and paradata related to the digitized objects in a structured and organized way, defining a set of collection information models (CIM), that considers not only the digitizing process but also the data collection process, layered by an Upper Ontology level structure, based on CIDOC-CRM.</p>

Scientific Discovery in Deep Social Space: Sociology without Borders

Globalization affords an excellent opportunity to develop a genuinely universal, scientific sociology. In recent decades, the politicization of the discipline has undermined the central mission of sociology: scientific discovery and explanation. The paper identifies several intellectual shifts that will facilitate expansion and communication in an emerging global village of sociological analysts: 1) breaking with classical sociology to build upon innovative theoretical ideas; 2) eliminating the ideological and normative focus that plagues much contemporary sociology; 3) moving beyond teleological approaches to scientific explanation; 4) embracing a distinctively “social” conceptualization of sociology’s subject matter; and 5) eliminating nationalistic disciplinary boundaries and the attendant parochialism that obscures the search for universal principles of social behaviour. The final section of the paper emphasizes the internationalization of sociology, reorganized along epistemological lines. Those scholars whose research focuses on observable variations in social behaviour occupy an intellectual location quite distinct from those who place their politics at the centre of their social analyses, focus on the meanings that individuals attach to their experiences, or reject science altogether as a valid form of knowledge building. Rather than continue fruitless dialogues with those who have different objectives with their work, sociological analysts are invited to join a global village of scientists who examine the full range of cases that reflect purely social behaviour, drawing upon the dimensions of social space or networks of resource flows that are most relevant to their general explanations. Conceptualized this way, sociology becomes a global science no longer handicapped by individualistic theories or nationalistic political fervour. The net result is the development of a genuine “sociology without borders” aimed at realizing the discipline’s fullest scientific potential. Résumé. La mondialisation fournit un excellent prétexte au développement d’une sociologie véritablement universelle et scientifique. Durant les dernières décennies, la politisation de la sociologie a conduit au déclin de la mission centrale propre à cette discipline, celle de découverte scientifique et de recherche d’explications. Cet article identifie plusieurs changements intellectuels qui visent à faciliter l’expansion et la communication d’une telle science dans un village planétaire d’analystes sociologiques en émergence: 1) Rompre avec la sociologie classique afin de construire des théories sociologiques innovantes; 2) Éliminer la concentration idéologique et normative qui caractérise en grande partie les recherches sociologiques actuelles; 3) Dépasser les approches téléologiques et les remplacer par des explications scientifiques; 4) Conceptualiser la matière de la sociologie en termes clairement «sociaux» 5) Enfin, éliminer les frontières disciplinaires nationalistes et l’esprit de clocher qui leur est corollaire, car ils nuisent à la recherche de principes universels gouvernant le comportement social. La dernière section de l’article met l’emphase sur l’internationalisation d’une sociologie réorganisée selon des schèmes épistémologiques. Les spécialistes dont les recherches se concentrent sur des variations observables dans le comportement social ont une position intellectuelle bien distincte de ceux qui placent leurs opinions politiques au centre de leurs analyses sociales, se concentrent sur les significations que les individus attachent à leurs expériences ou encore nient à la science toute validité à fonder un savoir. Plutôt que de continuer un dialogue stérile avec ceux qui ont des objectifs différents pour leur travail, les sociologues sont invités à se joindre au village planétaire des scientifiques qui examinent l’ensemble des cas renvoyant à un comportement purement social. Il s’agit d’établir les dimensions de l’espace social ou les mécanismes des flux de ressources les plus pertinents pour fournir des explications générales. Ainsi conceptualisée, la sociologie n’est plus entravée par des théories individuelles ou des ferveurs politiques nationalistes et elle a le potentiel de devenir une science mondiale. Le résultat en sera le développement d’une véritable «sociologie sans frontières» apte à réaliser le potentiel scientifique maximum de la discipline.

Max Weber and the Unity of Normative and Empirical Theory

Although Max Weber is often invoked as an authority to justify the distinction between ‘normative’ and ‘empirical’ theory, both his methodological and theoretical work call into question any such distinction. All specifically social or collective concepts, Weber argued, are derived from the subjective commitments of the researcher. It is impossible for such concepts to be ‘objectively’ valid. In the first part of this essay, Weber's analysis of the role of values in the formation of collective concepts is discussed, as well as the sense in which he believed that social scientific knowledge could be objectively valid in spite of the normative nature of social conceptualization. The second part will demonstrate the normative basis of Weber's own social theory, and its consequent political prescriptions.