Articles

Tracing Interpretation: A Human-in-the-Loop Workflow for Distilling Conceptual Systems from Architectural Theory Writings


Abstract


The reconstruction of conceptual systems emerging from architectural theoretical writings is traditionally based on the interpretive reading of sources. These writings are fundamental for understanding the cultural identity of a historic building. However, this knowledge is expressed in a discursive, often implicit, and unstructured form. Scholars often mentally reconstruct the relationships between concepts, then express them in narrative form. This study proposes a human-in-the-loop workflow to trace, as much as possible, some aspects of the interpretive process and model these distilled conceptual structures. Starting from a research question born from the observation of some recurring clues during the first reading of the sources, computational corpus analysis helps identify lexical signals, which are subsequently interpreted through close reading, traced through TEI encoding, and formalized in RDF to make conceptual relationships explicit.


Keywords


Quantitative Text Analysis; Interpretation; RDF; Knowledge Graph; Semantic Graph; TEI Encoding; Human-In-The-Loop;

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2423/i22394303v16n1p129

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