Abstract: A wealth of humanities resources is available on the world wide web. Access to these resources remains hampered, however, by the absence of sophisticated tools for aggregating, searching, and navigating the various digital collections. As the resources grow, we must also improve our ability to represent their contents in meaningful ways accessible to novices, experts, and machines. Due to the increased scale and dynamic nature of digital humanities resources, traditional methods of gathering and organizing metacontent are too resource- intensive and inefficient to be practicable. More sophisticated techniques of generating metacontent from large, asynchronously- updated corpora are required. The NEH-funded Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project combines human expertise and software analysis to generate a “dynamic ontology” for the domain of philosophy. What can one do with the InPhO? I will describe and demo some current and future applications that we are developing over the next two years with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Biography: Colin Allen, holds a B.A. in philosophy from University College London and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Los Angeles where he also did graduate work in computer science (artificial intelligence). He is Professor of History & Philosophy of Science and Professor of Cognitive Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has been a faculty member since 2004. He also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Philosophy, and is a faculty member of IU's Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. His main area of research is on the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, particularly with respect to nonhuman animals, but he also pursues topics in artificial intelligence and his most recent book is Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Oxford University Press 2009), coauthored with Wendell Wallach. Since 1998 he has been consulting and programming for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and is Associate Editor of the encyclopedia. Allen is currently director of the Indiana Philosophy Ontology project (InPhO) which in 2007 was awarded a Digital Humanities startup grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and in 2009 was received a $400,000 grant from the NEH Division of Preservation and Access. Allen was President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 2008-2009. In 2008 he was awarded the Faculty Mentor of the Year award by the Indiana University Graduate and Professional Students Organization.