PORT: A testbed paradigm for knowledge processing in the humanities

The Peirce On-line Resource Testbed (PORT) is, materially, a digital resource of primary data: C.S. Peirce's manuscripts, archived in the Houghton Library at Harvard, which have remained largely and essentially inaccessible for 80 years. Building upon this “raw data” archive (as digitized page images, transcribed text, and indexed links), we have the opportunity to increase the contributions of scholars and researchers in a networked, continuing resource development testbed. Conceptually, Peirce's pragmatic philosophy encourages us to treat this form of communication as a continuing argument, with premises, conclusions, and an account of the interpretational procedure by which the result is reached from the evidence. But Peirce's pragmatism also cautions that judgment should proceed heuristically—not algorithmically, since the conceptual basis for judgment established by any group of inquirers may, at any time, be mistaken. With inquiry conceived as an ongoing, sophisticated communicational challenge, the collective “editorial role” in this procedure is to stabilize collective inquiry with respect to the manuscript evidence. This model of an on-line research testbed requires a conceptual map or meta-representation of the work of individual scholars, as well as a means for representing the possible order(s) of the primary materials. In this respect, our work with knowledge processing researchers to develop PORT as a testbed for tool development depends less on producing definitive algorithms for editorial work than on maintaining an intelligible communication pathway for a community of scholars carrying out in practice Peirce's idea of inquiry as a self-correcting and self-directing experiment.