This year, the DHBenelux Conference took place on the Belval campus in Luxembourg, an amalgam of futuristic and industrial scenery and of technology-based supplies from writing on the walls to automatic book scanning.

The pre-conference workshop I attended on day 1, Exploring Old Maps, brought into discussion questions related to the digitisation of old and historical maps, georeferencing and overlaying on modern maps, methodologies for text (labels) and forms (e.g. streets, buildings) recognition or for landscape change analysis, as well as viewpoints on crowd-sourced map enrichment and users’ engagement in geohumanities.

Day 2 and 3, between the two keynotes – one examining the relationship among data, algorithms and human interpretation, the other the modelling of ideas in a computational framework – included five thematic parallel sessions and a posters/demos exhibition. The parallel sessions that I could attend contained talks on Historical Research and Network Analysis, Digital Textual Analysis and Digital Literary Analysis. The presentations in these categories covered a variety of topics such as:

• social network analysis for studying:
  • individual relationships inside institutions for intellectual cooperation,
  • relations and interactions between producers and consumers of creative goods,
  • the role of interpersonal and group ties in the so-called “survival” networks under difficult historical conditions,
  • the disambiguation of person names in modern religious history;
• textual analysis techniques for:
  • detecting patterns in news writing,
  • measuring the popularity of newspaper articles,
  • reconstructing the rhythm and prosody of old literary texts,
  • determining authorship in historical texts;
• critical perspectives on large textual data collections and analytic tools in order to:
  • define and formulate the limits of an “ideal” digital corpus,
  • combine scalability and annotation layers requirements for supporting retrieval and analysis infrastructures,
  • compare and evaluate the accuracy of different digital tools for narratological analysis;
• tools building for:
  • supporting text normalisation, search and analysis of historical and literary texts from the distant past,
  • linking entities in “encyclopaedic” novels with corresponding disciplines in semantic Web repositories.

In this context, my co-authored contributions, a paper and a demo, dealt with a combination of Human Computer Interaction and digital textual analysis for interpreting usability tests responses and with a metaphorical didactic interpretation of historical writings on architecture via a model and interface for textual zooming.

One of the questions – proposed by the opening keynote speaker – discussed during the theme based lunch was (approximately): What is specific to the humanities in digital humanities, apart from content? A potential subject of reflection for the next DHBenelux 2017 in Utrecht, Netherlands.

The theme of this year’s TEI Conference was “Connect. Animate. Innovate” focusing on the idea of continuous innovation, interaction and sharing within the TEI and, at a larger scale, the Digital Humanities community.

The variety of topics and approaches presented at the parallel papers and posters sessions, SIG meeting and keynote I could attend reflected this focal idea.

Sections like Correspondence in the TEI, Encoding historical data in TEI (my abstract and presentation), Encoding orality and performance were centred both on:

1. particular types of data (letters – from ancient Akkadian tablets to early 20-th century personal collections of letters in Ireland; historical documents – such as Western European Union’s archives on armament issues or the charters of the late medieval period in Spain; conceptual artists’ notebooks and oral music from Maghreb);
2. dedicated tools and methods for encoding and sharing these kinds of data (e.g. Web services for scholarly letter editions, modular and collaborative platforms for publishing historical structured data or for the transcription and annotation of oral phenomena).

Other sections, Interoperability and the TEI, Abstracting the TEI, Interchange and the TEI, Presentation and engagement with the TEI, Hermeneutics and the TEI, along with displaying a large array of data (dialectal and prosopographical databases, encoded plays, Antiquity textual resources, art history collections, literary editions, etc.) addressed a set of questions such as:

• software engineering best practices for supporting interoperability ;
• sustainability and longevity of the TEI conceptual model and the need of an abstract concept independent of its implementation (TEI versus XML);
• sonification and its potential use in comparing texts;
• analysis of the submerged process of scholarly annotation in a TEI archive;
• algorithmic approaches to the visualisation of complex textual structures in TEI;
• building a model for Interlinked (inter-related, inter-dependent) Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects – (I)OHCO;
• creation of connected corpora based on TEI and Linked Open Data (LOD) technologies;
• exploring the pedagogic potential of the TEI for developing multi-cultural literary projects at high school and early university level;
• approaching, from a conceptual perspective, the application of the critical apparatus model to variants of iconographic representation;
• adopting an ontological model for TEI simple that allows interoperability between different vocabularies.

The same diversity of content characterised the posters and SIG sessions, with topics varying from tools (for stand-off markup, XML editing, visualisation, dissemination), historical and literary digital editions, to theoretical and practical considerations on TEI encoding, TEI integration with other standards (ISO) or TEI-based semantic and comparative studies on monolingual and multilingual corpora.

As the closing keynote pointed out, the TEI in particular and the digital scholarship in general reveals that we are in a new world now. When people start teaching Homer with access to manuscripts, we are talking about a new kind of scholarship.

From the periphery, I have always been interested in crowdsourcing and have often thought that it would be an interesting way to extend the www.bombsight.org apps that I developed back in 2012,.ie would it be useful for the public to engage in the crowd collection, co-curation of memories, photographs and documents to add to the formal archival resources. Furthermore, here at the CVCE we have been considering if it would be suitable to explore whether crowd-sourcing would be a helpful way of transcribing hand written and other documents,  from our Pierre Werner publications or even for error detection and validation of automatic OCR and entity extraction. In our histoGraph tool, the notion of expert crowds has been implemented to annotate and validate automatic face recognition of European Figures from face-recognition algorithms that processed our picture collection.

Therefore,  I was interested to find out more about crowd-sourcing projects and research in the Humanities. At the beginning of September I was lucky return to London to attend the Crowdsourcing for the Humanities in the 21st Century event, organised by Kings College London.

The theme of the 2 days of presentation and discussions was “Citizen Humanities Comes of Age: Crowdsourcing for the Humanities in the 21st Century”. The event was made up of a mix of interdisciplinary researchers from diverse backgrounds such as Archaeology, Ecology, Archival Research, Social Sciences and Humanities, which made for fascinating discussion.

For me some of the points of interest collated from discussions and speakers include:

• There is a need for more research around the ethical considerations of crowd-sourcing activities. Is it possible to recognise the skills acquired and time contributed to such humanities projects?
• Crowds alone do not sustain projects, it is essential to build a community from the bottom up (this reminds me of the very successful Open Street Map community);
• Projects should not just be about technology and data capture – there needs to be greater emphasis on the research questions and managing social experiences.
• There is an increasing need to nuture and prioritise human factors for improving likelihood of success.
• Is it possible to develop crowd-sourcing pipelines that mix automation, human-intervention and machine learning to further develop crowd-sourcing activities.
• Project design should enable the framing of dynamic research questions that emerge as projects evolve.
• All projects have difficulty in overcoming the long-tail where the highest volume of contributions is made by a small proportion of all the contributors.
• Successful projects should consider integrating a task ecosystem that provide a mix of different tasks taking different lengths of time to complete- appealing to non-experts and experts depending of the type of task and so eliciting different types of contributions.
• Lots of projects fail but rarely are there discussions of why or how they fail (for me I think lessons learned from failure can be as interesting as those that succeed)

This blog post presents a short summary of the CVCE DH Lab participation at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School from 20 to 24 July 2015.

“Managing modern data for academic research” was the focus of the workshop “Humanities Data: Curation, Analysis, Access and Reuse” organized by the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School from 20 to 24 July 2015.

Data constituted the heart of this session. With the following topics discussed: importance of maintaining research data and digital information to preserve its meaning and usefulness.

This session was actually an opportunity to explore data concepts and practices, with an emphasis on digital humanities data curation. Data curation appears as the active and ongoing management of data through its lifecycle of interest. After an introduction to  the Conceptual Frameworks of Humanities Data Curation, the workshop covered several topics including Metadata Normalization with OpenRefine, Information Organization, Data Modelling, Big Data and Data Analysis, as well as workflows (personal and institutional Workflows) and research objects. One section focused on the languages OWL and OWL 2. Case studies included examples from the Hathi Trust, EEBO-TCP and the BUDDAH project.

I found the discussion about associated with defining data, dataset, issue of provenance, new challenges and new opportunities raised by data curation and the comparison between data curation and digital preservation was particularly interesting due to it relevant to the work we are undertaking at CVCE.

This event was also the occasion to meet and talk to the other participants and speakers from all over the world. A special time was the peer-reviewed poster session. An exhibition of 30 posters presenting different works from researchers highlighting diversity and state of the art.

More information on http://dhoxss.humanities.ox.ac.uk/2015/humanitiesdata.html

Network theories and methods have recently gained wide-spread attention. Graph visualizations look great and will easily grab the attention of any audience. However for those who are new to the field, there is a steep learning curve. Novices need to learn to master a variety of skills starting from network theory to systematic data collection, appropriate means to compute and visualize them and finally the challenge to link back the results of any analyses to their original research questions.

This flow chart is meant to help people with the hard decision whether or not it is worthwhile and feasible to engage with network analysis. You may also think of these questions as a simple way to test the quality of existing projects.

This is my first draft of this flow chart, so nothing is set in stone and I am happy to consider any criticism you leave in the comments.

To get a first idea of Social Network Analysis concepts, you may want to take a look at the Cheat Sheet: Social Network Analysis for Humanists.

Social Network Analysis concepts and methods are extremely powerful ways to describe complex social relations. The field however has developed their own their concepts, some of which require a little bit of translation. This cheat sheet should help with the very first steps.

The project is part of a larger CVCE research project on the diplomacy within Western European Union (WEU). The corpus includes a selection of bilingual institutional documents (French, English) on the production and standardisation of armaments (1954 to 1982) from the Archives Nationales de Luxembourg, WEU collection. The documents (in a first phase, in French) were encoded in XML-TEI P5 in order to enable corpus analysis on specific elements, side by side visualisation of facsimiles and their transcriptions, as well as particular search engine capabilities (e.g. facets).

Several types of documents compose the corpus: meeting minutes, notes from the Secretary-General or Secretariat-General, memoranda and studies. Three categories of encoding are provided: metadata (title, author, availability date, origin place, confidentiality status, etc.), structural markup (headers, footers, sections, paragraphs, line breaks), content-related annotations (discourse of country/institutional representatives, names of persons, organisations, places, etc.).

Building the TEI corpus implied: OCR processing with ABBYY FineReader (one image file per typewritten page), Microsoft Word styling and OxGarage conversion from DOCX to XML-TEI P5, as well as semi-automatic enrichment by means of XSLT 2.0 and oXygen, Named Entity Recognition (NER) with GATE – General Architecture for Text Engineering and manual annotation. Experiments are currently ongoing for corpus analysis, using Textométrie TXM software (e.g. to discern specific linguistic patterns for the different country or institutional representatives) and Web publishing (focusing on potential adaptation of image-text edition tools as EVT – Edition Visualization Technology or query/index/browsing features provided by platforms like XTF – eXtensible Text Framework and KILN).

In the current stage of the project (Web publication of the TEI corpus), given the particular research needs and the CVCE’s Back End/Front End architecture, an adaptation/combination of different technologies and open source tools seems more probable than the use of a single existing platform for this purpose. Although the design of the actual TEI publication framework is still work in progress, the main challenge of the whole process in creating the digital edition from the initial images has become apparent, i.e. to fine-tune the ratio of automatic versus manual processing and the implied modular, configurable mechanism based on “relatively steady/changing”, “core/project specific” and “mandatory/optional” dichotomies.

This post gives an overview of the peculiarities of Open Journal System, an open source publication tool and might be of help when considered together with OJS’s documentation. OJS is developed by the Public Knowledge Project has become the chosen publishing platform for CVCE. OJS sports a variety of features which are of relevance for us: Multi-language support, xml integration and a clean and customizable look to it.

In this blog post I describe the process of setting up Transactions in Digital Humanities, the first publication by CVCE which publishes papers from last year’s DHLU conference.

I cannot really comment on the installation process itself since thankfully a colleague of mine in the IT department took on this task. There were a few hickups at first: some of the labels were not displayed correctly as shown in the screenshot below (not that this is not the final design).

OJS features a range of different user profiles, each with associated rights and access levels. Starting with “reader” and “author”, the roles include section editors, layout editors, proofreaders, editors, a journal manager and finally an admin. OJS explain their respective roles rather well. In an ideal world you would have a team of people, each with their respective task working on such a project who would seamlessly interact with each other and pass on tasks from one step to the next. In the real world, one person needs to manage a range of tasks. Thankfully, OJS lets users take on more than one role.

This can get confusing however: Once logged in you put on your author hat and submit an article using a detailed and nicely configurable submission process. This process includes the acknowledgement of copyright issues, metadata self-classification, file upload etc. Once an article is submitted, a section editor or an editor needs to assign a reviewer to the article. To do this, you need to click (in my mind: counter intuitively) on “My Journals” in the right navigation pane.

This brings you back to an overview page which bundles the different roles associated with your user id and provides handy updates on the progress of different publications.

As an editor you are free to assign reviewers, add their respective recommendations (accept/reject) and forward the task to layouters and proof-readers who are able to upload the edited versions of the files they have been working on. OJS stores these versions separately, albeit only the admin has access to the quite rudimentary file browser. OJS offers a quite handy, yet easily overlooked navigation through the publishing process:

You might find it hard to find the “Complete” commands which are associated with each task in the user interface, again in my mind counter intuitively, they are positioned in the middle of the page and are easily overlooked.

Once everything is proof-read and layouted, OJS asks you upload the final version of the file. I chose to edit an HTML file and to upload it directly in the Layout section, selecting the “Galley” option. Not that there seems to be an annoying bug which causes problems when parsing H2 (second level) captions. Replacing them with H3 (third level) captions in an editor solves this.

The test file I worked with came in ODT format. Images embedded in the text and exported to HTML will contain machine-created filenames which will not be recognized by OJS. Instead I embedded images manually in an editor, for example:

IMG SRC=”figure_1.jpg” NAME=”graphics1 WIDTH=741 HEIGHT=536>

The file will be uploaded and displayed above. Click “Edit” next to the uploaded file to change the label of the link to the uploaded file (I stick with “HTML”. Albeit a bit hidden, this editing section is quite useful for any revisions. Here you can replace the uploaded file in case you run into formatting problems and crucially: Upload pictures which accompany the text.

Note that once you close this editing section, you will jump back to the previous page but end up in the deviously similarly looking Copyediting section above the Layout section.

Continue by “Completing” the Proofreading section and the article should be published.

Helpful links:

Detailed User Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

OJS Forum