Digital Humanities News
ADHO News
ADHO to participate in Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks - CHAIN
A meeting was held at King's College, London, on 26th and 27th October 2009, between representatives of the following networks, infrastructure projects, and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Arts and Humanities: * arts-humanities.net (http://www.arts-humanities.net/) * ADHO - Association of Digital Humanities Organisations (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/) * CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu/) * centerNet (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/centernet/) * DARIAH (http://www.dariah.eu/) * NoC - Network of Expert Centres in Great Britain and Ireland (http://www.arts-humanities.net/noc/) * Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/) * TextGrid (http://www.textgrid.de/) We identified the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies as a barrier to fully exploiting the transformative role that these technologies can potentially play. We resolved that our present, proposed, and future activities are interdependent and complementary and should be oriented towards working together to overcome barriers, and to create a shared environment where technology services can interoperate and be sustained, thus enabling new forms of research in the Humanities.
Digital Humanities 2010 CFP
We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference. Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Digital Humanities 2010 Call for Papers Abstract Deadline: Oct. 31, 2009 (extended to November 15, 2009). The International Programme Committee invites submissions of abstracts of between 750 and 1500 words on any aspect of humanities computing, broadly defined to encompass the common ground between information technology and problems in humanities research and teaching. We welcome submissions in all areas of the humanities, particularly interdisciplinary work. We especially encourage submissions on the current state of the art in humanities computing, and on recent developments.
Call for Nominations for the 2011 Antonio Zampolli Prize
Call for Nominations for the 2011 Antonio Zampolli Prize. The Antonio Zampolli Prize is an award of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). Now in its inaugural year, the prize will be given every three years to honour an outstanding scholarly achievement in humanities computing. It is presented by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) on behalf of its constituent organizations: the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI). The first Antonio Zampolli Prize will be given at the Digital Humanities 2011 conference, which will be held at Stanford University. For the full CFP see http://digitalhumanities.org/view/Adho/ZampolliPrize2011. For a description of the Zampolli Prize see http://www.digitalhumanities.org/view/Adho/ZampolliPrize
Digital Humanities 2009 Call for Papers
We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Digital Humanities Conference 2009. Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Digital Humanities 2009 Call for Papers Hosted by the Maryland institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland, College Park, USA 22-25 June, 2009 http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/ Abstract Deadline: October 31, 2008 (Midnight GMT) Presentations can include: • Single papers (abstract max of 1500 words) • Multiple paper sessions (overview max of 500 words) • Posters (abstract max of 1500 words)
Text Encoding Initiative 2008 Member's Meeting
Registration for the TEIMM 2008 is now open.
Digital Humanities Initiatives (via Neil Fraistat)
SUMMARY OF GOOGLE MEETING On Thursday, June 14, representatives from the start up committee of the centers network met for three hours at Google with Vint Cerf, Dan Clancy, and members of the Google Book Search team. Representing the U.S. centers were Matt Kirschenbaum, John Unsworth, and me. Geoffrey Rockwell represented the Canadian centers. Our purpose was to initiate a dialogue about how the centers and Google might best work together. The conversations were wide-ranging and very encouraging. We began with a brief presentation about the history of digital humanities as a field and a demonstration of some recent projects and tools. Among the ensuing topics discussed were (1) the possibility of Google providing digital humanities centers with specially focused subsets of Google Books (e.g., British novels from 1830-1870) for scholarly research and annotation; (2) the possibility of Google making available a layer of special services for scholarly analysis, perhaps to be accessed through the new international digital humanities portal that we hope will be emerging within the next year or so; (3) the possibility of Google running broad-based workshops for digital humanities scholars, or perhaps developing some larger research facility for scholars in the field; (4) the participation of Google at digital humanities conferences. Google is thinking seriously about all of these possibilities and has committed to participating in the center-related sessions at CNI next December, which are being organized by Mark Kornbluh and Kay Walter, and to similarly participate at DH 2008 in Finland. We will keep you posted as things develop. INTERNET ARCHIVE/OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE On Friday, June 15, Matt Kirschenbaum and I met with Brewster Kahle to begin a dialogue about how the centers network might best work together with the Internet Archive and Open Content Alliance. The conversation centered on the possibility of OCA creating special subsets of its scanned books on demand. That is, if a scholarly team of researchers were to put in a request through the centers network for, say, British novels from 1820-1870, the OCA might be willing to create and share the subset. In return, scholars would help to clean the scans and share with OCA the metadata they create. Currently the OCA scans about 12,000 books each month. Talks of possible joint grants between the Internet Archive and the network of centers were begun and will continue over the summer.
Digital Humanities Companion Available in Full-Text Online
The full-text of The Companion to Digital Humanities (edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth; published by Blackwell) is now available online at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
Digital Humanities 2007, June 4-7, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne (USA)
After Paris, Champagne. Digital Humanities 2007 will be co-hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne, June 4-7, 2007 (see http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dh2007/). Board meetings and meetings of the program committees (for 2007 and 2008), as well as meetings of the ADHO Steering Committee and its standing committees will be held June 2nd and 3rd. Registrants at DH2007 will also be able to attend the annual meeting of the Classification Society of North America, June 7-10 (see http://www.classification-society.org/csna/csna07.html).
Call for papers: Modern Informational Technologies and Written Heritage: From Ancient Manuscripts to Electronic Texts (Izhevsk, Russia, 13-17 July 2006)
RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCES
Izhevsk State Technical University
Department of Informatics
Department of Automated Systems of Control Information Processing
Department of LinguisticsThe aforementioned sponsors announce an international workshop and conference in Izhevsk, Russia, entitled "Modern Informational Technologies and Written Heritage: From Ancient Manuscripts to Electronic Texts" (13-17 July 2006), dedicated to investigating modern means of storage, description, processing, analysis, and publication of ancient and medieval written-language materials. The conference organizers invite participation by anyone interested in theoretical and practical problems associated with these issues, including researchers, educators, librarians, archivists, software developers, and graduate and undergraduate students. The working languages of the workshop and conference are Russian and English.
Workshop Themes:
- Meta- and analytic descriptions of manuscripts and early printed books.
- Full-text data bases.
- Formats for the storage and transmission of textual data.
- Digital editions.
- Web modules for accessing collections and full-text data bases.
- Local means for textual input, storage, and processing.
Proposed panel and round-table themes:
- Textological, paleographic, and linguistic problems of informational technology and computer modeling.
- Library and archival electronic collections, descriptions, and catalogues.
- Technologies for producing electronic full-text collections and libraries.
- Formats for textual storage, detailed markup, and interchange.
- Technologies and methods for identifying manuscript texts.
- Technologies for access to and navigation within electronic libraries.
- Web technologies for electronic publication.
- Methods and tools for the educational, scientific, and popular use of full-text electronic collections, libraries, descriptions, and catalogues.
- Copyright issues associated with the creation, publication, and use of electronic textual resources.
Projects that will be demonstrated at the workshop include:
- Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium
- Repertorium of Old Bulgarian Literature and Letters (Bulgaria, Sofia, The Institute of Bulgarian Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and USA, University of Pittsburgh)
- Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien (TITUS) (Germany, Frankfort University),
- Computer Processing of Written Heritage Sources (ACT) (Czech Republic, Prague, Charles University),
- Manuscript (Russia, Izhevsk, Udmurt State University and Izhevsk State Technical University),
- Technological Decisions of Knowledge's Capitalization based on Constructional Digital Editions (INC) (Russia, Izhevsk, Izhevsk State Technical University).
The workshop will include lecture lectures and seminars on the technologies, formats, and software products of projects listed above, to be presented by the authors and developers, as well as panel sessions and round-table discussions.
[DIGICULT] International Conference June 2006: An Expedition to European Digital Cultural Heritage
The Austrian Presidency of the European Union invites to the international conference on the digitisation of cultural heritage: "An Expedition to European Digital Cultural Heritage Collecting, Connecting - and Conserving?" 21-22 June, 2006 | Salzburg, Austria. For full information on the conference such as programme, online-registration, accommodation and travelling advices, please visit the conference website at: http://www.kulturleben.at/dhc2006.
CaSTA 2006 Conference: The Breadth of Text
The Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis in 2006 will be held at the University of New Brunswick. The Call for Papers (PDF) is up. For more information see CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text.
Digital Spectrum: Integrating Technology and Culture
The 10th ICCC International Conference on Electronic Publishing, "Digital Spectrum: Integrating Technology and Culture", will be held in Bansko, Bulgaria on June 14-16, 2006. More information is available at www.elpub.net, or email elpub2006@elpub.net.
Digital Humanities 2006 - 5-9 July, 2006 at the Sorbonne, Paris, France
The joint conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities is the oldest established meeting of scholars working at the intersection of advanced information technologies and the humanities, annually attracting a distinguished international community at the forefront of their fields. See http://www.allc-ach2006.colloques.paris-sorbonne.fr/AllcCall.htm. The call for papers and link for submissions is at https://webcgi.oulu.fi/dh2006/.
Electronic Textual Editing available online.
Electronic Textual Editing, edited by Lou Burnard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and John Unsworth is available free, online at the TEI Web Site; it will be published in book form by the Modern Language Association in late 2005.
Registration for Digital Resources in the Humanities is now open.
Registration for Digital Resources in the Humanities is now open.
New Book Series: "Topics in the Digital Humanities"
New Book Series: The University of Illinois Press is pleased to announce a new book series, Topics in the Digital Humanities, under the general editorship of Susan Schriebman and Ray Siemens. More information available from Humanist
ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships
ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships: These fellowships, created with the generous help of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are intended to support an academic year dedicated to work on a major scholarly project of a digital character that advances humanistic studies and best exemplifies the integration of such research with use of computing, networking, and other information technology-based tools. The online application for the fellowship program is located at http://ofa.acls.org/; applications must be completed by November 10, 2005 (decisions to be announced in late March 2006).
Immediate Residential Fellowship at MITH for a Scholar Impacted by Katrina
Immediate Residential Fellowship for a Scholar Impacted by Katrina: The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, College Park is pleased to be able to offer an immediate residential fellowship available to any one faculty member or ABD doctoral candidate at an institution closed by Hurricane Katrina.
CLiP 2006 Conference, KCL (UK), June 29 to July 1
CLiP 2006: The 7th Computers, Literature and Philology (CLiP) conference: 'Literatures, Languages and Cultural Heritage in a digital world' Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, UK Thursday 29 June - Saturday 1 July 2006 The international Computers, Literature and Philology (CLiP) conference focuses on the integration of Philology and Information Technology relevant to humanities computing communities involved in the study of Romance languages. For the call for paper in different European languages and further details visit the conference website at http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/clip2006/
Current LLC
A chronometric approach to Indian alchemical literature
Indian alchemy, a branch of traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda), has produced a corpus of texts that are difficult to date using regular philological techniques. This article describes a contents-based computational method that is capable of calculating the relative chronology of these texts. Central parts of alchemical literature are encoded in a language model that can be understood by a computer and then compared with an alignment algorithm. Phylogenetic trees derived from these alignments show regularities in the ordering of alchemical texts, and these may be interpreted as temporal patterns. Processing these patterns with a minimization algorithm, we are able to compute a relative chronology of the corpus, which is largely consistent with results obtained using traditional philological techniques.
Assessing frequency changes in multistage diachronic corpora: Applications for historical corpus linguistics and the study of language acquisition
The use of corpora that are divided into temporally ordered stages is becoming increasingly wide-spread in historical corpus linguistics. This development is partly due to the fact that more and more resources of this kind are being developed. Since the assessment of frequency changes over multiple periods of time is a relatively recent practice, there are few agreed-upon standards of how such trends should be statistically interpreted. This article addresses the need for a basic analytical toolbox that is specifically tailored to the interpretation of frequency changes in multistage diachronic corpora. We present a number of suggestions for the analysis of data that analysts commonly face in historical studies, but also in the study of language acquisition.
Untangling the derivatives: points for clarification in the findings of the Shakespeare Clinic
The work of the Shakespeare Clinic of Claremont McKenna College, led by Ward E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, is recognized for its pioneering computer analysis of many early modern texts to determine whether William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote the works traditionally ascribed to him. The Clinic achieved its primary objective of eliminating all other known candidates and thus confirming that Shakespeare wrote them. Two general methods of analysis were applied to whole plays and variable-sized large texts: Discrete Composite Analysis and Continuous Composite Analysis.. The first uses univariate analysis to determine acceptance or rejection of forty-eight stylometric tests for each text. The second uses a multi-dimensional composite mean for Shakespeare derived from all forty-eight in order to determine acceptance or rejection for each text. This article notes the omission of Discrete Analysis to take into consideration statistical dependencies between the forty-eight tests, the partly arbitrary ‘handfitting’ of acceptance–rejection boundaries for each of the forty-eight tests, the failure to take into full account the factor of chronology, and the absence of discussion of the part played by prior probabilities as to existing beliefs concerning attribution. By this last point, I mean the role played by the existing traditional consensus as to Shakespeare attribution, prior to linguistic analysis. For Continuous Analysis, it is noted that the stated probabilities are not true probabilities as acknowledged, and that the resulting acceptance–rejection levels for them are calibrated in line with prior beliefs. Principal component analysis is shown to give improved results in dealing with co-authored Shakespeare plays, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, and Pericles. This does not invalidate the overall aim of the Shakespeare Clinic.
Evaluating methods for computer-assisted stemmatology using artificial benchmark data sets
Given a collection of imperfect copies of a textual document, the aim of stemmatology is to reconstruct the history of the text, indicating for each variant the source text from it was copied. We describe an experiment involving three artificial benchmark data sets to which a number of computer-assisted stemmatology methods were applied. Contrary to earlier similar experiments, we propose and use a numerical criterion to evaluate all the solutions. Moreover, our primary data set is significantly larger than used before. The results suggest the superiority of two computer-assisted methods amongst those tested: the maximum parsimony method implemented in the PAUP* software package and a related compression-based method we have proposed in earlier work.
Lexical Diversity in a Literary Genre: A Corpus Study of the Rgveda
This research<cross-ref type="fn" refid="NT1">1</cross-ref> evaluates the extent to which lexical diversity, measured by frequent content words, hapax legomena, and type-token ratios (TTRs), is dependent on three features of the genre of the oral Indo-Aryan cultic poetry represented by the literary corpus of the Rgveda (ca. 165,000 tokens): characteristic choice of subject matter, usage of refrains, and the attribution of hymns to distinct poetic collectives. Analysis of 255 texts of 200 tokens showed that hymns on popular topics and where refrains were attested have a significantly higher rate of high-frequency content words and a lower ratio of once-occurring types. A higher TTR is observed in the hymns of specific family origin. Complexity of genre can be interpreted as a result of different discourse strategies of the poets. Overall, conservative mythological texts are characterized by regularity in word usage. Occurrence of content words, in the entire corpus, with lexemes denoting ‘deities’ on the one side and ‘nature’ on the other is accounted for by the factor of semantics, which deals with the structure of narrative.
Dictionary generation for less-frequent language pairs using WordNet
Bilingual dictionaries are vital resources in many areas of natural language processing. Numerous methods of machine translation require bilingual dictionaries of large coverage, but less-frequent language pairs rarely have any digitalized resources of such kind. Since the need for these resources is increasing, but the human resources are scarce for less represented languages, efficient automatized methods are imperative. This article presents a fully automated, robust intermediate language-based bilingual dictionary generation method that uses the WordNet of the intermediate language to build a new bilingual dictionary. We propose the usage of WordNet in order to increase accuracy; we also introduce a bidirectional selection method with a flexible threshold to maximize recall. The evaluations showed 79% accuracy and 51% weighted recall, outperforming representative pivot language-based methods. A dictionary generated with this method will still need manual post-editing, but the improved recall and precision decrease the work of human correctors.
An exercise in non-ideal authorship attribution: the mysterious Maria Ward
The dangers of computational approaches to authorship attribution in the absence of an adequate set of training texts for the claimant authors are well known. This study aims to show, however, that significant progress can be made even where conditions are quite problematic. We investigate a difficult authorship question involving three texts, ostensibly by three authors, each of whom wrote nothing else. Only one of the texts can be unquestionably ascribed to a known author, and this author has been suggested as the true author of one of the two remaining texts. We investigate these three texts, along with similar texts by other authors, using cluster analysis, Delta analysis, t-testing, and PCA. We also create simulations of our authorship problem using sets of three texts of known authorship by one, two, and three authors. We test these sets using correct and incorrect assumptions of authorial difference, and then compare the results with analyses of our three texts based on the same range of assumptions. By combining information from all of these tests, we achieve what we believe is a persuasive, if not conclusive, solution to a significant and long-standing question concerning the authorship of Maria Warda's violently anti-Mormon Female Life Among the Mormons. At the same time, we demonstrate methods for making progress in cases where conditions are less than ideal.
Digital Images for the Information Professional.: Melissa M. Terras.
Cyberculture, Cyborgs and Science Fiction: Consciousness and the Posthuman. * William S. Haney.
TAPoR News
Schwartz and Mason - History and Josephus, Mar 3
On Wed. March 3, from 12:00 to 2:30 p.m., Prof. Hindy Najman at the University of Toronto will host a discussion led by Profs. Daniel R. Schwartz (Hebrew University) and Steve Mason (York U., Toronto) on the nature of historical research into Roman Judaea and the role of Josephus' works in that research. 318 Jackman Humanities Building, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto.
Judean War 2 commentary online (and at Brill)
Volume 1b of the Brill project, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (= Judean War 2), is now posted on the PACE site and integrated with all other database resources. War 2 is also available in print from Brill (www.brill.nl).