Digital Humanities News
ADHO News
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
Interpreting Burrows's Delta: Geometric and Probabilistic Foundations
While Burrows's intuitive and elegant ‘Delta’ measure for authorship attribution has proven to be extremely useful for authorship attribution, a theoretical understanding of its operation has remained somewhat obscure. In this article, I address this issue by introducing a geometric interpretation of Delta, which further allows us to interpret Delta as a probabilistic ranking principle. This interpretation gives us a better understanding of the method's fundamental assumptions and potential limitations, as well as leading to several well-founded variations and extensions.
Working Papers, Open Access, and Cyber-infrastructure in Classical Studies
Princeton—Stanford Working Papers in Classics (PSWPC) is a web-based series of work-in-progress scripts by members of two leading departments of classics. It introduces the humanities to a new form of scholarly communication and represents a major advance in the free availability of classical-studies scholarship in cyberspace. This article both reviews the initial performance of this open-access experiment and the benefits and challenges of working papers more generally for classical studies. After 2 years of operation PSWPC has proven to be a clear success. This series has built up a large international readership and a sizeable body of pre-prints and performs important scholarly and community-outreach functions. As this performance is largely due to its congruency with the working arrangements of ancient historians and classicists and the global demand for open-access scholarship, the series confirms the viability of this means of scholarly communication, and the likelihood of its expansion in our discipline. But modifications are required to increase the benefits this series brings and the amount of scholarship it makes freely available online. Finally, departments wishing to replicate its success will have to consider other important developments, such as the increasing availability of post-prints, the linking of research funding to open access, and the emergence of new cyber-infrastructure.
Corpus Tools and Methods, Today and Tomorrow: Incorporating Linguists' Manual Annotations
Today's corpus tools offer the user a wide range of features that greatly facilitate the linguistic analysis of large amounts of authentic language data (e.g. frequency distributions, collocations, keywords, etc.). However, these tools typically fail to address the fundamental need of the linguist to add interpretive information to a concordance or query result, by coding individual concordance lines for structural, functional, discoursal, and other features in a flexible way. The ability to add such qualitative data is indispensable to a fuller understanding of the phenomenon under investigation as it allows the linguist to produce more rigorous descriptions—and theories—about language in use.
Our article has two aims: first, to assess the merits and drawbacks of existing solutions, by surveying what can be achieved using state-of-the-art corpus tools and generic database software; second, we draw up a set of desiderata and recommendations for the incorporation of flexible encoding features into future corpus tools. We describe an initial step in this direction, with a recent enhancement to the BNCweb corpus analysis software. More generally, we hope our suggestions will lead to linguists and software developers working together more closely to ensure that the needs of the former are provided for by the available technology.
Stylochronometry: Stylistic Development, Sequence of Composition, and Relative Dating
This article examines representative successful and unsuccessful applications of stylochronometric approaches of the last sixty years in a thematic fashion, aiming to present in a concise manner, although not exhaustive, modern approaches. Differences concerned with adopted methodologies, stylistic markers, and text size render any comparisons among the studies difficult. Nevertheless, common problems may be traced, whereas groups of different stylistic marker types of potential use for applications concerned with stylistic change in time are identifiable.
Zitate per Mausklick? Das Textkorpus zum WORTERBUCH DER BAIRISCHEN MUNDARTEN IN OSTERREICH (WBO) als leistungsstarkes Werkzeug fur die lexikographische Praxis
The DATABASE OF ELECTRONIC TEXTS of the LEXICON OF BAVARIAN DIALECTS IN AUSTRIA (WBÖ) (TEXTKORPUS zum WBÖ)—The Lexicon of Bavarian Dialects in Austria (Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Österrreich [WBÖ]) is based on a collection of about 4 million single records. They represent the variety of the regional, social and historical Bavarian dialects. About 10% of all entries are excerpts from texts of various types. The lexicographer has to draw the illustrative quotations from the original texts. The digitized full-texts have been dated and localized, thus each quotation can be placed in time and area enabling the lexicogapher to choose a representative number of examples. For the definitions, the most appropriate and illustrative quotations have to be found, in order to actively support the lexicographer's work, the Institute of Lexicography of Austrian Dialects and Names / Institut für Österreichische Dialekt- und Namenlexika (<inter-ref locator="http://www.oeaw.ac.at/dinamlex" locator-type="url">http://www.oeaw.ac.at/dinamlex</inter-ref>) started a new project: the so-called DBÖ (Database of the Bavarian Dialects in Austria / Datenbank der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich), financed by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften / Austrian Academy of Sciences. One main database includes the so-called Hauptkatalog, the main archive; there are additional databases which are necessary to retrieve correct information about the questionnaire, the localization of the word and the date of its recording. One component of the DBÖ is the database of electronic texts of the WBÖ, including some 90 Austrian texts spanning several centuries, representing the Austrian dialects. The original texts are scanned using the Austrian OCR-programme proLector V1.20 (A.1) which allows the training of various fonts. The machine-readable texts are converted in TUSTEP (Tübinger System von Textverarbeitungs-Programmen / Tübingen System of Text Processing Programmes). The TUSTEP-files get an alphanumeric key, which allows one to retrieve each quotation from the database in a chronological order and to sort it according to its localization. Finally the texts are broken down into the requisite sized pieces for quoting in the WBÖ-entries. Using a special programme the quotations can easily be reconnected and replaced in the proper context from which they were drawn. The digital texts are a valuable source for the lexicographer freeing him from the monotony of checking over and over again, thus leaving him more time for his proper work, namely the writing of entries for the WBÖ. Furthermore, the digital texts are important for speeding up the dictionary's publication in accordance with the guidelines of the Straffungskonzept 1993 and 1998.
What Does the Statistical Style Analysis of Film Involve? A Review of Moving into Pictures. More on Film History, Style, and Analysis
From First Person to Second Person
Permanent Pixels: Building Blocks for the Longevity of Digital Surrogates of Historical Photographs. * Rene van Horik.
The Internet and the Madonna: Religious Visionary Experience on the Web.
Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage. * Lindsay MacDonald (ed.).
Corpus Linguistics and the Web. * Marianne Hundt, Nadja Nesselhauf and Carolin Biewer (eds).
TAPoR News
PACE welcomes new publications
The PACE is adding to its list of electronic publications completely new studies, for cases in which an author seeks much wider dissemination than print publication allows. We have established a PACE review committee to referee these new submissions. We are also in discussion with print publishers about the possibility of offering bound paperback copies of the same studies at reasonable cost (on a non-profit basis for PACE).
T. Leoni's translations of Motzo and Gabba added
English translations of important articles by R. B. Motzo (from the 1920s) and E. Gabba (1967), have been made by York doctorand Tommaso Leoni.
Against Apion posted on PACE (and available from Brill)
Professor John Barclay has completed his landmark commentary to Josephus's Against Apion, with a new translation, released by Brill Academic Publishers at SBL 2006 (www.brill.nl). It is also available for focused research (by the page) here on PACE.