Digital Humanities News
ADHO News
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
Intoduction
Reflecting on a dual publication: Henry III Fine Rolls print and web
The Henry III Fine Rolls project is a collaborative project between the National Archives in the UK, the departments of History and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London, and the department of History and American Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. Its aim is to produce a digital and print edition of the Fine Rolls from the reign of the 13th-century English King Henry III (1216–72). At the core of the resource are the translated summaries of the fine rolls which have been encoded in TEI XML, complemented by an overarching RDF/OWL conceptual model and digital facsimiles. In this article, we reflect on the ontological complexities of a dual publication, by bringing together various theoretical frameworks. Our aim is to take inspiration from these theories and connect them to the experience of producing two objects of different materiality but of very close scope. Ultimately, we will also explain how some of these reflections have been used to design a study for evaluating the utility of this edition.
Annotated Facsimile Editions: Defining macro-level structure for image-based electronic editions
Annotated Facsimile Edition (AFED) is a high-level model for representing macro-level structure in digital facsimiles. AFED models a facsimile as a set of images with multiple orderings or collations. The structure of these collations are encoded by ‘annotations’ that define a range of images in the collation and describe the properties of the content object identified by the annotations (for example, chapter, paragraph, page, poem). Separate annotation streams encode multiple analytical perspectives, for example, the physical structure of the edition (volumes, pages, and lines) and the poetic structure (poems, titles, epigraphs, and stanzas). Annotations within a single analytical perspective—but not those from different perspectives—follow a hierarchical structure. We discuss our initial results in implementing AFED and using it to deploy a reading interface for AJAX enabled rich-client Web applications. The primary contribution of our work is a general-purpose model for representing digital facsimiles that focuses on the major conceptual structures present among the contents of documents drawn from a wide range of sources. AFED provides a highly flexible model that can serve as a substrate for developing tools designed to support visual document editing during the exploratory stages of scholarly research.
Performance as digital text: Capturing signals and secret messages in a media-rich experience
As libraries increasingly undertake digitization projects, it behooves us to consider the collection/capture, organization, preservation, and dissemination of all forms of documentation, including and beyond written text. While several libraries have funded projects which acknowledge the need to digitize other forms of text, few have extended the digital projects to include film, much less performed texts. Further, as more performing arts incorporate born-digital elements, use digital tools to create media-rich performance experiences, and look to the possibility for digital preservation of the performance text, the capture of the performance event and its born-digital artefacts must be considered. This article, then, presents a first look at the ARTeFACT project, undertaken at the University of Virginia Library in collaboration with an introductory course in Engineering and a student choreographer at Brenau University Women's College. Historical intersections of technology and dance are introduced, theoretical concerns of using technology in dance are considered, the processes involved in the creation, capture, and preservation of dance data are discussed along with the technologies used to produce an interactive dance performance.
TEI and cultural heritage ontologies: Exchange of information?
The content in information systems and virtual reconstructions in the cultural heritage sector is to a large degree directly based on information deduced from the study of texts. In many cases, even if the texts are available electronically, the links from the deduced facts to the original texts are not available and in many cases very costly to re-establish. Reproducibility of results is a core concept in text-based research as in all research. Thus, such links should be expressed explicitly in the systems and in accordance with the data standards developed in the fields of text encoding and conceptual modelling. To do this it is necessary to create a combined understanding of text encoding represented by the TEI guidelines and the understanding of conceptual models represented by initiatives like the CIDOC CRM and FRBRoo. In this article, we study a part of this complex by comparing the expressive power of the real world descriptions TEI P5 by mapping central parts of the CIDOC CRM onto TEI P5. It is clear that the TEI P5 has moved a great step in the direction towards an event-oriented model compared with TEI P4. Our use of CIDOC CRM as a yardstick shows that the expressiveness of TEI P5 can be greatly improved by extending the scope of very restricted elements like the relation element and adding a few new elements to the TEI.
The TEI as luminol: Forensic philology in a digital age
The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore forensic philology in the context of electronic text editing. Drawing primarily on the example provided by the development of a TEI P5 conformant edition of Hafgeirs saga Flateyings, an alleged Icelandic saga forgery attested in a single, unsigned eighteenth century paper manuscript, this discussion explains how literary, linguistic, and transmission-level interpretations can be employed to describe the saga text and to bear witness to its origin and transmission process. It further explains how encoding the metadata described in these interpretations beside the data described in (near)zero-level text can be accomplished without sacrificing the role of the manuscript as artefact and without sacrificing the appearance of the text as it occurs on the page.
TEI Analytics: converting documents into a TEI format for cross-collection text analysis
For the purposes of large-scale analysis of XML/SGML files, converting humanities texts into a common form of markup represents a technical challenge. The MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) Project has developed both a common format, TEI Analytics (a TEI subset designed to facilitate interoperability of text archives) and a command-line tool, Abbot, that performs the conversion. Abbot relies upon a new technique, schema harvesting, developed by the author to convert text documents into TEI-A. This article has two aims: first, to describe the TEI-A format itself and, second, to outline the methods used to convert files. More generally, it is hoped that the techniques described will lead to greater interoperability of text documents for text analysis in a wider context.
Sustainability of annotated resources in linguistics: A web-platform for exploring, querying, and distributing linguistic corpora and other resources
We report on finished work in a project that is concerned with providing methods, tools, best practice guidelines, and solutions for sustainable linguistic resources. The article discusses several general aspects of sustainability and introduces an approach to normalizing corpus data and metadata records. Moreover, the architecture of the sustainability platform implemented by the authors is described.
iTrench: A study of user reactions to the use of information technology in field archaeology
This article describes work undertaken by the VERA project to investigate how archaeologists work with information technology (IT) on excavation sites. We used a diary study to research the usual patterns of behaviour of archaeologists digging the Silchester Roman town site during the summer of 2007. Although recording had previously been undertaken using pen and paper, during the 2007 season a part of the dig was dedicated to trials of IT and archaeologists used digital pens and paper and Nokia N800 handheld PDAs to record their work. The goal of the trial was to see whether it was possible to record data from the dig whilst still on site, rather than waiting until after the excavation to enter it into the Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB) and to determine whether the archaeologists found the new technology helpful. The digital pens were a success, however, the N800s were not successful given the extreme conditions on site. Our findings confirmed that it was important that technology should fit in well with the work being undertaken rather than being used for its own sake, and should respect established work flows. We also found that the quality of data being entered was a recurrent concern as was the reliability of the infrastructure and equipment.
'It's a team if you use "reply all" ': An exploration of research teams in digital humanities environments
Given that the nature of research work involves computers and a variety of skills and expertise, Digital Humanities researchers are working collaboratively within their institutions and with others nationally and internationallly to undertake the research. This work typically involves the need to coordinate efforts between academics, undergraduate and graduate students, research assistants, computer programmers, librarians, and other individuals as well as the need to manage financial and other resources. Despite this use of collaboration, there has been little formal research on team development within this community. This article reports on a research project exploring the nature of Digital Humanities research teams. Drawing upon interviews with members of the community, a series of exemplary patterns and models of research collaboration are identified and outlined. Important themes include a definition of team which focuses on common tasks and outcomes as well as a need for responsibility and accountability to the team as a whole; elements of a successful team which include clear task definition and productive working relationships over the life of the project and beyond, a need for balance between digital and face-to-face communication and collaboration tools, and potential for more deliberate training in collaboration and team work. The article concludes with recommendations for the individual team members, project leaders, and teams.
From Common Sense to Common Knowledge. And Vice Versa
Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. * Christine L. Borgman.
Errors and Intelligence in Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Parsers and Pedagogues. * Trude Heift and Mathias Schulze.
TAPoR News
PACE server moves to McMaster
We are pleased to announce that the PACE has found a new and welcoming home in the Humanities Media and Computing Technology Group at McMaster.
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.
Phase IV: Judean War 2
As of August 2008, Open Sky Solutions of Hamilton, Ontario, has begun another phase of development on PACE: to integrate Josephus's Judean War, Book 2, into the resources of the site.