“Crossing borders: Three talks on Text Analysis and Digital Humanities” 3/3

Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Delphine Montoliu): The podcast of Elena Gonzáles-Blanco’s English talk at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) of Paris-France is now available.

Conférence d’Elena González-Blanco: “From counting syllables to linked data. Interoperability and digital standardization as a new model to analyze European poetry: POSTDATA”.

 

The need of standardization has been increasingly important in different fields as a common way of understanding and exchanging information. Scientific disciplines have early established formal protocols and languages, which have been quickly adopted and adapted to their particular problems. Humanities and cultural disciplines have followed, however, an independent path in which creativity and tradition play an essential role. Literature, and especially poetry, are a clear reflection of this idiosyncrasy. From the philological point of view, there is no uniform academic approach to analyze, classify or study the different poetic manifestations, and the divergence of theories is even bigger when comparing poetry schools from different languages and periods. POSTDATA project has been born to bridge the digital gap among traditional cultural assets and the growing world of data. It is focused on poetry analysis, classification and publication, applying Digital Humanities methods of academic analysis -such as XML-TEI encoding- in order to look for standardization. Interoperability problems between the different poetry collections are solved by using semantic web technologies to link and publish literary datasets in a structured way in the linked data cloud. The advantages of making poetry available online as machine-readable linked data are threefold: first, the academic community will have an accessible digital platform to work with poetic corpora and to contribute to its enrichment with their own texts; second, this way of encoding and standardizing poetic information will be a guarantee of preservation for poems published only in old books or even transmitted orally, as texts will be digitized and stored as XML files; third: datasets and corpora will be available and open access to be used by the community for other purposes, such as education, cultural diffusion or entertainment.

Original publication date: 23/06/2017.

Source: “Crossing borders: Three talks on Text Analysis and Digital Humanities” 3/3