Introduction: Thibault Clérice reports on the successfulness of recognizing word boundaries in scripta continua (typically late classic and early medieval Latin). This will not be easy reading for many a philologist and classicist, but it is well worth trying to bridge the gap. Next to explaining and evaluating Thibault Clérice releases the software Boudams used for his research.
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Introduction: There is a postulated level of anthropomorphism where people feel uncanny about the appearance of a robot. But what happens if digital facsimiles and online editions become nigh indistinguishable from the real, yet materially remaining so vastly different? How do we ethically provide access to the digital object without creating a blindspot and neglect for the real thing. A question that keeps digital librarian Dot Porter awake and which she ponders in this thoughtful contribution.
Introduction: The Research Software Directory of the Netherlands eScience Institute provides easy access to software, source code and its documentation. More importantly, it makes it easy to cite software, which is highly advisable when using software to derive research results. The Research Software Directory positions itself as a platform that eases scientific referencing and reproducibility of software based research—good peer praxis that is still underdeveloped in the humanities.
Introduction: With Web archives becoming an increasingly more important resource for (humanities) researchers, it also becomes paramount to investigate and understand the ways in which such archives are being built and how to make the processes involved transparent. Emily Maemura, Nicholas Worby, Ian Milligan, and Christoph Becker report on the comparison of three use cases and suggest a framework to document Web archive provenance.
Introduction: Apart from its buoyant conclusion that authorship attribution methods are rather robust to noise (transcription errors) introduced by optical character recognition and handwritten text recognition, this article also offers a comprehensive read on the application of sophisticated computational techniques for testing and validation in a data curation process.
Introduction: Ecologists are much aided by historical sources of information on human-animal interaction. But how does one cope with the plethora of different descriptions for the same animal in the historic record? A Dutch research group reports on how to aggregate ‘Bunzings’, ‘Ullingen’, and ‘Eierdieven’ (‘Egg-thieves’) into a useful historical ecology knowledge base.
Introduction: What is the precise impact of digital humanities on the humanities in general? That this influence exists seems a given, but how the digital humanities impact humanities methodology en epistemology is still an open question. This article delves deeper into this problem of epistemology and presents a model of five ‘polarities’ along which these influences can be positioned.
Introduction: Concepts are described differently in different times, and the way people talk about them reveals much about how people perceive these concepts. Researchers of the eScience Center in Amsterdam together with scholars from Utrecht University developed a visual tool to gain insight into such concept shift.
Introduction: How do we improve the quality of the fledgling practice of Web archeology, so much needed now that a first decade of Web information threatens to disappear as current interest wanes but contemporaneous cultural value is undisputed. A National Library of the Netherlands scientific report investigates.
Introduction: Open Access has made an impact on the business strategies of major publishing companies, but the effects may turn out to be perverse. Pressed by Open Access to find new revenue models publishing houses have moved to acquire ownership and dominance of academic data infrastructures. This article investigates the strategy of Elsevier to acquire renewed economical gain of academic work.