Category: Analysis

This general research goal refers to the activity of extracting any kind of information from open or closed, structured or unstructured collections of data, of discovering recurring phenomena, units, elements, patterns, groupings, and the like. This can refer to structural, formal or semantic aspects of data. Analysis also includes methods used to visualize results. Methods and techniques related to this goal may be considered to follow Capture and Enrichment; however, Enrichment depends upon assumptions, research questions and results related to Analysis.

From Hermeneutics to Data to Networks: Data Extraction and Network Visualization of Historical Sources

Introduction: This lesson by Marten Düring from the “Programming Historian-Website” gently introduces novices to the topic to Network Visualisation of Historical Sources. As a case study it covers not only the general advantages of network visualisation for humanists but also a step-by-step explanation of the process from extraction of the data until the visualization (using the Palladio-tool). This lesson has also been translated into Spanish and includes many useful references for further reading.

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Towards Scientific Workflows and Computer Simulation as a Method in Digital Humanities – Digitale Bibliothek – Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.

Introduction: The explore! project tests computer stimulation and text mining on autobiographic texts as well as the reusability of the approach in literary studies. To facilitate the application of the proposed method in broader context and to new research questions, the text analysis is performed by means of scientific workflows that allow for the documentation, automation, and modularization of the processing steps. By enabling the reuse of proven workflows, the goal of the project is to enhance the efficiency of data analysis in similar projects and further advance collaboration between computer scientists and digital humanists.

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Not All Character N-grams Are Created Equal: A Study in Authorship Attribution – ACL Anthology

Introduction: Studying n-grams of characters is today a classical choice in authorship attribution. If some discussion about the optimal length of these n-grams have been made, we have still have few clues about which specific type of n-grams are the most helpful in the process of efficiently identifying the author of a text. This paper partly fills that gap, by showing that most of the information gained from studying n-grams of characters comes from the affixes and punctuation.

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If These Crawls Could Talk: Studying and Documenting Web Archives Provenance

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.

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Old Periodicals, a New Datatype and Spiderfied Query Results in Wikidata

Introduction: This blog post describes how the National Library of Wales makes us of Wikidata for enriching their collections. It especially showcases new features for visualizing items on a map, including a clustering service, the support of polygons and multipolygons. It also shows how polygons like the shapes of buildings can be imported from OpenStreetMap into Wikidata, which is a great example for re-using already existing information.

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Attributing Authorship in the Noisy Digitized Correspondence of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm | Digital Humanities

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. 

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KNOW YOUR IMPLEMENTATION: SUBGRAPHS IN LITERARY NETWORKS

Introduction: Know Your Implementation: Subgraphs in Literary Networks shows how the online tool ezlinavis can give account of detached subgraphs while working with network analysis of literary texts. For this specific case, Goethe’s Faust, Part One (1808) was analyzed and visualized with ezlinavis, and average distances were calculated giving some new results to this research in relation to Faust as protagonist.

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Towards Semantic Enrichment of Newspapers: A Historical Ecology Use Case

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.

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