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.

Cultural Ontologies: the ArCo Knowledge Graph.

Cultural Ontologies: the ArCo Knowledge Graph.

Introduction: Standing for ‘Architecture of Knowledge’, ArCo is an open set of resources developed and managed by some Italian institutions, like the MiBAC (Minister for the Italian Cultural Heritage) and, within it, the ICCD – Institute of the General Catalogue and Documentation), and the CNR – Italian National Research Council. Through the application of eXtreme Design (XD), ArCO basically consists in an ontology network comprising seven modules (the arco, the core, the catalogue, the location, the denotative description, the context description, and the cultural event) and a set of LOD data comprising a huge amount of linked entities referring to the national Italian cultural resources, properties and events. Under constant refinement, ArCo represents an example of a “robust Semantic Web resource” (Carriero et al., 11) in the field of cultural heritage, along with other projects like, just to mention a couple of them, the Google Arts&Culture (https://artsandculture.google.com/) or the Smithsonian American Art Museum (https://americanart.si.edu/about/lod).

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Programmable Corpora: Introducing DraCor, an Infrastructure for the Research on European Drama

Programmable Corpora: Introducing DraCor, an Infrastructure for the Research on European Drama

Introduction: The DraCor ecosystem encourages various approaches to the browsing and consultation of the data collected in the corpora, like those detailed in the Tools section: the Shiny DraCor app (https://shiny.dracor.org/), along with the SPARQL queries and the Easy Linavis interfaces (https://dracor.org/sparql and https://ezlinavis.dracor.org/ respectively). The project, thus, aims at creating a suitable digital environment for the development of an innovative way to approach literary corpora, potentially open to collaborations and interactions with other initiatives thanks to its ontology and Linked Open data-based nature.
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Worthäufigkeiten als Quelle für die Geschichtswissenschaft? – Einblicke in die Digital Humanities

Worthäufigkeiten als Quelle für die Geschichtswissenschaft? – Einblicke in die Digital Humanities

Introduction: Especially humanities scholars (not only historians) who have not yet had any contact with the Digital Humanities, Silke Schwandt offers a motivating and vivid introduction to see the potential of this approach, using the analysis of word frequencies as an example. With the help of Voyant Tools and Nopaque, she provides her listeners with the necessary equipment to work quantitatively with their corpora. Schwandt’s presentation, to which the following report by Maschka Kunz, Isabella Stucky and Anna Ruh refers, can also be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJvbC3b1yPc.

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Fragmentarium: a Model for Digital Fragmentology

Fragmentarium: a Model for Digital Fragmentology

Introduction: One of the major challenges of digital data workflows in the Arts and Humanities is that resources that belong together, in extreme cases, like this particular one, even parts of dismembered manuscripts, are hosted and embedded in different geographical and institutional silos. Combining IIIF with a mySQL database, Fragmentarium provides a user-friendly but also standardized, open workspace for the virtual reconstruction of medieval manuscript fragments. Lisa Fagin Davis’s blog post gives contextualized insights of the potentials of Fragmentarium and how, as she writes, “technology has caught up with our dreams”. 

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An end-to-end approach for extracting and segmenting high-variance references from pdf documents

An end-to-end approach for extracting and segmenting high-variance references from pdf documents

Introduction: Digital text analysis depends on one important thing: text that can be processed with little effort. Working with PDFs often leads to great difficulties, as Zeyd Boukhers Shriharsh Ambhore and Steffen Staab describe in their paper. Their goal is to extract references from PDF documents. Highlight of their described workflow are very impressive precision rates. The paper thereby encourages to a further development of the process and its application as a “method” in the humanities.

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OpenMethods Spotlights #1: Interview with Hilde De Weerdt about MARKUS

OpenMethods Spotlights #1: Interview with Hilde De Weerdt about MARKUS

OpenMethods Spotlights showcase people and epistemic reflections behind Digital Humanities tools and methods. You can find here brief interviews with the creator(s) of the blogs or tools that are highlighted on OpenMethods to humanize and contextualize them. In the first episode, Alíz Horváth is talking with Hilde de Weerdt at Leiden University about MARKUS, a tool that offers offers a variety of functionalities for the markup, analysis, export, linking, and visualization of texts in multiple languages, with a special focus on Chinese and now Korean as well.

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MARKUS – Comprehensive tool with the needs of non-Latin script users in mind

MARKUS – Comprehensive tool with the needs of non-Latin script users in mind

East Asian studies are still largely underrepresented in digital humanities. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is the relative lack of tools and methods which could be used smoothly with non-Latin scripts. MARKUS, developed by Brent Ho within the framework of the Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective project led by Hilde de Weerdt at Leiden University, is a comprehensive tool which helps mitigate this issue. Selected as a runner up in the category “Best tool or suite of tools” in the DH2016 awards, MARKUS offers a variety of functionalities for the markup, analysis, export, linking, and visualization of texts in multiple languages, with a special focus on Chinese and now Korean as well.

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Zur Digitalisierung der Materialität mittelalterlicher Objekte. Ein Bericht aus der wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Werkstatt

Zur Digitalisierung der Materialität mittelalterlicher Objekte. Ein Bericht aus der wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Werkstatt

Introduction: In this blog post, Michael Schonhardt explores and evaluates a range of freely available, Open Source tools – Inkscape, Blender, Stellarium, Sketchup – that enable the digital, 3D modelling of medieval scholarly objects. These diverse tools bring easily implementable solutions for both the analysis and the communication of results of object-related cultural studies and are especially suitable for projects with small budgets.

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When history meets technology. impresso: an innovative corpus-oriented perspective.

When history meets technology. impresso: an innovative corpus-oriented perspective.

Historical newspapers, already available in many digitized collections, may represent a significant source of information for the reconstruction of events and backgrounds, enabling historians to cast new light on facts and phenomena, as well as to advance new interpretations. Lausanne, University of Zurich and C2DH Luxembourg, the ‘impresso – Media Monitoring of the Past’ project wishes to offer an advanced corpus-oriented answer to the increasing need of accessing and consulting collections of historical digitized newspapers.
[…] Thanks to a suite of computational tools for data extraction, linking and exploration, impresso aims at overcoming the traditional keyword-based approach by means of the application of advanced techniques, from lexical processing to semantically deepened n-grams, from data modelling to interoperability.
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