Category: Enrichment

Enrichment refers to the activity of adding information to an object of enquiry, by making its origin, nature, structure, meaning, or elements explicit. This activity typically follows the capture of the object.

“Document Enrichment as a Tool for Automated Interview Coding”

“Document Enrichment as a Tool for Automated Interview Coding”

Following our last post focusing on Critical Discourse Analysis, today we highlight an automated document enrichment pipeline for automated interview coding, proposed by Ajda Pretnar Žagar, Nikola Ðukic´, Rajko Muršic in their paper presented at the Conference on Language Technologies & Digital Humanities, Ljubljana 2022. As described in the “Essential Guide to Coding Qualitative Data” (https://delvetool.com/guide), one of the main field of application of such a procedure is Ethnography, but not only.

Thanks to qualitative data coding it is possible to enrich texts through adding labels and descriptions to specific passages, that are generally pinpointed by means of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis softwares (CAQDAS). This can be valid for several fields of applications, from the humanities to biology, from sociology to medicine.
In their paper, Pretnar Žagar, Ðukic´ and Muršicˇ illustrate how relying on a couple of taxonomies (or onthologies) already known in anthropological studies may represent an asset to automatize and hasten the process of data labelling. These taxonomies are the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM) and the ETSEO (acronym for Ethnological Topography of Slovenian Ethnic Territory) systematics. In both cases we deal with taxonomies elaborated and applied in ethnographic research in order to organize and better analyze concepts and categories related to human cultures and traditions.

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Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis – and introduction to tool critizism

Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis – and introduction to tool critizism

In this video, Drs. Stephanie Vie and Jennifer deWinter explain some of the tools digital humanists can use for critical discourse analysis and visualization of data collected from social media platforms. Although not all the tools they mention are open source, the majority of them have free to use or freemium versions, including AntConc, a free-to-use concordancing tool, or several Twitter data visualisation tools such as Tweeps map or Tweetstats.

Even though the video does not provide just-as-good open source alternatives to Atlas.ti or MAXQDA (an obviously a recurrent question or shortcoming that is recurrently discussed on OpenMethods), it sets an excellent example for how to introduce tool criticism in the classroom alongside introduction to certain Digital Humanities Tools. After briefly touching upon both advantages and disadvantages of each tool, they encourage their audience (students in Digital Humanities study programs) to pilot each of them by using the same data-set and not only compare their results but also reflect on the epistemic processes in-between.

Sharing the video on Humanities Commons with stable archiving, DOI and rich metadata is among the best things that could happen to teaching resources of all kinds.

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What is PixPlot? (DH Tools) – YouTube

What is PixPlot? (DH Tools) – YouTube

Introduction: This short video teaser summarizes the main characteristics of PixPlot, a Python-based tool for clustering images and analyzing them from a numerical perspective as well as its pedagogical relevance as far as
machine learning is concerned.

The paper “Visual Patterns Discovery in Large Databases of Paintings”, presented at the Digital Humanities 2016 Conference held in Poland,
can be considered the foundational text for the development of the PixPlot Project at Yale University.
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Navigating the centuries with the ‘Mapping of the Republic of Letters’ project.

Navigating the centuries with the ‘Mapping of the Republic of Letters’ project.

In this post, we reach back in time to showcase an older project and highlight its impact on data visualization in Digital Humanities as well as its good practices to make different layers of scholarship available for increased transparency and reusability.  

Developed at Stanford with other research partners (‘Cultures of Knowledge’ at Oxford, the Groupe d’Alembert at CNRS, the KKCC-Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic, the DensityDesign ResearchLab), the ‘Mapping of the Republic of Letters Project’ aimed at digitizing and visualizing the intellectual community throughout the XVI and XVIII centuries known as ‘Republic of Letters’ (an overview of the concept can be found in Bots and Waquet, 1997), to get a better sense of the shape, size and associated intellectual network, its inherent complexities and  boundaries.

Below we highlight the different, interrelated
layers of making project outputs available and reusable on the long term (way before FAIR data became a widespread policy imperative!): methodological reflections, interactive visualizations, the associated data and its data model schema. All of these layers are published in a trusted repository and are interlinked with each other via their Persistent Identifiers.

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OpenMethods Spotlights #4 Improving access to Asian cultural heritage and enabling new ways to connect and study them: a podcast with Alíz Horváth and Shih-Pei Chen

OpenMethods Spotlights #4 Improving access to Asian cultural heritage and enabling new ways to connect and study them: a podcast with Alíz Horváth and Shih-Pei Chen

The conversation below is a special, summer episode of our Spotlight series. It is a collaboration between OpenMethods and the Humanista podcast and this it comes as a podcast, in which Alíz Horváth, owner of the Humanista podcast series and proud Editorial Team member of OpenMethods, is asking Shih-Pei Chen, scholar and Digital Content Curator at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science about the text analysis tools LoGaRT, RISE and SHINE; non-Latin scripted Digital Humanities, why local gazetteers are goldmines to Asian Studies, how digitization changes, broadens the kinds research questions one can study, where are the challenges in the access to cultural heritage and liaising with proprietary infrastructure providers… and many more! Enjoy!

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LoGaRT and RISE: Two multilingual tools from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

LoGaRT and RISE: Two multilingual tools from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Introduction: This post introduces two tools developed by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, LoGaRT and RISE with a focus on Asia and Eurasia. […]The concept of LoGaRT – treating local gazetteers as “databases” by themselves – is an innovative and pertinent way to articulate the essence of the platform: providing opportunities for multi-level analysis from the close reading of the sources (using, for example, the carousel mode) to the large-scale, “bird’s eye view” of the materials across geographical and temporal boundaries. Local gazetteers are predominantly textual sources – this characteristic of the collection is reflected in the capabilities of LoGaRT as well, since some of its key capabilities include data search (using Chinese characters), collection and analysis, as well as tagging and dataset comparison. That said, LoGaRT also offers integrated visualization tools and supports the expansion of the collection and tagging features to the images used in a number of gazetteers. The opportunity to smoothly intertwine these visual and textual collections with Chinese historical maps (see CHMap) is an added, and much welcome, advantage of the tool, which helps to develop sophisticated and multifaceted analyses.
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Annotation Guidelines For narrative levels, time features, and subjective narration styles in fiction (SANTA 2).

Annotation Guidelines For narrative levels, time features, and subjective narration styles in fiction (SANTA 2).

Introduction: If you are looking for solutions to translate narratological concepts to annotation guidelines to tag or mark-up your texts for both qualitative and quantitative analysis, then Edward Kearns’s paper “Annotation Guidelines for narrative levels, time features, and subjective narration styles in fiction” is for you! The tag set is designed to be used in XML, but they can be flexibly adopted to other working environments too, including for instance CATMA. The use of the tags is illustrated on a corpus of modernist fiction.
The guidelines have been published in a special issue of The Journal of Cultural Analytics (vol. 6, issue 4) entirely devoted to the illustration of the Systematic Analysis of Narrative levels Through Annotation (SANTA) project, serving as the broader intellectual context to the guidelines. All articles in the special issue are open peer reviewed , open access, and are available in both PDF and XML formats.
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GitHub – CateAgostini/IIIF

GitHub – CateAgostini/IIIF

Introduction: In this resource, Caterina Agostini, PhD in Italian from Rutgers University, Project Manager at The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton shares two handouts of workshops she organized and co-taught on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). They provide a gentle introduction to IIIF and clear overview of features (displaying, editing, annotating, sharing and comparing images along universal standards), examples and resources. The handouts could be of interest to anyone interested in the design and teaching of Open Educational Resources on IIF.
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The First of May in German Literature

The First of May in German Literature

Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra): Research on date extractions from literature brings us closer to answering big questions of “when literature takes place”.  As Frank Fischer’s blog post, First of May in German literature shows, beyond mere quantification, this line of research also yields insights on the cultural significance of certain dates. In this case, the significance of 1st of May in German literature (as reflected in the “Corpus of German-Language Fiction” dataset) was determined with the help of a freely accessible data set and the open access tool HeidelTime. The brief description of the workflow is a smart demonstration of the potential of open DH methods and data sharing in sustainable ways.

Bonus one: the post starts out from briefly touching upon some of Frank’s public humanities activities.

Bonus two: mention of the Tiwoli (“Today in World Literature”) app, a fun side product built on to pof the date extraction research.

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TAO IC Project: the charm of Chinese ceramics.

TAO IC Project: the charm of Chinese ceramics.

Introduction: Among the Nominees in the ‘Best DH Dataset’ of the DH Awards 2020, the TAO IC Project (http://www.dh.ketrc.com/index.html) leads us in a fascinating journey through the world of Chinese ceramics. The project, which is developed in a collaborative way at the Knowledge Engineering & Terminology Research Center of Liaocheng (http://ketrc.com/), exploits an onto-terminology-based approach to build an e-dictionary of Chinese vessels. Do you want to know every detail about a ‘Double-gourd Vase I’? If you consult ‘Class’ in the ‘Ontology’ section (http://www.dh.ketrc.com/class.html), you can discover the component, the function, from what such a vessel is made of, and what is the method to fire it. If you also wish to see how the vase appears, under ‘Individuals’ of the same section you can read a full description of it and, also, see a picture (http://www.dh.ketrc.com/class.html). All this information is collected in the e-dictionary for each beautiful item belonging to the Ming and Qing dynasties.

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