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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Category: Annotating
Annotating refers to the activity of making information about a digital object explicit by adding, e.g., comments, metadata or keywords to a digitized representation or to an annotation file associated with it. This can be in the form of annotations that comment on or contextualize a passage (explanatory annotations) in order to make structural or linguistic information explicit (structural/linguistic annotation), as linked open data making the relationships between objects machine-readable, or, in the case of general metadata, adding information about the object as a whole. Encoding is a technique associated with annotating, as are POS-Tagging, Tree-Tagging, and Georeferencing.
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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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.
Introduction: Digital Literary Studies has long engaged with the challenges in representing ambiguity, contradiction and polyvocal readings of literary texts. This book chapter describes a web-based tool called CATMA which promises a “low-threshold” approach to digitally encoded text interpretation. CATMA has a long trajectory based on a ‘standoff’ approach to markup, somewhat provocatively described by its creators as “undogmatic”, which stands in contrast to more established systems for text representation in digital scholarly editing and publishing such as XML markup, or the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Standoff markup involves applying numbers to each character of a text and then using those numbers as identifiers to store interpretation externally. This approach allows for “multiple, over-lapping and even taxonomically contradictory annotations by one or more users” and avoids some of the rigidity which other approaches sometimes imply. An editor working with CATMA is able to create multiple independent annotation cycles, and to even specify which interpretation model was used for each. And the tool allows for an impressive array of analysis and visualization possibilities.
Recent iterations of CATMA have developed approaches which aim to bridge the gap between ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading by providing scalable digital annotation and interpretation involving “semantic zooming” (which is compared to the kind of experience you get from an interactive map). The latest version also brings greater automation (currently in German only) to grammatical tense capture, temporal signals and part-of-speech annotation, which offer potentially significant effort savings and a wider range of markup review options. Greater attention is also paid to different kinds of interpretation activities through the three CATMA annotation modes of ‘highlight’, ‘comment’ and ‘annotate’, and to overall workflow considerations. The latest version of the tool offers finely grained access options mapping to common editorial roles and workflows.
I would have welcome greater reflection in the book chapter on sustainability – how an editor can port their work to other digital research environments, for use with other tools. While CATMA does allow for export to other systems (such as TEI), quite how effective this is (how well its interpretation structures bind to other digitally-mediated representation systems) is not clear.
What is most impressive about CATMA, and the work of its creator – the forTEXT research group – more generally, is how firmly embedded the thinking behind the tool is in humanities (and in particular literary) scholarship and theory. The group’s long-standing and deeply reflective engagement with the concerns of literary studies is well captured in this well-crafted and highly engaging book chapter.
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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”.
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.
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.
Introduction: the RIDE journal (the Review Journal of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing) aims to offer a solution to current misalignments between scholarly workflows and their evaluation and provides a forum for the critical evaluation of the methodology of digital edition projects. This time, we have been cherry picking from their latest issue (Issue 11) dedicated to the evaluation and critical improvement of tools and environments.
Ediarum is a toolbox developed for editors by the TELOTA initiative at the BBAW in Berlin to generate and annotate TEI-XML Data in German language. In his review, Andreas Mertgens touches upon issues regarding methodology and implementation, use cases, deployment and learning curve, Open Source, sustainability and extensibility of the tool, user interaction and GUI and of course a rich functional overview.
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The reviewed article presents the project BILBO and illustrates the application of several appropriate machine-learning techniques to the constitution of proper reference corpora and the construction of efficient annotation models. In this way, solutions are proposed for the problem of extracting and processing useful information from bibliographic references in digital documentation whatever their bibliographic styles are. It proves the usefulness and high degree of accuracy of CRF techniques, which involve finding the most effective set of features (including three types of features: input, local and global features) of a given corpus of well-structured bibliographical data (with labels such as surname, forename or title). Moreover, this approach has not only been proven efficient when applied to such traditional, well-structured bibliographical data sets, but it also originally contributes to the processing of more complicated, less-structured references such as the ones contained in footnotes by applying SVM with new features for sequence classification.
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Introduction: Hosted at the University of Lausanne, “A world of possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony in the Latin language” (WoPoss) is a project under development exploiting a corpus-based approach to the study and reconstruction of the diachrony of modality in Latin.
Following specific annotation guidelines applied to a set of various texts pertaining to the time span between 3rd century BCE and 7th century CE, the work team lead by Francesca Dell’Oro aims at analyzing the patterns of modality in the Latin language through a close consideration of lexical markers.