Category: Bibliographic Listings

Novels in distant reading: the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC).

Novels in distant reading: the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC).

Introduction: Among the most recent, currently ongoing, projects exploiting distant techniques reading there is the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC), which is one of the main elements of the Distant Reading for European Literary History (COST Action CA16204, https://www.distant-reading.net/). Thanks to the contribution provided by four Working Groups (respectively dealing with Scholarly Resources, Methods and Tools, Literary Theory and History, and Dissemination: https://www.distant-reading.net/working-groups/ ), the project aims at providing at least 2,500 novels written in ten European languages with a range of Distant Reading computational tools and methodological strategies to approach them from various perspectives (textual, stylistic, topical, et similia). A full description of the objectives of the Action and of ELTeC can be found and read in the Memorandum of Understanding for the implementation of the COST Action “Distant Reading for European Literary History” (DISTANT-READING) CA 16204”, available at the link  https://e-services.cost.eu/files/domain_files/CA/Action_CA16204/mou/CA16204-e.pdf

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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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GROBID: when data extraction becomes a suite

GROBID: when data extraction becomes a suite

Introduction: GROBID is an already well-known open source tool in the field of Digital Humanities, originally built to extract and parse bibliographical metadata from scholarly works. The acronym stands for GeneRation Of BIbliographic Data.
Shaped by use cases and adoptions to a range of different DH and non-DH settings, the tool has been progressively evolved into a suite of technical features currently applied to various fields, like that of journals, dictionaries and archives.
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Automatic annotation of incomplete and scattered bibliographical references in Digital Humanities papers

Automatic annotation of incomplete and scattered bibliographical references in Digital Humanities papers

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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El archivo y la toma de notas. El lugar del software en la interpretación histórica

El archivo y la toma de notas. El lugar del software en la interpretación histórica

Introduction: In this article, Nicolás Quiroga reflects on the fundamental place of the note-taking practice in the work of historians. The artcile also reviews some tools for classifying information -which do not substantially affect the note-taking activity – and suggests how the use of these tools can create new digital approaches for historians.

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On the first Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language (DOSL)

Introduction: A review of the book BITECA: Bibliografia de textos antics catalans, valencians i balears: Biblioteques i Arxius Valencians, by Beltran, Avenoza & Soriano (2013), that is an excuse to explain the technologies used to work on the first Dictionary of the Old Spanish Langauge (DOSL) and other versions at the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (HSMS).

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