FactGrid – a database for historians

FactGrid – a database for historians

FactGrid is both a database as well as a wiki. This project operated by the Gotha Research Centre and the data lab of the University of Erfurt. It utilizes MediaWiki and a Wikidata’s “wikibase” extension to collect data from historic research. With FactGrid you can create a knowledge graph, giving information in triple statements. This knowledge graph can be asked with SPARQL. All data provided by FactGrid holds a CC0-license.

Linked Data from TEI (LIFT): A Teaching Tool for TEI to Linked Data Transformation

Linked Data from TEI (LIFT): A Teaching Tool for TEI to Linked Data Transformation

TEI editions are among the most used tool by scholarly editors to produce digital editions in various literary fields. LIFT is a Python-based tool that allows to programmatically extract information from digital texts annotated in TEI by modelling persons, places, events and relations annotated in the form of a Knowledge Graph which reuses ontologies and controlled vocabularies from the Digital Humanities domain.

Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python — Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python

Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python — Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python

Introduction: Folgert Karsdorp, Mike Kestemont and Allen Riddell ‘s  interactive book, Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python had been written with the aim in mind to equip humanities students and scholars working with textual and tabular resources with practical, hands-on knowledge to better understand the potentials of data-rich, computer-assisted approaches that the Python framework offers to them and eventually to apply and integrate them to their own research projects.

The first part introduces a “Data carpentry”, a collection of essential techniques for gathering, cleaning, representing, and transforming textual and tabular data. This sets the stage for the second part that consists of 5 case studies (Statistics Essentials: WhoReads Novels? ; Introduction to Probability ; Narrating with Maps ; Stylometry and the Voice of Hildegard ; A Topic Model of United States Supreme Court Opinions, 1900–2000 ) showcasing how to draw meaningful insights from data using quantitative methods. Each chapter contains executable Python codes and ends with exercises ranging from easier drills to more creative and complex possibilities to adapt the apply and adopt the newly acquired knowledge to their own research problems.

The book exhibits best practices in how to make digital scholarship available in an open, sustainable ad digital-native manner, coming in different layers that are firmly interlinked with each other. Published with Princeton University Press in 2021, hardcopies are also available, but more importantly, the digital version is an  Open Access Jupyter notebook that can be read in multiple environments and formats (.md and .pdf). The documentation, coda and data materials are available on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/3560761#.Y3tCcn3MJD9). The authors also made sure to select and use packages which are mature and actively maintained.

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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Collaborative Digital Projects in the Undergraduate Humanities Classroom: Case Studies with Timeline JS

Collaborative Digital Projects in the Undergraduate Humanities Classroom: Case Studies with Timeline JS

https://openmethods.dariah.eu/2022/05/11/open-source-tool-allows-users-to-create-interactive-timelines-digital-humanities-at-a-state/ OpenMethods introduction to: Collaborative Digital Projects in the Undergraduate Humanities Classroom: Case Studies with Timeline JS 2022-05-11 07:28:36 Marinella Testori Blog post Creation Data Designing Digital Humanities English Methods…

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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Find research data repositories for the humanities – the data deposit recommendation service

Find research data repositories for the humanities – the data deposit recommendation service

Introduction: Finding  suitable research data repositories that best match the technical or legal requirements of your research data is not always an easy task. This paper, authored by Stephan Buddenbohm, Maaikew de Jong, Jean-Luc Minel  and Yoann Moranville showcase the demonstrator instance of the Data Deposit Recommendation Service (DDRS), an application built on top of the re3data database specifically for scholars working in the Humanities domain. The paper  also highlights further directions of developing the tool, many of which implicitly bring sustainability issues to the table.

BERT for Humanists: a deep learning language model  meets DH

BERT for Humanists: a deep learning language model meets DH

Introduction: Awarded as Best Long Paper at the 2019 NACCL (North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) Conference, the contribution by Jacob Devlin et al. provides an illustration of “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Biredictional Transformers for Language Understanding” (https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/).

As highlighted by the authors in the abstract, BERT is a “new language representation model” and, in the past few years, it has become widespread in various NLP applications; for example, a project exploiting it is CamemBERT (https://camembert-model.fr/), regarding French. 

In June 2021, a workshop organized by David Mimno, Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak (https://melaniewalsh.github.io/BERT-for-Humanists/workshop/) pointed out how to use BERT in projects related to digital humanities, in order to deal with word similarity and classification classification while relying on Phyton-based HuggingFace transformers library. (https://melaniewalsh.github.io/BERT-for-Humanists/tutorials/ ). A further advantage of this training resource is that it has been written with sensitivity towards the target audience in mind:  in a way that it provides a gentle introduction to complexities of language models to scholars with education and background other than Computer Science.

Along with the Tutorials, the same blog includes Introductions about BERT in general and in its specific usage in a Google Colab notebook, as well as a constantly-updated bibliography and a glossary of the main terms (‘attention’, ‘Fine-Tune’, ‘GPU’, ‘Label’, ‘Task’, ‘Transformers’, ‘Token’, ‘Type’, ‘Vector’).

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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