Category: Link

The Language Interpretability Tool: Extensible, Interactive Visualizations and Analysis for NLP Models

The Language Interpretability Tool: Extensible, Interactive Visualizations and Analysis for NLP Models

Introduction: NLP modelling and tasks performed by them are becoming an integral part of our daily realities (everyday or research). A central concern of NLP research is that for many of their users, these models still largely operate as black boxes with limited reflections on why the model makes certain predictions, how their usage is skewed towards certain content types, what are the underlying social, cultural biases etc. The open source Language Interoperability Tool aim to change this for the better and brings transparency to the visualization and understanding of NLP models. The pre-print describing the tool comes with rich documentation and description of the tool (including case studies of different kinds) and gives us an honest SWOT analysis of it.

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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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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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Approaching Linked Data

Approaching Linked Data

Introduction: Linked Data and Linked Open Data are gaining an increasing interest and application in many fields. A recent experiment conducted in 2018 at Furman University illustrates and discusses some of the challenges from a pedagogical perspective posed by Linked Open Data applied to research in the historical domain.

“Linked Open Data to navigate the Past: using Peripleo in class” by Chiara Palladino describes the exploitation of the search-engine Peripleo in order to reconstruct the past of four archeologically-relevant cities. Many databases, comprising various types of information, have been consulted, and the results, as highlighted in the contribution by Palladino, show both advantages and limitations of a Linked Open Data-oriented approach to historical investigations.

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Old Periodicals, a New Datatype and Spiderfied Query Results in Wikidata

Old Periodicals, a New Datatype and Spiderfied Query Results in Wikidata

Introduction: This blog post describes how the National Library of Wales makes us of Wikidata for enriching their collections. It especially showcases new features for visualizing items on a map, including a clustering service, the support of polygons and multipolygons. It also shows how polygons like the shapes of buildings can be imported from OpenStreetMap into Wikidata, which is a great example for re-using already existing information.

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Towards Semantic Enrichment of Newspapers: A Historical Ecology Use Case

Introduction: Ecologists are much aided by historical sources of information on human-animal interaction. But how does one cope with the plethora of different descriptions for the same animal in the historic record? A Dutch research group reports on how to aggregate ‘Bunzings’, ‘Ullingen’, and ‘Eierdieven’ (‘Egg-thieves’) into a useful historical ecology knowledge base.

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The Migrant Letter Digitised: Visualising Metadata

Introduction: The article discusses how letters are being used across the disciplines, identifying similarities and differences in transcription, digitisation and annotation practices. It is based on a workshop held after the end of the project Digitising experiences of migration: the development of interconnected letters collections (DEM). The aims were to examine issues and challenges surrounding digitisation, build capacity relating to correspondence mark-up, and initiate the process of interconnecting resources to encourage cross-disciplinary research. Subsequent to the DEM project, TEI templates were developed for capturing information within and about migrant correspondence, and visualisation tools were trialled with metadata from a sample of letter collections. Additionally, as a demonstration of how the project’s outputs could be repurposed and expanded, the correspondence metadata that was collected for DEM was added to a more general correspondence project, Visual Correspondence.

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