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.

Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool

Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool

The Spanish Paleography (http://spanishpaleographytool.org) tool helps to bridge this gap for those interested in learning paleography of the early modern Spanish period, covering the late 15th to the 18th centuries. The tool is intended to allow users to learn how to decipher and read handwriting from documents of this era. Full transcriptions of the documents can be viewed in a facing-page format, or users can highlight individual words. This tool could be used as a teaching tool to introduce students to paleography.

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.

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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Fragmentarium: a Model for Digital Fragmentology

Fragmentarium: a Model for Digital Fragmentology

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”. 

The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine

The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine

Introduction: There is a postulated level of anthropomorphism where people feel uncanny about the appearance of a robot. But what happens if digital facsimiles and online editions become nigh indistinguishable from the real, yet materially remaining so vastly different? How do we ethically provide access to the digital object without creating a blindspot and neglect for the real thing. A question that keeps digital librarian Dot Porter awake and which she ponders in this thoughtful contribution.