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.
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: Standardized metadata, linked meaningfully using semantic web technologies are prerequisites for cross-disciplinary Digital Humanities research as well as for FAIR data management. In this article from the Open Access Journal o-bib, members of the project „GND for Cultural Data“ (GND4C) describe how the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND) (engl. Integrated Authority File), a widely accepted vocabulary for description and information retrieval in the library world is maintained by the German National Library and how it supports semantic interoperability and reuse of data. It also explores how the GND can be utilized and advanced collaboratively, integrating the perspectives of its multidisciplinary stakeholders, including the Digital Humanities. For background reading, the training resources „Controlled Vocabularies and SKOS“ (https://campus.dariah.eu/resource/controlled-vocabularies-and-skos) or „Formal Ontologies“ (https://campus.dariah.eu/resource/formal-ontologies-a-complete-novice-s-guide) are of interest.
Introduction: Issues around sustaining digital project outputs after their funding period is a recurrent topic on OpenMethods. In this post, Arianna Ciula introduces the King’s Digital Lab’s solution, a workflow around their CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network) instance, and uncovers the many questions around not only maintaining a variety of legacy resources from long-running projects, but also opening them up for data re-use, verification and integration beyond siloed resources.
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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Introduction: In this article, Alejandro Bia Platas and Ramón P. Ñeco García introduce TEIdown, an extension of the Markdown syntax that aims at creating XML-TEI documents, and transformation programs. TEIdown helps editors to validate and find errors in TEI documents.
Introduction: This is a comprehensive account of a workshop on research data in the study of the past. It introduces a broad spectrum of aspects and questions related to the growing relevance of digital research data and methods for this discipline and which methodological and conceptual consequences are involved and needed, especially a shared understanding of standards.
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.
Introduction: This post explains the benefits of using BEACON for data enrichment and increased visibility, on the example of Bibliografie deutsch-jüdische Geschichte Nordrhein-Westfalen.