Category: Named Entities

Navigating the centuries with the ‘Mapping of the Republic of Letters’ project.

Navigating the centuries with the ‘Mapping of the Republic of Letters’ project.

In this post, we reach back in time to showcase an older project and highlight its impact on data visualization in Digital Humanities as well as its good practices to make different layers of scholarship available for increased transparency and reusability.  

Developed at Stanford with other research partners (‘Cultures of Knowledge’ at Oxford, the Groupe d’Alembert at CNRS, the KKCC-Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic, the DensityDesign ResearchLab), the ‘Mapping of the Republic of Letters Project’ aimed at digitizing and visualizing the intellectual community throughout the XVI and XVIII centuries known as ‘Republic of Letters’ (an overview of the concept can be found in Bots and Waquet, 1997), to get a better sense of the shape, size and associated intellectual network, its inherent complexities and  boundaries.

Below we highlight the different, interrelated
layers of making project outputs available and reusable on the long term (way before FAIR data became a widespread policy imperative!): methodological reflections, interactive visualizations, the associated data and its data model schema. All of these layers are published in a trusted repository and are interlinked with each other via their Persistent Identifiers.

[Click ‘Read more’ for the full post!]

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OpenMethods Spotlights #4 Improving access to Asian cultural heritage and enabling new ways to connect and study them: a podcast with Alíz Horváth and Shih-Pei Chen

OpenMethods Spotlights #4 Improving access to Asian cultural heritage and enabling new ways to connect and study them: a podcast with Alíz Horváth and Shih-Pei Chen

The conversation below is a special, summer episode of our Spotlight series. It is a collaboration between OpenMethods and the Humanista podcast and this it comes as a podcast, in which Alíz Horváth, owner of the Humanista podcast series and proud Editorial Team member of OpenMethods, is asking Shih-Pei Chen, scholar and Digital Content Curator at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science about the text analysis tools LoGaRT, RISE and SHINE; non-Latin scripted Digital Humanities, why local gazetteers are goldmines to Asian Studies, how digitization changes, broadens the kinds research questions one can study, where are the challenges in the access to cultural heritage and liaising with proprietary infrastructure providers… and many more! Enjoy!

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OpenMethods Spotlights #1: Interview with Hilde De Weerdt about MARKUS

OpenMethods Spotlights #1: Interview with Hilde De Weerdt about MARKUS

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.

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MARKUS – Comprehensive tool with the needs of non-Latin script users in mind

MARKUS – Comprehensive tool with the needs of non-Latin script users in mind

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.

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When history meets technology. impresso: an innovative corpus-oriented perspective.

When history meets technology. impresso: an innovative corpus-oriented perspective.

Historical newspapers, already available in many digitized collections, may represent a significant source of information for the reconstruction of events and backgrounds, enabling historians to cast new light on facts and phenomena, as well as to advance new interpretations. Lausanne, University of Zurich and C2DH Luxembourg, the ‘impresso – Media Monitoring of the Past’ project wishes to offer an advanced corpus-oriented answer to the increasing need of accessing and consulting collections of historical digitized newspapers.
[…] Thanks to a suite of computational tools for data extraction, linking and exploration, impresso aims at overcoming the traditional keyword-based approach by means of the application of advanced techniques, from lexical processing to semantically deepened n-grams, from data modelling to interoperability.
[Click ‘Read more’ for the full post!]

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Navegación de corpus a través de anotaciones lingüísticas automáticas obtenidas por Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural: de anecdótico a ecdótico

Navegación de corpus a través de anotaciones lingüísticas automáticas obtenidas por Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural: de anecdótico a ecdótico

Introduction: Spanish scholars Pablo Ruiz Fabo and Helena Bermúdez Sabel work in this article on two case studies regarding the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, entity linking, and Computational Linguistics methods to create corpus navigation interfaces. The authors also focus on how these technologies for automatic text analysis allow us to enrich scholarly digital editions. They include interesting points of view about analogue and digital editions, and their relation with ecdotic practice.

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Pipelines for languages: not only Latin! The Italian NLP Tool (Tint)

Pipelines for languages: not only Latin! The Italian NLP Tool (Tint)

The StandforCore NLP wishes to represent a complete Java-based set of tools for various aspects of language analysis, from annotation to dependency parsing, from lemmatization
to coreference resolution. It thus provides a range of tools which
can be potentially applied to other languages apart from English.

Among the languages to which the StandfordCore NLP is mainly applied there is Italian, for which the Tint pipeline has been developed as described in the paper “Italy goes to Stanford: a collection of CoreNLP modules for Italian” by Alessio Palmero Apostolo and Giovanni Moretti.

On the Tint webpage the whole pipeline can be found and downloaded: it comprises tokenization and sentence splitting, morphological analysis and lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition and dependency parsing, including wrappers under construction. [Click ‘Read more’ for the whole post.]

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Evaluating named entity recognition tools for extracting social networks from novels

Evaluating named entity recognition tools for extracting social networks from novels

Introduction: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is used to identify textual elements that gives things a name. In this study, four different NER tools are evaluated using a corpus of modern and classic fantasy or science fiction novels. Since NER tools have been created for the news domain, it is interesting to see how they perform in a totally different domain. The article comes with a very detailed methodological part and the accompanying dataset is also made available.

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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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