Category: Text

Annotation Guidelines For narrative levels, time features, and subjective narration styles in fiction (SANTA 2).

Annotation Guidelines For narrative levels, time features, and subjective narration styles in fiction (SANTA 2).

Introduction: If you are looking for solutions to translate narratological concepts to annotation guidelines to tag or mark-up your texts for both qualitative and quantitative analysis, then Edward Kearns’s paper “Annotation Guidelines for narrative levels, time features, and subjective narration styles in fiction” is for you! The tag set is designed to be used in XML, but they can be flexibly adopted to other working environments too, including for instance CATMA. The use of the tags is illustrated on a corpus of modernist fiction.
The guidelines have been published in a special issue of The Journal of Cultural Analytics (vol. 6, issue 4) entirely devoted to the illustration of the Systematic Analysis of Narrative levels Through Annotation (SANTA) project, serving as the broader intellectual context to the guidelines. All articles in the special issue are open peer reviewed , open access, and are available in both PDF and XML formats.
[Click ‘Read more’ for the full post!]

Read More
What Counts as Culture? Part I: Sentiment Analysis of The Times Music Reviews, 1950-2009 – train in the distance

What Counts as Culture? Part I: Sentiment Analysis of The Times Music Reviews, 1950-2009 – train in the distance

Introduction: This blog post by Lucy Havens presents a sentiment analysis of over 2000 Times Music Reviews using freely available tools: defoe for building the corpus of reviews, VADER for sentiment analysis and Jupiter Notebooks to provide a rich documentation and to connect the different components of the analysis. The description of the workflow comes with tool and method criticism reflections, including an outlook how to improve and continue to get better and more results.

Read More
La poética dramática desde una perspectiva cuantitativa: la obra de Calderón de la Barca

La poética dramática desde una perspectiva cuantitativa: la obra de Calderón de la Barca

Introduction: In this paper, Ehrlicher et al. follow a quantitative approach to unveil possible structural parallelisms between 13 comedies and 10 autos sacramentales written by Calderón de la Barca. Comedies are analyzed within a comparative framework, setting them against Spanish comedia nueva and French comedie precepts. Authors employ tool DramaAnalysis and statistics for their examination, focusing on: word frequency per subgenre, average number of characters, their variation and discourse distribution, etc. Autos sacramentales are also evaluated through these indicators. Regarding comedies, Ehrlicher et al.’s results show that Calderón: a) plays with units of space and time depending on creative and dramatic needs, b) does not follow French comedie conventions of character intervention or linkage, but c) does abide by its concept of structural symmetry. As for autos sacramentales, their findings brought forth that these have a similar length and character variation to comedies. However, they also identified the next difference: Calderón uses character co-presence in them to reinforce the message conveyed. Considering all this, authors confirm that Calderón’s comedies disassociate from classical notions of theatre – both Aristotelian and French –ideals. With respect to autos sacramentales, they believe further evaluation would be needed to verify ideas put forward and identify other structural patterns.

Read More
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.

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

Read More
An end-to-end approach for extracting and segmenting high-variance references from pdf documents

An end-to-end approach for extracting and segmenting high-variance references from pdf documents

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.

Read More
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.

Read More
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.

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

Read More
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!]

Read More