Category: Tools

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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Zur Digitalisierung der Materialität mittelalterlicher Objekte. Ein Bericht aus der wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Werkstatt

Zur Digitalisierung der Materialität mittelalterlicher Objekte. Ein Bericht aus der wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Werkstatt

Introduction: In this blog post, Michael Schonhardt explores and evaluates a range of freely available, Open Source tools – Inkscape, Blender, Stellarium, Sketchup – that enable the digital, 3D modelling of medieval scholarly objects. These diverse tools bring easily implementable solutions for both the analysis and the communication of results of object-related cultural studies and are especially suitable for projects with small budgets.

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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.
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Ediarum. A toolbox for editors and developers | RIDE

Ediarum. A toolbox for editors and developers | RIDE

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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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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Do humanists need BERT?

Do humanists need BERT?

Introduction: Ted Underwood tests a new language representation model called “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers” (BERT) and asks if humanists should use it. Due to its high degree of difficulty and its limited success (e.g. in questions of genre detection) he concludes, that this approach will be important in the future but it’s nothing to deal with for humanists at the moment. An important caveat worth reading.

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‘Voyant Tools’

‘Voyant Tools’

Introduction: Digital humanists looking for tools in order to visualize and analyze texts can rely on ‘Voyant Tools’ (https://voyant-tools.org), a software package created by S.Sinclair and G.Rockwell. Online resources are available in order to learn how to use Voyant. In this post, we highlight two of them: “Using Voyant-Tools to Formulate Research Questions for Textual Data” by Filipa Calado (GC Digital Fellows and the tutorial “Investigating texts with Voyant” by Miriam Posner.

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The Research Software Directory and how it promotes software citation

The Research Software Directory and how it promotes software citation

Introduction: The Research Software Directory of the Netherlands eScience Institute provides easy access to software, source code and its documentation. More importantly, it makes it easy to cite software, which is highly advisable when using software to derive research results. The Research Software Directory positions itself as a platform that eases scientific referencing and reproducibility of software based research—good peer praxis that is still underdeveloped in the humanities. 

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