Category: Research Techniques

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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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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Das Projekt “GND für Kulturdaten” (GND4C)

Das Projekt “GND für Kulturdaten” (GND4C)

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.

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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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Research COVID-19 with AVOBMAT

Research COVID-19 with AVOBMAT

Introduction: In our guidelines for nominating content, databases are explicitly excluded. However, this database is an exception, which is not due to the burning issue of COVID-19, but to its exemplary variety of digital humanities methods with which the data can be processed.AVOBMAT makes it possible to process 51,000 articles with almost every conceivable approach (Topic Modeling, Network Analysis, N-gram viewer, KWIC analyses, gender analyses, lexical diversity metrics, and so on) and is thus much more than just a simple database – rather, it is a welcome stage for the Who is Who (or What is What?) of OpenMethods.

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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.
[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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Mining ethnicity: Discourse-driven topic modelling of immigrant discourses in the USA, 1898–1920

Mining ethnicity: Discourse-driven topic modelling of immigrant discourses in the USA, 1898–1920

Introduction: The article illustrates the application of a ‘discourse-driven topic modeling’ (DDTM) to the analysis of the corpus ChronicItaly comprising several newspapers in Italian language, appeared in the USA during the time of massive migration towards America between the end of the XIX century and the first two decades of the XX (1898-1920).

The method combines both Text Modelling (™) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA) in order to get a more comprehensive representation of the ethnocultural and linguistic identity of the Italian group of migrants in the historical American context in crucial periods of time like that immediately preceding the eruption and that of the unfolding of World War I.

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