If These Crawls Could Talk: Studying and Documenting Web Archives Provenance

If These Crawls Could Talk: Studying and Documenting Web Archives Provenance

Introduction: With Web archives becoming an increasingly more important resource for (humanities) researchers, it also becomes paramount to investigate and understand the ways in which such archives are being built and how to make the processes involved transparent. Emily Maemura, Nicholas Worby, Ian Milligan, and Christoph Becker report on the comparison of three use cases and suggest a framework to document Web archive provenance.

Transkribus & Magazines: Transkribus’ Transcription & Recognition Platform (TRP) as Social Machine…

Transkribus & Magazines: Transkribus’ Transcription & Recognition Platform (TRP) as Social Machine…

Introduction: This article proposes establishing a good collaboration between FactMiners and the Transkribus project that will help the Transkribus team to evolve the “sustainable virtuous” ecosystem they described as a Transcription & Recognition Platform — a Social Machine for Job Creation & Skill Development in the 21st Century!

Towards Semantic Enrichment of Newspapers: A Historical Ecology Use Case

Introduction: Ecologists are much aided by historical sources of information on human-animal interaction. But how does one cope with the plethora of different descriptions for the same animal in the historic record? A Dutch research group reports on how to aggregate ‘Bunzings’, ‘Ullingen’, and ‘Eierdieven’ (‘Egg-thieves’) into a useful historical ecology knowledge base.

Teaching Quantitative Methods: What Makes It Hard (in Literary Studies)

Introduction: This article reflects on the lessons learnt by the author as he first taught a graduate course in digital analysis of literary texts. He stresses the importance of methodologies over technologies, the need for well-curated, community-created teaching datasets and the implications of the practical, discipline-based organisation of the curricula.