Centre for Digital Humanities

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">Digital Public Archaeology is a very new label for a contemporary practice, and as such has been subject to a limited amount of theoretical scrutiny. The rapid pace of change within Internet technologies has significantly expanded potential for this ‘digital’ form of Public Archaeology practice. Internet technologies can be used to gather contributions of ‘crowd-sourced’ archaeological content; to share and discuss archaeological news and discoveries; foster online community identity, situated around the topic of archaeology and wider heritage issues, or to elicit financial support. Expectations of and opportunities for social, collaborative and individual participation and interaction with cultural heritage have grown accordingly. Professional archaeological organisations are increasingly encouraged, if not required, to disseminate their grey literature reports, publications, educational resources, data-sets, images and other archaeological informatics through digital means, frequently as mandatory outputs for impact assessment and public accountability. Real-time sharing, comment and feedback of archaeological information online and via mobile technologies stand in contrast to lengthy waits for publication and wider dissemination. This paper will explore the literature on the practice of Public Archaeology in the UK, and issues associated with the development of digital public engagement in the heritage sector.</span>

This paper describes a co-creative text generation system applied within a science fiction setting to be used by an established novelist. The project was initiated as part of The Dutch Book Week, and the generated text will be published within a volume of science fiction stories. We explore the ramifications of applying Natural Language Generation within a cocreative process, and examine where the cocreative setting challenges both writer and machine. We employ a character-level language model to generate text based on a large corpus of Dutch novels that exposes a number of tunable parameters to the user. The system is used through a custom graphical user interface, that helps the writer to elicit, modify and incorporate suggestions by the text generation system. Besides a literary work, the output of the present project also includes user-generated meta-data that is expected to contribute to the quantitative evaluation of the text-generation system and the co-creative process involved.

This article describes the development and application of an innovative tool, Text Re-use Alignment Visualization (TRAViz), whose aim is to visualize variation between editions of both historical and modern texts. Reading different editions of a text empowers research in literary studies and linguistics, where one can study a text's reception or follow the development of its language over time. One of the purposes of a text edition is to trace or reconstruct a possible archetype or something that might be considered to be an original version of the text in order to better understand its evolution over time. To do so, the textual scholar examines and records the similarities and the differences between a number of exemplars in what is known as a 'critical apparatus'. The result of this variant analysis can be visually represented as a 'Variant Graph', where the relationships between these exemplars can be more easily studied. Variant Graphs can be, in turn, visualized in order to facilitate reading and interaction with the source data. Borrowing from existing digital tools, TRAViz assists the scholar in the collation process by specifically focusing on design and user engagement, concurrently seeking to simplify interaction as a means of encouraging humanists to adopt the tool. The article will describe the needs and rationale behind the creation of TRAViz by exploring existing research, describing its functionality through examples, and by finally discussing how its application can influence future development of this tool in particular and of the field in general.

The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who have tended to dominate such studies thus far. The survey was delivered via an online survey platform, in language versions specific to each target country. It was completed by 9,562 respondents, over 300 respondents per country on average. The survey consisted of the general section, which was translated and presented to all participants, as well as country-specific sections for a subset of 11 countries, which were drafted by collaborators at the national level. The present report covers the general section.

Although there has been a drive in the cultural heritage sector to provide large-scale, open data sets for researchers, we have not seen a commensurate rise in humanities researchers undertaking complex analysis of these data sets for their own research purposes. This article reports on a pilot project at University College London, working in collaboration with the British Library, to scope out how best high-performance computing facilities can be used to facilitate the needs of researchers in the humanities. Using institutional data-processing frameworks routinely used to support scientific research, we assisted four humanities researchers in analysing 60,000 digitized books, and we present two resulting case studies here. This research allowed us to identify infrastructural and procedural barriers and make recommendations on resource allocation to best support non-computational researchers in undertaking ‘big data’ research. We recommend that research software engineer capacity can be most efficiently deployed in maintaining and supporting data sets, while librarians can provide an essential service in running initial, routine queries for humanities scholars. At present there are too many technical hurdles for most individuals in the humanities to consider analysing at scale these increasingly available open data sets, and by building on existing frameworks of support from research computing and library services, we can best support humanities scholars in developing methods and approaches to take advantage of these research opportunities.

Engagement with, or research and teaching driven by, play has long been only a minor aspect of archaeological scholarship. In recent years, however, spurred on by the continued success of interactive entertainment, digital play has grown from a niche field to a promising avenue for all types of archaeological scholarship (Champion 2011; Champion 2015; Mol et al. 2017a; Morgan 2016; Reinhard 2018). Firstly, this article provides an introduction on the intersection between play and scholarship, followed by a discussion on how ‘<em>archaeogaming</em>’ scholarship has been shaping and been shaped by its subject matter over the last years. Secondly, the scholarship that arises from digital play is further illustrated with a case study based on the <em>RoMeincraft</em> project developed by the authors. The latter, made use of <em>Minecraft</em>, the popular digital building game, to (re-)construct and discuss Roman heritage through collaborative play between archaeologists and members of the public. Starting with in-game maps, sites such as forts, settlements, and infrastructural elements were rebuilt based on geological, archaeological, and historical information. These crowdsourced reconstructions, which not only relied on archaeological knowledge but also on a fair dose of creativity, took place in a series of educational public events in 2017–2019. The case study will detail the results of this project, as well as its methods, thus providing a practical example of digital scholarship which begins with discovery and ends in learning. The paper will conclude by reflecting on how the fun yet unpredictable dynamics of a digital playground not only shape public engagement with the past, but also open up unexpected avenues for more inclusive archaeological scholarship.

This paper provides both an update concerning the setting up of the European DARIAH infrastructure and a series of strong action lines related to the development of a data-centred strategy for the humanities in the coming years. In particular we tackle various aspects of data management: data hosting, the setting up of a DARIAH seal of approval, the establishment of a charter between cultural heritage institutions and scholars, and finally, a specific view on certification mechanisms for data.

This paper presents a joint project of the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies to produce a new open series of Greek and Latin fragmentary authors. Such authors are lost and their works are preserved only thanks to quotations and text reuses in later texts. The project is undertaking two tasks: (1) the digitization of paper editions of fragmentary works with links to the source texts from which the fragments have been extracted; (2) the production of born-digital editions of fragmentary works. The ultimate goals are the creation of open, linked, machine-actionable texts for the study and advancement of the field of Classical textual fragmentary heritage and the development of a collaborative environment for crowdsourced annotations. These goals are being achieved by implementing the Perseids Platform and by encoding the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, one of the most important and comprehensive collections of fragmentary authors.

Building on current work on multilingual hate speech (e.g.,

Abstract. Polished metallic surfaces exhibit a high degree of specularity, which makes them difficult to reproduce accurately. We have applied two different techniques for modelling a heritage object known as the Islamic handbag. Photogrammetric multi-view stereo enabled a dense point cloud to be extracted from a set of photographs with calibration targets, and a geometrically accurate 3D model produced. A new method based on photometric stereo from a set of images taken in an illumination dome enabled surface normals to be generated for each face of the object and its appearance to be rendered, to a high degree of visual realism, when illuminated by one or more light sources from any angles. The specularity of the reflection from the metal surface was modelled by a modified Lorentzian function.

The paper will provide an overview of the various domains covered by TEI Lex- 0 and the main decisions that were taken over the last 18 months: constraining the general structure of a lexical entry; offering mechanisms to overcome the limits of &lt;entry&gt; when used in retro-digitized dictionaries (by allowing, for instance, &lt;pc&gt; and &lt;lbl&gt; as children of &lt;entry&gt;); systematizing the representation of morpho-syntactic information; providing a strict &lt;sense&gt;-based encoding of sense-related information; deprecating &lt;hom&gt;; dealing with internal and external references in dictionary entries, providing more advanced encodings of etymology; as well as defining technical constraints on the systematic use of @xml:id at different levels of the dictionary microstructure.

This paper analyzes the application of usage labels in three representative lexicographic works, namely the Portuguese, Spanish, and French Academy Dictionaries as a starting point for creating a consistent classifcation of usage labels and their encoding in accordance with TEI Lex-0. The use of labels is not always entirely consistent within individual dictionaries and even less so across diferent lexicographic projects. This makes the tasks of accurately classifying and encoding them quite diffcult. This difculty is compounded by the diferences and partial incompatibilities found in the lexicographic literature on the treatment of diasystemic information. We address the existing literature and the initial classifcation of TEI Lex-0, and argue for the need to introduce some changes to TEI Lex-0, most notably in terms of diatextual labels. Finally, we argue that the existing classifcations based on examples rather than on clear and explicit defnitions of classifcation categories will always lack in precision and lead to mutually incompatible encodings of diferent dictionaries. We propose a set of defnitions for usage label categories that can be adopted by TEI Lex-0 and used in other similar attempts to create interoperable lexical resources. An agreement on usage label categories is a frst and necessary step before proceeding in the direction of harmonizing and standardizing the actual values of usage labels across various dictionaries and across diferent languages.

The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society is a major surviving historical record of the estates of the county of Londonderry (in modern day Northern Ireland). It contains key data about landholding and population in the Irish province of Ulster and the city of Londonderry and its environs in the mid-17th century, at a time of social, religious, and political upheaval. Compiled in 1639, it was severely damaged in a fire in 1786, and due to the fragile state of the parchment, its contents have been mostly inaccessible since. We describe here a long-term, interdisciplinary, international partnership involving conservators, archivists, computer scientists, and digital humanists that developed a low-cost pipeline for conserving, digitizing, 3D-reconstructing, and virtually flattening the fire-damaged, buckled parchment, enabling new readings and understanding of the text to be created. For the first time, this article presents a complete overview of the project, detailing the conservation, digital acquisition, and digital reconstruction methods used, resulting in a new transcription and digital edition of the text in time for the 400th anniversary celebrations of the building of Londonderry’s city walls in 2013. We concentrate on the digital reconstruction pipeline that will be of interest to custodians of similarly fire-damaged historical parchment, whilst highlighting how working together on this project has produced an online resource that has focussed community reflection upon an important, but previously inaccessible, historical text.

Edmond, Fischer, Romary, and Tasovac begin this chapter by exploring what infrastructure means in different contexts before going on to consider ‘digital infrastructure’ as not only a tool that needs to be built but also understood. They examine practices and theories in an attempt to define infrastructure for the arts and humanities in the digital age: firstly, considering infrastructure as knowledge spaces; secondly, considering why the arts and humanities need research infrastructure and; thirdly, establishing why a community approach should be adopted and what baseline requirements should be met. They focus on the case study of DARIA ERIC and its dual hierarchical and marketplace structure to optimise knowledge sharing and in-flow from within its community. They argue that infrastructures today not only represent a different model for supporting knowledge creation but are also developing new models for creating knowledge. They conclude that DARIAH ERIC harnesses the best of two communities — research infrastructures as originally conceived of in the sciences, as well as the arts and humanities research base.

Book of Abstracts from the Digital Humanities Conference 2023, held from 10th to 14th July in Graz, Austria

RuZ - Recht und Zugang , Seite 160 - 175

Introduction Emergent information technologies offer museum professionals new ways of bringing information about their collections directly to their audiences. There is a strong ethos within museums to widen public access to collections via the ever-growing digital provision of collections data. Over the past decade, the number of online museum collections, and the number of online visitors using those collections, has increased significantly. These changes have posed challenges for museum professionals and academics alike, seeking to understand how digital museum resources feature in the information seeking practices of their online visitors. There are now vast amounts of digital museum resources available to support scholarship. These resources are changing the ways researchers work, offering convenient quick access to a wide selection of materials, particularly with regard to cultural heritage content. However, finding information in museums, as well as libraries and archives (memory institutions), is not an easy task. Collections database information systems can be overwhelming and daunting to many users. Designing intuitive systems that meet researchers’ needs requires a thorough understanding of the information-seeking behaviour of collection database users. A proper understanding of how museum visitors use digital museum resources is critical for the success of museums in the information age. As museums cope with the challenges of ‘being digital’ (Hamma, 2004), meeting the information needs of online visitors has become an important part of the museum's role (Marty, 2004) and it is now critical for researchers and museum professionals to explore the use of museum digital resources, in-house and online (Booth, 1999; Sarraf, 1999). The British Museum has a commitment to expanding virtual and physical access to its collections, utilizing different mediums to open up the museum collections to a wider, more diverse audience. In October 2007, it launched an online version of its collections database, British Museum Collection Database Online (COL2). By the end of 2009, nearly two million records from the museum collections had been made available to the public worldwide. Despite recent technical advances in collections access and interpretation, very little is known about whether and how this material is used, or if it makes possible new kinds of engagement with museum objects.

This paper applies stylometry to quantify the literariness of 73 novels and novellas by American author Stephen King, chosen as an extraordinary case of a writer who has been dubbed both "high" and "low" in literariness in critical reception. We operationalize literariness using a measure of stylistic distance (Cosine Delta) based on the 1000 most frequent words in two bespoke comparison corpora used as proxies for literariness: one of popular genre fiction, another of National Book Award-winning authors. We report that a supervised model is highly effective in distinguishing the two categories, with 94.6% macro average in a binary classification.

Book of Abstracts from the Digital Humanities Conference 2023, held from 10th to 14th July in Graz, Austria

The growth of digitization in the cultural heritage domain offers great possibilities to broaden the boundaries of historical research. With the ultimate aim of creating social networks of person names from news articles, we introduce a person name disambiguation method that exploits the relation between the ambiguity of a person name and the number of entities referred to by it. Modeled as a clustering problem with a strong focus on social relations, our system dynamically adapts its clustering strategy to the most suitable configuration for each name depending on how common this name is. Our method's performance is on par with the state-of-the-art reported for the CRIPCO dataset, while using less specific resources.