The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing
The Association for Computers and the Humanities
The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities
centerNet
The Society for Digital Humanities – Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs

Digital Humanities 2012
Conference Abstracts

University of Hamburg, Germany
July 16–22, 2012

Hamburg University Press
Publishing House of the Hamburg State and University Library
Carl von OssietzkyPrinted with the Support of the German Research Foundation

EditorJan Christoph Meister
Editorial Assistant
Katrin Schönert
Editorial Staff
Bastian Lomsché
Wilhelm Schernus
Lena Schüch
Meike Stegkemper
Technical Support
Benjamin W. Bohl
Daniel Röwenstrunk

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library).
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed
bibliographic data are available on the Internet at https://portal.dnb.de/
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek stores this online publication on its Archive Server. The Archive
Server is part of the deposit system for long-term availability of digital publications.
Also available open access on the Internet at:
Hamburg University Press – http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de
PURL: http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/HamburgUP/DH2012_Book_of_Abstracts
For an elaborated version of this Book of Abstracts with color photos and zoom function, please visit:www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de
ISBN 978-3-937816-99-9 (printed version)© 2012 Hamburg University Press, publishing house of the Hamburg State and University Library
Carl von Ossietzky, Germany
Cover design: Turan UsukCover illustration: Dagmar Schwelle/laifPrinting house: Elbepartner, BuK! Breitschuh & Kock GmbH, Hamburg, Germany

The 24th Joint International Conference of
the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and
the Association for Computers and the Humanities
andThe 5th Joint International Conference of
the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing,
the Association for Computers and the Humanities,
the Society for Digital Humanities – Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs,
for the first time organized together with
the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities andcenterNet

International Programme Committee• Susan Brown (SDH/SEMI – Vice Chair)• Arianna Ciula (ALLC)• Tanya Clement (ACH)• Michael Eberle-Sinatra (SDH/SEMI)• Dot Porter (ACH)• Jan Rybicki (ALLC)• Jon Saklofske (SDH/SEMI)• Paul Spence (ALLC – Chair)• Tomoji Tabata (ALLC)• Katherine Walter (ACH)

Local Organizing Committee• Peer Bolten• Imke Borchers• Evelyn Gius
• Mareike Höckendorff• Bastian Lomsché• Jan Christoph Meister• Marco Petris• Wilhelm Schernus• Lena Schüch• Katrin Schönert
• Meike StegkemperDigital Humanities 2012

Welcome DH2012 from the Vice President Research,
University of Hamburg
Hans Siegfried Stiehl

University of Hamburg, Germany

With about 40,000 students, 680 professors and 4200 research staff, the University of Hamburg is
one of Germany’s largest universities which comprises six schools: Law; Business, Economics andSocial Sciences; Medicine; Education, Psychology and Human Movement; Humanities; Mathematics,
Informatics and Natural Sciences. As of this spring, these schools are home to about 300 collaborative
research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry of Education
and Research and the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission. This includes 28
DFG-Collaborative Research Centres, DFG-Research Training Groups, and DFG-Research Groups, aswell as the Excellence Cluster ‘Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction (CLISAP).’
From the mid-1990s on, researchers in the School of Humanities and the Department of Informatics
at University of Hamburg began to explore the potential for cooperation in an emerging field thenstill referred to as ‘Computational Philology.’ Eventually in the School of Humanities the ‘Arbeitsstelle
Computerphilologie’, one of the first institutions of its kind in Germany, was established.
Today the use of eScience and eHumanities approaches and technology has become part of the daily
routine of an ever rising number of scholars and students. ‘Digital Diversity: Cultures, Languages andMethods’, the motto for this year’s Digital Humanities conference, relates methodical and technicalinnovation to the traditional research agenda of the Humanities – a relation fostering the novel researchparadigm DH that is of particular interest to University of Hamburg. Indeed, Digital Humanities
methods play a vital role in some of our most advanced and prestigious research initiatives, such as the
DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre ‘Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe.’ In thecontext of this interdisciplinary research project the traditional focus on cultural diversity, which has
been characteristic for our university from its very beginning in 1919, goes hand in hand with methodical
and technical innovation. Projects like this demonstrate the relevance of spurring further exchange
among the research paradigms of the humanities, informatics and of computational science. I am certainthat the current conference is bound to make a significant contribution to further building bridges.
The University of Hamburg is therefore delighted to host the Digital Humanities 2012 conference, andit gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our university as well as to the Free and Hanseatic City of
Hamburg. For us, the DH 2012 is one of the most important academic events in this year’s calendar,and I wish the conference every success!

VIIDigital Humanities 2012

Chair of International Programme Committee
Paul Spence

Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK

A recurring theme at Digital Humanities conferences in recent years has been the high number ofsubmissions, and this year has continued the upward trend, with close to 400 submissions across thedifferent categories: pre-conference workshops/tutorials, long papers, short papers, posters and multipaper sessions (including panels). I take this as a sign that the field continues to grow and develop,
and the quality of the submissions this year certainly made the job of the International ProgrammeCommittee challenging (in a good way), although thanks to the excellent facilities provided by our
Hamburg hosts we have been able to expand the conference to five strands this year, meaning that thisyear’s conference has more contributions, and by more participants, than most DH conferences in thepast.
The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Digital Diversity: Cultures, languages and methods’ and theconference schedule includes contributions on a wide range of topics, reflecting the increasing breadthin the field on all levels. The conference offers opportunities to explore new themes, acknowledges
the increasing linguistic diversity of the field and reflects the growth of digital humanities centres andnetworks in new regions of the world. Both of our keynote speakers reflect on this diversity: Claudine
Moulin will explore the challenges in developing interdisciplinary and transnational research structures,with particular consideration for the role of digital humanities; Masahiro Shimoda contemplates therelationship of the field to the wider humanities from a historical and cultural perspective.
I would like to thank all those who submitted proposals this year and all those who agreed to act asreviewers – your contributions on both fronts ensured that the conference continues to reflect the very
best of digital scholarship in the humanities at this moment in time. We enlarged our group of reviewers
this year, both in anticipation of increased submissions and in a concerted effort to build on the goodwork of previous PC chairs in broadening the geographic coverage of our reviewer pool.
I would like to give my thanks to the members of the International Programme Committee, who this year
included: Arianna Ciula (ALLC), Tanya Clement (ACH), Michael Eberle-Sinatra (SDH-SEMI), Dot Porter(ACH), Jan Rybicki (ALLC), Jon Saklofske (SDH-SEMI), Tomoji Tabata (ALLC) and Katherine Walter(ACH). I would particularly like to thank the Vice Chair Susan Brown (SDH-SEMI) whose advice andgood judgement were a great help throughout. Finally, I wish to thank the local organizers, in particular
Jan Christoph Meister and Katrin Schönert, for their hard work and support in finding rooms, making
practical suggestions and showing the energy and creativity which promise to make this an outstanding
conference.

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Digital Humanities 2012

Welcome ashore!
Jan Christoph Meister and Katrin Schönert
University of Hamburg, Germany

The use of maritime metaphor is tempting in Hamburg. Our harbor is 824 years old this year, counts no.
3 in Europe and ranks among the top 15 in the world. From the days of the Hanseatic League to present,
it has been the main driver of local economy and become Germany’s ‘Gateway to the World’. However,this year the Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, is also the portof call for digital humanists. A hearty ‘Welcome!’ from your local organizers – drop anchor and comeashore: This is where DH 2012 happens!
Present day activity in Hamburg’s port is all about cargo, but until the mid-20th Century its piers werealso lined by ocean steamers that carried immigrants to the New World. Does the exchange of goods
come before or after the exchange of people and ideas? In our globalized world where cultures meet andmingle across all domains – commerce, education, politics, knowledge – the philosophical question ofprimacy seems a bit old fashioned. As 21st century humanists we will of course not deny the importanceof the material realm, and as digital humanists the relevance of technological advancement is part of ourcredo anyhow. On the other hand, we are by definition traditionalists. For our ultimate interest rests withpeople and cultures, their past, their present and their future, and with the various symbolic languages– natural, textual, visual, musical, material, abstract, concrete or performative – through which wecommunicate and reflect our human concerns. These are still the essential questions that motivate ourendeavor, whether digital or traditional.
At the DH 2011 we gathered under the colorful California ‘Big Tent’ erected by our Stanford hosts – it
was a marvelous experience to see how many we have become, how the field has grown into one of themost vibrant scientific communities, and how we collaborate in building bridges between the digital andthe humanities. We speak one language!
And at the same time, we speak many. We’re part of a unique intellectual culture that is only possible
because of the multitude of human cultures that we come from and from which we contribute to
our common cause. We carry intellectual cargo to a communal agora of ideas – ideas and concepts
shipped from the many facetted cultural, philosophical, epistemological and methodological contexts
and domains of the humanities. The annual DH conference is the biggest intellectual market place of ourscientific community, and it is hard to imagine a venue where more could be on offer.
Our conference motto ‘Digital Diversity – Cultures, languages and methods’ underlines that which
motivates and, at the same time, makes this intellectual exchange worthwhile: Diversity. It took us sometime to discover its worth: For about two decades, when DH was still called Humanities Computing, we
discussed whether what we practiced would not perhaps justify the formation of a discipline. For someof us this seemed a desirable status to attain; for others not. However, in today’s perspective one thingis obvious: the reality of Digital Humanities cuts across traditional conceptions of carefully delineateddisciplines and their traditional definition in terms of object domain, methodology, institution, degree
course, journal, etc. Conceptually as well as institutionally, DH thrives on diversity, and what we docannot be reduced to a single purpose, object domain or method. Conformity is absolutely not what DH
is about, and it is puzzling why scholars outside our community still feel tempted to reduce DH to what
the field itself has long transcended in theory as well as in practice: the mere application of computer
technology.
One of the aims of DH conferences is of course to show case the many facets of contemporary digital
humanities. Still, not every traditional humanist will be easily convinced. On that score, the history of
Hamburg and its university may perhaps offer a good example for how single-mindedness, attributed
or professed, can in the end be nevertheless subverted and brought to fruit. Hamburg politics at the
beginning of the 20th century was dominated by the interests of merchants, bankers, and owners ofshipping companies (mind you, it still is). Intellectual capital, it was held, was cheaper bought in thanlocally produced; so why invest in a university? It was only in 1919 when Werner von Melle, First Mayor

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and an ardent educationalist, convinced his colleagues in the Senate that their business – the exchangeof goods and money between nations – would thrive if the Humanities’ business was looked after: theexchange of knowledge and ideas between cultures. The intellectual encounter with other cultures andlanguages through academic education, von Melle successfully argued, was necessary to sustain andfurther develop commerce with other nations. This eventually lead to the founding of the very university
which, almost a century later, is today proud to host this DH conference. Our wish as local organizers isthat the DH 2012 may present an equally persuasive example to those scholars who question the needto explore what at first glance might appear to be a foreign methodological paradigm.
Today Hamburg University is Germany’s fifth largest in terms of student intake, and at the same time one
which, true to the meaning of universitas, engages in teaching and research across the entire spectrumof the human, the social, the natural and the medical sciences. In the Faculty of the Humanities over
one hundred degree courses are on offer, many of which focus on foreign languages and cultures. This
diversity of cultures, languages and methods makes for an intellectual environment attracting overten thousand students to the Humanities, that is close to one third of the university’s total student
population.
What if Digital Humanities became a topic of interest to each and every one of these students, if only inpassing? And what if one would achieve this elsewhere too, at universities across the world? Ten years
ago this would have sounded like a lunatic vision, but today DH certainly enjoys a strong increase inattention that has put its methodology on many people’s agenda. This development has been strongly
supported by research funding agencies and institution building, such as the formation of ADHO and of
new DH associations across the world. Incidentally, by the time you read this the inaugural meeting of
the DHD as a German chapter should be under way: it is scheduled to take place immediately prior to
the DH 2012, and also at Hamburg University.
Perhaps even more impressive than the rise in external support is the tremendous internal dynamics
of the DH community. The volume which you currently hold in hand (or read on screen) contains theabstracts of some 200 papers, panel sessions, posters and workshops. The Call for Papers attracted arecord number of proposals, and even though the conference program was eventually extended to fiveparallel tracks, only half of the close to four hundred submissions could in the end be accommodated. The
International Program Committee chaired by Paul Spence worked extremely hard in order to announce
the results earlier than usual, but in the end our ambitious deadline could not be met: not only becauseof numbers involved, but more importantly because of the high quality of submissions which confronted
reviewers with many hard choices. It is sad that so many excellent proposals could not be accepted,
but this painstaking process also testifies to the very high standard that DH research has nowadays
attained. As local organizers our deepest gratitude goes to everyone who submitted a proposal, whether
successful or not, to the army of reviewers who dedicated their time to careful reviewing, and to Pauland the program committee for drawing up what is certainly one of the richest conference agendas in
our field.
Thanks are also due to ADHO’s conference coordinating committee and its chair, John Unsworth. The
guidance that John and his team provide comes in two forms: That of carefully thought out and well
documented protocols, and that of John’s concise and immediate response to a frantic organizers’ plea
for help, mercy and redemption. The former is available to everyone via the ADHO website. The latteris reserved for those who have qualified through an act of folly committed about two years prior, an
act usually referred to as a ‘conference bid’. However, once you find yourself on the spot you may rest
assured that advice and support will be granted magnanimously. The conference as well as the programcommittee and their chairs will be with you all the way, as they were with us. Both Paul and John have
served as local organizers themselves, and through ADHO invaluable ‘institutional knowledge’ such as
theirs can be passed on to others – not only the type of knowledge that is formalized in protocols, butalso the personal experiences that one needs to draw on in moments of crisis. This is where organizationbuilding provides tangible benefits to a scientific community as ours.
Can one also say ‘Thank you!’ to a piece of software? It feels a bit like talking to your hammer, butthen who of us knows the inventor of the hammer him- or herself? We do, however, know the person
who invented ConfTool, the conference management software provided by ADHO which many previous
DH organizers have used and which we have found to be absolutely indispensible. Incidentally, Harald
Weinreich, its creator, lives and works in – Hamburg. (Honestly, we didn’t know that when we bid

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for DH 2012!) While ConfTool came to our aid as an administrative backend, the design of the public
image, of the DH2012 logo and website, were the work of Leon and his developers. Indeed, making
a DH conference happen is like producing a movie, and at the end you wish you could run a long
list of credits. Our list would include Basti, Benjamin, Daniel, Lena, Meike and Willi who took on thetechnical production of the Book of Abstracts; Marco who contributed sysad wizzadry and firefighting,and Evelyn and Imke who specialized in what is perhaps best and with intentional opacity referred to as‘administrative diplomacy’. Many others deserve mentioning, but cannot be named here – so please justimagine those movie credits, accompanied by a suitably dramatic sound track (‘Don’t dream it’s over’ by
Crowded House of 1986 will do just fine). To all of you whose names appear on that long, long list ofnames and who helped us make DH 2012 happen we extend a big, a VERY BIG thank you!
An important goal of this year’s DH was to make sure that the conference motto would become
meaningful in as many facets of conference reality as possible – through the composition of the academic
and social program, through the choice of keynote speakers and their topics, and through regional
representation in our team of international student conference assistants. Applications for the bursaries
that were on offer were scrutinized by Elisabeth Burr, Chair of ADHO’s Multi Cultural and Multi Lingualcommittee, and her team of reviewers, and awards were then made to twelve young DH scholars from allover the world. Each of them partners with one Hamburg student and we trust that this experience will
inspire them to engage in joint, international DH student projects in the future. To the award recipients
as well as to their local partners we say: welcome! It’s great to have you on our team!
This ambitious project in particular could not have been realized without the very generous financial
support of the DH 2012 granted by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and the equally
generous support granted by the University of Hamburg whose President, Prof. Dieter Lenzen and VicePresident Research, Prof. Hans Siegfried Stiehl, were both extremely supportive. A welcome note is not
the place to talk money; suffice it to say that without this support, the conference fee would probably
have trebled. Our gratitude to both institutions is to that order, and more. We also thank Google Inc.
who sponsor part of the social program.
In the light of the brief episode about our university’s history mentioned above we particularly thank the
Senator of Science and Research, Dr. Dorothee Stapelfeldt, for inviting the DH 2012 conference attendees
to a welcome reception at Hamburg’s City Hall. This is a great and exceptional honor not often bestowed
on academic conferences in Hamburg, and it is a sign of acknowledgment of the role and importance ofthe humanities at large that is very much appreciated.
And with that there’s only one more person we haven’t said ‘Thank you!’ to. That person is – you. It’s
great you came and moored your vessel. Whether by boat or ship, the cargo you have brought to DH 2012is what this convention is all about: The exchange of ideas. So discharge your bounty, come ashore, andhelp us hoist the banner of Digital Diversity at the DH 2012!
Your local organizers
Chris Meister, Katrin Schönert & teamXIII

Digital Humanities 2012

Obituary for Gerhard Brey (1954-2012)
Harold Short

Dept of Digital Humanities King’s College London, UK; Visiting Professor University of Western
Sydney, Australia

We mourn the loss of our friend and colleague Gerhard Brey, who died in February this year after a shortillness.
Gerhard was a remarkable man, with interests and expertise that bridged the humanities and thesciences, including computation. His humanistic background was extremely rich and varied. It included
his fluency in several western European languages, including classical Greek and Latin, and also Sanskrit
and Arabic. Part of the bridge was his interest and wide reading in the history of science. In terms ofcomputation he developed considerable expertise across a range of programming languages and tools,
from digital editing and typesetting to databases to text mining.
Gerhard was born in a small German town near the Austrian border, close to Salzburg. His early academic
and professional career was in Germany, mainly in Munich, apart from a year spent studying in France.
This was personally as well as professionally important, because it was at the university in ClermontFerrand that he met Gill, his wife and life-long companion. In 1996 Gerhard and Gill moved to England,
and in 2001 he began working with Dominik Wujastyk at the Wellcome Institute. (For a longer and moredetailed obituary, see the one by Wujastyk on the ALLC website at allc.org.)Gerhard came to work at what is now the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London
in 2004, first as a part-time consultant, then as Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow. His
wide-ranging expertise in both humanities disciplines and technical matters meant that he was not
only directly involved in numerous research projects, but was also consulted by colleagues in many
more. While it is right to acknowledge Gerhard’s formidable humanistic and technical range, it is thehuman being who is most sorely missed. He was deeply interested in people, and had a real gift forcommunication and engagement. We remember him especially for his calmness, patience, ready good
humour and his self-deprecating sense of fun. As his head of department, I valued particularly his
willingness to lend a hand in a crisis.
It was also Gerhard who took the lead in nurturing links with Japanese colleagues that led to a joint
research project with the University of Osaka, and in the last years of his life he developed a passionate
interest in Japanese culture, drawn in part by the work of our colleagues in Buddhist Studies, which
spoke to his love of Sanskrit and Arabic literatures. As a colleague remarked, his gentle, quiet mannerconcealed a fine mind and wider and deeper learning than even his friends tended to expect. He will be
more sorely missed than any of us can say.

XVDigital Humanities 2012

Bursary Winners
DH 2012 Student Conference Assistant Bursaries
Kollontai Cossich Diniz (University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil)Peter Daengeli (National University of Ireland Maynooth, Dublin, Ireland)
Elena Dergacheva (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
Ali Kira Grotkowski (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
Dagmara Hadyna (Jagiellonian University, Kielce, Poland)
Biljana Djordje Lazic (University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia)
Yoshimi Iwata (Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan)
Jie Li Kwok (Dharma Drum Buddhist College, New Taipei City, Taiwan)
Jose Manuel Lopez Villanueva (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico)
Alex Edward Marse (2CINEM, Atlanta, USA)
Gurpreet Singh (Morph Academy, Fatehgarh Sahib, India)
Rosa Rosa Souza Rosa Gomes (University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil)

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Table of Contents
List of Reviewers ........................................................................................................

1

Plenary Sessions
Dynamics and Diversity: Exploring European and Transnational Perspectives on
Digital Humanities Research Infrastructures
Moulin, Claudine .........................................................................................................................

9

Embracing a Distant View of the Digital Humanities
Shimoda, Masahiro ....................................................................................................................

11

Pre-conference Workshops
Digital Methods in Manuscript Studies
Brockmann, Christian; Wangchuk, Dorji ................................................................................. 15

Introduction to Stylomatic Analysis using R
Eder, Maciej; Rybicki, Jan ........................................................................................................

16

NeDiMAH workshop on ontology based annotation
Eide, Øyvind; Ore, Christian-Emil; Rahtz, Sebastian ............................................................. 18

Service-oriented Architectures (SOAs) for the Humanities: Solutions and Impacts
Hinrichs, Erhard; Neuroth, Heike; Wittenburg, Peter ...........................................................

20

Here and There, Then and Now – Modelling Space and Time in the Humanities
Isaksen, Leif; Day, Shawn; Andresen, Jens; Hyvönen, Eero; Mäkelä, Eetu .......................... 22

Crowdsourcing meaning: a hands-on introduction to CLÉA, the Collaborative
Literature Éxploration and Annotation Environment
Petris, Marco; Gius, Evelyn; Schüch, Lena; Meister, Jan Christoph .....................................

24

Learning to play like a programmer: web mash-ups and scripting for beginners
Ridge, Mia .................................................................................................................................

25

Introduction to Distant Reading Techniques with Voyant Tools, Multilingual
EditionSinclair, Stéfan; Rockwell, Geoffrey ........................................................................................

26

Towards a reference curriculum for the Digital Humanities
Thaller, Manfred .......................................................................................................................

27

Free your metadata: a practical approach towards metadata cleaning andvocabulary reconciliationvan Hooland, Seth; Verborgh, Ruben; De Wilde, Max ........................................................... 28

PanelsText Analysis Meets Text Encoding
Bauman, Syd; Hoover, David; van Dalen-Oskam, Karina; Piez, Wendell ............................

33

Designing Interactive Reading Environments for the Online Scholarly Edition
Blandford, Ann; Brown, Susan; Dobson, Teresa; Faisal, Sarah; Fiorentino, Carlos;
Frizzera, Luciano; Giacometti, Alejandro; Heller, Brooke; Ilovan, Mihaela; Michura,
Piotr; Nelson, Brent; Radzikowska, Milena; Rockwell, Geoffrey; Ruecker, Stan; Sinclair,Stéfan; Sondheim, Daniel; Warwick, Claire; Windsor, Jennifer ............................................ 35

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Developing the spatial humanities: Geo-spatial technologies as a platform forcross-disciplinary scholarship
Bodenhamer, David; Gregory, Ian; Ell, Paul; Hallam, Julia; Harris, Trevor; Schwartz,
Robert .........................................................................................................................................

41

Prosopographical Databases, Text-Mining, GIS and System Interoperability for
Chinese History and Literature
Bol, Peter Kees; Hsiang, Jieh; Fong, Grace ............................................................................

43

Future Developments for TEI ODDCummings, James; Rahtz, Sebastian; Burnard, Lou; Bauman, Syd; Gaiffe, Bertrand;
Romary, Laurent; Bański, Piotr ............................................................................................... 52

Compiling large historical reference corpora of German: Quality Assurance,
Interoperability and Collaboration in the Process of Publication of DigitizedHistorical Prints
Geyken, Alexander; Gloning, Thomas; Stäcker, Thomas .......................................................

54

Computational models of narrative structure
Löwe, Benedikt; Físseni, Bernhard; León, Carlos; Bod, Rens ................................................

57

Approaches to the Treatment of Primary Materials in Digital Lexicons: Examplesof the New Generation of Digital Lexicons for Buddhist Studies
Nagasaki, Kiyonori; Tomabechi, Toru; Wangchuk, Dorji; Takahashi, Koichi; Wallman,
Jeff; Muller, A. Charles .............................................................................................................

61

Topic Modeling the Past
Nelson, Robert K.; Mimno, David; Brown, Travis .................................................................

64

Facilitating Research through Social-Document Networks
Pitti, Daniel; Simon, Agnès; Vitali, Stefano; Arnold, Kerstin ................................................. 70

Digital Humanities as a university degree: The status quo and beyond
Thaller, Manfred; Sahle, Patrick; Clavaud, Florence; Clement, Tanya; Fiormonte,
Domenico; Pierazzo, Elena; Rehbein, Malte; Rockwell, Geoffrey; Schreibman, Susan;
Sinclair, Stéfan ..........................................................................................................................

72

PapersExploring Originality in User-Generated Content with Network and Image
Analysis Tools
Akdag Salah, Alkim Almila; Salah, Albert Ali; Douglass, Jeremy; Manovich, Lev ............... 79

Patchworks and Field-Boundaries: Visualizing the History of English
Alexander, Marc ........................................................................................................................

82

Developing Transcultural Competence in the Study of World Literatures: Golden
Age Literature Glossary Online (GALGO)
Alonso Garcia, Nuria; Caplan, Alison .....................................................................................

84

Trees of Texts – Models and methods for an updated theory of medieval text
stemmatology
Andrews, Tara Lee; Macé, Caroline ........................................................................................

85

Mapping the Information Science Domain
Arazy, Ofer; Ruecker, Stan; Rodriguez, Omar; Giacometti, Alejandro; Zhang, Lu; Chun,
Su ...............................................................................................................................................

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Digital Humanities 2012

Words made Image. Towards a Language-Based Segmentation of Digitized Art
Collections
Armaselu, Florentina .................................................................................................................

91

HisDoc: Historical Document Analysis, Recognition, and Retrieval
Baechler, Micheal; Fischer, Andreas; Naji, Nada; Ingold, Rolf; Bunke, Horst; Savoy,
Jacques .......................................................................................................................................

94

Research infrastructures for Digital Humanities: The local perspective
Bärenfänger, Maja; Binder, Frank ..........................................................................................

97

Pelagios: An Information Superhighway for the Ancient World
Barker, Elton; Simon, Rainer; Isaksen, Leif ...........................................................................

99

Putting TEI Tite to use – generating a database resource from a printed
dictionary or reference type publication
Barner-Rasmussen, Michael ...................................................................................................

102

Digital Humanities in the Classroom: Introducing a New Editing Platform for
Source Documents in Classics
Beaulieu, Marie-Claire; Almas, Bridget ................................................................................. 105

DiaView: Visualise Cultural Change in Diachronic Corpora
Beavan, David ..........................................................................................................................

107

Catch + Release: Research and Creation of a Digital New Media Exhibition in theContext of a Cultural and Heritage Museum
Beer, Ruth ................................................................................................................................

109

Opportunity and accountability in the ‘eResearch push’
Bellamy, Craig ..........................................................................................................................

111

Connecting European Women Writers. The Selma Lagerlöf Archive and Women
Writers Database
Bergenmar, Jenny; Olsson, Leif-Jöran ................................................................................... 113

Stylometric Analysis of Chinese Buddhist texts: Do different Chinese translationsof the ‘Gandhavyūha’ reflect stylistic features that are typical for their age?
Bingenheimer, Marcus; Hung, Jen-Jou; Hsieh, Cheng-en ....................................................

115

Information Extraction on Noisy Texts for Historical Research
Blanke, Tobias; Bryant, Michael; Speck, Reto; Kristel, Conny .............................................

117

Modeling Gender: The ‘Rise and Rise’ of the Australian Woman Novelist
Bode, Katherine ........................................................................................................................

119

Contextual factors in literary quality judgments: A quantitative analysis of an
online writing community
Boot, Peter ................................................................................................................................

121

Violence and the Digital Humanities Text as Pharmakon
Bradley, Adam James .............................................................................................................

123

Towards a bibliographic model of illustrations in the early modern illustrated
book
Bradley, John; Pigney, Stephen .............................................................................................. 124

Automatic Mining of Valence Compounds for German: A Corpus-BasedApproach
Brock, Anne; Henrich, Verena; Hinrichs, Erhard; Versley, Yannick ...................................

126
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Networks of networks: a critical review of formal network methods inarchaeology through citation network analysis and close reading
Brughmans, Tom .....................................................................................................................

129

On the dual nature of written texts and its implications for the encoding ofgenetic manuscripts
Brüning, Gerrit; Henzel, Katrin; Pravida, Dietmar ..............................................................

131

Automatic recognition of speech, thought and writing representation in German
narrative texts
Brunner, Annelen .....................................................................................................................

135

Bringing Modern Spell Checking Approaches to Ancient Texts – AutomatedSuggestions for Incomplete Words
Büchler, Marco; Kruse, Sebastian; Eckart, Thomas .............................................................. 137

Designing a national ‘Virtual Laboratory’ for the humanities: the Australian
HuNI project
Burrows, Toby Nicolas ............................................................................................................

139

Beyond Embedded Markup
Buzzetti, Dino; Thaller, Manfred ............................................................................................

142

Myopia: A Visualization Tool in Support of Close Reading
Chaturvedi, Manish; Gannod, Gerald; Mandell, Laura; Armstrong, Helen; Hodgson,
Eric ...........................................................................................................................................

148

Translation Arrays: Exploring Cultural Heritage Texts Across Languages
Cheesman, Tom; Thiel, Stephan; Flanagan, Kevin; Zhao, Geng; Ehrmann, Alison;
Laramee, Robert S.; Hope, Jonathan; Berry, David M. ........................................................ 151

Constructing a Chinese as Second Language Learner Corpus for Language
Learning and ResearchChen, Howard ..........................................................................................................................

154

Social Curation of large multimedia collections on the cloud
Chong, Dazhi; Coppage, Samuel; Gu, Xiangyi; Maly, Kurt; Wu, Harris; Zubair,
Mohammad ..............................................................................................................................

155

Sounding for Meaning: Analyzing Aural Patterns Across Large Digital Collections
Clement, Tanya; Auvil, Loretta; Tcheng, David; Capitanu, Boris; Monroe, Megan; Goel,
Ankita .......................................................................................................................................

158

The Programming Historian 2: A Participatory Textbook
Crymble, Adam H.; MacEachern, Alan; Turkel, William J. .................................................

162

Multilingual and Semantic Extension of Folk Tale Catalogues
Declerck, Thierry; Lendvai, Piroska; Darányi, Sándor ........................................................

163

Digital Language Archives and Less-Networked Speaker Communities
Dobrin, Lise M. ........................................................................................................................

167

Language Documentation and Digital Humanities: The (DoBeS) Language
Archive
Drude, Sebastian; Trilsbeek, Paul; Broeder, Daan ...............................................................

169

The potential of using crowd-sourced data to re-explore the demography ofVictorian Britain
Duke-Williams, Oliver William ...............................................................................................

XXII

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Digital Humanities 2012

Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: developing structures for tracking cultural dynamics
by linking moral and philosophical anthologies with their source andrecipient texts
Dunn, Stuart; Hedges, Mark; Jordanous, Anna; Lawrence, Faith; Roueche, Charlotte;
Tupman, Charlotte; Wakelnig, Elvira ....................................................................................

176

Recovering the Recovered Text: Diversity, Canon Building, and Digital Studies
Earhart, Amy ...........................................................................................................................

179

Mind your corpus: systematic errors in authorship attribution
Eder, Maciej .............................................................................................................................

181

Underspecified, Ambiguous or Formal. Problems in Creating Maps Based on
Texts
Eide, Øyvind .............................................................................................................................

185

A Frequency Dictionary of Modern Written and Oral Media Arabic
Elmaz, Orhan ...........................................................................................................................

188

Texts in Motion – Rethinking Reader Annotations in Online Literary Texts
Fendt, Kurt E.; Kelley, Wyn; Zhang, Jia; Della Costa, Dave ................................................ 190

May Humanists Learn from Artists a New Way to Interact with Digital
Technology?
Franchi, Stefano .......................................................................................................................

192

A flexible model for the collaborative annotation of digitized literary works
Gayoso-Cabada, Joaquin; Ruiz, Cesar; Pablo-Nuñez, Luis; Sarasa-Cabezuelo, Antonio;
Goicoechea-de-Jorge, Maria; Sanz-Cabrerizo, Amelia; Sierra-Rodriguez, Jose-Luis ......... 195

HyperMachiavel: a translation comparison tool
Gedzelman, Séverine; Zancarini, Jean-Claude ...................................................................... 198

Discrimination sémantique par la traduction automatique, expériences sur ledictionnaire français de Littré
Glorieux, Frédéric; Jolivet, Vincent .......................................................................................

202

The Myth of the New: Mass Digitization, Distant Reading and the Future of theBook
Gooding, Paul Matthew; Warwick, Claire; Terras, Melissa ................................................

204

Designing Navigation Tools for an Environmental Humanities Portal:
Considerations and Critical Assessments
Graf von Hardenberg, Wilko; Coulter, Kimberly .................................................................

206

Processing Email Archives in Special Collections
Hangal, Sudheendra; Chan, Peter; Lam, Monica S.; Heer, Jeffrey ..................................... 208

The Stylometry of Collaborative Translation
Heydel, Magda; Rybicki, Jan .................................................................................................

212

Focus on Users in the Open Development of the National Digital Library of
Finland
Hirvonen, Ville; Kautonen, Heli Johanna ..............................................................................

215

The Rarer They Are, the More There Are, the Less They Matter
Hoover, David ..........................................................................................................................

218

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Digital Humanities 2012

Experiments in Digital Philosophy – Putting new paradigms to the test in theAgora project
Hrachovec, Herbert; Carusi, Annamaria; Huentelmann, Raphael; Pichler, Alois;
Antonio, Lamarra; Cristina, Marras; Alessio, Piccioli; Lou, Burnard ................................. 221

Information Discovery in the Chinese Recorder Index
Hsiang, Jieh; Kong, Jung-Wei; Sung, Allan .........................................................................

224

Complex Network Perspective on Graphic Form System of Hanzi
Hu, Jiajia; Wang, Ning ..........................................................................................................

228

A Computer-Based Approach for Predicting the Translation Time Period of Early
Chinese Buddhism Translation
Hung, Jen-Jou; Bingenheimer, Marcus; Kwok, Jieli ............................................................ 230

Bridging Multicultural Communities: Developing a Framework for a European
Network of Museum, Libraries and Public Cultural Institutions
Innocenti, Perla; Richards, John; Wieber, Sabine ................................................................

232

Ptolemy’s Geography and the Birth of GIS
Isaksen, Leif .............................................................................................................................

236

Tracing the history of Noh texts by mathematical methods. Validitating theapplication of phylogenetic methods to Noh texts
Iwata, Yoshimi ........................................................................................................................

239

Computing and Visualizing the 19th-Century Literary Genome
Jockers, Matthew ....................................................................................................................

242

Using the Google Ngram Corpus to Measure Cultural Complexity
Juola, Patrick ..........................................................................................................................

245‘All Rights Worth Recombination’: Post-Hacker Culture and ASCII Literature(1983-1993)
Katelnikoff, Joel .......................................................................................................................

247

Evaluating Unmasking for Cross-Genre Authorship Verification
Kestemont, Mike; Luyckx, Kim; Daelemans, Walter; Crombez, Thomas ............................

249

Literary Wikis: Crowd-sourcing the Analysis and Annotation of Pynchon, Eco
and Others
Ketzan, Erik .............................................................................................................................

252

Social Network Analysis and Visualization in ‘The Papers of Thomas Jefferson’
Klein, Lauren Frederica ..........................................................................................................

254

VariaLog: how to locate words in a French Renaissance Virtual Library
Lay, Marie Hélène ...................................................................................................................

256

DeRiK: A German Reference Corpus of Computer-Mediated Communication
Lemnitzer, Lothar; Beißwenger, Michael; Ermakova, Maria; Geyken, Alexander; Storrer,
Angelika ................................................................................................................................... 259

Estimating the Distinctiveness of Graphemes and Allographs in Palaeographic
Classification
Levy, Noga; Wolf, Lior; Dershowitz, Nachum; Stokes, Peter ..............................................

XXIV

264

Digital Humanities 2012

Academic Research in the Blogosphere: Adapting to New Opportunities andRisks on the Internet
Littauer, Richard; Winters, James; Roberts, Sean; Little, Hannah; Pleyer, Michael;
Benzon, Bill ..............................................................................................................................

268

Feeling the View: Reading Affective Orientation of Tagged Images
Liu, Jyi-Shane; Peng, Sheng-Yang ......................................................................................... 270

Characterizing Authorship Style Using Linguistic Features
Lucic, Ana; Blake, Catherine ..................................................................................................

273

Investigating the genealogical relatedness of the endagered Dagon languages
Moran, Steven; Prokic, Jelena ...............................................................................................

276

Landscapes, languages and data structures: Issues in building the Placenames
Database of IrelandMěchura, Michal Boleslav ......................................................................................................

278

Interoperability of Language Documentation Tools and Materials for Local
Communities
Nakhimovsky, Alexander; Good, Jeff; Myers, Tom .............................................................. 280

Content Creation by Domain Experts in a Semantic GIS System
Nakhimovsky, Alexander; Myers, Tom .................................................................................

283

From Preserving Language Resources to Serving Language Speakers: New
Prospects for Endangered Languages Archives
Nathan, David John ................................................................................................................ 286

Retrieving Writing Patterns From Historical Manuscripts Using Local
Descriptors
Neumann, Bernd; Herzog, Rainer; Solth, Arved; Bestmann, Oliver; Scheel, Julian ........... 288

Distractorless Authorship Verification
Noecker Jr., John; Ryan, Michael .........................................................................................

292

Cataloguing linguistic diversity: Glottolog/Langdoc
Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald ....................................................................... 296

Geo-Temporal Interpretation of Archival Collections Using Neatline
Nowviskie, Bethany; Graham, Wayne; McClure, David; Boggs, Jeremy; Rochester,
Eric ...........................................................................................................................................

299

Enriching Digital Libraries Contents with SemLib Semantic Annotation System
Nucci, Michele; Grassi, Marco; Morbidoni, Christian; Piazza, Francesco ..........................

303

The VL3: A Project at the Crossroads between Linguistics and Computer Science
Nuñez, Camelia Gianina; Mavillard, Antonio Jiménez ........................................................

306‘Eric, you do not humble well’: The Image of the Modern Vampire in Text and on
ScreenOpas-Hänninen, Lisa Lena; Hettel, Jacqueline; Toljamo, Tuomo; Seppänen, Tapio .......... 308

Electronic Deconstruction of an argument using corpus linguistic analysis of its
on-line discussion forum supplement
O’Halloran, Kieran Anthony ...................................................................................................

310

Citygram One: Visualizing Urban Acoustic Ecology
Park, Tae Hong; Miller, Ben; Shrestha, Ayush; Lee, Sangmi; Turner, Jonathan; Marse,
Alex ...........................................................................................................................................

313

XXV

Digital Humanities 2012

Towards Wittgenstein on the Semantic Web
Pichler, Alois; Zöllner-Weber, Amélie ....................................................................................

318

Uncovering lost histories through GeoStoryteller: A digital GeoHumanities
project
Rabina, Debbie L.; Cocciolo, Anthony ...................................................................................

322

Workflows as Structured Surfaces
Radzikowska, Milena; Ruecker, Stan; Rockwell, Geoffrey; Brown, Susan; Frizzera,
Luciano; INKE Research Group ............................................................................................. 324

Code-Generation Techniques for XML Collections Interoperability
Ramsay, Stephen; Pytlik-Zillig, Brian ...................................................................................

327

Uncertain Date, Uncertain Place: Interpreting the History of Jewish
Communities in the Byzantine Empire using GIS
Rees, Gethin Powell .................................................................................................................

329

Code sprints and Infrastructure
Reside, Doug; Fraistat, Neil; Vershbow, Ben; van Zundert, Joris Job ................................. 331

Digital Genetic Criticism of RENT
Reside, Doug ............................................................................................................................

333

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a historian: exploring resistance to
crowdsourced resources among historians
Ridge, Mia ...............................................................................................................................

335

Formal Semantic Modeling for Human and Machine-based Decoding of Medieval
Manuscripts
Ritsema van Eck, Marianne Petra; Schomaker, Lambert .................................................... 336

The Swallow Flies Swiftly Through: An Analysis of Humanist
Rockwell, Geoffrey; Sinclair, Stéfan ......................................................................................

339

The Digital Mellini Project: Exploring New Tools & Methods for Art-historical
Research & Publication
Rodríguez, Nuria; Baca, Murtha; Albrezzi, Francesca; Longaker, Rachel .......................... 342

Intertextuality and Influence in the Age of Enlightenment: Sequence Alignment
Applications for Humanities ResearchRoe, Glenn H.; The ARTFL Project ........................................................................................

345

Engaging the Museum Space: Mobilising Visitor Engagement with DigitalContent Creation
Ross, Claire Stephanie; Gray, Steven; Warwick, Claire; Hudson Smith, Andrew; Terras,
Melissa .....................................................................................................................................

348

Aiding the Interpretation of Ancient Documents
Roued-Cunliffe, Henriette ........................................................................................................

351

The Twelve Disputed ‘Federalist’ Papers: A Case for Collaboration
Rudman, Joseph ......................................................................................................................

353

Writing with Sound: Composing Multimodal, Long-Form Scholarship
Sayers, Jentery ........................................................................................................................

357

Intra-linking the Research Corpus: Using Semantic MediaWiki as a lightweight
Virtual Research Environment
Schindler, Christoph; Ell, Basil; Rittberger, Marc ................................................................
XXVI

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Digital Humanities 2012

Corpus Coranicum: A digital landscape for the study of the Qu’ran
Schnöpf, Markus .....................................................................................................................

362

The MayaArch3D Project: A 3D GIS Web System for Querying AncientArchitecture and Landscapes
Schwerin, Jennifer von; Richards-Rissetto, Heather; Agugiaro, Giorgio; Remondino,
Fabio; Girardi, Gabrio ............................................................................................................

365

Multi-dimensional audio-visual technology: Evidence from the endangered
language documentation
Sharma, Narayan P. ...............................................................................................................

368

Contours of the Past: Computationally Exploring Civil Rights Histories
Shaw, Ryan Benjamin ............................................................................................................

370

Notes from the Collaboratory: An Informal Study of an Academic DH Lab inTransition
Siemens, Lynne; Siemens, Raymond .....................................................................................

373

XML-Print: an Ergonomic Typesetting System for Complex Text Structures
Sievers, Martin; Burch, Thomas; Küster, Marc W.; Moulin, Claudine; Rapp, Andrea;
Schwarz, Roland; Gan, Yu ......................................................................................................

375

Federated Digital Archives and Disaster Recovery: The Role of the Digital
Humanities in Post-earthquake Christchurch
Smithies, James Dakin ...........................................................................................................

380

Modeling Medieval Handwriting: A New Approach to Digital Palaeography
Stokes, Peter ............................................................................................................................

382

A Digital Geography of Hispanic Baroque Art
Suárez, Juan-Luis; Sancho-Caparrini, Fernando .................................................................

385

Approaching Dickens’ Style through Random Forests
Tabata, Tomoji ........................................................................................................................

388

Interfacing Diachrony: Visualizing Linguistic Change on the Basis of Digital
Editions of Serbian 18th-Century Texts
Tasovac, Toma; Ermolaev, Natalia .......................................................................................

392

Promise and Practice of Enhanced Publications to Complement ConventionallyPublished Scholarly Monographs
Tatum, Clifford; Jankowski, Nicholas; Scharnhorst, Andrea ..............................................

394

Culpeper’s legacy: How title pages sold books in the 17th century
Tyrkkö, Jukka Jyrki Juhani; Suhr, Carla Maria; Marttila, Ville ......................................... 396

The Differentiation of Genres in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English
Literature
Underwood, Ted; Sellers, Jordan; Auvil, Loretta; Capitanu, Boris ..................................... 397

Digital editions with eLaborate: from practice to theory
van Dalen-Oskam, Karina; van Zundert, Joris Job .............................................................

400

Delta in 3D: Copyists Distinction by Scaling Burrows’s Delta
van Zundert, Joris Job; van Dalen-Oskam, Karina .............................................................

402

Wiki Technologies for Semantic Publication of Old Russian Charters
Varfolomeyev, Aleksey; Ivanovs, Aleksandrs ........................................................................ 405

XXVII

Digital Humanities 2012

L’histoire de l’art à l’ère numérique – Pour une historiographie médiologique
Welger-Barboza, Corinne .......................................................................................................

407

Benefits of tools and applications for a digitized analysis of Chinese Buddhist
inscriptions
Wenzel, Claudia ........................................................................................................................

411

The ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus: toward an open-source tool to minemovement-derived data
Wiesner, Susan L.; Bennett, Bradford; Stalnaker, Rommie L. .............................................

413

The electronic ‘Oxford English Dictionary’, poetry, and intertextuality
Williams, David-Antoine .........................................................................................................

415

Reasoning about Genesis or The Mechanical Philologist
Wissenbach, Moritz; Pravida, Dietmar; Middell, Gregor ..................................................... 418

The Digital Daozang Jiyao – How to get the edition into the Scholar’s labs
Wittern, Christian ...................................................................................................................

422

Posters
A Digital Approach to Sound Symbolism in English: Evidence from the Historical
Thesaurus
Alexander, Marc; Kay, Christian ...........................................................................................

427

Collaborative Video and Image Annotation
Arnold, Matthias; Knab, Cornelia; Decker, Eric ................................................................... 429

Le Système modulaire de gestion de l’information historique (SyMoGIH): une
plateforme collaborative et cumulative de stockage et d’exploitation del’information géo-historique
Beretta, Francesco; Vernus, Pierre; Hours, Bernard ............................................................ 431

Realigning Digital Humanities Training: The Praxis Program at the Scholars’ Lab
Boggs, Jeremy; Nowviskie, Bethany; Gil, Alexander; Johnson, Eric; Lestock, Brooke;
Storti, Sarah; Swafford, Joanna; Praxis Program Collaborators .......................................

433

Supporting the emerging community of MEI: the current landscape of tools fornote entry and digital editing
Bohl, Benjamin W.; Röwenstrunk, Daniel; Viglianti, Raffaele ............................................. 435‘The Past Is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past’: The Challenge of Data Provenancein the e-Humanities
Clark, Ashley M.; Holloway, Steven W. ................................................................................

438

The Social Edition: Scholarly Editing Across Communities
Crompton, Constance; Siemens, Raymond; The Devonshire MS Editorial Group ............... 441

Courting ‘The World’s Wife’: Original Digital Humanities Research in the
Undergraduate Classroom
Croxall, Brian ..........................................................................................................................

443

The Academy’s Digital Store of Knowledge
Czmiel, Alexander; Jürgens, Marco .......................................................................................

445

Building a TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service: The TAPAS Project
Flanders, Julia; Hamlin, Scott; Alvarado, Rafael; Mylonas, Elli ........................................

448

Author Consolidation across European National Bibliographies
Freire, Nuno ............................................................................................................................
XXVIII450

Digital Humanities 2012

Historical Events Versus Information Contents – A Preliminary Analysis of the
National Geographic Magazine
Fujimoto, Yu ............................................................................................................................

453‘Tejiendo la Red HD’ – A case study of building a DH network in Mexico
Galina, Isabel; Priani, Ernesto; López, José; Rivera, Eduardo; Cruz, Alejandro ................ 456

Adaptive Automatic Gesture Stroke Detection
Gebre, Binyam Gebrekidan; Wittenburg, Peter ....................................................................

458

Towards a Transnational Multilingual Caribbean Digital Humanities Lab
Gil, Alexander ..........................................................................................................................

462

NUScholar: Digital Methods for Educating New Humanities Scholars
Graff, Ann-Barbara; Lucas, Kristin; Blustein, James; Gibson, Robin; Woods, Sharon ...... 463

Latent Semantic Analysis Tools Available for All Digital Humanities Projects in
Project Bamboo
Hooper, Wallace Edd; Cowan, Will; Jiao, David; Walsh, John A. ....................................... 465

Machine Learning for Automatic Annotation of References in DH scholarly
papersKim, Young-Min; Bellot, Patrice; Faath, Elodie; Dacos, Marin ........................................... 467

An Ontology-Based Iterative Text Processing Strategy for Detecting andRecognizing Characters in Folktales
Koleva, Nikolina; Declerck, Thierry; Krieger, Hans-Ulrich .................................................

470

Integrated multilingual access to diverse Japanese humanities digital archives bydynamically linking data
Kuyama, Takeo; Batjargal, Biligsaikhan; Kimura, Fuminori; Maeda, Akira ..................... 473

Linguistic concepts described with Media Query Language for automatedannotation
Lenkiewicz, Anna; Lis, Magdalena; Lenkiewicz, Przemyslaw .............................................. 477

Virtual Reproduction of Gion Festival Yamahoko Parade
Li, Liang; Choi, Woong; Nishiura, Takanobu; Yano, Keiji; Hachimura, Kozaburo ............ 480

Complex entity management through EATS: the case of the Gascon Rolls Project
Litta Modignani Picozzi, Eleonora; Norrish, Jamie; Monteiro Vieira, Jose Miguel ............ 483

TextGrid Repository – Supporting the Data Curation Needs of Humanities
Researchers
Lohmeier, Felix; Veentjer, Ubbo; Smith, Kathleen M.; Söring, Sibylle ................................ 486

RIgeo.net – A Lab for Spatial Exploration of Historical Data
Loos, Lukas; Zipf, Alexander .................................................................................................

488

Automatic Topic Hierarchy Generation Using Wordnet
Monteiro Vieira, Jose Miguel; Brey, Gerhard † ....................................................................

491

Hypotheses.org, une infrastructure pour les Digital Humanities
Muscinesi, Frédérique .............................................................................................................

494

TXSTEP – an integrated XML-based scripting language for scholarly text dataprocessing
Ott, Wilhelm; Ott, Tobias; Gasperlin, Oliver ......................................................................... 497

XXIX

Digital Humanities 2012

Exploring Prosopographical Resources Through Novel Tools and Visualizations:a Preliminary Investigation
Pasin, Michele ..........................................................................................................................

499

Heterogeneity and Multilingualism vs. Usability – Challenges of the Database
User Interface ‘Archiv-Editor’
Plutte, Christoph ......................................................................................................................

502

Medievalists’ Use of Digital Resources, 2002 and 2012
Porter, Dot ...............................................................................................................................

505

Cross-cultural Approaches to Digital Humanities – Funding and Implementation
Rhody, Jason; Kümmel, Christoph; Effinger, Maria; Freedman, Richard; Magier, David;
Förtsch, Reinhard ................................................................................................................... 506

CWRC-Writer: An In-Browser XML Editor
Rockwell, Geoffrey; Brown, Susan; Chartrand, James; Hesemeier, Susan ........................ 508

The Musici Database
Roeder, Torsten; Plutte, Christoph .......................................................................................... 511

The TEICHI Framework: Bringing TEI Lite to Drupal
Schöch, Christof; Achler, Stefan .............................................................................................

514

What Has Digital Curation Got to Do With Digital Humanities?
Schreibman, Susan; McCadden, Katiet Theresa; Coyle, Barry ............................................

516

Orbis Latinus Online (OLO)
Schultes, Kilian Peter; Geissler, Stefan ..................................................................................

518

Semantically connecting text fragments – Text-Text-Link-Editor
Selig, Thomas; Küster, Marc W.; Conner, Eric Sean ............................................................ 520

The Melesina Trench Project: Markup Vocabularies, Poetics, and Undergraduate
Pedagogy
Singer, Kate .............................................................................................................................

522

Digital Edition of Carl Maria von Weber’s Collected Works
Stadler, Peter ...........................................................................................................................

525

Data sharing, virtual collaboration, and textual analysis: Working on ‘Women
Writers In History’van Dijk, Suzan; Hoogenboom, Hilde; Sanz, Amelia; Bergenmar, Jenny; Olsson, LeifJöran ........................................................................................................................................

527

Storage Infrastructure of the Virtual Scriptorium St. Matthias
Vanscheidt, Philipp; Rapp, Andrea; Tonne, Danah .............................................................. 529

Digital Emblematics – Enabling Humanities Research of a Popular Early Modern
Genre
Wade, Mara R.; Stäcker, Thomas; Stein, Regine; Brandhorst, Hans; Graham, David ....... 532

DTAQ – Quality Assurance in a Large Corpus of Historical Texts
Wiegand, Frank .......................................................................................................................

535

The Digital Averroes Research Environment – Semantic Relations in the
Editorial Sciences
Willems, Florian; Gärtner, Mattias .......................................................................................

XXX

537

Digital Humanities 2012

AV Processing in eHumanities – a paradigm shift
Wittenburg, Peter; Lenkiewicz, Przemyslaw; Auer, Erik; Lenkiewicz, Anna; Gebre,
Binyam Gebrekidan; Drude, Sebastian .................................................................................

538

XXXI

Digital Humanities 2012

List of Reviewers- Susan Brown- Hiroyuki Akama- Marjorie Burghart- Marc Alexander- Lou Burnard- Peter Roger Alsop- Elisabeth Burr

- Deborah Anderson- Toby Nicolas Burrows- Vadim Sergeevich Andreev- Dino Buzzetti- Tara Lee Andrews- Olivier Canteaut- Simon James Appleford- Paul Caton- Stewart Arneil- Hugh Cayless- Rolf Harald Baayen- Tom Cheesman- Drew Baker- Shih-Pei Chen

- David Bamman- Paula Horwarth Chesley- Piotr Bański

- Tatjana Chorney- Brett Barney- Neil Chue Hong

- Sabine Bartsch- Arianna Ciula- Patsy Baudoin- Florence Clavaud- Syd Bauman- Frédéric Clavert- Ryan Frederick Baumann- Tanya Clement- David Beavan- Claire Clivaz- Craig Bellamy- Louisa Connors- Hans Bennis- Paul Conway- Anna Bentkowska-Kafel- Charles M. Cooney- Alejandro Bia- David Christopher Cooper- Hanno Biber- Hugh Craig- Marcus Bingenheimer- Tim Crawford- Tobias Blanke- James C. Cummings- Gabriel Bodard- Richard Cunningham- Jeremy Boggs- Alexander Czmiel- Peter Kees Bol- Marin Dacos- Geert E. Booij- Stefano David- Peter Boot

- Rebecca Frost Davis- Lars Broin- John Dawson- Federico Boschetti- Marilyn Deegan- Arno Bosse- Janet Delve- Matthew Bouchard- Kate Devlin- William Bowen- Joseph DiNunzio- John Bradley- Quinn Anya Dombrowski- David Prager Branner- Jeremy Douglass- Gerhard Brey

- J. Stephen Downie- Anne-Laure Brisac- David S. Dubin- Marco Büchler

1Digital Humanities 2012

- Stuart Dunn

- Nathalie Groß

- Alastair Dunning- Gretchen Mary Gueguen- Amy Earhart- Carolyn Guertin- Michael Eberle-Sinatra- Ann Hanlon- Thomas Eckart- Eric Harbeson- Maciej Eder

- Katherine D. Harris- Jennifer C. Edmond- Kevin Scott Hawkins- Gabriel Egan

- Sebastian Heath- Øyvind Eide

- Mark Hedges- Paul S. Ell- Serge Heiden- Deena Engel- Gerhard Heyer- Maria Esteva- Timothy Hill

- Martin Everaert- Brett Hirsch- Kurt E. Fendt- Martin Holmes- Franz Fischer- David L. Hoover- Kathleen Fitzpatrick- Xiao Hu- Julia Flanders- Lorna Hughes- Dominic Forest- Barbara Hui- Fenella Grace France- Claus Huitfeldt- Amanda French- Lásló Hunyadi- Christiane Fritze- Leif Isaksen- Chris Funkhouser- Aleksandrs Ivanovs- Jonathan Furner- Fotis Jannidis- Richard Furuta- Matthew Jockers- Isabel Galina Russell- Lars Johnsen- Liliane Gallet-Blanchard- Ian R. Johnson- David Gants- Patrick Juola- Susan Garfinkel- Samuli Kaislaniemi- Kurt Gärtner- Sarah Whitcher Kansa- Richard Gartner- John Gerard Keating- Alexander Gil- Margaret Kelleher- Joseph Gilbert- Kimon Keramidas- Sharon K. Goetz- Katia Lida Kermanidis- Mattew K. Gold

- Erik Ketzan- Joel Goldfield- Foaad Khosmood- Sean Gouglas- Douglas Kibbee- Ann Gow

- Gareth Knight- Stefan Gradmann- Fabian Körner

- Wayne Graham- Kimberly Kowal- Harriett Elisabeth Green- Steven Krauwer- Jan Gregory- William Kretzschmar

2

Digital Humanities 2012

- Michael Adam Krot

- Kiyonori Nagasaki- Christoph Kuemmel- Brent Nelson- Maurizio Lana

- John Nerbonne- Lewis Rosser Lancaster- Greg T. Newton- Anouk Lang

- Angel David Nieves- John Lavagnino- Bethany Nowviskie- Alexei Lavrentiev- Julianne Nyhan- Séamus Lawless- Daniel Paul O’Donnell- Katharine Faith Lawrence- Kazushi Ohya

- Domingo Ledezma- Mark Olsen- Caroline Leitch- Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen- Piroska Lendvai- Christian-Emil Ore- Richard J. Lewis- Espen S. Ore- Thomas Lippincott- John Paolillo- Eleonora Litta Modignani Picozzi- Brad Pasanek- Clare Llewellyn- Michele Pasin- Dianella Lombardini- Susan Holbrook Perdue- Elizabeth Losh

- Santiago Perez Isasi- Ana Lucic- Elena Pierazzo- Harald Lüngen

- Wendell Piez

- Kim Luychx- Daniel Pitti- Akira Maeda- Dorothy Carr Porter- Simon Mahony- Andrew John Prescott- Martti Makinen- Ernesto Priani- Kurt Maly

- Michael John Priddy- Worthy N. Martin- Brian L. Pytlik Zillig- Javier Martín Arista- Sebastian Rahtz- Jarom Lyle McDonald- Michael John Rains- Stephanie Meece- Stephen Ramsay- Federico Meschni- Andrea Rapp

- Adrian Miles- Gabriela Gray Redwine- Maki Miyake- Dean Rehberger- Jose Miguel Monteiro Viera- Georg Rehm

- Ruth Mostern- Allen H. Renear- Stuart Moulthrop- Doug Reside- Martin Mueller- Jason Rhody- A. Charles Muller- Allen Beye Riddell- Trevor Muñoz- Jim Ridolfo- Orla Murphy- David Robey- Frédérique Muscinesi- Peter Robinson- Elli Mylonas- Geoffrey Rockwell3

Digital Humanities 2012

- Nuria Rodríguez

- Paul Joseph Spence- Glenn H. Roe- Michael Sperberg-McQueen- Torsten Roeder- Lisa Spiro- Augusta Rohrbach- Peter Anthony Stokes- Matteo Romanello- Suzana Sukovic- Laurent Romary- Chris Alen Sula

- Lisa Rosner- Takafumi Suzuki- Charlotte Roueché- Elizabeth Anne Swanstrom- Henriette Roued-Cunliffe- Tomoji Tabata- Joseph Rudman- Toma Tasovac- Stan Ruecker- Aja Teehan- Angelina Russo- Elke Teich- Jan Rybicki- Melissa Terras- Patrick Sahle- Manfred Thaller- Patrick Saint-Dizier- Ruck John Thawonmas- Jon Saklofske- Christopher Theibault- Gabriele Salciute-Civiliene- Amalia Todirascu- Manuel Sánchez-Quero- Kathryn Tomasek- Concha Sanz

- Marijana Tomić- Jentery Sayers- Charles Bartlett Travis- Torsten Schaßan- Thorsten Trippel- Stephanie Schlitz- Charlotte Tupman- Desmond Schmidt- Kirsten Carol Uszkalo- Harry Schmidt- Ana Valverde Mateos- Sara A. Schmidt- Karina van Dalen-Oskam- Christof Schöch- Ron van den Branden- Susan Schreibman- H. J. van den Herik- Charlotte Schubert- Bert van Elsacker- Paul Anthony Scifleet- Marieke van Erp- Tapio Seppänen- Seth van Hooland- Ryan Benjamin Shaw

- Joris Job van Zundert- William Stewart Shaw

- Tomás Várdi- Lynne Siemens- John T. Venecek- Raymond George Siemens- Silvia Verdu Ruiz

- Gary F. Simons- Christina Vertan- Stéfan Sinclair- Paul Vetch- Kate Natalie Singer- Raffaele Viglianti- Natasha Smith- John Walsh- James Dakin Smithies- Katherine L. Walter- Lisa M. Snyder- Claire Warwick- Małgorzata Sokoł- Robert William Weidman

4

Digital Humanities 2012

- Corinne Welger-Barboza- Willeke Wendrich- Susan L. Wiesner- Matthew Wilkens- Perry Willett- William Winder- Andreas Witt
- Christian Wittern- Mark Wolff- Glen Worthey- Clifford Edward Wulfman- Vika Zafrin- Douwe Zeldenrust- Matthew Zimmerman- Amélie Zöllner-Weber5Plenary Sessions

Digital Humanities 2012

Dynamics and Diversity: Exploring European andTransnational Perspectives on Digital Humanities
Research Infrastructures
Moulin, Claudine

moulin@uni-trier.de
Trier Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Trier, Germany

In my talk I would like to reflect on Digital Humanities and Research infrastructures from aninternational and interdisciplinary perspective. Preserving and documenting cultural and linguistic
variety is not only one of the most important challenges linked to the development and future impact
of Digital Humanities on scholarly work and methodologies, it is also one of the key elements to beconsidered in the field of policy making and research funding at the European and international level. I
will explore this by reflecting on Digital Humanities and its outcomes from the perspectives of cultural
history and linguistic and interdisciplinary diversity; I will also tackle key questions related to building
multi-level inter- and transdisciplinary projects and transnational research infrastructures. In addition
to considering how Digital Humanities can extend and transform existing scholarly practice I will
also consider how it is fostering the emergence of new cultural practices that look beyond establishedacademic circles, for example, interactions between Digital Humanities and works of art.
Biographical Note
Claudine Moulin studied German and English philology in Brussels and Bamberg, receiving postdoctoral research grants for manuscript studies in Oxford. She was a Heisenberg fellow of the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); since 2003 she holds the chair for German Philology/ Historical
Linguistics at the University of Trier/Germany and is the Scientific Director of the Trier Centre for
Digital Humanities. She has published monographs and articles in the domain of text editing, digitallexicography, glossography, historical linguistics, and manuscript and annotation studies. She is afounding member of the Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliches Forschungszentrum (HKFZ Trier). She isa member of the Standing Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation (ESF) andspeaker of the ESF-Expert Group on Research Infrastructures in the Humanities. She was recipient of
the Academy Award of Rhineland-Palatinate in 2010, Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz.
C. Moulin is co-editor of the linguistic journal Sprachwissenschaft and of the series ‘Germanistische
Bibliothek‘; together with Julianne Nyhan and Arianna Ciula (et al.) she has publishedin 2011 the ESF-Science Policy Briefing on Research Infrastructures in the Humanities( http://www.esf.org/research-areas/humanities/strategic-activities/research-infrast
ructures-in-the-humanities.html ).

9Digital Humanities 2012

Embracing a Distant View of the Digital Humanities
Shimoda, Masahiro

shimoda@l.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Department of Indian Philosophy and Buddhist Studies/ Center for Evolving Humanities, Graduate
School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo, Japan

How should cultures transmit what they believe to be of vital importance from their own culture in its
period of decline to another culture on the rise? This question, taken as one of the most challenging bycontemporary historians, might well be posed themselves by DH scholars for the purpose of recognizing
the magnitude of the problem they have been confronting and the significance of the endeavor they havebeen undertaking in the domain of the humanities. The variety of efforts that cannot but be included
with the aims of each individual project, when combined together in a single arena such as DH 2012, willin the end be found to have been dedicated to the larger project of the constructing of ‘another culture on
the rise’ on a global scale in this age of drastic transformation of the medium of knowledge. To keep thissort of ‘distant view’ of DH in mind, while it seems to have no immediate, sensible influence on our dayto-day ‘close views,’ though, would be inevitable. Inevitable not only in the making of untiring efforts
to improve research environments amidst bewildering changes of technologies, but also in positively
inviting new, unknown, unprecedented enterprises into the domain of DH. DH in its diverse forms
should therefore assimilate into its identity the ostensively incommensurate aspects of steadfastness andflexibility. Among the numerous approaches that might be taken for understanding this peculiar identityof DH, I would like to demonstrate the significance of Digital Humanities research of Buddhist scripturesappropriately placed in the longer view of the history of the humanities.
Biographical Note
Masahiro Shimoda is a Professor in Indian Philosophy and Buddhist Studies with a cross appointment in
the Digital Humanities Section of the Center for Evolving Humanities at the University of Tokyo. He has
been Visiting Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University College London (2006),
Visiting Professor at Stanford University (2010), and is presently Visiting Research Fellow at Universityof Virginia (2012). He is the president of Japanese Association for Digital Humanities established lastSeptember (2011), and the chair of the trans-school program of Digital Humanities at the University ofTokyo, which has started on the 1st April 2012 in the collaborative program among the Graduate School ofInterdisciplinary Information Studies, the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, and the Center
for Structuring Knowledge. As his main project, Shimoda has launched since 2010 with government
granted budget ‘the construction of academic Buddhist knowledge base in international alliance.’ This
multi-nodal project, comprising seven major projects of self-financed agencies (Indo-Tibetan Lexical
Resources at University of Hamburg, Hobogirin project at École Français d’Étrême Orient, Pali Text
Compilation Project at Dhammacai Institute in Thai, Digital Dictionary of Buddhism in Tokyo etc.) withSAT (Chinese Buddhist Text Corpus Project at the University of Tokyo) placed as their hub, aims at
providing a variety of research resources for Buddhist studies such as the primary sources, secondary
resources, catalogues, dictionaries, lexicons and translations, all databases interlinked to each other ata deep structural level.

11

Pre-conference Workshops

Digital Humanities 2012

Digital Methods in
Manuscript Studies
Brockmann, Christianchristian.brockmann@uni-hamburg.de
University og Hamburg, Germany

Wangchuk, Dorji

dorji.wangchuk@uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

The workshop will consist of brief introductory
presentations on current developments in theseareas by international experts, short hands-on anddemonstration units on multispectral imaging andcomputer-assisted script and feature analysis as well
as discussions on expected future developments,
application perspectives, challenges and possible
fields of cooperation.
Joint speakers/demonstrators:
Jost Gippert (University of Frankfurt)
Lior Wolf (Tel-Aviv University)

Manuscript Studies constitute one of the main
research areas in the Humanities at the University of
Hamburg. This has been underlined recently when
the large multidisciplinary Centre for the Studyof Manuscript Cultures (Sonderforschungsbereich
950, http://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/ ) won a substantial grant from theDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in May 2011. The
centre can draw on experience aggregated by several
other projects in Hamburg such as ‘Forschergruppe
Manuskriptkulturen in Asien und Afrika’, ‘Teuchos.
Zentrum für Handschriften- und Textforschung’ and‘Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project(NGMCP)’. Manuscripts as the central and mostimportant media for the dissemination of writing
have influenced and even shaped cultures worldwide
for millennia, and only the relatively recent advent of
the printed book has challenged their predominance.
In the past few years, Manuscript Studies haveprofited greatly from the use of digital methods andtechnologies, ranging e.g. from the creation of betterand more accessible images to electronic editions andfrom a broad range of special databases supporting
this research to analytical tools. Whereas such areas
as digital cataloguing and editing have received more
extensive coverage, methods more specific to thestudy of manuscripts in particular deserve broader
attention.

Lorenzo Perilli (University of Rome, Tor Vergata)
Domenico Fiormonte (Università di Roma Tre)
Agnieszka
Helman-Wazny(UniversityofHamburg) / Jeff Wallman (Tibetan Buddhist
Resource Center, New York) / Orna Almogi(University of Hamburg, Centre for the Study ofManuscript Cultures)
Boryana Pouvkova / Claire MacDonald (Universityof Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript
Cultures)
Daniel Deckers (University of Hamburg)
Arved Solth / Bernd Neumann (University of
Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript
Cultures)
Ira Rabin, Oliver Hahn, Emanuel Kindzorra (Centre
for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Federal
Institute for Materials Research and Testing)This workshop focuses on Manuscript Studies as
a distinctive field, i.e. the study of manuscripts
as a characteristic feature and expression of thosecultures that are built on their use. It will
examine recent developments in digital methods
that can be applied across various manuscript
cultures worldwide, and aim to make awarenessand discussion of these accessible to a broader
group of scholars. It focuses exclusively on new
developments in its subject fields that rely on thedigital medium or on recent advances in technology
as applied to the study of manuscripts, with apenchant towards aspects beyond the scope of theindividuals fields concerned with just one particularmanuscript culture.
15

Digital Humanities 2012

Introduction to Stylomatic
Analysis using R
Eder, Maciej

maciejeder@gmail.com
Pedagogical University, Kraków, Poland

Rybicki, Janjkrybicki@gmail.com
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

1. Brief Description
Stylometry, or the study of measurable features of(literary) style, such as sentence length, vocabularyrichness and various frequencies (of words, word
lengths, word forms, etc.), has been around at
least since the middle of the 19th century, and has
found numerous practical applications in authorship
attribution research. These applications are usuallybased on the belief that there exist such consciousor unconscious elements of personal style that canhelp detect the true author of an anonymous text;that there exist stylistic fingerprints that can betraythe plagiarist; that the oldest authorship disputes (St.
Paul’s epistles or Shakespeare’s plays) can be settledwith more or less sophisticated statistical methods.
While specific issues remain largely unresolved (or,if closed once, they are sooner or later reopened), a
variety of statistical approaches has been developedthat allow, often with spectacular precision, toidentify texts written by several authors based ona single example of each author’s writing. But evenmore interesting research questions arise beyond
bare authorship attribution: patterns of stylometricsimilarity and difference also provide new insights
into relationships between different books by thesame author; between books by different authors;
between authors differing in terms of chronology
or gender; between translations of the same author
or group of authors; helping, in turn, to find new
ways of looking at works that seem to have beenstudied from all possible perspectives. Nowadays, inthe era of ever-growing computing power and of evermore literary texts available in electronic form, weare able to perform stylometric experiments that ourpredecessors could only dream of.
This half-day workshop is a hands-on introduction
to stylometric analysis in the programming language
R, using an emerging tool, a collection of Maciej
Eder’s and Jan Rybicki’s scripts, which perform
multivariate analyses of the frequencies of themost frequent words, the most frequent word
n-grams, and the most frequent letter n-grams.
16

One of the scripts produces Cluster Analysis,
Multidimensional Scaling, Principal Component
Analysis and Bootstrap Consensus Tree graphs basedon Burrows’s Delta and other distance measures;
it applies additional (and optional) procedures,such as Hoover’s ‘culling’ and pronoun deletion.
As by-products, it can be used to generate various
frequency lists; a stand-alone word-frequencymaker is also available. Another script provides
insight into state-of-the-art supervised techniques ofclassification, such as Support Vector Machines, kNearest Neighbor classification, or, more classically,
Delta as developed by Burrows. Our scripts havealready been used by other scholars to study
Wittgenstein’s dictated writings or, believe it or not,DNA sequences!
The workshop will be an opportunity to see this inpractice in a variety of text collections, investigatedfor authorial attribution, translatorial attribution,
genre, gender, chronology. Text collections in avariety of languages will be provided; workshop
attendees are welcome to bring even more texts (ineither plain text format or tei-xml). No previous
knowledge of R is necessary: our script is very userfriendly (and very fast)!

2. Tutorial Outline
During a brief introduction, (1) R will be installed on
the users’ laptops from the Internet (if it has not been
already installed); (2) participants will receive CDs/
pendrives with the script(s), a short quickstart guideand several text collections prepared for analysis;(3) some theory behind this particular stylometricapproach will be discussed, and the possible usesof the tools presented will be summarized. Afterthat and (4) a short instruction, participants will
move on to (5) hands-on analysis to produce as
many different results as possible to better assess thevarious aspects of stylometric study; (6) additional
texts might be downloaded from the Internet or
added by the participants themselves. The results,
both numeric and visualizations, will be analyzed.
For those more advanced in R (or S, or Matlab),details of the script (R methods, functions, andpackages) will be discussed.

3. Special Requirements
Participants should come with their own laptops. We
have versions of scripts for Windows, MacOS andLinux. The workshop also requires a projector andInternet connection in the workshop room.

Digital Humanities 2012

References
Baayen, H. (2008). Analyzing Linguistic Data:
A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Rybicki, J., and M. Eder (2011). Deeper Delta
across genres and languages: do we really need
the most frequent words?. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 26(3): 315-321.

Burrows, J. (1987). Computation into Criticism: A
Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in
Method. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Burrows, J. F. (2002). ‘Delta’: a measure of stylistic
difference and a guide to likely authorship. Literaryand Linguistic Computing 17(3): 267-287.
Craig, H. (1999). Authorial attribution andcomputational stylistics: if you tell authors apart,
have you learned anything about them? Literary and
Linguistic Computing 14(1): 103-113.
Craig, H., and A. F. Kinney, eds. (2009).
Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of
Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Eder, M. (2010). Does size matter? Authorship
attribution, small samples, big problem. Digital
Humanities 2010: Conference Abstracts. King’s
College London, pp. 132-135.
Eder, M. (2011). Style-markers in authorship
attribution: a cross-language study of the authorial
fingerprint. Studies in Polish Linguistics 6: 101-116.
Eder, M., and J. Rybicki (2011). Stylometry with
R. Digital Humanities 2011: Cconference Abstracts.
Stanford University, Stanford, pp. 308-311.
Eder, M., and J. Rybicki (2012). Do birds ofa feather really flock together, or how to choose
test samples for authorship attribution. Literary and
Linguistic Computing 27 (in press).
Hoover, D. L. (2004). Testing Burrows’s Delta.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 19(4): 453-475.
Jockers, M. L., and D. M. Witten (2010). A
comparative study of machine learning methods
for authorship attribution. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 25(2): 215-223.
Koppel, M., J. Schler, and S. Argamon (2009).
Computational methods in authorship attribution.
Journal of the American Society for Information
Science and Technology, 60(1): 9-26.
Rybicki, J. (2012). The great mystery of the (almost)invisible translator: stylometry in translation. In
M. Oakley and M. Ji (eds.), Quantitative Methods
in Corpus-Based Translation Studies. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Oakes, M., and A. Pichler (2012). Computational
Stylometry of Wittgenstein’s Diktät für Schlick.
Bergen Language and Linguistic (Bells) Series, (inpress).
17

Digital Humanities 2012

NeDiMAH workshop on
ontology based annotation
Eide, Øyvind

oyvind.eide@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College, London, UK

Ore, Christian-Emilc.e.s.ore@iln.uio.no
University of Oslo, Norway

Rahtz, Sebastiansebastian.rahtz@oucs.ox.ac.uk
University of Oxford, UK

The aim of this workshop is to present and discusscurrent ontology based annotation in text studies
and to give participants an introduction and updated
insight to the field. One of the expected outcomesfrom the workshop is to throw light on theconsequences and experiences of a renewed databaseapproach to computer assisted textual work, basedon the developments over the last decade in text
encoding as well as in ontological systems.

1. The NeDiMAH Network
The Network for Digital Methods in the Artsand Humanities (NeDiMAH) is a research network
running from 2011 to 2015, funded by the European
Science Foundation, ESF. The network will examine
the practice of, and evidence for, advanced ICT
methods in the arts and humanities across Europe,and articulate these findings in a series of outputs andpublications. To accomplish this, NeDiMAH provides
a locus of networking and interdisciplinary exchangeof expertise among the trans-European communityof digital arts and humanities researchers, as well as
those engaged with creating and curating scholarly
and cultural heritage digital collections. NeDiMAH
will work closely with the EC funded DARIAH
and CLARIN e-research infrastructure projects, aswell as other national and international initiatives.
NeDiMaH includes the following Working Groups:
1. Spatial and temporal modelling,
2. Information visualisation,
3. Linked data and ontological methods,
4. Developing digital data
5. Using large scale text collections for research
6. Scholarly digital editions
The
WGs
will
examinetheuseofformal computationally-based methods for thecapture, investigation, analysis, study, modelling,18

presentation, dissemination, publication andevaluation of arts and humanities materials forresearch. To achieve these goals the WGs willorganise annual workshops and whenever possible,
the NeDiMAH workshops will be organised inconnection with other activities and initiatives in thefield.
The NeDiMAH WG3, Linked data and ontologicalmethods, proposes to organise a preconference
workshop ‘Ontology based annotation’ in connection
with the Digital Humanities 2011 in Hamburg.

2. Motivation and backgroundThe use of computers as tools in the study of textual
material in the humanities and cultural heritage goesback to the late 1940s, with links back to similar
methods used without computer assistance, such as
word counting in the late nineteenth century andconcordances from the fourteenth century onwards.
In the sixty years of computer assisted text research,
two traditions can be seen. One is that which includes
corpus linguistics and the creation of digital scholarly
editions, while the other strain is related to museum
and archival texts. In the former tradition, texts arecommonly seen as first class feasible objects of study,
which can be examined by the reader using aesthetic,
linguistic or similar methods. In the latter tradition,
texts are seen mainly as a source for information;
readings concentrate on the content of the texts,
not the form of their writing. Typical examples aremuseum catalogues and historical source documents.
These two traditions will be called form and content
oriented, respectively. It must be stressed that thesecategories are not rigorous; they are points in acontinuum.
Tools commonly connected to museum and archive
work, such as computer based ontologies, can be used
to investigate texts of any genre, be it literary texts
or historical sources. Any analysis of a text is basedon a close reading of it. The same tools can also be
used to study texts which are read according to boththe form oriented and the content oriented way (Eide2008; Zöllner-Weber & Pichler 2007).
The novelty of the approach lies in its focus on
toolsets for modelling such readings in formal
systems. Not to make a clear, coherent representationof a text, but rather to highlight inconsistencies aswell as consistencies, tensions as well as harmonies,
in our readings of the texts. The tools used
for such modelling can be created to store andshow contradictions and inconsistencies, as well as
providing the user with means to detect and examinesuch contradictions. Such tools are typically used in
an iterative way in which results from one experiment
may lead to adjustments in the model or in the way it
is interpreted, similar to modelling as it is describedDigital Humanities 2012by McCarty (2005). The source materials for this typeof research are to be found in the results of decadesof digital scholarly editing. Not only in the fact thata wide variety of texts exist in digital form, but alsothat many of these texts have been encoded in ways
which can be used as starting points for the modelbuilding. Any part of the encoding can be contested,in the modelling work as well as in the experiments
performed on the model. The methods developed inthis area, which the TEI guidelines are an example of,provide a theoretical basis for this approach.
In the end of the 1980ies Manfred Thaller developed
Kleio, a simple ontological annotation system forhistorical texts. Later in the 1990s hypertext, notdatabases, became the tool of choice for textual
editions (Vanhoutte 2010: 131). The annotation
system Pliny by John Bradley (2008) was design
both as a practical tool for scholars abut also because
Bradley was interested in how scholars work whenstudying a text. One of the expected outcomes fromthis workshop is to throw light on the consequencesand experiences of a renewed database approachin computer assisted textual work, based on thedevelopment in text encoding over the last decade as
well as in ontological systems.
A basic assumption is that reading a text includes
a process of creating a model in the mind of thereader. This modelling process of the mind works
in similar ways for all texts, being it fiction or nonfictions (see Ryan 1980). Reading a novel and readinga historical source document both result in models.
These models will be different, but they can all betranslated into ontologies expressed in computer
formats. The external model stored in the computer
system will be a different model from the one stored
in the mind, but it will still be a model of the text
reading. By manipulating the computer based model
new things can be learned about the text in question.
This method represents an answer to Shillingsburg’scall for editions which are open not only forreading by the reader, but also for manipulation(Shillingsburg 2010: 181), and to Pichler’s
understanding of digital tools as means to document
and explicate our different understandings andinterpretations of a text (Zöllner-Weber & Pichler2007).
A digital edition can be part of the text model stored
in the computer system. As tools and representation
shape thinking not only through the conclusions they
enable but also through the metaphors they deploy(Galey 2010: 100), this model will inevitably lead toother types of question asked to the text. A hypothesisis that these new questions will lead to answers
giving new insight into the texts of study. Some ofthese insights would not have been found using othermethods.

There is a movement in the humanities from seeking
local knowledge about specific cases (McCarty,
Willard. Humanities Computing. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) which in this respect
are traditional humanities investigations into specificcollections of one or a limited number of texts. The
general patterns sought may rather be found on ameta-research level where one investigate into new
ways in which research that has a traditional scope
can be performed.

3. A description of target audience
Scholars interested in online and shared annotationof texts and media based on ontologies. Practice inthe field is not a requirement. Knowlegde of theconcept ‘ontology’ or ‘conceptual model’ can be anadvantage.
The aim of this workshop is to present and discusscurrent ontology based annotation in text studies
and to give the participant an introduction andupdated insight in the field and also bringing together
researchers. One of the expected outcomes from thisworkshop is to throw light on the consequencesand experiences of a renewed database approachin computer assisted textual work, based on thedevelopments over the last decade in text encoding aswell as in ontological systems.

References
Bradley, J. (2008). Pliny: A model for
digital support of scholarship. Journal of Digital
Information 9(1). http://journals.tdl.org/jod
i/article/view/209/198 . Last checked 2011-11-01
Crane, G. (2006). What Do You Do with a Million
Books? D-Lib Magazine 12(3). URL: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/crane/03crane.html .
(checked 2011-11-01).
Eide, Ø. (2008). The Exhibition Problem. A Reallife Example with a Suggested Solution. Lit Linguist
Computing 23(1): 27-37.
Galey, A. (2010). The Human Presence in Digital
Artefacts’. In W. McCarty (ed.), Text and Genre in
Reconstruction: Effects of Digitalization on Ideas,
Behaviours, Products and Institutions. Cambridge:
Open Book Publishers, pp. 93-117.
McCarty, W. (2005). Humanities Computing.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees: abstract
models for a literary history. London: Verso.
Ryan, M.-L. (1980). Fiction, non-factuals, and theprinciple of minimal departure. Poetics 9: 403-22.

19

Digital Humanities 2012

Shillingsburg, P. (2010). How Literary Works
Exist: Implied, Represented, and Interpreted. In W.
McCarty (ed.), Text and Genre in Reconstruction:
Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours,
Products and Institutions. Cambridge: Open Book
Publishers, pp. 165-82.
Kleio-system,

http://www.hki.uni-koeln.
de/kleio/old.website/welcome.html , checked

2011-11-01.

Zöllner-Weber, A., and A. Pichler (2007).
Utilizing OWL for Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
In H. Hrachovec, A. Pichler and J. Wang(eds.), Philosophie der Informationsgesellschaft /Philosophy
oftheInformation
Society.
Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein
Society. Kirchberg am Wechsel: ALWS, pp. 248-250.
Vanhoutte, E. (2010) Defining Electronic Editions:
A Historical and Functional Perspective. In W.
McCarty (ed.), Text and Genre in Reconstruction:
Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours,
Products and Institutions. Cambridge: Open Book
Publishers, pp. 119-44.

Service-oriented
Architectures (SOAs) for
the Humanities: Solutions
and Impacts
Hinrichs, Erhard

erhard.hinrichs@uni-tuebingen.de
Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany

Neuroth, Heike

neuroth@sub.uni-goettingen.de
Unversity of Göttingen, Germany

Wittenburg, PeterPeter.Wittenburg@mpi.nl
Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Large research infrastructure projects in the
Humanities and Social Sciences such as Bamboo( http://www.projectbamboo.org/ ), CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu ), DARIAH ( http://www.dariah.eu/ ), eAqua ( http://www.eaqua.net/index.php ), Metanet ( http://www.meta-net.
eu ), and Panacea ( http://www.panacea-lr.eu) increasingly offer their resources and tools as
web applications or web services via the internet.
Examples of this kind include:- Bamboo Technology Project ( http://www.proje
ctbamboo.org/infrastructure/ )- eAqua Portal ( http://www.eaqua.net/portal/ )- Language Technology World Portal of MetaNet (http://www.lt-world.org )- PANACEA platform ( http://www.panacea-lr.eu/en/project/the-platform )- TextGrid – eScience methods in Arts andHumanities ( http://www.textgrid.de/en.html)- VLO – Virtual Language Observatory ( http://www.clarin.eu/vlw/observatory.php )- WebLicht – Web Based Linguistic Chaining Tool
( http://https://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/ )Such web-based access has a number of crucial
advantages over traditional means of service
provision via downloadable resources or desktop
applications. Since web applications can be invokedfrom any browser, downloading, installation, andconfiguration of individual tools on the user’s
local computer is avoided. Moreover, users of web
applications will be ensured to always use the latest

20

Digital Humanities 2012

version of the software, since it will be updated on
the host computer. It is exactly this ease of use thatis of crucial advantage for eHumanities researchers,
since configuration and updates of software often
require computational skills that can ordinarily not
be expected from humanities researchers.
The paradigm of service-oriented architectures(SOA) is often used as a possible architecture forbundling web applications and web services. Whilethe use of web services and SOAs is quickly gaining
in popularity, there are still a number of open
technology and research questions which await moreprincipal answers:- Currently, web services and SOAs in the
Digital Humanities often concentrate on writtenmaterial. Will the current technology scale up
to accommodate multimodal data like speech orvideo data as well?
- Currently, web services and SOAs typically processdata in a synchronous fashion. How can verylarge data sets such as multimodal resources beprocessed in an asynchronous fashion?
- Currently, web services and SOAs tend to deliver
analysis or search results in a non-interactive
fashion, allowing user input only to initiate
processing and to react to the processing result.
How can the current applications be extended
so as to allow dynamic user interaction during
processing? Such considerations are of crucial
importance for the eHumanities in order tosupport, inter alia, interactive annotation of
text corpora, a desideratum for all text-oriented
disciplines such as literary studies, history, andlinguistics.

1. Invited Speaker- Eric Nyburg (Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh): A Service-Oriented Architecture for
Rapid Development of Language Applications

2. Accepted Papers- Tara L. Andrews, Moritz Wissenbach, Joris J.
Van Zundert and Gregor Middell – Embracing
research: consolidating innovation throughsustainable development of infrastructure- Dorothee Beermann, Pavel Mihaylov and Han
Sloetjes – Linking annotations Steps towards
tool-chaining in Language Documentation- Andre Blessing, Jens Stegmann and Jonas Kuhn
– SOA meets Relation Extraction: Less may be
more in Interaction- Michael Scott Cuthbert, Beth Hadley, Lars
Johnson and Christopher Reyes – Interoperable
Digital Musicology Research via music21 Web
Applications- Emanuel Dima, Erhard Hinrichs, Marie Hinrichs,
Alexander Kislev, Thorsten Trippel and Thomas
Zastrow – Integration of WebLicht into the
CLARIN Infrastructure- Rüdiger Gleim, Alexander Mehler and Alexandra
Ernst – SOA implementation of the eHumanities
Desktop- Thomas Kisler, Florian Schiel and Han Sloetjes –Signal processing via web services: the use case
WebMAUS- Will web-based access over time completely
replace stand-alone (downloadable) desktop or
CLI applications, or will there always be a need for
both: local and web-based applications?

- Chiara Latronico, Nuno Freire, Shirley Agudo
and Andreas Juffinger – The European Library:
A Data Service Endpoint for the Bibliographic
Universe of Europe- What is the impact of emerging technologies suchas web sockets or cloud computing on existing web
service environments?

- Przemyslaw Lenkiewicz, Dieter van Uytvanck,Sebastian Drude and Peter Wittenburg– Advanced Web-services for AutomatedAnnotation of Audio and Video Recordings- Currently, SOAs tend to be application or domain
specific, catering to the data formats and services
most relevant to particular user communities.
What are the possibilities for generalizing suchcurrent practice and developing generic execution
models and standards?
- How to generate knowledge from data, e.g.
developing new digital methods and concepts suchas new and adapted data structures, hierarchicaldata storage, data modeling, sorting and searchalgorithms, selection of data via metadata, andvisualization tools?

- Scott Martens – TüNDRA: TIGERSearch-style
treebank querying as an XQuery-based web
service- Christoph Plutte – How to Turn a Desktop
Application into a Web-Interface? – ArchivEditor as an Example of Eclipse RCP and RAP
Single Sourcing- Thomas Zastrow and Emanuel Dima – Workflow
Engines in Digital Humanities

21

Digital Humanities 2012

Here and There, Then and
Now – Modelling Space andTime in the Humanities
Isaksen, Leifleifuss@googlemail.com
University of Southampton, UK

Day, Shawn

day.shawn@gmail.com
Digital Humanities Observatory, Ireland

Andresen, Jens

jens.andresen@hum.au.dk
University of Aarhus, Denmark

Hyvönen, Eero

eero.hyvonen@tkk.fi
Aalto University, Finland

Mäkelä, Eetu

eetu.makela@aalto.fii
Aalto University, Finland

Spatio-temporal concepts are so ubiquitous that it
is easy for us to forget that they are essential to
everything we do. All expressions of Human culture
are related to the dimensions of space and time in
the manner of their production and consumption, thenature of their medium and the way in which theyexpress these concepts themselves. This workshop
seeks to identify innovative practices among theDigital Humanities community that explore, critiqueand re-present the spatial and temporal aspects ofculture.
Although space and time are closely related, there
are significant differences between them which may
be exploited when theorizing and researching the
Humanities. Among these are the different naturesof their dimensionality (three dimensions vs. one),the seemingly static nature of space but enforced‘flow’ of time, and the different methods we use
to make the communicative leap across spatial andtemporal distance. Every medium, whether textual,
tactile, illustrative or audible (or some combinationof them), exploits space and time differently
in order to convey its message. The changes
required to express the same concepts in different
media (between written and performed music, forexample), are often driven by different spatiotemporal requirements. Last of all, the impossibility(and perhaps undesirability) of fully representing afour-dimensional reality (whether real or fictional)
mean that authors and artists must decide how
to collapse this reality into the spatio-temporal
22

limitations of a chosen medium. The nature of thosechoices can be as interesting as the expression itself.
This workshop allows those working with digital tools
and techniques that manage, analyse and exploit
spatial and temporal concepts in the Humanities
to present a position paper for the purposes ofwider discussion and debate. The position papers
will discuss generalized themes related to use of
spatio-temporal methods in the Digital Humanities
with specific reference to one or more concrete
applications or examples. Accepted papers have been
divided into three themed sessions: Tools, Methods
and Theory. This workshop is part of the ESFfunded NEDIMAH Network and organised by its
Working Group on Space and Time. The group will
also present its findings from the First NeDiMAH
Workshop on Space and Time.

1. About NeDiMAH
NeDiMAH is examining the practice of, and evidence
for, advanced ICT methods in the Arts andHumanities across Europe, and will articulate thesefindings in a series of outputs and publications. To
accomplish this, NeDiMAH assists in networking
initiatives and the interdisciplinary exchange ofexpertise among the trans-European community of
Digital Arts and Humanities researchers, as well as
those engaged with creating and curating scholarly
and cultural heritage digital collections. NeDiMAH
maximises the value of national and international
e-research infrastructure initiatives by helping Artsand Humanities researchers to develop, refine andshare research methods that allow them to create
and make best use of digital methods and collections.
Better contextualization of ICT Methods also builds
human capacity, and is of particular benefit for earlystage researchers. For further information see http://
www.nedimah.eu.
The workshop will also be aligned and coordinatedwith ongoing work at the DARIAH Project (cf.
http://www.dariah.eu ). DARIAH is a large-scale
FP7-project that aims to prepare the building ofdigital research infrastructure for European Arts andHumanities researchers and content/data curators.

2. Papers
2.1. Tools
Shoichiro Hara & Tatsuki Skino – Spatiotemporal
Tools for Humanities
David McClure – The Canonical vs. The Contextual:
Neatline’s Approach to Connecting Archives with
Spatio-Temporal Interfaces

Digital Humanities 2012

Roxana Kath – eAQUA/Mental Maps: Exploring
Concept Change in Time and Space- Shawn Day, Digital Humanities Observatory

Kate Byrne – The Geographic Annotation Platform:
A New Tool for Linking and Visualizing Places
References in the Humanities- Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton- Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University- Eetu Mäkelä, Aalto University

2.2. Methods
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. & C. Thomas Bailey– Computer Simulation of Speech in Cultural
Interaction as a Complex System
Karl Grossner –Event Objects for Placial History
Charles Travis – From the Ruins of Time and Space:
The Psychogeographical GIS of Postcolonial Dublin
in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds (1939)

2.3. Theory
Maria Bostenaru Dan – 3D conceptual
representation of the (mythical) space and timeof the past in artistic scenographical and garden
installations
Eduard Arriaga-Arango – Multiple temporalities atcrossroads: Artistic Representations of Afro in Latin
America and the Hispanic World in the current stageof Globalization (Mapping Cultural emergences
through Networks)
Kyriaki Papageorgiou – Time, Space, Cyberspaceand Beyond, On Research Methods, Delicate
Empiricism, Labyrinths and Egypt
Patricia Murrieta-Flores – Finding the way without
maps: Using spatial technologies to explore theories
of terrestrial navigation and cognitive mapping inprehistoric societies

2.4. Discussion Objectives- Bring together the experiences of researchersdeveloping or using spatial or temporal methods inthe Digital Humanities.
- Evaluate the impact of such methods in terms ofaddressing traditional Humanities questions andposing new ones.
- Explore non-investigative benefits, such as the useof spatial and temporal tools and visualization asmeans for contextualization.
- Identify where tools developed for spatial analysis
may be applicable to temporal analysis (and viceversa).

2.5. Program Committee- Jens Andresen, University of Aarhus

23

Digital Humanities 2012

Crowdsourcing meaning:a hands-on introduction
to CLÉA, the Collaborative
Literature Éxploration andAnnotation Environment
Petris, Marco

marco.petris@uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Gius, Evelyn

evelyn.gius@uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Schüch, Lena

lena.schuech@googlemail.com
University of Hamburg, Germany

Meister, Jan Christophjan-c-meister@uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

1. Context and description
Humanities researchers in the field of literary studies
access and read literary texts in digital format
via the web in increasing numbers – but, apartfrom search and find, the cognitive processing of atext still takes place outside the digital realm. Theinterest essentially motivating human encounterswith literature hardly seems to benefit from the newparadigm: hermeneutic, i.e. ‘meaning’ oriented highorder interpretation that transcends a mere decodingof information. The main reason for this might
be that hermeneutic activity is not deterministic,
but explorative: in the scholarly interpretation ofliterature we are not looking for the right answer, but
for new, plausible and relevant answers. Thus highorder hermeneutic interpretation requires more than
the automated string- or word-level pattern analysisof the source object provided by most digital text
analysis applications so far, namely the ability to add
semantic markup and to analyse both the objectdata and the metadata in combination. This requires
markup that goes beyond the distinction between
procedural vs. descriptive of Coombs et al. (1987)
and even beyond the subdivision of descriptive
markup into genuinely descriptive vs. performative
introduced by Renear (2004). By semantic markup
we rather mean a true hermeneutic markup as
defined by Pietz (2010: paragraph 1):
By ‘hermeneutic’ markup I mean markup thatis deliberately interpretive. It is not limited to24

describing aspects or features of a text thatcan be formally defined and objectively verified.
Instead, it is devoted to recording a scholar’sor analyst’s observations and conjectures in an
open-ended way. As markup, it is capable ofautomated and semi-automated processing, so thatit can be processed at scale and transformed
into different representations. By means of amarkup regimen perhaps peculiar to itself, atext will be exposed to further processing suchas text analysis, visualization or rendition. Texts
subjected to consistent interpretive methodologies,
or different interpretive methodologies applied tothe same text, can be compared. Rather than being
devoted primarily to supporting data interchange
and reuse – although these benefits would not be
excluded – hermeneutic markup is focused on thepresentation and explication of the interpretation it
expresses.
CLÉA (Collaborative Literature Éxploration andAnnotation) was developed to support McGann’s(2004) open-ended, discontinuous, and nonhierarchical model of text-processing and allows theuser to express many different readings directly inmarkup. The web based system not only enables
collaborative research but it is based on an approachto markup that transcends the limitations of lowlevel text description, too.1 CLÉA supports high-level
semantic annotation through TEI compliant, nondeterministic stand off markup and acknowledges
the standard practice in literary studies, i.e.
a constant revision of interpretation (including
one’s own) that does not necessarily amount tofalsification. CLÉA builds on our open source desktop
application CATMA2.
In our workshop, we will address some key challengesof developing and applying CLÉA:- We will discuss both the prerequisites mentioned
above and their role in the development of CLÉA,- present interdisciplinary use cases where acomplex tagset that operationalizes literary theory(namely narratology) is applied,- give a practical introduction in the use of CLÉA,
and- provide a hands-on session where participants canannotate their own texts.
Finally, we would like to engage participants in adesign critique of CLÉA and a general discussion
about requirements for text analysis tools in theirfields of interest.

References
Coombs, J. H., A. H. Renear, and St. J. DeRose(1987). Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly

Digital Humanities 2012

Text Processing. Communications of the ACM (ACM)
30(11): 933–947. Available online at http://xml.co
verpages.org/coombs.html (last seen 2011-10-31).
McGann, J. (2004). Marking Texts ofMany Dimensions. In S. Schreibman, R.
Siemans,andJ.
Unsworth(eds.),A
Companion to Digital Humanities, 2004.
Oxford:Blackwell,pp.
218-239.
Onlineat http://www.digitalhumanities.org/compani
on/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781
405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-3-4&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-3-4&brand=9781405103213_brand=
default (last seen 2011-10-31).

Piez, W. (2010). Towards Hermeneutic Markup:
An architectural outline. King’s College, DH 2010,
London. Available from:http://piez.org/w
endell/papers/dh2010/index.html(last seen
2011-10-31).
Renear, A. H. (2004). Text Encoding. In
S. Schreibman, R. Siemans, and J. Unsworth(eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities,
2004. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 218–239. Online
at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/compani
on/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781
405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-3-5&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-3-5&brand=default(last seen

2011-10-31).
Notes

1. We define this distinction as follows: description cannot
tolerate ambiguity, whereas an interpretation is aninterpretation if and only if at least one alternative to it
exists. Note that alternative interpretations are not subject toformal restrictions of binary logic: they can affirm, complement
or contradict one another. In short, interpretations are of aprobabilistic nature and highly context dependent.
2. CLÉA is funded by the European Digital Humanities Award
2010, see http://www.catma.de

Learning to play like aprogrammer: web mashups and scripting for
beginners
Ridge, Miam.ridge@open.ac.uk
Open University, UK

Have you ever wanted to be able to express yourideas for digital humanities data-based projects moreclearly, or wanted to know more about hack days andcoding but been too afraid to ask?
In this hands-on tutorial led by an experienced web
programmer, attendees will learn how to use online
tools to create visualisations to explore humanities
data sets while learning how computer scripts
interact with data in digital applications.
Attendees will learn the basic principles ofprogramming by playing with small snippets of codein a fun and supportive environment. The instructor
will use accessible analogies to help participants
understand and remember technical concepts.
Working in pairs, participants will undertake short
exercises and put into practice the scripting concepts
they are learning about. The tutorial structure
encourages attendees to reflect on their experiences
and consolidate what they have learned from theexercises with the goal of providing deeper insight
into computational thinking.
The tutorial aims to help humanists without atechnical background understand more about thecreation and delivery of digital humanities data
resources. In doing so, this tutorial is designed tosupport greater diversity in the ‘digital’ part of thedigital humanities community.
Target audience: This tutorial is aimed at people
who want to learn enough to get started playing
with simple code to manipulate data, or gain an
insight into how programming works. No technicalknowledge is assumed. Attendees are asked to bring
their own laptops or net books.

1. Tutorial structure
The tutorial will include:- what a humanities data set is and how to access one- how web scripting languages
JavaScript as an example)

work(using- how to sketch out your ideas in pseudo-code25

Digital Humanities 2012

- the value of visualisation tools in understanding
the shape of a data set- prepared exercises: ‘hello world’, using script
libraries for mash-ups, creating your first mashup using a live cultural dataset (e.g. a timeline ormap),- how to find further resources and keep learning

Introduction to DistantReading Techniques with
Voyant Tools, Multilingual
EditionSinclair, Stéfan

sgsinclair@gmail.com
McGill University, Canada

Rockwell, Geoffrey

grockwel@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

You have a collection of digital texts, now what?
This workshop provides a gentle introduction to
text analysis in the digital humanities using Voyant
Tools, a collection of free web-based tools that canhandle larger collections of texts, be they digitizednovels, online news articles, twitter feeds, or othertextual content. This workshop will be a hands-on,
practical guide with lots of time to ask questions, so
participants are encouraged to bring their own texts.
In the workshop we will cover the following:
1. A brief introduction to text analysis in thehumanities;
2. Preliminary exploration techniques using Voyant;
3. Basic issues in choosing, compiling, and preparing
a text corpus;
4. Text mining to identify themes in large corpora;
5. Ludic tools and speculative representations oftexts; and6. Integrating tool results into digital scholarship.
This year’s workshop will pay special attention
to certain multilingual issues in text analysis,
such as character encoding, word segmentation,
and available linguistic functionality for different
languages. The instructors will present in English,
but can also present or answer questions in French
and Italian.
This is intended as an introduction to text analysis
and visualization. We hope for an audience witha range of interests and relevant competencies.
Participants are expected to bring their own laptop
and are encouraged to bring their own texts.

26

Digital Humanities 2012

Towards a reference
curriculum for the Digital
Humanities
Thaller, Manfred

manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de
Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche
Informationsverarbeitung, Universität zu Köln,
Germany

In late 2009 the Cologne Centre for eHumanities
started an initiative to improve the cooperation
between (mainly) German universities actively
offering degree courses in Digital Humanities.
Within three meetings the concepts of theparticipating universities have been compared and a
discussion on possibilities for closer cooperation has
been started. As a result:of the degree courses. This process has so far
been implemented mainly in Germany for pragmatic
reasons: To make students aware of the existenceof the field of Digital Humanities as a regular fieldof academic studies on the level of practical PR
activities, you have to address a community whichfinds all of the participating universities as similarly
logical choices for a place to study. It is also mucheasier to start the discussion of a core curriculum
if during the first rounds all participants of the
discussion operate under the same administrative
rules for the establishment of degree courses.
We will organize a workshop attached to the Digital
Humanities 2012 at Hamburg in order to extend
this discussion to representatives of other university
landscapes.
On the most fundamental level we would like to:- Present the results of the German initiative.
- Invite presentations of the Digital Humanities
degree courses existing within other countries.

A ‘catalogue’ ( http://www.cceh.uni-koeln.de/in the context
Dokumente/BroschuereWeb.pdf
of http://www.cceh.uni-koeln.de/dh-degrees2011 – German only, so far) to document thedegree programs that have actively contributed tothe common work has been prepared. It includes
ten BA programs, twelve MA / MSc programs, twocertificates of DH based training as professional
add-on qualification on top of regular degrees plus
one embedded degree within the regular teachingof a Humanities study program. The universities
ofBamberg, Bielefeld, Darmstadt, Erlangen,
Gießen, Göttingen, Graz, Groningen, Hamburg,
Köln, Lüneburg, Saarbrücken and Würzburg havecontributed to this catalogue. What started as an
initiative of Cologne has in the meantime become an
integral part of DARIAH-DE, a general framework ofprojects for the establishment of an infrastructure forthe Digital Humanities within Germany.

On the level of practical co-operation we intend to
discuss:

Parallel to that initiative, a discussion has been
started which shall lead towards the identification ofcommon elements of Digital Humanities curricula,making it easier for students to move between
individual degrees and providing the ground workfor the recognition of Digital Humanities as a
general concept by the agencies responsible for theaccreditation of university degrees within Germany.
The German situation is probably different fromthat in many other countries, as two BA and one
MSc program from the list above are offered not by
Arts faculties, but by Computer Science faculties or
institutes.

- To initialize a discussion about possible terms ofreference for Digital Humanities curricula, whichtranscend individual academic systems.

Both activities are results of an underlying processof ‘comparing the notes’ between people responsible
directly for conceptualization and implementation- The creation and maintenance of a database /catalogue of European degree courses in Digital
Humanities.
- The possibility for improved exchange activities
within existing funding schemes, within Europe
e.g. ERASMUS, between different degree courses.
This will require, among other things, theidentification of elements in different curricula
which could substitute courses required at a homeinstitution.
- In a very exploratory way, the possibilities for thefacilitation of genuine ‘European Master’ degrees
in Digital Humanities, in the sense used by theEuropean Commission.
On the conceptual level we hope:- To arrive at a working definition for the fieldcovered by such curricula. We are covering, e.g.,
degree courses which try to combine archaeology
with computer science elements as well as degree
courses, which are closely related to computational
linguistics. As these communities are differently
related within different university landscapes, acommon conceptual reference framework should
be used.
As this is an initiative which emerges fromongoing work and is directed mainly at institutions
and persons which have experience with the27Digital Humanities 2012

implementation of Digital Humanities degrees, we do
not intend to rely primarily on a call for papers.
We will not rely on a call for papers primarily.
During April 2012 a set of documents will be sent
to all institutions in Europe, and many beyond,which are known to organize a degree course in
the Digital Humanities or a closely connected field,with an invitation to join the workshop. We hope forresults leading to direct and practical cooperation
within existing frameworks. So the primary target
group of this workshop are the European academic
institutions offering or planning degree courses inthe Digital Humanities. This said, of course we also
invite the wider community to join the conceptual
discussions.

Free your metadata: apractical approach towards
metadata cleaning andvocabulary reconciliationvan Hooland, Sethsvhoolan@ulb.ac.be
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Verborgh, Ruben

ruben.verborgh@ugent.beGhent University, Belgium

De Wilde, Max

Participation of institutions we are not aware of,particularly from those which are currently only inthe planning stages of Digital Humanities’ degree
courses, is very much hoped for. Please directenquiries to manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de to receive
additional material from the preparatory round of
discussions and supporting material before the startof the workshop.

madewild@ulb.ac.be
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

The workshop will run for a full day. The following
program is tentative, to be adapted to accommodate
for proposals and explicit wishes from participants
during the preparatory stage.

The early-to-mid 2000s economic downturn in the
US and Europe forced Digital Humanities projects
to adopt a more pragmatic stance towards metadata
creation and to deliver short-term results towards
grant providers. It is precisely in this context
that the concept of Linked and Open Data (LOD)
has gained momentum. In this tutorial, we want
to focus on metadata cleaning and reconciliation,
two elementary steps to bring cultural heritage
collections into the Linked Data cloud. After an initialcleaning process, involving for example the detectionof duplicates and the unifying of encoding formats,metadata are reconciled by mapping a domain
specific and/or local vocabulary to another (morecommonly used) vocabulary that is already a part of
the Semantic Web. We believe that the integrationof heterogeneous collections can be managed byusing subject vocabularies for cross linking between
collections, since major classifications and thesauri(e.g. LCSH, DDC, RAMEAU, etc.) have been madeavailable following Linked Data Principles.

09:00 – 10:30 Setting the agenda – reports on
existing degree courses.
11:00 – 12:30 What do we have in common? I:
Parallels and differences in the scope of individual
degree courses.
14:00 – 15:30 What do we have in common? II:
Parallels and differences in the concept of ‘Digital
Humanities’ underlying the individual courses.
16:00 – 17:30 Are there synergies? Creating awork program to facilitate discussions of exchange
facilities and curricular coordination across nationalboundaries.

1. Tutorial content and its
relevance to the DH community

Re-using these established terms for indexing
cultural heritage resources represents a big potentialof Linked Data for Digital Humanities projects,
but there is a common belief that the applicationof LOD publishing still requires expert knowledge
of Semantic Web technologies. This tutorial will
therefore demonstrate how Semantic Web novices
can start experimenting on their own with nonexpert software such as Google Refine. Participantsof the tutorial can bring an export (or a subset) ofmetadata from their own projects or organizations.
All necessary operations to reconcile metadata with28

Digital Humanities 2012

controlled vocabularies which are already a partof the Linked Data cloud will be presented indetail, after which participants will be given timeto perform these actions on their own metadata,
under assistance of the tutorial organizers. Previous
tutorials have mainly relied on the use of the Libraryof Congres Subject Headings (LCSH), but for theDH2012 conference we will test out beforehand
SPARQL endpoints of controlled vocabularies inGerman (available for example on http://wiss-ki.
eu/authorities/gnd/ ), allowing local participants
to experiment with metadata in German.
This tutorial proposal is a part of the Free your
Metadata research project.1 The website offers avariety of video’s, screencasts and documentation
on how to use Google Refine to clean and reconcile
metadata with controlled vocabularies alreadyconnected to the Linked Data cloud. The website
also offers an overview of previous presentations.
Google Refine currently offers one of the best
possible solutions on the market to clean andreconcile metadata. The open-source character ofthe software makes it also an excellent choice fortraining and educational purposes. Both researchersand practitioners from the Digital Humanities
are within cultural heritage projects inevitably
confronted with issues of bad quality metadata
and the interconnecting with external metadata andcontrolled vocabularies. This tutorial will therefore
provide both practical hands-on information andan opportunity to reflect on the complex theme of
metadata quality.

2. Outline of the tutorial

After a break, the participants will have theopportunity to work individually or in group on theirown metadata and to experiment with the different
operations showcased during the first half of thetutorial. The tutorial organizers will guide and assist
the different groups during this process. Participants
will be given 60 minutes for their own experimenting
and during a 45 minutes wrap-up, participants
will be asked to share their the outcomes of theexperimentation process. This tutorial will also
explicitly try to bring together Digital Humanists
will similar interests in Linked Data and in this way
stimulate future collaborations between institutions
and projects.

3. Target audience
The target audience consists both of practitioners
and researchers from the Digital Humanities field
who focus on the management of cultural heritage
resources.

4. Special requests/equipment
needs
Participants should preferably bring their own laptop
and, if possible, have installed Google Refine.
Intermediate knowledge of metadata creation andmanagement is required.
Notes
1. See the projects website on http://freeyourmetadata.org .

During this half day tutorial, the organizers will
present each essential step of the metadata cleaning
and reconciliation process, before focusing on ahands-on session during which each participant will
be asked to work on his or her own metadata set(but default metadata sets will also be provided). The
overview of the different features will approximately
take 60 minutes:- Introduction: Outline regarding the importanceof metadata quality and the concrete possibilities
offered by Linked Data for cultural heritage
collections- Metadata cleaning: Insight into the features of
Google Refine and how to apply filters and facets
to tackle metadata quality issues.
- Metadata reconciliation: Use of the RDF extension
which can be in- stalled to extend Google Refine’s
reconciliation capabilities. Overview of SPARQL
endpoints with interesting vocabularies available
for Digital Humanists, in different languages.

29PanelsDigital Humanities 2012

Text Analysis Meets Text
Encoding
Bauman, Syd

Syd_Bauman@Brown.edu
Brown University, USA

Hoover, David

david.hoover@nyu.edu
New York University, USA

van Dalen-Oskam, Karina
karina.van.dalen@huygens.knaw.nl
Huygens Institute, The Netherlands

Piez, Wendell

wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc., USA

1. Aim and Organization
The main aim of this panel discussion is to bring
together text encoding specialists and text analysis
researchers. Recent DH conferences have comprised,in addition to other activities, two distinct subconferences – one focusing on text encoding in
general and TEI in particular, and the other on text
analysis, authorship attribution, and stylistics. The
separation between the two is so extreme that their
participants often meet only at breaks and social
events. This is reﬂected in the way text encoding
specialists and text analysis scholars do their work
as well: they hardly ever work together on the same
projects. Because of this lack of connection, some of
the long-promised benefits of markup for analysis
remain unrealized. This panel takes a step toward
bridging the gap between markup and analysis.
We focus on both the causes for the gap and possible
solutions. What could and should markup do that it
doesn’t currently do? Why do analysts rarely workwith the huge number of texts already encoded? How
can text encoders and those who process encoded
texts make their work more useful to text analysts,
and how can text analysis specialists help encoders
make their texts more useful? What opportunities
currently exist for collaboration and cooperation
between encoders and analysts, and how can moreproductive opportunities be created?

2. Panel Topic
The reasons for the present gap between markup
and analysis are partly technical and partly nontechnical, and arise from the disparate aims andmethods of the two camps. While markup systems

have generally been designed to meet the needs of(scholarly) publishing, markup adherents have often
claimed that their markup is also useful for analytic
purposes. However, the very concept of ‘markup’
itself is different for the two constituencies. XML,in particular, isn’t ‘markup’ in the full sense, as
used by specialists in text processing. Rather, it is adata structuring methodology that imposes a single
unitary hierarchy upon the text. Consequently, it isa poor instrument for the complete interpretive loopor spiral, where we start with text (with or without
markup), perform analysis, use markup to recordor ‘inscribe’ our findings into the text, and thenreturn to analysis at a higher level. This is largely
because the inscription step is usually inhibited byany prior (XML) markup. Consider two ﬂowcharts of
document processing workﬂows at http://piez.or
g/wendell/papers/dh2010/743_Fig2a.jpg (whatXML provides) and http://piez.org/wendell/papers/dh2010/743_Fig2b.jpg (what we need).
(As noted on the page at
http://piez.org/wendell/papers/dh2010, these images were
presented as part of a paper delivered at Digital
Humanities 2010 in London Piez 2010].) The
difference between these is essentially that in thecurrent (XML-based) architecture, extending andamending our document schemas and processing
require re-engineering the system itself; the stablesystem (which is designed to support publishing notresearch) does not naturally sustain that activity.
A system that supported markup in the sense thattext analysis requires – which would support, among
other possibilities, multiple concurrent overlapping
hierarchies (including rhetorical, prosodic, narrativeand other organizations of texts) and arbitraryoverlap (including overlap between similar typesof elements or ranges) – would also support
incremental development of processing to takeadvantage of any and all markup that researchers see
fit to introduce.
Part of the solution to this problem is in theemergence of standard methodologies for encoding
annotations above or alongside one or more ‘base’layers of markup, perhaps using standoff markup oralternatives to XML. The details are less important
than the capabilities inherent in a data model not
limited to unitary trees (see Piez 2010 for discussion;
for a more wide-ranging critique of markup, see
Schmidt 2010). Over the long term, given suitableutilities and interfaces, textual analysts may be able
to use such systems productively; in the medium
term this is more doubtful.
This leads to the non-technical part of the problem:
largely because XML is not very well suited to theirrequirements, text analysis tools typically cannot
handle arbitrary encoding in XML along with thetexts themselves, while at the same time there is33

Digital Humanities 2012

not yet a viable alternative encoding technology,
specified as a standard and suitable for supportinginterchange. And so an analyst must begin byprocessing the encoded text into a usable form. While
the markup specialist may be able (perhaps easily) toperform such a transformation on his or her XML
texts using XSLT, this is usually more difficult for the
text analyst, for several reasons. Moreover, we submitthat many or most of these difficulties are not simply
due to known limitations of current text-encoding
technologies as described above, but will also persist
in new, more capable environments.
Markup processing technologies such as XSLT arerarely among the text analyst’s armamentarium,
and the benefits of XSLT (and we imagine thiswould be the case with any successor as well) areoften not clear enough to the text analyst to justify
its significant learning curve. XSLT need not bedifficult, but it can be challenging to assimilate –especially because it seems superficially similar totext analysis. Those who do learn XSLT will findsome of the tasks most useful to them relatively
easy (e.g., filtering markup and splitting/aggregatingtexts). XSLT 2.0 also includes regular expressions,grouping, and stylesheet functions, and handles
plain text input gracefully, making it a much more
hospitable environment than XSLT 1.0 for text
analysis. Yet more often than not, these features serve
only to make XSLT tantalizing as well as frustrating
to those for whom markup processing cannot be acore competency.
Moreover, intimate familiarity with the encoding
system is typically necessary to process it correctly,
yet the text analyst is frequently working with texts
that he or she was not a party to creating. Many
texts are encoded according to the TEI Guidelines,
but analysts are often not experts in TEI in general,
let alone expert at a particular application of TEI
by a particular project. But such expertise is often
required, as even ‘simple’ word extraction from anarbitrary TEI text can be problematic. Certainly,
plenty of TEI encodings make the task non-trivial.
Consider in particular the task of ingesting an
arbitrary unextended TEI P5 text and emitting aword list, assuming that we can ignore one importantdetail: word order. What assumptions are necessary?
What information will the data provider need toprovide to the transformation process? Below aresome preliminary considerations toward a tool thatwould present the user with a form to fill out andreturn an XSLT stylesheet for extracting words (notethat many of these considerations would benefit fromcollaboration between the text encoder and the text
analyst):34- What metadata can be ignored? E.g., if a default
rendition of display:none applies to an element, are
its contents words?
- Which element boundaries always/never/sometimes imply word breaks? When ‘sometimes’,
how can we tell?
- Which hierarchical content structures (if any)
should be ignored? (E.g,. colophons, forwards,
prefaces) Which trappings? (E.g., <interGrp>,<figDesc>)- Which elements pointed to by an <alt> element(or child of a <choice>) get ignored, and which get
included?
The complexity of this analysis compounds thedifficulty already described. And it must be
performed anew for every encoded text or set of texts
the analyst wishes to consider.
Furthermore, the publishing focus noted abovemeans that text-encoding projects rarely encode theelements most useful for analysis, and you can only
get out of markup what the encoder puts in. An
analyst interested in how names are used in literarytexts, for example, will find that even projects that
encode proper names often encode only the namesof authors and publishers (not very interesting fortext analysis), or only personal names (the analyst
may also be interested in place names and names ofother things). Likewise, adding the desired markup
to encoded texts requires that the analyst conform to(or perhaps modify) the existing encoding scheme,
imposing another learning curve above that for the
XSLT needed to extract the names once they havebeen encoded. Consequently, scholars interested intext analysis typically find it is more efficient touse plain texts without any markup, and then apply
an ad hoc system of manual tagging, or namedentity recognition (NER) tools in combination withmanual correction of tagging. The analyst who wants
to extract the speeches of characters in alreadyencoded plays will sometimes discover that the
speeches are encoded in such a way that automatic
extraction is quite problematic (e.g., at Documenting
the American South). It is a rare literary encoding
project that provides texts with the dialog encoded
for speaker so that the speech of each character canbe extracted (even apart, again, from the overlap
problem) – a kind of analysis made popular by
Burrows’s pioneering work (Burrows 1987), but very
labor-intensive.
Finally, even if texts with the desired encoding
are available and the analyst is willing to learn
the basics of XSLT, typically the XSLT has to be
rewritten or tweaked for each new collection of texts
that is examined because of differences in encoding
schemes. And it is just those ambitious encoding
projects that are likely to encode more elements ofDigital Humanities 2012

interest to the text analyst that are also more likely
to have complex, individualized, and difficult-toprocess encoding (e.g., the Brown University Women
Writers Project). From the analyst’s point of view,
the process of using existing encoding may be moretime-consuming and frustrating than doing the work
manually. Surely this state of affairs is undesirable.

Designing Interactive
Reading Environments
for the Online Scholarly
EditionYet there is another way forward besides text analysts
learning new skills or text encoders offering their own
text-extraction tools. While the problems describedhere add up to a formidable challenge, the very
fact that we can enumerate them suggests that weare not entirely helpless. There is much work thatcan be done both to refine our understanding, andto develop tools and methodologies that will help
to bridge this divide. We suggest beginning withcloser collaboration between the two camps. If eachsupports, works with, and learns from the other,both sides will benefit, and we will have a better
foundation of understanding on which to build thenext generation of technologies – technologies thatwill be valuable for both camps.

Blandford, Ann

Referencescarlosf@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Willa Cather Archive http://cather.unl.edu/
The Brown University Women
Project. http://www.wwp.brown.edu/

Writersa.blandford@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Brown, Susan

sbrown@uoguelph.ca
University of Guelph, Canada

Dobson, Teresa

teresa.dobson@ubc.ca
University of British Columbia, Canada

Faisal, Sarahs.faisal@cs.ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Fiorentino, Carlos
Frizzera, Luciano

dosreisf@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Documenting the American South. http://doGiacometti, Alejandro

Piez, W. (2010). Towards hermeneutic markup:
an architectural outline. DH2010, King’s College
London, July 9.

Heller, Brooke

csouth.unc.edu/

Burrows, J. (1987). Computation into Criticism.
Oxford: Clarendon P.
Schmidt, D. (2010). The inadequacy of embedded
markup for cultural heritage texts. LLC 25: 337-356.
Burnard, L., and S. Bauman (eds.).
TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text
Encoding and Interchange. Version 1.7.0.
2010-07-06. http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html

alejandro.giacometti.09@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK
brooke.heller@gmail.com
University of British Columbia, Canada

Ilovan, Mihaela

ilovan@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Michura, Piotr

zemichur@cyf-kr.edu.pl
Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland

Nelson, Brent

brent.nelson@usask.ca
University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Radzikowska, Milena

mradzikowska@gmail.com
Mount Royal University, Canada

Rockwell, Geoffrey

grockwel@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Ruecker, Stansruecker@id.iit.edu
IIT Institute of Design, USA

35

Digital Humanities 2012

Sinclair, Stéfan

PAPER 2

Sondheim, Daniel

Digital Scholarly Editions:
A Functional Perspective

stefan.sinclair@mcgill.ca
McMaster University, Canada
sondheim@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Warwick, Clairec.warwick@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Windsor, Jennifer

jwindsor@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Sondheim, Daniel

sondheim@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Rockwell, Geoffrey

grockwel@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Ruecker, Stansruecker@id.iit.edu
IIT Institute of Design, USA

PAPER 1Introduction to Designing
Interactive Reading
Environments for theOnline Scholarly Edition
In this panel, members of the Interface Design teamof the Implementing New Knowledge Environments(INKE) project will present a set of ideas, designs,
and prototypes related to the next generation of theonline scholarly edition, by which we mean a primarytext and its scholarly apparatus, intended for use bypeople studying a text.
We begin with ‘Digital Scholarly Editions: An
Evolutionary Perspective’, which proposes ataxonomy of design features and functions available
in a wide range of existing projects involving
scholarly editions. ‘Implementing Text Analysis Ereader Tools to Create Ad-hoc Scholarly Editions’draws on this taxonomy and examines how thestrategies of ubiquitous text analysis can be applied todigital texts as a means of providing new affordances
for scholarship. ‘Visualizing Citation Patterns in
Humanist Scholarship’ looks at the use of citationsin scholarly writing and proposes visual models of
possible benefit for both writers and readers. ‘The
Dynamic Table of Contexts: User Experience andFuture Directions’ reports our pilot study of a toolthat combines the conventional table of contents
with semantic XML encoding to produce a richprospect browser for books, while ‘The Usabilityof Bubblelines: A Comparative Evaluation of Two
Prototypes’ provides our results in looking at a casewhere two distinct prototypes of a visualization toolfor comparative search results were created from asingle design concept.

36

Ilovan, Mihaela

ilovan@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Frizzera, Luciano

dosreisf@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Windsor, Jennifer

jwindsor@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Definitions of the scholarly edition at times seem as
diverse as their content; definitions may highlight
usefulness (e.g., Hjørland, n.d.), reliability (e.g.
Lyman, 2009), or editorial expertise (e.g. Price2008). Nevertheless, it is clear that scholarly editions‘comprise the most fundamental tools in literarystudies’ (McGann 2001: 55). The move from print
to screen has offered scholars an opportunity
to remediate scholarly editions and to improveupon them (Werstine 2008; Shillingsburg 2006),
perhaps in the hope of producing their ‘fullest
realization’ (Lyman 2009: iii).
Online, distinctions between traditional types ofscholarly editions are blurred. Variorum editions are
increasingly becoming the norm (Galey 2007), since
the economy of space is no longer as important avariable. The notion of a ‘best version’ of a text is also
becoming less of an issue, as what constitutes ‘thebest’ is open to interpretation and is often irrelevantwith regard to questions that scholars would like toask (Price 2008).
Rather than categorizing electronic scholarly
editions, we propose to evaluate a selection of
influential and/or representative examples on thebasis of a series of functional areas that have been
noted in relevant literature as having undergone
substantial changes in their move to the digitalDigital Humanities 2012environment. These areas include (1) navigation,
including browsing and searching; (2) knowledgesharing, including public annotation; (3) textual
analysis, including graphs and visualizations; (4)customizability of both interface and content; (5)side-by-side comparisons of multiple versions; and(6) private note-taking and markup.
This study reveals that although all of thefunctionalities available in the digital medium are not
implemented in every digital scholarly edition, it isnevertheless the case that even the simplest amongst
them offer affordances that are different than theirprinted counterparts. The fact remains, however,that due to variety of functionalities implemented
in digital scholarly editions, we are still negotiating
what Lyman’s ‘fullest realization’ could be.

PAPER 3

Implementing Text Analysis
E-reader Tools to Create
Ad-hoc Scholarly Editions
Windsor, Jennifer

jwindsor@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

they are insufficient to support in-depth scholarly
research.
To alleviate this difficulty, we propose integrating
Voyant tools, a user-friendly, flexible and powerful
web-based text analysis environment developed by
Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, with current
e-reader technology, such as that used in the Internet
Archive reader.
In this design, Voyant functions as a sidebar to ereaders, allowing the text to remain visible during
analysis. Choosing from a list of tools allows scholars
to create a custom text analysis tool palette andhaving more than one tool open allows crossreferencing between results. Tools can be dragged
into a custom order and a scroll bar allows navigation
between several tools at once. A Voyant tutorial isavailable and each individual tool also has its own
instructions for use, as well as a help feature and an
option to export results.
We anticipate this tool being of use to scholars invarious fields who wish to use quantitative methods
to analyze text. By implementing tools for textual
analysis in an online reading environment, we are ineffect offering scholars the ability to choose the kindsof analysis and depth of study that they wish; they
will in effect be able to produce ad-hoc customized
editions of digital text.

Ilovan, Mihaela

ilovan@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Sondheim, Daniel

sondheim@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Frizzera, Luciano

dosreisf@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Ruecker, Stansruecker@id.iit.edu
IIT Institute of Design, USA

Sinclair, Stéfan

stefan.sinclair@mcgill.ca
McMaster University, Canada

Rockwell, Geoffrey

grockwel@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Figure 1: Integration of Voyant tools
with the Internet Archive e-reader

PAPER 4Visualizing Citation
Patterns in Humanist
Monographs
Ilovan, Mihaela

With the proliferation of e-readers, the digitization
efforts of organizations such as Google and Project
Gutenberg, and the explosion of e-book sales,
digital reading has become a commonplace activity.
Although resources for casual reading are plentiful,

ilovan@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

37

Digital Humanities 2012

Frizzera, Luciano

dosreisf@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Michura, Piotr

zemichur@cyf-kr.edu.pl
Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland

Rockwell, Geoffrey

grockwel@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

view of the visualization tool represents the internal
structure of complex footnotes (see Figure 3) andvisually highlights the relationship between different
citations included in the same note, as well as theirfunction in relation to the argument of the citing text.
In this presentation we will introduce thevisualization tool, demonstrate its functionalities andprovide the results of initial testing performed. We
will also discuss the lessons learned from this earlystage of the project.

Ruecker, Stansruecker@id.iit.edu
IIT Institute of Design, USA

Sondheim, Daniel

sondheim@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Windsor, Jennifer

jwindsor@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, CanadaThis paper documents the design and programmingof a visualization tool for the analysis of citation
patterns in extended humanist works such asmonographs and scholarly editions. Traditional
citation analysis is widely acknowledged as being
ineffective for examining citations in the humanities,
since the accretive nature of research (Garfield 1980),
the existence of multiple paradigms, the preference
for monographs (Thompson 2002), and the richnessof non-parenthetical citations all present problems
for interpretation and generalization.
To address this situation, we employ non-traditional
methods of content and context analysis of citations,like functional classification (Frost 1979) and the
exploration of the way in which sources are
introduced in the flow of the argument (Hyland1999). Acknowledging the richness of citations inhumanist research, we employ graphic visualization
for display and data inquiry, which allows us to carryout visual analytical tasks of the referencing patternsof full monographs.
We opted to provide three distinct views of theanalyzed monograph. The first one – a facetedbrowser of the references, affords the comparisonof different aspects of the references included andintroduces the user to the structure and content of
the monograph’s critical apparatus. The second viewcontextualizes individual citations and highlights
the fragments of text they support (see Figure 2);
by representing both supported and non-supported
portions of the monograph in their natural order, theview facilitates the linear reading of the way in whichargument is built in the citing work. Finally, the third
38

Figure 2: ‘Contextualize’ view (citations in context)

Figure 3: Displaying complex footnotes

PAPER 5

The Dynamic Table ofContexts: User Experienceand Future Directions
Dobson, Teresa

teresa.dobson@ubc.ca
University of British Columbia, Canada

Heller, Brooke

brooke.heller@gmail.com
University of British Columbia, Canada

Ruecker, Stansruecker@id.iit.edu
IIT Institute of Design, USA

Digital Humanities 2012

Radzikowska, Milena

mradzikowska@gmail.com
Mount Royal University, Canada

Brown, Susan

sbrown@uoguelph.ca
University of Guelph, Canada

The Dynamic Table of Contexts (DToC) is a text
analysis tool that combines the traditional conceptsof the table of contents and index to create a new
way to manipulate digital texts. More specifically,
DToC makes use of pre-existing XML tags in adocument to allow users to dynamically incorporate
links to additional categories of items into thetable of contents. Users may load documents they
have tagged themselves, further increasing theinteractivity and usefulness of the tool (Ruecker et al.
2009).
DToC includes four interactive panes, and one larger
pane to view the text (see Figure 4). The first twopanes are the table of contexts and the XML tag
list: the former changes when a particular tag isselected in the latter, allowing the user to see where
tokens of the tag fall in the sequence of the text.
The third and fourth panes operate independentlyof each other but with the text itself: the ‘Excerpts’pane highlights a selected token in the text andreturns surrounding words, while the ‘Bubbleline’maps multiple instances of a token across a predesignated section (such as a chapter, or scene).

in XML; screen captures are supplementing ourunderstanding of the participants’ experience. In
this paper we will report results and discuss future
directions for development of the prototype.

PAPER 6

The Usability of
Bubblelines: A Comparative
Evaluation of Two
Prototypes
Blandford, Anna.blandford@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Faisal, Sarahs.faisal@cs.ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Fiorentino, Carlos

carlosf@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Giacometti, Alejandro

alejandro.giacometti.09@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Ruecker, Stansruecker@id.iit.edu
IIT Institute of Design, USA

Sinclair, Stéfan

stefan.sinclair@mcgill.ca
McMaster University, Canada

Warwick, Clairec.warwick@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Figure 4: The Dynamic Table of Contexts, showing three of fourinteractive panes at left along with the text viewing pane at right.

With twelve pairs of participants (n = 24), we
completed a user experience study in which theparticipants were invited: 1) to complete in pairs anumber of tasks in DToC, 2) to respond individuallyto a computer-based survey about their experience,and 3) to provide more extensive feedback during
an exit interview. Their actions and discussion whileworking with the prototype were recorded. Data
analysis is presently underway: transcribed interview
data has been encoded for features of experience

In this paper, we explore the idea that programmingis itself an act of interpretation, where theuser experience can be profoundly influenced byseemingly minor details in the translation of a visualdesign into a prototype. We argue that the approachof doing two parallel, independent implementations
can bring the trade-offs and design decisions into
sharper relief to guide future development work.
As a case study, we examine the results of thecomparative user evaluation of two INKE prototypes
for the bubblelines visualization tool. Bubblelines
allows users to visually compare search results
across multiple text files, such as novels, or piecesof text files, such as chapters. In this case, we
had a somewhat rare opportunity in that both
implementations of bubblelines began from a single
39Digital Humanities 2012

design sketch, and the two development teams
worked independently to produce online prototypes.
The user experience study involved 12 participants,
consisting of sophisticated computer users either
working on or already having completed computerscience degrees with a focus on human-computerinteraction. They were given a brief introduction,
exploratory period, assigned tasks, and an exit
interview. The study focused on three design
aspects: the visual representation, functionality andinteraction.
All users liked the idea of bubblelines as a tool for
exploring text search results. Some users wanted
to use the tools to search and make sense of
their own work, e.g. research papers and computer
programming codes. The study has shown that there
was no general preference for one prototype over
the other. There was however, general agreements
of preferred visual cues and functionalities thatusers found useful from both prototypes. Similarly,
there was an overall consensus in relation to visual
representations and functionalities that users founddifficult to use and understand in both tools. Having
the ability to compare two similar yet somehow
different prototypes has assisted us in fishing out
user requirements summarized in the form of visualcues, functionalities and interactive experiences froma dimension that that would have been difficult toreach if we were testing a single prototype.

to evaluate with expert users where our focus would
be on the ability of the tool in assisting experts inmaking sense of the data.

References
Garfield, E. (1980). Is Information Retrieval in theArts and Humanities Inherently Different from Thatin Science? The Effect That ISI®’S Citation Index
for the Arts and Humanities Is Expected to Haveon Future Scholarship. The Library Quarterly 50(1):40–57.
Galey, A. (2007) How to Do Things with Variants:
Text Visualization in the Electronic New Variorum
Shakespeare. Paper presented at the Modern
Language Association Annual Convention, Chicago.
Frost, C.O. (1979). The Use of Citations in Literary
Research: A Preliminary Classification of Citation
Functions. The Library Quarterly 49(4): 399–414.
Hyland, K. (1999). Academic attribution: citationand the construction of disciplinary knowledge.
Applied Linguistics 20(3): 341–367.
Lyman,
E.
(2009).
Assistive
potencies:
Reconfiguring the scholarly edition in an electronic
setting. United States-Virginia: University ofVirginia.
Hjørland, B. (n.d.). Scholarly edition. Available at:
http://www.iva.dk/bh/core%20concepts%20in%
20lis/articles%20a-z/scholarly_edition.htm(accessed 20 October, 2011).

Lyman,
E.
(2009).
Assistive
potencies:
Reconfiguring the scholarly edition in an electronic
setting. United States-Virginia: University ofVirginia. http://www.proquest.com.login.ezpro
xy.library.ualberta.ca (accessed Sept, 2010).
McGann, J. (2001). Radiant textuality: literature
after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave.
Figure 5: The two alternative
implementations of Bubblelines (t1 & t2)

In summary, most participants preferred the visualappearance and simplicity of t1, but the greater
functionality offered by t2. Apparently incidental
design decisions such as whether or not search
was case sensitive, and whether strings or words
were the objects of search (e.g. whether a searchfor ‘love’ would highlight ‘lover’ or ‘Love’ as wellas ‘love’) often caused frustration or confusion.
We argue that the approach of doing two parallel,
independent implementations can bring the tradeoffs and design decisions into sharper relief to guide
future development work.
Our plan is to take these requirements into account inorder to generate a third prototype which we envision40

Price, K. (2008). Electronic Scholarly Editions.
In S. Schreibman and R. Siemens (eds.), A
Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford:
Blackwell http://digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/97
81405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-6-5(accessed

25 October, 2011)

Radzikowska, M., S. Ruecker, S. Brown,
P. Organisciak, and the INKE ResearchGroup (2011). Structured Surfaces for JiTR.
Paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2011
Conference, Stanford.
Rockwell, G., S. Sinclair, S. Ruecker, and
P. Organisciak (2010). Ubiquitous Text Analysis.
Poetess Archive Journal 2(1): 1-18.

Digital Humanities 2012

Ruecker, S., S. Brown, M. Radzikowska, S.
Sinclair, T. Nelson, P. Clements, I. Grundy,
S. Balasz, and J. Antoniuk (2009). The Tableof Contexts: A Dynamic Browsing Tool for Digitally
Encoded Texts. In L. Dolezalova (ed.), The Charmof a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised
Data Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, pp. 177-187.

Developing the spatial
humanities: Geo-spatial
technologies as a platform
for cross-disciplinary
scholarship

Shillingsburg, P. L. (2006). From Gutenberg toGoogle: electronic representations of literary texts.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge UP.

Bodenhamer, David

Thompson, J. W. (2002). The Death of the
Scholarly Monograph in the Humanities? Citation
Patterns in Literary Scholarship. Libri 52(3): 121-136.
Werstine, P. (2008). Past is prologue: Electronic
New Variorum Shakespeares. Shakespeare 4:
208-220.

intu100@iupui.edu
The Polis Center at IUPUI, USA

Gregory, Iani.gregory@lancaster.ac.uk
Lancaster University, UK

Ell, PaulPaul.Ell@qub.ac.uk
Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queens
University of Belfast, Ireland

Hallam, Julia

J.Hallam@liverpool.ac.uk
University of Liverpool, UK

Harris, Trevor

tharris2@wvu.edu
West Virginia University, USA

Schwartz, Robertrschwart@mtholyoke.edu
Mount Holyoke College, USA

1. SignificanceDevelopments in Geographic Information Systems(GIS) over the past few decades have been nothing
short of remarkable. So revolutionary have theseadvances been that the impact of GIS on many
facets of government administration, industrial
infrastructure, commerce, and academia has been
likened to the discoveries brought about by the
microscope, the telescope, and the printing press.
While concepts of spatial science and spatial thinking
provide the bedrock on which a broad range of
geospatial technologies and methods have beenfounded, the dialog between the humanities andgeographic information science (GISci) have thus
far been limited and have largely revolved aroundthe use of ‘off-the-shelf’ GIS in historical mapping
projects. This limited engagement is in stark contrast
to the substantive inroads that GIS has madein the sciences and social sciences, as capturedby the growing and valuable field of a socialtheoretic informed Critical GIS. Not surprisingly, thehumanities present additional significant challenges

41

Digital Humanities 2012

to GISci because of the complexities involved inmeshing a positivist science with humanist traditions
and predominantly literary and aspatial methods.
And yet it is the potential dialogue and engagement
between the humanities and GISci that promises
reciprocal advances in both fields as spatial science
shapes humanist thought and is in turn reshaped by
the multifaceted needs and approaches represented
by humanist traditions. We use the term spatial
humanities to capture this potentially rich interplay
between Critical GIS, spatial science, spatial systems,
and the panoply of highly nuanced humanist
traditions.
The use of GIS in the humanities is not new. The
National Endowment for the Humanities has funded
a number of projects to explore how geo-spatial
technologies might enhance research in a numberof humanities disciplines, including but not limited
to history, literary studies, and cultural studies. The
National Science Foundation and National Institutesof Health also have supported projects related tospatial history, such as the Holocaust Historical
GIS (NSF) and Population and Environment in the
U.S. Great Plains (National Institute of Child Healthand Human Development). Although successful by
their own terms, these projects also have revealed
the limits of the technology for a wider rangeof humanities scholarship, which an increasing
body of literature discusses in detail. Chief among
the issues are a mismatch between the positivist
epistemology of GIS, with its demand for precise,measurable data, and the reflexive and recursive
approaches favored by humanists and some social
scientists (e.g. practitioners of reflexive sociology)
who wrestle continually with ambiguous, uncertain,
and imprecise evidence and who seek multivalentanswers to their questions. The problem, it seems,
is both foundational and technological: we do not
yet have a well-articulated theory for the spatial
humanities, nor do we have tools sufficient for theneeds of humanists. Addressing these deficits is at theheart of much current work in GIScience and in thespatial humanities.
The panel, composed of scholars who havesuccessfully blended geo-spatial technologies withcross-disciplinary methods in a variety of projects,
will discuss how these digital tools can be bent
toward the needs of humanities scholars and serve
as a platform for innovative work in humanities
disciplines. Emphasis will be on three important
themes from the spatial humanities that also address
the broader interests of the digital humanities:
1. Exploring the epistemological frameworks of thehumanities and GISc to locate common groundon which the two can cooperate. This step often
has been overlooked in the rush to develop
new technology but it is the essential point of42

departure for any effort to bridge them. Thisventure is not to be confused with a more sweeping
foundational analysis of ingrained methodologicalconceits within the sciences and the humanities,
and certainly should not be misunderstood as aquery about the qualitative approach versus thequantitative approach. Rather, what is desired
here is for the technology itself to be interrogatedas to its adaptability, in full understandingthat the technology has, in its genesis, been
epistemologically branded and yet still offers
potential for the humanities. What is required
is an appropriate intellectual grounding in thehumanities and draws the technology further
out of its positivistic homeland. The payoff forcollaboration will be a humanities scholarshipthat integrates insights gleaned from spatial
information science, spatial theory, and theGeospatial Web into scaled narratives abouthuman lives and culture.
2. Designing and framing narratives about individualand collective human experience that are spatiallycontextualized. At one level, the task is definedas the development of reciprocal transformations
from text to map and map to text. More
importantly, the humanities and social sciencesmust position themselves to exploit the Geospatial
Semantic Web, which in its extraordinarily
complexity and massive volume, offers a rich data
bed and functional platform to researchers who areable to effectively mine it, organize the harvested
data, and contextualize it within the spaces ofculture. Finding ways to make the interaction
among words, location, and quantitative data more
dynamic and intuitive will yield rich insights into
complex socio-cultural, political, and economic
problems, with enormous potential for areas
far outside the traditional orbits of humanities
research. In short, we should vigorously explore
the means by which to advance translation fromtextual to visual communication, making the mostof visual media and learning to create ‘fits’ between
the messages of text (and numbers) and thecapabilities of visual forms to express spatial
relationships.
3. Building increasingly more complex maps (using
the term broadly) of the visible and invisible
aspects of a place. The spatial considerations
remain the same, which is to say that geographic
location, boundary, and landscape remain crucial,whether we are investigating a continental
landmass or a lecture hall. What is added bythese ‘deep maps’ is a reflexivity that acknowledges
how engaged human agents build spatially framed
identities and aspirations out of imaginationand memory and how the multiple perspectives
constitute a spatial narrative that complements

Digital Humanities 2012

the verbal narrative traditionally employed byhumanists.
After an introductory framing statement by themoderator, panelists will each take no more than 10
minutes to offer reflections and experiences drawn
from their own projects that will address one or moreof these themes. Several questions will guide thesepresentations:

Prosopographical
Databases, TextMining, GIS and System
Interoperability for Chinese
History and Literature

1. What advantages did geo-spatial technologies
bring to your research? What limitations? How did
you overcome or work around the limits?

Bol, Peter Kees

2. How did your project address the mismatch
between the positivist assumptions of GIS andthe multivalent and reflexive nature of humanities
scholarship?

Hsiang, Jieh

3. What lessons have you learned that would
be helpful for other scholars who use thesetechnologies?
Following the presentations, the moderator will
guide a discussion among the panelists and withaudience members to explore these themes further
in an effort to distill an agenda or, more modestly, a
direction for future work.

References
Bodenhamer, D., J. Corrigan, and T. Harris,eds. (2010). The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the
Future of Humanities Scholarship. Bloomington:
Indiana UP.
Daniels, S., D. DeLyser, J. Entrikin, and D.
Richardson, eds. (2011). Envisioning Landscapes,
Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities.
New York: Routledge.
Dear, M., J. Ketchum, S. Luria, and D.
Richardson (2011). GeoHumanities: Art, History,
Text at the Edge of Place. New York: Routledge.
Gregory, I., and P. Ell (2008). Historical
GIS: Technologies, Methodologies, and Scholarship.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Knowles, A., ed. (2008). Placing History: How
Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing
Historical Scholarship. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press.

pkbol@fas.harvard.edu
Harvard University, USA
jieh.hsiang@gmail.com
National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Fong, Grace

grace.fong@mcgill.ca
McGill University, Canada

PAPER 1Introduction
1. Overview
Digital content and tools for Chinese studies havebeen developing very quickly. The largest digitaltext corpus currently has 400 million characters.
There is now an historical GIS for administrative
units and towns in China from 221 BCE to 1911.
And there are general and specialized biographicaland literary databases. This wealth of resources
is constrained, however, by the histories of theirdevelopment: all have been developed independentlyof each other and there has been no systematic effort
to create interoperability between them. This panelbrings together three innovators in Chinese digital
humanities and shows how, by implementing systeminteroperability and content sharing, their separate
approaches to content and tool development can be
mutually supporting and result in more powerfulapplications for the study of China’s history andliterature. The goal of this session is both to introduce
the projects the presenters lead and to demonstrate
the advantages of sharing and interoperability acrosssystems. Moreover, because their outputs are multilingual (Chinese, English translation, and pinyin)
they are making the data from China’s past accessible
to a non-Chinese-reading public.
The China Biographical Database (CBDB) has been
accumulating biographical data on historical figures,
mainly from the 7th through early 20th century.
It populates the database by applying text-mining
procedures to large bodies of digital texts. Users
43

Digital Humanities 2012

can query the system in terms of place, time,
office, social associations and kinship, and export
the results for further analysis with GIS, social
networks, and statistical software. The ResearchCenter for the Digital Humanities at National Taiwan
University developed the Taiwan History Digital
Library, a system for the spatial and temporalvisualization of the distribution of Taiwan historicalland deeds, creating a temporally-enabled map
interface that allows users to discover relevant
documents, examine them and track their frequency.
Using CBDB code tables of person names, place
names, and official titles for text mark-up, the Center
is now applying this system to a compendium of
80,000 documents from the 10th through early
13th century that cover all aspects of government,
including such diverse topics as religious activity, tax
revenues and bureaucratic appointments. Users will
be able to track the careers of individuals and call up
their CBDB biographies through time and space aswell as seeing when, where, and what the government
was doing. This will be a model for incorporating
the still larger compendia of government documentsfrom later periods. Data will be discovered (e.g.
the location and date of official appointments) anddeposited into the CBDB. The Ming Qing Women’s
Writings (MQWW) project is a multilingual online
database of 5000 women writers from Chinese
history which includes scans of hitherto unavailable
works and analyses of their content. Users can querythe database by both person and literary content.
Using APIs to create system interoperability between
MQWW and CBDB, MQWW is building into its
interface the ability to call up CBDB data on kinship,associations, and careers of the persons in MQWW.
For their part CBDB users will be able to discover thewritings of women through the CBDB interface.

PAPER 2Chinese Biographical Data:
Text-mining, Databases andSystem Interoperability
Bol, Peter Kees

pkbol@fas.harvard.edu
Harvard University, USA

Biography has been a major component of Chinese
historiography since the first century BCE and takes
up over half the contents in the twenty-five dynastic
histories; biographical and prosopographical dataalso dominate the 8500 extant local histories.
The http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?ke44

yword=k16229 is a collaborative project of Harvard

University, Peking University, and Academia Sinica
to collect biographical data on men and women in
China’s history (Bol and Ge 2002-10). It currently
holds data on about 130,000 people, mainly from theseventh through early twentieth century, and is freely
available as a http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k16229&pageid=icb.page76670 ,as an
http://cbdb.fas.harvard.edu/cbdbc/
cbdbedit , and as an online query systemwith both http://59.124.34.70/cbdbc/ttsweb?@0:0:1:cbdbkmeng@@0.10566209097417267 andhttp://59.124.34.70/cbdbc/ttsweb?@0:0:1:cb
dbkm@@0.10566209097417267 interfaces. Code anddata tables cover the multiple kinds of names
associated with individuals, the places with which
they were associated at birth and death and during
their careers, the offices they held, the educationaland religious institutions with which they wereassociated, the ways in which they entered theircareers (with special attention to the civil service
examination), the people they were associatedwith through kinship and through non-kin social
associations (e.g. teacher-student), social distinction,
ethnicity, and writings (Fuller 2011).
The purpose of the database is to enable users,
working in Chinese or English, to use large
quantities of prosopographical data to explore
historical questions (Stone 1972). These may
be straightforward (e.g. What was the spatial
distribution of books by bibliographic class duringa certain period? How did age at death vary bytime, space, and gender?) or complex (e.g. What
percentage of civil officials from a certain place
during a certain period were related to each otherthrough blood or marriage? How did intellectual
movements spread over time?). The standalone
database and the online query system also include
routines for generating genealogies of any extent
and social networks of up to five nodes, finding
incumbents in a particular office, etc. The standalone
database (and next year the online system) can
also output queries in formats that can be analyzed
with geographic information system and social
network analysis software (Bol 2012). Historicalsocial network analysis is challenging but rewarding(Padgett & Ansell 1993; Wetherhall 1998).
We began to populate the database largely throughtext-mining and text-modeling procedures. We
began with Named Entity Recognition procedures(e.g. finding text-strings that matched reign periods
titles, numbers, years, months, and days to capture
dates, with 99% recall and precision) written in
Python. We then proceeded to write more complex
Regular Expressions to identify, for example, theoffice a person assumed at a certain date, where
the office title is unknown. Currently we areDigital Humanities 2012

implementing probabilistic procedures to identify
the social relationship between the biographicalsubject and the names of people co-occurring in the
biographical text (we have reached a 60% match withthe training data).
An important outcome for the humanities generally
is Elif Yamangil’s (Harvard University: Computer
Science) development of the ‘Regular Expression
Machine.’ This is a graphical user interface (GUI)built within Java Swing library that allows auser to graphically design patterns for biographicaltexts, match these against the data and see
results immediately via a user-friendly color-coding
scheme. It consists of a workspace of three main
components: (1) a view that displays the textual
data currently used, (2) a list of active regularexpressions that are matched against the data via
color-coding, and (3) a list of shortcut regularexpression parts that can be used as building-blocks
in active regular expressions from (2). Additional
facilities we have built into our product are (1)an XML export ability: Users can create XML
files that flatten the current workspace (data andregular expression matched against) at the clickof a button. This facilitates interfacing to otherprograms such as Microsoft Excel and Access fordatabase input. (2) A save/load ability: Users caneasily save/load the workspace state which includes
the list of regular expressions and shortcuts and theircolor settings. (3) A handy list of pre-made regularexpression examples: Numerous date patterns can be
added instantly to any regular expression using the
GUI menus. The point of building this application
is to allow users with no prior experience with
programming or computer science concepts such as
regular expression scripting to experiment with datamining Chinese biographical texts at an intuitive
template-matching understanding level only, yet still
effectively.
The CBDB project also accepts volunteered data.
Our goal in this is social rather than technical.
Researchers in Chinese studies have long paid
attention to biography and in the course of theirresearch have created tables, and occasionallydatabases, with biographical data. By offering
standard formats and look-ups and queries forcoding, we provide researchers with a permanent
home for their data. Currently there are twelve
collaborating research projects, among which are an
extensive database of Buddhist monks, a collectionof 5000 grave biographies, 30,000 individuals activein the ninth through tenth centuries. The morebiographical data the project accumulates the greater
the service to research and learning that explore thelives of individuals.

making it accessible to others on the web. In
Chinese studies – speaking now only of thoseonline systems that include biographical data –these include the Tang Knowledge Database at theCenter for Humanistic Research at Kyoto University,
the Ming-Qing Archives at Academia Sinica andthe National Palace Museum Taiwan, the databases
for Buddhist Studies at Dharma Drum College,
Ming Qing Women’s Writings Database at McGill
University, and the University of Leuven’s databaseof writings by Christian missionaries and converts in
China. The role of the China Biographical Databaseproject in this environment is to provide an online
resource for biographical data that others can draw
on to populate fields in their own online systems.
To this end we are currently developing (and will
demonstrate this summer) a set of open Application
Programming Interfaces that will allow other systems
to incorporate data from the China Biographical
Database on the fly. This will allow other projects tofocus their resources on the issues that are of mostinterest to them while at the same time being able toincorporate any or all the data in CBDB within theirown systems.

Figure 1: Online search results for Zhu Xi

Figure 2: Persons in CBDB from Jianzhou in the Song period

Humanists are exploring ways in which they canuse data in quantity and looking for ways of45

Digital Humanities 2012

Stone, L. (1972). Prosopography. In F. Gilbert, E.
J. Hobsbawm and St. Richards Graubard (eds.),
Historical studies today., xxi, 469. New York:
Norton.
Wetherhall, Ch. (1998). Historical Social Network
Analysis. In L. J. Griffin and M. van der Linden (eds.),
New methods for social history. Cambridge, New
York: Cambridge UP, p. 165.

PAPER 3Figure 3: Kin to Zhu Xi (5 generations up anddown, collateral and marriage distance of 1)

Context discovery inhistorical documents – acase study with Taiwan
History Digital Library(THDL)
Hsiang, Jieh

jieh.hsiang@gmail.com
National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Figure 4: Civil Service Examination
degree holders of 1148 and 1256

References
Bol, P. K. (2007). Creating a GIS for the Historyof China. In A. Kelly Knowles and A. Hillier (eds.),
Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS
Are Changing Historical Scholarship. Redlands, CA:
ESRI Press, pp. 25-57.
Bol, P. K. (2012). GIS, Prosopography, and History.
Annals of GIS 18(1): 3-15.
Bol, P. K., and Ge Jianxiong 葛剑雄 (2002-10).
China historical GIS [electronic resource] =Zhongguo li shi di li xin xi xi = 中国历史地理信息系统. Version 1.0-5.0 Harvard University and Fudan
University.
Fuller, M. A. (2011). CBDB User’s Guide. 2ndedition. Harvard University: China Biographical
Database.
Padgett, J. F., and Chr. K. Ansell (1993). Robust
Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434.
American Journal of Sociology 98: 1259-319.

46

Research on pre-1900 Taiwanese history has sufferedfrom the lack of primary historical documents.
Most of the local government records, except for
the Danxin Archives (an archive of about 20,000
official documents from the two northern Taiwan
prefectures during the 19th century) are lost.
Although there are quite a few records about Taiwan
in the Imperial Court archives, they are kept inseveral different institutions, scattered among thevolumes, and are hard to access. The situation withlocal documents such as land deeds is even worse.
Some are published in local gazetteers or books,
and some are family records kept by individual
researchers for their own research use. There wasan urgent need to collect primary documents andput them under one roof so that they can be better
utilized by scholars.
In 2002 the Council of Cultural Affairs of Taiwan
commissioned the National Taiwan University
Library to select imperial court documents relevant
to Taiwan from the Ming and Qing court archives,
and the National Taichung Library to collect local
deeds (especially land deeds). More than 30,000
court documents and 19,000 local deeds werecollected and transcribed into full text. Most of thecourt documents and a portion of the land deeds werethen published, from 2003 to 2007, into a book seriesof 147 volumes.
At the same time, CCA authorized the ResearchCenter for Digital Humanities (RCDH) of NTU toDigital Humanities 2012

create a digital library so that the digital files of thefound materials could be used on line. In addition tocreating THDL, the Taiwan History Digital Library,
RCDH also added a significant number of documentsthat were collected later. THDL now contains three
corpuses, all in searchable full-text. The Ming andQing Taiwan-related Court Document Collection,
numbered at 45,722, are collected from about 300
different sources and includes memorials, imperial
edicts, excerpts from personal journals of local
officials, and local gazetteers. The Old Land Deeds
Collection contains 36,535 pre-1910 deeds fromover 100 sources, with new material added every
month. The Danxin Archives includes about 1,151
government court cases with 19,557 documents.
Together they form the largest collection of its kind,with over 100,000 documents, all with metadata andsearchable full text. The three corpuses reflect 18thand 19th century Taiwan from the views of the central
government, the local government, and grassroots
respectively. THDL has been available for free overthe Internet since 2009, and has already made an
impact on research of Taiwanese history.
When designing THDL we encountered a challenge.
Unlike conventional archives whose documents havea clear organization, the contents in THDL, beingfrom many different sources, do not have predefinedcontexts. Although one can easily create a searchengine-like system that returns documents when
given a query, such a system is cumbersome since theuser has to peruse the returned documents to find therelevant ones. In THDL we use a different approach.
We assume that documents may be related, andtreat a query return (or any subset of documents)
as a sub-collection – a group of related documents(Hsiang et al. 2009). Thus in addition to returninga list of documents as the query result, the system
also provides the user with as many contexts about
the returned sub-collection as possible. This is donein a number of ways. The first one is to classify
the query return according to attributes such as
year, source, type, location, etc. Visualization tools
are provided to give the user a bird’s eyes viewof the distributions. Analyses of co-occurrences ofnames, locations and objects provide more ways toobserve and explore the relationships among theactors and the collective meanings of the documents.
For example, co-occurrence analysis of terms reveals
the names of the associates mentioned most often
in the memorials from a certain official, or themost frequently mentioned names during a historicalevent. Figure 1 is a snapshot of THDL after issuing
the query ‘找洗字’. The map on the left shows thegeographic locations of the documents in the query
return. The top is a chronological distribution chart,
and the left column is the post-classification of
the query result according to year. We have also
developed GIS techniques both for issuing a queryand for analyzing/visualizing query results. For theland deeds, for instance, one can draw a polygon
to query about all the land deeds appeared in that
region (Ou 2011). (Such a query is quite impossibleusing keywords.) Figure 2 contains such an example.
In order to go beyond syntactic queries, we further
developed text mining techniques to explore thecitation relations among the memorials and imperial
edicts of the Ming Qing collection (Hsiang et al.
2012), and land transaction relations among thedeeds in the land deed collection (Chen et al. 2011).
Both projects have produced transitivity graphs that
capture historical phenomena that would be difficult
to discover manually.
In order to accomplish the above we developed anumber of text-mining techniques. Term extraction
methods were developed to extract more than
90,000 name entities from the corpuses (Hsieh2011), and information such as the locations, dates,
the four reaches of the land deeds, prices, andpatterns. Matching algorithms were designed tofind the transaction, citation and other relations
mentioned above (Huang 2009; Chen 2011). GISrelated spatial-temporal techniques have also beendeveloped (Ou 2011).
The contents of the China Biographical Database(CBDB) and Ming Qing Women’s Writers (MQWW)
described in other parts of this panel share anumber of commonalities with the contents of
THDL. In additional to being written in classicalChinese, the documents in each of the corpuses
were collected from many different sources andspanned over hundreds of years. Furthermore, there
are no intrinsic relations among the documents
other than the obvious. To use such loosely knitted
collections effectively in research would require asystem that can help the user explore contexts that
may be hidden among the documents. This is exactly
what THDL provides. The designing philosophy oftreating a query return as a sub-collection and themining and presentation technologies developed for
THDL can be adapted in the other two collections
as well. Indeed, THDL’s design, interface, andmining technologies are flexible enough to easily
incorporate other Chinese language corpuses. The
only assumption is that the documents in a collection
should have well-structured metadata, which isimportant for the purpose of post-classification of
a sub-collection. If the full-text of the content isalso available, then more sophisticated analyticalmethods such as co-occurrence analysis can be
deployed.
We have worked with the CBDB team of Harvard
and built, within a month, a fully functional systemfrom the THDL shell for Song huiyao (宋會要), a
compendium of government records between 10thand 13th century China. (The content was jointly
47

Digital Humanities 2012

developed at Harvard and the Academia Sinica of
Taiwan.) The system has also incorporated 9,470
person names, 2,420 locations, and 3,366 official
titles from CBDB and used them in co-occurrence
analysis, classifications and other features. It also
extracted, automatically, 11,901 additional terms
from the corpus. To reduce the number of errors
unavoidable from this automated process, we havedesigned a crowd-sourcing mechanism for users
to make corrections and to add new terms they
discovered when using the system. The new names
obtained through this process will in turn be fed backto CBDB.
We have also built a prototype for MQWW with
post-classification features. Significant enhancement
to this system is being planned once we receive
enough users’ feedback. Incorporating the names
and locations of CBDB into the system is also being
studied.
While the text mining techniques that we havedescribed here are designed for the Chinese language,
the retrieval methodology of treating a query
return as a sub-collection and the mechanisms fordiscovering and representing its collective meanings
is universal. It provides a way to present and analyze
the query return that seems better suitable forscholars to explore digital archives than the moreconventional search engine that treats a query return
as a ranked list.

Figure 1: Snapshot of THDL with query term “找洗字”

Figure 2: Query resulted fromissuing a polygon (region) as a query

References
Chen S. P. (2011). Information technology forhistorical document analysis, Ph.D. thesis, National
Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
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Digital Humanities 2012

Chen, S. P., Y. M. Huang, H. L. Ho, P. Y.
Chen, and J. Hsiang (2011). Discovering landtransaction relations from land deeds of Taiwan.
Digital Humanities 2011 Conference, June 19-22,
2011. Stanford, CA, pp. 106-110.
Hsiang, J., S. P. Chen, and H. C. Tu (2009).
On building a full-text digital library of land deedsof Taiwan. Digital Humanities 2009 Conference.
Maryland, June 22-25, 2009, pp. 85-90.
Hsiang, J., S. P. Chen, H. L. Ho, and H. C.
Tu (2012). Discovering relations from imperial court
documents of Qing China. International Journal of
Humanities and Arts Computing 6: 22-41.
Hsieh, Y. P. (2012), Appositional Term Clip:a subject-oriented appositional term extraction
algorithm. In J. Hsiang (ed.), New Eyes for
Discovery: Foundations and Imaginations ofDigital Humanities. Taipei: National Taiwan UP, pp.
133-164.
Huang, Y. M. (2009). On reconstructing
relationships among Taiwanese land deeds. MS
Thesis, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Ou, C.-H. (2011). Creating a GIS for the historyof Taiwan – a case study of Taiwan during
the Japanese occupation era. MS Thesis, National
Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.

PAPER 4

System Interoperability
and Modeling Women
Writers’ Life Histories of
Late Imperial China
Fong, Grace

grace.fong@mcgill.ca
McGill University, Canada

Recent scholarship has shown that Chinese
women’s literary culture began to flourish on an
unprecedented level alongside the boom in printing
industry in the late sixteenth century, and continued
as a cultural phenomenon in the late imperial period
until the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) (Ko
1994; Mann 1997; Fong 2008; Fong & Widmer
2010). Over 4,000 collections of poetry and otherwritings by individual women were recorded forthis period (Hu and Zhang 2008). These collections
with their rich autobiographical and social contents
open up gendered perspectives on and complicatedmany aspects of Chinese culture and society –unsuspected kinship and family dynamics, startling
subject positions, new topoi and genres, all deliveredfrom the experience of literate women. Yet, within
the Confucian gender regime, women were asubordinated group and ideally to be located within
the domestic sphere, and in many instances theirwritings had not been deemed worthy of systematicpreservation. Perhaps less than a quarter of recorded
writings in individual collections have survived
the ravages of history; many more fragments andselections are preserved in family collections, local
gazetteers, and various kinds of anthologies. Worksby individual women have been difficult to access forresearch, as they have mostly ended up in rare bookarchives in libraries in China.
Aimed at addressing the problem of accessibility,
the Ming Qing Women’s Writings project(MQWW; http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing)is a unique digital archive and web-based databaseof historical Chinese women’s writing enhanced bya number of research tools. Launched in 2005, thiscollaborative project between McGill and Harvard
University makes freely available the digitized imagesof Ming-Qing women’s texts held in the HarvardYenching Library, accompanied by the analyzed
contents of each collection, which can be viewed
online, and a wealth of literary, historical, andgeographical data that can be searched (Fig. 1-4).
However, MQWW is not a full-text database –we do not have the funding resources for that,
but it is searchable based on an extensive setof metadata. In addition to identifying thematic
categories, researchers can link between womenbased on exchange of their work and correspondence,
obtain contextual information on family and friends,
and note the ethnicity and marital status of thewomen writers, among other data fields. Eachtext within a collection is analyzed and identified
according to author, title, genre and subgenre,
whether it is a poem, a prose piece, or chapter ofa verse novel. The MQWW digital archive contains
more than 10,000 poems (majority by women) andalso more than 10,000 prose pieces of varying lengths
and genres (some by men), ranging from prefaces toepitaphs, and over 20,000 images of original texts.
It clearly enables literary research; conferences,
research papers, and doctoral dissertations havedrawn on the resources provided, as well, thedatabase has been serving as an important teaching
resource in North America, China, Hong Kong, andTaiwan.
While the MQWW database contains basic
information on 5,394 women poets and other writers,
it was not originally designed with biographicalresearch in mind. Yet, continuing research has
pointed to how family and kinship, geographicallocation and regional culture, and social networks

49

Digital Humanities 2012and literary communities are significant factors
affecting the education, marriage, and general life
course of women as writers (Mann 2007; Widmer
2006). The current phase of the collaborative projectwith the China Biographical Database (CBDB),
Harvard University, will develop the biographicaldata of MQWW for large-scale prosopographicalstudy (Keats-Rohan 2007). It is guided by thepotential for taking digital humanities research in the
China field to a new stage of development by focusing
on system interoperability. By this we mean thatonline systems are built so as to enable interaction
with other online systems through an Application
Programming Interface (API), which must be
developed in both directions. Our methodologicalstrength is based on the two robust databases withdemonstrated long-term sustainability and scholarly
significance. An API is being created for CBDB
to enable it to interact with MQWW and viceversa. MQWW will retain its separate identity asa knowledge site with its unique digital archive oftexts and multifunction searchable database. Systeminteroperability will support cross-database queries
on an ad hoc basis by individual users. We aredeveloping an integrated search interface to query
both databases.
My paper will be an experiment based on a projectin progress. With the massive biographical data
available in CBDB, I will formulate and test queries
for kinship and social network analysis for women
writers in MQWW for a life history model, or a
prosopographical study, of writing women in lateimperial China. Some of the questions I will addressare:and geographical experiences, and their subtle rolein the social and political domain, and disclose
unsuspected lines of family and social networks,
political alliances, literati associations, and women’sliterary communities for further study and analysis.
The experiments can show the probabilities andpossibilities of the new system interoperability for
identifying not only normative patterns, but also
‘outlier’ cases in marginal economic, geographical,
and cultural regions, for which social, political, andhistorical explanations can be sought through moreconventional humanities research.

Figure 1: Search poems of mourning by the keyword= dao wang (悼亡) using the English interface- Can we map historical changes statistically totest the ‘high tides’ of women’s writings (midseventeenth century and late eighteenth century),which were arrived at through non-statisticalobservations?
- What graphs do the data yield for women’ssocial associations when mapped according togeographical regions, historical periods, and malekin success in the civil examination system, andother defined parameters?
- How do the official assignments of male kin
affect groups of women in their life cycle
roles: as daughter, wife, mother, mother-in-law,grandmother?
- What social patterns can emerge, such as local
and translocal marriage and female friendship,
through social network analysis with data in
CBDB?
The rich data for male persons in CBDB can offer
possibilities for mapping the life history of women
writers: the circulation of their books, the physical‘routes’ of movement in their lives, their temporal
50

Figure 2: Search results displaying poem titles with the
keyword = dao wang (悼亡) with links to digitized text images

Digital Humanities 2012

Widmer, E. (2006). The Beauty and the Book:
Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

Figure 3: Digitized texts of the first set ofdao wang (悼亡) poems in the result list

Figure 4: Search results for the woman
poet Xi Peilan (1760-after 1829)

References
Fong, G. S. (2008). Herself an Author: Gender,
Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China.
Honolulu: U of Hawaii P.
Fong, G. S., and E. Widmer, eds. (2010). The
Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from
Ming through Qing. Leiden: Brill.
Hu, W., and H. Zhang (2008). Lidai funü
zhuzuokao (zengdingben) (Catalogue of women’s
writings through the ages [with supplements]).
Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe.
Keats-Rohan,
K.
S.
B.,
ed. (2007).
Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A
Handbook. Oxford: Unit for ProsopographicalResearch, Linacre College, University of Oxford.
Ko, D. (1994). Teachers of the Inner Chambers:
Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China.
Stanford: Stanford UP.
Mann, S. (1997). Precious Records: Women in
China’s Long Eighteenth-Century. Berkeley, CA: U of
California P.
Mann, S. (2007). The Talented Women of the Zhang
Family. Berkeley, CA: U of California P.

51

Digital Humanities 2012

Future Developments for
TEI ODD
Cummings, James

James.Cummings@oucs.ox.ac.uk
University of Oxford, UK

Rahtz, SebastianSebastian.Rahtz@oucs.ox.ac.uk
University of Oxford, UK

Burnard, Lou

lou.burnard@tge-adonis.fr
TGE-Adonis, France

Bauman, Syd

Syd_Bauman@Brown.edu
Brown University, USA

Gaiffe, Bertrand
bertrand.gaiffe@atilf.fr
ATILF, France

Romary, Laurent
laurent.romary@inria.fr
INRIA, FranceBański, Piotr
bansp@o2.pl
HUB & IDS, Poland

The purpose of this panel is to look at the applicationand future development of the literate programming
system known as ODD which was developed for the
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and underlies every
single use of the TEI.
Though strongly influenced by data modelling
techniques characteristic of markup languages suchas SGML and XML, the conceptual model of the
Text Encoding Initiative is defined independentlyof any particular representation or implementation.
The objects in this model, their properties, andtheir relationships are all defined using a special
TEI vocabulary called ODD (for One Document
Does-it-all); in this way, the TEI model is used todefine itself and a TEI specification using that modelis, formally, just like any other kind of resource
defined using the TEI. An application selects theparts of the TEI model it wishes to use, and any
modifications it wishes to make of them, by writing
a TEI specification (a TEI ODD document), which
can then be processed by appropriate software to
generate instance documents relevant to the given
application. Typically, these instance documents willconsist of both user documentation, such as project
manuals for human use, and system documentation,

52

such as XML schemas or DTDs, sets of Schematron
constraints etc. for machine use. In this respect ODD
is a sophisticated re-implementation of the ‘literate
programming’ paradigm developed by Don Knuth in
the 1970s reimagined as ‘literate encoding’.
One of the requirements for TEI Conformanceis that the TEI file ‘is documented by means of
a TEI Conformant ODD file which refers to the
TEI Guidelines’. In many cases users employ pregenerated schemas from exemplar customizations,but they are usually better served if they use the TEIODD markup language, possibly through the Roma
web application, to constrain what is available tothem thus customizing the TEI model to reflect more
precisely their encoding needs.
Some of the mechanisms supporting thisextensibility are relatively new in the TEI Guidelines,
and users are only now beginning to recognize
their potential. We believe that there is considerable
potential for take-up of the TEI system beyond its
original core constituencies in language engineering,
traditional philology, digital libraries, and digital
humanities in general. Recent additions to the
TEI provide encoding schemes for database-like
information about persons and places to complement
their existing detailed recommendations for names
and linguistic structures; they have always provided
recommendations for software-independent meansof authoring scientific documentation, but the ODD
framework makes it easier for TEI documents tocoexist with other specialist XML vocabularies aswell as expanding it to encompass the needs of new
specialised kinds of text. It has been successfully
used for describing other XML schemas, notably the
W3C ITS (Internationalisation Tagset) and ISO TC37
SC4 standards documents; more recently its facilities
have greatly simplified the task of extending the
TEI model to address the needs of other researchcommunities, such as musicologists and genetic
editors.
We believe that the current ODD system could befurther enhanced to provide robust support for new
tools and services; an important step is to compareand contrast its features with those of other ‘metaencoding’ schemes and consider its relationship toontological description languages such as OWL. The
potential role of ODD in the development of thesemantic web is an intriguing topic for investigation.
This panel brings together some of the world’s
most knowledgeable users and architects of the
TEI ODD language, including several who havebeen responsible for its design and evolution over
the years. We will debate its strengths, limitations,and future development. Each speaker will focus
on one aspect, problem, or possible development
relating to TEI ODD before responding to eachDigital Humanities 2012

others suggestions and answering questions from theaudience.
Lou Burnard will introduce the history and practicaluse of ODD in TEI, and describe its relevance as ameans of introducing new users to the complexityof the TEI. Sebastian Rahtz will talk about theprocessing model for ODD, and the changes required
to the language to model genuinely symmetric, andchainable, specifications. Bertrand Gaiffe will lookat some of the core mechanisms within ODD, andsuggest that model classes that gather elements (orother model classes) for their use into content models
could be better as underspecified bags instead of sets.
Syd Bauman will discuss co-occurrence constraints,
pointing out that ODD’s lack of support for thisfeature is a significant limitation, but also that it canoften be worked around by adding Schematron to an
ODD. Laurent Romary and Piotr Banski will describe
issues in drafting ODD documents from scratch, inparticular in the context of ISO standardisation work,
introducing proposals to make ODD evolve towards
a generic specification environment.
We believe that the DH2012 conference offers a
useful outreach opportunity for the TEI to engage
more closely with the wider DH community, andto promote a greater awareness of the power andpotential of the TEI ODD language. We also see
this as an invaluable opportunity to obtain feedback
about the best ways of developing ODD in the future,
thereby contributing to the TEI Technical Council’s
ongoing responsibility to maintain and enhance thelanguage.
Organization

OrganizerJames
james.cummings@oucs.ox.ac.uk,
OxfordCummings,
UniversityofReferences
Burnard, L., and R. Rahtz (2004). RelaxNG
with Son of ODD. Extreme Markup Languages
2004, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/
download?doi=10.1.1.124.7139&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Romary, L. (2009). ODD as a generic specification
platform, Text encoding in the era of massdigitization – Conference and Members’ Meeting of
the TEI Consortium http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00433433

TEI By Example (2010). Customising TEI, ODD,
Roma. TEI By Example, http://tbe.kantl.be/TB
E/modules/TBED08v00.htm

TEI Consortium, eds. (2007). TEI P5 Guidelines
Chapter on “Documentation Elements”. TEI P5:
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding andInterchange. http://www.tei-c.org/release/do
c/tei-p5-doc/en/html/TD.html

TEI Consortium, eds. (2007). TEI P5 Guidelines
Section on “Implementation of an ODD System”.
TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding andInterchange. http://www.tei-c.org/release/do
c/tei-p5-doc/en/html/USE.html#IMTEI Consortium, eds. (2007). Getting Started
with TEI P5 ODDs. TEI-C Website. http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/Customization/odds.xml

The 5 speakers will each give a 15-minuteintroduction to a problem or possible developmentthat relates to TEI ODD. After this the organizer
will moderate discussion between members of thepanel on a number of questions before opening thediscussion to questions from the audience.
Speakers- Lou Burnard, lou.burnard@tge-adonis.fr, TGEAdonis- Syd Bauman, syd_bauman@brown.edu, Brown
University Center for Digital Scholarship- Bertrand Gaiffe, bertrand.gaiffe@atilf.fr, ATILF- Sebastian Rahtz, sebastian.rahtz@oucs.ox.ac.uk,
University of Oxford- Laurent Romary & Piotr Bański (Piotr speaking),laurent.romary@inria.fr, bansp@o2.pl, Inria,
HUB & IDS

53

Digital Humanities 2012

Compiling large historicalreference corporaof German: Quality
Assurance, Interoperability
and Collaboration in theProcess of Publication of
Digitized Historical Prints

1. Despite the growing acceptance of annotation
standards such as the TEI, there are different‘encoding dialects’ and baseline formats usedin different contexts (e.g. TextGrid Baseline
Encoding, the TEI-Encoding recommended by
HAB, the ›base format‹ of the DTA, and others).
Neither one has gained wider acceptance nor
have they been checked against each other. As
a result, repositories of digital documents do
not apply consistent, interoperable encoding. In
addition, users cannot draw on these resources in
an integrated way.

Geyken, Alexander

2. There is no approved system of evaluation
for both the quality of corpus texts and thequality of the encoding. In addition, there is
no reputation system for crediting individual
researchers’ accomplishments with respect to the
production and annotation of corpus texts. As aconsequence, there is no ‘culture of sharing
corpus resources’ in a collaborative way inthe research community.

geyken@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Germany

Gloning, ThomasThomas.Gloning@germanistik.uni-giessen.de
CLARIN-D, Germany

Stäcker, Thomas

staecker@hab.de
Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Germany

PAPER 1Introduction
1. Problem Statement
It has been and still is one of the core aims
in German Digital Humanities to establish large
reference corpora for the historical periods ofGerman, i.e. Old and Middle High German, Early
New High German (ENHG), New High German
and Contemporary German (NHG). This panel
focusses on NHG and ENHG. A reference corpusof the 17th to 19th century German is currently
being compiled by the Deutsches Textarchiv projectat the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciencesand Humanities (BBAW). The Herzog August
Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (HAB) constructs text
corpora encompassing the period between the 15th
and the 18th century, with a focus on ENHG. Apartfrom core activities like these, that usually are carriedout by institutions for long time research such as
academies, research centers and research libraries,
many digital resources are created by individual
scholars or small project teams. Often, however, such
resources never show up in the pool of publicly
available research corpora.
Building an integrated corpus infrastructure forlarge corpora of ENHG and NHG faces three main
problems:

54

3. The vision of an integrated historical corpus of
German and an integrated research platform is in
conflict with the principle of local ascriptionof scholarly work. While the user would like tohave one place to find all the available corpus texts
and one platform to run the available corpus tools,
each academy, each institute, each library, eachresearch project and even individual researchers
need to produce work and resources ascribable ina local or even in a personal way.

2. Panel Topics
Well-established infrastructure projects such
as TextGrid, CLARIN or DARIAH can contributeenormously to the process of integration by
establishing methods of interoperation, a system of
quality assurance and credit, and a set of technicalpractices that allow to integrate resources of different
origin, to credit the producers of resources in
an appropriate way, to ensure public access in apersistent way and thereby to involve a greater
scholarly community.
The proposed panel, organized by the Deutsches
Textarchiv at the BBAW, the Special Interest
Group ‘Deutsche Philologie’ (‘German Philology’)in CLARIN-D and the HAB Wolfenbüttel, will
demonstrate how efforts for community-building,text aggregation, the technical realization ofinteroperability and the collaboration of two large
infrastructure centers (BBAW and HAB) is set towork in the digital publication platforms of theDeutsches Textarchiv (BBAW) and AEDit (HAB).
Technical requirements include tools for longterm archiving as well as the implementationand documentation of reference formats. Interfaces

Digital Humanities 2012need to be standardized, easy to handle andwell documented to minimize the user’s effort to
upload their resources. Transparent criteria have tobe developed regarding the expected quality, theencoding level and requirements for interoperabilityof texts in the repository. The DTA provides alarge corpus of historical texts of various genres, aheterogeneous text base encoded in one consistentformat (i.e. DTA ‘base format’). Facilities for quality
assurance (DTAQ) and for the integration of external
text resources (DTAE) have been developed.

PAPER 2

The DTA ‘base format’Haaf, Susanne

haaf@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Deutsches Textarchiv, Germany

Geyken, Alexander

geyken@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Deutsches Textarchiv, Germany

The DTA ‘base format’ consists of about 80 TEI
P5 <text>-elements which are needed for the basic
formal and semantic structuring of the DTA reference
corpus. The purpose of developing the ›base format‹
was to gain coherence at the annotation level, given
the heterogeneity of the DTA text material over time
(1650-1900) and text types (fiction, functional andscientific texts). The restrictive selection of ‘baseformat’ elements with their corresponding attributesand values is supposed to cover all annotation
requirements for a similar level of structuring of
historical texts. We will illustrate this by means ofcharacteristic annotation examples taken from the
DTA reference corpus.
We will compare the DTA ‘base format’ to otherexisting base formats considering their different
purposes and discuss the usability of the DTA ‘baseformat’ in a broader context (DTAE, CLARIN-D).
A special adaptation of the oXygen TEI-framework
which supports the work with the DTA ‘base format’
will be presented.

PAPER 3

DTAE
Thomas, Christian

thomas@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Deutsches Textarchiv, Germany

DTAE is a software module provided by the DTA
for external projects interested in integrating their
historical text collections into the DTA reference
corpus. DTAE provides routines for uploading
metadata, text and images, as well as semiautomaticconversion tools from different source formats into
the DTA ‘base format’. The text- and metadata
are indexed for lemma-based full text search andprocessed with tools for presentation in order tooffer parallel views of the source image, the XML/TEI encoded text as well as a rendered HTMLpresentation layer. In addition, external contributors
can integrate the processed text into their own website via <iframe> and use the DTA-query-API for fulltext queries. DTAE demonstrates how interchange
and interoperability among projects can work on
a large scale. The paper illustrates these issues
by example of five selected cooperation projects.
Possibilities (and limits) of the exchange of TEI
documents will be discussed as well as the difficult,
but worthwhile task of converting other/older text
formats into DTA ‘base format’.

PAPER 4

DTAQ
Wiegand, Frankwiegand@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Deutsches Textarchiv, Germany

DTAQ is a browser-based tool to find, categorize, andcorrect different kinds of errors or inconsistencies
occuring during the XML/TEI-transcription resp. theoptical character recognition of texts. Using a simple
authentication system combined with a fine-grained
access control system, new users can easily be added
to this Quality Assurance system. The GUI of the toolis highly customizable and provides various viewsof source images, XML-transcriptions, and HTMLpresentations. The backend of DTAQ is built upon
many open source packages. Using Perl as a glue
language, the system runs on Catalyst, connects to55

Digital Humanities 2012a PostgreSQL database via the DBIx::Class ORM
and builds its web pages with Template Toolkit. The
frontend makes heavy use of jQuery and Highcharts
JS to create a very interactive and responsive userinterface.

PAPER 5The project AEDit
Stäcker, Thomas

staecker@hab.de
Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Germany

practices in research methodology). One goal in
the field of historical corpora is to create an
infrastructure that allows users (i) to integrate theirown documents into historical reference corpora;(ii) to gain proper credit and reputation in doingso; (iii) to reuse the documents in local corpora
together with expert corpus technology. – In thistalk I shall demonstrate usage scenarios that show
how the DTA extension infrastructure (DTAE) canbe used to create specialized corpora for specificresearch topics. These usage scenarios shall serve as
prototypes for collaboration and community building
in ENHG and NHG corpus research.

References
CLARIN-D http://clarin-d.net/

In the field of digital humanities there isa great demand for trustworthy platforms orrepositories that aggregate, archive, make available
and disseminate scholarly texts or databases.
AEDit (Archiving, Editing, Disseminating) aims at
establishing such a platform at the HAB Wolfenbüttel
for documents with a focus on ENHG. Partners
and contributors of the initial phase are four
outstanding editorial projects from the German
academy program. Central issues will be addressed,
e.g. creating persistent identifiers at word level by IDs
or Xpointer, determining the relation of community
specific markup to basic text encoding by means ofstand-off markup, defining a basic format for texts
and databases, integrating research data originatingfrom biographic, bibliographic or subject-related andlexical databases, examining ways of interconnection
with already existing editorial tools such as TextGrid
and last but not least setting up an institutionalframework for supporting scholars who are willing toparticipate or publish online.

PAPER 6

CLARIN-D – Historical
Corpora, Collaboration,
Community building
Gloning, ThomasThomas.Gloning@germanistik.uni-giessen.de
CLARIN-D, Germany

The task of the special interest group ›Deutsche
Philologie‹ in Clarin-D is to support infrastructure
centers (IDS, BBAW, MPI, HAB) in building
up, enriching and integrating German language
resources (e.g. corpora, tools, dictionaries, best
56

DTA http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/
DTA ‘base format’, Description [in German]:
http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/doku/bas
isformat

DTAE http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/dta
e

DTAQ http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/dta
qHerzog August Bibiliothek Wolfenbüttel http://www.hab.de/

Wolfenbütteler Digitale Bibliothek (WDB) http://
www.hab.de/bibliothek/wdb/

Geyken, A., et al. (2011). Das Deutsche Textarchiv:
Vom historischen Korpus zum aktiven Archiv. In
S. Schomburg, C. Leggewie, H. Lobin, and C.
Puschmann (eds.), Digitale Wissenschaft. Standund Entwicklung digital vernetzter Forschung in
Deutschland, 20./21. September 2010. Beiträge derTagung. 2., ergänzte Fassung. Köln: HBZ, pp.
157-161.
Jurish, B. (2010). More than Words: Using Token
Context to Improve Canonicalization of Historical
German. Journal for Language Technology andComputational Linguistics (JLCL) 25(1).
Jurish, B. (2012) Finite-state Canonicalization
Techniques for Historical German. PhD thesis,
Universität Potsdam 2012 (urn:nbn:de:kobv:517opus-55789).
Unsworth, J. (2011) Computational Work with
Very Large Text Collections. Interoperability,
Sustainability, and the TEI. Journal of the Text
Encoding Initiative 1 ( http://jtei.revues.org/2
15 , 29. 8. 2011).
Bauman,S.
(2011).
Interchangevs.
Interoperability. Presented at Balisage: The Markup

Digital Humanities 2012

Conference 2011, Montréal, Canada, August
2 - 5, 2011. In Proceedings of Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2011. Balisage Series
on Markup Technologies, vol. 7. doi:10.4242/
BalisageVol7.Bauman01.

Computational models of
narrative structure
Löwe, Benedikt

b.loewe@uva.nl
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Físseni, Bernhard

bernhard.fisseni@uni-due.de
University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

León, Carlos

carlos.leon@uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Bod, Rens

L.W.M.Bod@uva.nl
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

PAPER 1Introduction
A question of particular interest to theComputational Narrative community is the questionof the notion of structural equivalence of stories(Löwe 2010, 2011). On the one hand, it is closely
related to research in other areas such as thestudy of analogical reasoning in cognitive scienceand psychology; on the other hand, a solution
to the question of when stories can count as
structurally similar underlies a number of potential
computational applications for narrative databases.
In our panel, the four speakers will discuss various
foundational issues that have to be dealt with
before a structural theory of narrative similarity canbe developed. The majority of these issues haveto do with the empirical validation of proposed
formal representations; the aim is to develop(1) a methodology that allows to determine andinvestigate those aspects of narratives that arecomputationally and cognitively relevant for thecomparison of stories and (2) a formal frameworkthat allows to represent narratives with regard
to these aspects and also allows to encode thenecessary algorithm (formalization guidelines). The
presentations will report on joint projects of thepanelists in this field, and part of the purpose of thepanel is to present the results of these projects to theDigital Humanities community.
These tasks are approached using the following
empirical and computational methods: First,(quasi-)experimental studies are used to determine
the relevant dimensions and trainability ofanalysis systems (Fisseni, Bod below). Secondly,
57

Digital Humanities 2012

computational representation and simulation isused to evaluate representational formalisms, andwill be experimentally evaluated in a final step (León,
below).

1. Theoretical Background
The field of computational models of narrative
goes back to the 1970s and has produced numerous
computational representations of narrative structure(e.g. Lehnert 1981; Turner 1994; León 2010). Its roots
lie in the structuralist school of narratology (Barthes,
Genette, Greimas, Todorov, among others) thatstarted with Vladimir Propp’s study of Russian folk
tales (Propp 1928), and it was greatly successful withthe methods of modern computational linguistics:
There is now a considerable body of work in
artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems
addressing the many research challenges raisedby such applications, including modeling engaging
virtual characters […] that have personality […],
that act emotionally […], and that can interact withusers using spoken natural language (Si, Marsella &Pynadath 2005: 21).
Recently, there has been an increased interestin developing theoretical foundations of what
is called shallow story understanding in thiscommunity: high-level structural analysis of thenarrative as opposed to understanding ‘deeply’,i.e., with background knowledge. The intersectionof narratives and computation is also being
considered in the field of Digital Humanities orthe application of computer software to narrative
analysis. In this context, we assume that theory ofnarrative structures is a prerogative to computational
treatment of narratives. All work presented here isconcerned with validating and extending existing
theories empirically. Even though non-structural
factors may influence judgment of stories, theyshould evidently be excluded in our formalizationof structural similarity. Potentially, one will haveto reconsider the notion of ‘structural core’ and its
differentiation from ‘mere’ accidental features suchas motifs or style (the latter is discussed by Crandell
et al. 2009, presented at DH 2009).
Two central themes of the entire panel are thequestions (1) Is there a structural core of narratives
and can we formally approximate it? and (2) Are
structural similarity judgments a ‘natural kind’ orrather a trained skill? The basis for discussing theseissues will be prepared in this presentation andfurther developed in three following presentations.

PAPER 2

Narrative Similarity and
Structural Similarity
Löwe, Benedikt

b.loewe@uva.nl
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

This first presentation will introduce the notions
and concepts that we shall deal with: the distinction
between the narrative and its formalization (orannotation), various levels of granularity, andvarious dimensions of similarity. We shall discuss
the human ability to identify a structural core ofa narrative and discuss intersubjectively in what
respects two narratives are structurally the same.
We discuss the question whether this structural core
exists and how to approach it. In particular, we shalldiscuss a number of methodological issues that create
obstacles when trying to determine this structural
core (Löwe 2011; Fisseni & Löwe 2012).

PAPER 3

Empirically Determining‘Optimal’ Dimensions andGranularity
Fisseni, Bernhard

bernhard.fisseni@uni-due.de
University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Dimensions that can be easily brought into focus
by an adequate instruction are highly relevant forour implementations and can presumably also beannotated with high reliability and inter-annotator
agreement by test subjects (see Bod, below).
These dimensions may also arguably be considered
important for the reception of narratives. As different
dimensions can be relevant for different tasks, thesetting presented to test subjects must be varied
to trigger different granularities and (presumably)
focus different dimensions. For example, taking therole of a magazine editor should focus different
notions than considering movies in an informal
setting.
Preliminary experiments (Block et al. submitted; Bodet al. 2012; Fisseni & Löwe 2012) show that naive
test subjects do not have a clear preformed concept58

Digital Humanities 2012of story similarity that privileges the structural coreof stories. Therefore, work will have to be done todetermine how to focus structural aspect and control
other, non-structural aspects.

PAPER 5

PAPER 4

Bod, Rens

A Computational
Framework for Narrative
Formalizations
León, Carlos

carlos.leon@uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Even with the most recent advances of Artificial
Intelligence, completely automatic formalizationsof narrative texts are still impossible, but itis well possible to develop and process formal
representations of stories computationally. In thispresentation, we shall focus on implementing acomputational instantiation of the set of different
formalizations. This instantiation will be used toformalize stories and check their structural similarity
under human supervision. In order to do this, a
mixed methodology will be applied: computationalversions of the defined formal systems will be
implemented in the form of several structured
descriptions of the stories, along with information
about their respective granularities. The dimensions
that are modeled should be those that can be easily
accessed (see Fisseni, above) and reliably annotated(see Bod, below).
A mixed human-computer process for acquisitionof one of the candidate formalizations has beensuccessfully tested by the author (León 2010; León
& Gervás 2010); hence, a computational tool willassist human users during the formalization process,iteratively creating partial structures according to
the defined granularity. It may also be interesting
to use techniques from knowledge representationand natural language processing to formalize atleast some guidelines and thus test their consistency
and usability. While these guidelines may notunambiguously define how to formalize each story,
they will be used to maximize the consensus among
the formalizers (see Bod, below).

Inter-Annotator Agreement
for Narrative Annotations
L.W.M.Bod@uva.nl
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A way to measure the quality of guidelines and formal
representation derived by applying them is interannotator agreement, which is used to assess thequality of linguistic structural annotations such as
treebanks (see e.g. Carletta et al. 1997; Marcu et al.
1999). We intend to apply inter-annotator agreement
to the formal study of narratives (Bod et al., 2011,2012).
As
Propp’sformalanalysisof
Russianfolktales (Propp 1928) has profoundly influenced
Computational Narratology, we ran a pilot
experiment in which external users are annotating
several Russian folktales with a subset of Propp’s
definitions, to establish the viability of themethodology (Bod et al. 2012). After a training
process, test subjects were expected to have a basic
knowledge about Propp’s formal system. In the main
phase of the experiment, they were to apply theirunderstanding of the formal system to other stories.
The results indicate that Propp’s formal system is noteasily taught (or learnt), and that this may have to
do with the structural constraints of the system: Its
functions and roles are so highly mutually dependentthat variation is great.
Hence, similar experiments with more ‘modern’and formal representations (such as those by León,
above) are planned. These experiments will also
profit from the preliminary studies (see Fisseni,
above) which try to determine which dimensions
can be triggered in test subjects and how to achievethis. Then it will be possible to measure agreement
between test subjects (using standard statistics),
which should provide an insight in the reliabilityof the guidelines and the viability of the formal
representation.

References
Afanas’ev, A. N. (1973). Russian Fairy Tales.
Translation by N. Guterman from the collections of A.
Afanas’ev. Folkloristic commentary by R. Jakobson.
New York: Pantheon.
Afanas’ev, A. N. (1985). Shabarsha.Translated
by Kathleen Cook. In The Three Kingdoms.

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Russian Fairy Tales From A. Afanasiev’s Collection,
illustrated by A. Kurkin. Moscow: Raduga Publisher.
Barzilay, R., and M. Elhadad (1997). Using
Lexical Chains for Text Summarization. In I.
Mani and M. Maybury (eds.), Intelligent Scalable
Text Summarization. Proceedings of a Workshop
sponsored by the ACL. Somerset, NJ: ACL, pp. 10-17.
Block, A., B. Fisseni, C. León, B. Löwe, and D.
Sarikaya (submitted). Narrative summarizationand its correspondence to Proppian functions.
Bod, R., B. Löwe, and S. Saraf (2011). How muchdo formal narrative annotations differ? A Proppiancase study. In C. Ess and R. Hagengruber (eds.),
The computational turn: Past, presents, futures?,
Aarhus University, July 4–6, 2011. Münster: MVWissenschaft, pp. 242-245.
Bod, R., B. Fisseni, A. H. Kurji, and B.
Löwe (2012). Objectivity and reproducibility ofProppian narrative annotations. To appear in theproceedings of the workshop on Computational
Models of Narratives, Istanbul, 26-27 May 2012.
Brants, T. (2000). Inter-Annotator Agreement for a
German Newspaper Corpus. In Proceedings Second
International Conference on Language Resources
and Evaluation LREC-2000.
Carletta, J. C., A. Isard, S. Isard, J. C. Kowtko,
G. Doherty-Sneddon, and A. H. Anderson(1997). The reliability of a dialogue structure coding
scheme. Computational Linguistics 23(1): 13-31.
Conroy, J. M., and D. P. O’Leary (2001).
Text summarization via hidden Markov models. In
Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM
SIGIR conference on Research and development in
information retrieval, SIGIR ’01. New York, NY:
ACM, pp. 406-407.
Crandell, C., E. Gong, R. Kraus, T. Lieu, andJ. Mason-Marshall (2009). Modulating Style (andExpectations): An Experiment with Narrative Voicein Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Talk at Digital
Humanities 2009, Maryland.
Dyer, M. G. (1983). In-depth understanding:
A computer model of integrated processing fornarrative comprehension. Artificial Intelligence
Series. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Fisseni, B., and B. Löwe (2012). Whichdimensions of narratives are relevant for humanjudgments of story equivalence? To appear in theproceedings of the workshop on Computational
Models of Narratives, Istanbul, 26-27 May 2012.
Kupiec, J., J. Pedersen, and F. Chen (1995).
A trainable document summarizer. In Proceedingsof the 18th Annual International ACM SIGIR
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Conference on Research and Development inInformation Retrieval. New York, NY: ACM Press,
pp. 68-73.
Lehnert, W. G. (1981). Plot units and narrative
summarization. Cognitive Science 4: 293-331.
León, C. (2010). A computational model for
automated extraction of structural schemes from
simple narrative plots. Ph.D. thesis, Universidad
Complutense de Madrid.
León, C., and P. Gervás (2010). Towards aBlack Box Approximation to Human Processingof Narratives based on Heuristics over Surface
Form. Paper at the AAAI 2010 Fall Symposiumon Computational Models of Narrative November
11-13, 2010. Arlington, VA.
Lin, C.-Y., and E. Hovy (1997). Identifying topics
by position. In Proceedings of the fifth conference
on Applied natural language processing, ANLC ’97.
Stroudsburg, PA: ACL, pp. 283-290.
Löwe, B. (2010). Comparing Formal Frameworks
of Narrative Structures. In M. Finlayson (ed.),Computational models of narrative. Papers from the2010 AAAI Fall Symposium, vol. FS-10-04 of AAAI
Technical Reports, pp. 45–46.
Löwe, B. (2011). Methodological Remarks about
Comparing Formal Frameworks for Narratives. In
P. Allo and G. Primiero (eds.), Third Workshop in
the Philosophy of Information, Contactforum vande Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor
Wetenschappen en Kunsten. Brussel: KVAB, pp.
10-28.
Marcu, D. (1998). Improving Summarization
through Rhetorical Parsing Tuning. In E. Charniak(ed.), Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Very
Large Corpora. Montréal: Université de Montréal.
Marcu, D., M. Romera, M., and E. Amorrortu(1999). Experiments in Constructing a Corpus of
Discourse Trees: Problems, Annotation Choices,
Issues. In M. A. Walker (ed.), Towards Standards
and Tools for Discourse Tagging. Proceedings of theWorkshop, pp. 71-78.
Marcus, M. P., B. Santorini, and M.
A. Marcinkiewicz (1993). Building a Large
Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank.
Computational Linguistics 19: 302-330.
Miller, G. A. (1995). WordNet: a lexical database forEnglish. Commun. ACM, 38: 39-41.
Passonneau, R., N. Habash, and O.
Rambow (2006). Inter-annotator Agreement ona Multilingual Semantic Annotation Task. In
Proceedings LREC-2006, pp. 1951-1956.

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Propp, V. Ya. (1928). Morfologiya skazki.
Leningrad: Akademiya.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1980). On evaluating story
grammars. Cognitive Science 4: 313-316.
Schank, R. C. (1982). Dynamic memory: A theoryof reminding and learning in computers and people.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Si, M., S. C. Marsella, and D. V. Pynadath(2005). Thespian: using multi-agent fitting to craftinteractive drama. In M. Pechoucek, D. Steiner,and S. Thompson (eds.), AAMAS ’05: Proceedingsof the Fourth International Joint Conference
on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems(2005), pp. 21-28.
Turner, S. (1994). The creative process. A
computer model of storytelling. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.

Approaches to theTreatment of PrimaryMaterials in Digital
Lexicons: Examples of the
New Generation of Digital
Lexicons for Buddhist
Studies
Nagasaki, Kiyonori

nagasaki@dhii.jp
International Institute for Digital Humanities,
Japan

Tomabechi, Toru

tomabechi@dhii.jp
International Institute for Digital Humanities,
Japan

Wangchuk, Dorji

dorji.wangchuk@uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Takahashi, Koichi
snb44191@nifty.ne.jp
University of Tokyo, Japan

Wallman, Jeff

jeffwallman@tbrc.org
Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, New York, USA

Muller, A. Charles
acmuller@jj.em-net.ne.jp
University of Tokyo, Japan

PAPER 1Introduction
Recently, several projects have emerged with theshared aim of creating online digital lexicons for
Buddhist studies. There are many possibilities in
the creation of digital lexicons for Buddhist studies,
since the Buddhist religion itself is so extensively
multilingual and multicultural, and also has an
unusually broad variety and number of readers.
As seen in Father Roberto Busa’s initiation of
his Thomas Aquinas lexicon project in 1949, thedigital lexicon has been a basic resource in thedigital humanities. The field of Buddhist studies
was one of the first to have its own newly-createdcomprehensive digital lexicons, entitled ‘Digital
Dictionary of Buddhism ( http://www.buddhismdict.net/ddb ).’ Under continuous developmenton the web for more than 15 years, it has been61

Digital Humanities 2012

one of the successful examples of the creationof new online reference resources from various
technical and scholarly perspectives. However,recent developments in the area of ICT have given
those who aim to make other type of digital lexicons
new opportunities to attempt to realize their ideals.
Most important in this regard is the spread ofcollaborative frameworks on the Web. Moreover,
TEI P5 has been aiding in the development ofsuch frameworks. Thus, the movement toward thecreation of online lexicons has become steadily more
visible.
One basic difficulty seen in the construction of digitallexicons for Buddhist studies is that of making thedecisions of selection between such a diversity ofresources, methodologies, and potential users, alongwith the possibilities of improvement of primarytexts as the sources of individual entries due to theongoing discovery of ancient manuscripts. Textual
sources are written in a range of languages including
Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Chinese, and so on; othertypes of materials such as pictures, statues, maps,
etc., also need to be treated. Methodologies need
to be diverse because the field of Buddhist studies
includes the approaches of philosophy, literature,
history, culture, psychology, and a number of otherdisciplinary approaches. Going far beyond specialists
in Buddhist studies, users of such lexicons also
include scholars from many other fields, as well as
followers of Buddhist religion, and general users. On
the other hand, many primary sources have gradually
come to be distributed on the Web so that online
lexicons can easily refer to them.
In this presentation, we will focus on the way oftreating primary sources in each project. This isimportant, because there is still considerable debate
among these projects regarding optimal approach.
This includes a transitional result of the ITLR projectand Bauddha Kośa project, the results of the workof the Tibetan Buddhist Research Center. We expect
comments from researchers and practitioner of otherfields.

PAPER 2

Indo-Tibetan Lexical
Resource (ITLR): The
Underlying Principle,
Policy, and Practice of
Employing Primary andSecondary Sources
Wangchuk, Dorji

dorji.wangchuk@uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

The collaborative project ‘Indo-Tibetan Lexical
Resource’ (henceforth ITLR) has been initiated withthe sole aim of creating a digital lexical resourcethat will benefit both academics and non-academics
who are engaged in the study of Buddhist (i.e.
mainly but not exclusively Indic and Tibetan) textual
and intellectual cultures. The ITLR database will
include Indic words (or phrases), terms, nameswith their corresponding Tibetan – and occasionallyalso Chinese and Khotanese – translations, their
etymologies and explanations found primarily in
Indic and Tibetan sources, metonyms or synonyms,
enumerative categories and classifications, modern
renderings, related discussions found in modern
academic works – all substantiated with primaryand secondary sources. Recognizing the advantagesof a digital lexical resource over a printed one, theaim of the ITLR from the very outset has been to
create a research tool that is continually improvable,
extendable, easily accessible, and reliable.
Reliability is a key issue in dealing with or
employing sources and resources. One of the causesof frustration in the field of Buddhist Studies
seems to be not the lack of relevant lexicographicalresources per se but the lack of a comprehensive
and reliable up-to-date lexical resource. Of course,
while we cannot speak of reliability in absolute terms,
maximizing the degree of reliability has been oneof the envisioned goals of the ITLR project. Our
success will depend not only on the availability offinancial, technical, and human resources but also on
our competence, cautiousness, and perseverance, notto speak of on how we use primary and secondary
sources.
In this presentation, we will discuss the underlying
practice, policy, and principle of employing primaryand secondary sources for the ITLR project. It will
be argued that while the absence or presence ofsource-references in a lexical work in itself might not

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necessarily indicate its reliability or unreliability, thelack of verifiable evidences, as in the case of mostexisting digital Tibetan dictionaries, would often
undermine its credibility.

PAPER 3

The Bauddha Kośa Project:
developing a new digitalglossary of Buddhist
technical terminology
Koichi Takahashi

snb44191@nifty.ne.jp
University of Tokyo, Japan

Buddhist technical terms are occasionally so
profound that it is difficult to translate them intomodern languages. Thus, many of scholars have been
making efforts to compose specialized dictionaries in
the Buddhist terminology. Added to that, today there
is movement to develop digital dictionaries which
can be browsed on the internet. In this situation,
our project attempts to make a new type of digitalglossary of the Buddhist technical terms, which iscalled the Bauddha Kośa, using XML as the data
framework.

In this way, some issues to solve remain before
accomplishing our purpose, but we are preparing
the model of the new digital glossary dependingon the Abhidharmakośabhāsya (ed. by P. Prahan1967), one of the most important glossaries of the
Buddhist technical terms composed by Vasubandhu
in 5c. This text has two Chinese translations and one
Tibetan, and some historical commentaries. In thispresentation, I will argue on a few issues to develop
the scheme for our glossary Bauddha Kośa by using
TEI P5 from the philological viewpoint.

PAPER 4

A Dynamic Buddhist
Lexical Resource basedon Full Text Querying
and Tibetan Subject
Taxonomies
Wallman, Jeff

jeffwallman@tbrc.org
Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, New York, USA

The basic methodology of our project is, rather
than applying definitions to terms by ourselves,
to extract statements to explain the meanings ofwords from the classical texts written in various
languages. Then we add the historical rendering
for them and the annotations written in Sanskrit,some of which are available only in the Chineseor Tibetan translations today, on the statements
quoted in our glossary. At the same time, we translatethese sentences into modern languages in orderto propose the more appropriate and intelligible
translation equivalents. In other words, the new
glossary consists of citations from the classical works
and their translation equivalents.

To accurately define terms in a lexical resource one
must be able to identify the context of those terms
in literature. As inquiry into the Tibetan Buddhist
lexicon progresses, the Tibetan Buddhist Resource
Center (TBRC) offers a framework to evaluate lexical
terms (technical terms, concepts, subjects, keywords)
in a wide variety of contexts across a massive corpus
of source Tibetan texts. Through its preservationand cataloging process, TBRC has developed amethod to classify individual works within larger
collections according to indigenous Tibetan subject
classifications. These indigenous subjects are thenorganized according to a broader, more generalized
framework of knowledge-based taxonomies. Eachtaxonomy is structured around a series of ‘heap
spaces’ – groupings of similar topics, rather thanhierarchical structures.

As for the policy to digitize this glossary, our project
follows TEI P5 ( http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelin
es/P5/ , [2011/09/13]). Although TEI P5 provides
adequate elements to encode a general dictionaryor glossary in modern Western languages, ourproject occasionally faced the difficulty to digitize ourglossary by using the Guidelines of TEI P5 becauseof its peculiarity that it mainly consists of citations
demanding to show the information about sources.
(This issue was reported at the poster session of
OSDH 2011 on September 13, 2011.)

The source literature corpus includes a burgeoning
TEI-compliant eText repository as well as scannedsource xylographs, manuscripts and modern
reprints, spanning the range of the Tibetan literary
heritage. The corpus is the largest online repositoryof Tibetan materials in the world. The metadata
framework and text corpus is the basis of an
integrated library resource being developed at TBRC.
Typing in a technical term in the library, a researcher
can see the entry in the database of topics, thelocation of each topic in a taxonomy, and the relevant

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associated works. Extending from this controlled
entry point, the researcher can then discover andmarkup terms in pages, by issuing full-text queries
across the eText repository.

References
Muller, A. Ch. (2011). The Digital Dictionary of
Buddhism: A Collaborative XMLBased ReferenceWork that has become a Field Standard: Technology
and Sustainable Management Strategies. Digital
Humanities 2011 Conference Abstracts. June 2011,
pp. 189-190.
Nagasaki, K., et al. (2011). Collaboration in the
Humanities – Through the Case of Development of
the ITLR Project –. IPSJ Symposium Series Vol.
2011, No. 8: The Computers and the Humanities
Symposium. Dec 2011, pp. 155-160.

Topic Modeling the Past
Nelson, Robert K.

rnelson2@richmond.edu
University of Richmond, USA

Mimno, David

david.mimno@gmail.com
Princeton University, USA

Brown, Travis

travisrobertbrown@gmail.com
University of Maryland, College Park, USA

PAPER 1Introduction
The enormous digitized archives of books, journals,
and newspapers produced during the past two
decades present scholars with new opportunities- and new challenges as well. The possibility ofanalyzing increasingly large portions of the historical,
literary, and cultural record is incredibly exciting, but
it cannot be done with conventional methods thatinvolve close reading or even not-so-close skimming.
These huge new text archives challenge us to apply
new methods. This panel will explore one suchmethod: topic modeling.
Topic modeling is a probabilistic, statisticaltechnique that uncovers themes and topics and canreveal patterns in otherwise unwieldy amounts oftext. In topic modeling, a ‘topic’ is a probability
distribution over words or, put more simply, a groupof words that often co-occur with each other in thesame documents. Generally these groups of words
are semantically related and interpretable; in otherwords, a theme, issue, or genre can often be identified
simply by examining the most common words ina topic. Beyond identifying these words, a topic
model provides proportions of what topics appear ineach document, providing quantitative data that canbe used to locate documents on a particular topic
or theme (or that combine multiple topics) and to
produce a variety of revealing visualizations about
the corpus as a whole.
This panel will, first and foremost, illustrate
the interpretative potential of topic modeling for
research in the humanities. Robert K. Nelson will
analyze the similarities and differences between
Confederate and Union nationalism and patriotism
during the American Civil War using topic modelsof two historic newspapers. Travis Brown will
explore techniques to tailor topic model generation
using historical data external to a corpus to64Digital Humanities 2012produce more nuanced topics directly relevant toparticular research questions. David Mimno (chief
maintainer of the most widely used topic modelingsoftware, MALLET) will describe his work using topic
modeling to generate – while respecting copyright –a new scholarly resource in the field of Classics thatderives from and organizes a substantial amount of
the twentieth-century scholarly literature.
The panel will also address methodologicalissues and demonstrate new applications of topic
modeling, including the challenge of topic modelingacross multi-lingual corpora, the integration of
spatial analysis with topic modeling (revealing theconstructedness of space, on the one hand, and thespatiality of culture, on the other), and the generationof visualizations using topic modeling useful for‘distant reading.’ The panel thus addresses issuesof multilingualism, spatial history, data mining, andhumanistic research through computation.

PAPER 2Modeling Nationalism andPatriotism in Civil War
America
Nelson, Robert K.

rnelson2@richmond.edu
University of Richmond, USA

Scholars of the American Civil War have productively
attended to particular keywords in their analysesof the conflict’s causes and its participants’motivations. Arguing that some words carried
extraordinary political and cultural weight at thatmoment, they have sought to unpack the deep
connotations of terms that are especially revealing
and meaningful. To take a couple of recent examples,
Elizabeth R. Varon frames Disunion!: The Coming of
the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (unsurprisingly)
around the term ‘disunion’: ‘This book argues that
‘disunion’ was once the most provocative and potent
word in the political vocabulary of Americans’ (Varon
2008: 1). Similarly, in The Union War Gary W.
Gallagher emphasize the importance of ‘Union,’arguing that ‘No single word in our contemporary
political vocabulary shoulders so much historical,
political, and ideological meaning; none can stir
deep emotional currents so easily’ (Gallagher 2011:46). Others studies have used terms like ‘duty,’‘honor,’ ‘manliness,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘nation,’‘republic,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘country,’ and ‘patriotism’
to analyze the ideological perspectives and culturalpressures that shaped the actions and perspectivesof soldiers and civilians during the Civil War(Linderman 1987; Prior 2012; Gallagher 1997: 73).
Together, the production of enormous digitalarchives of Civil War-era documents in thepast decade and the development of new
sophisticated text-mining techniques present uswith an opportunity to build upon the strengthsof this approach while transcending some ofits limitations. While unquestionably insightful,arguments that have relied heavily upon keyword
analyses are open to a number of critiques. How
do we know that the chosen keywords are thebest window through which to examine the issues
under investigation? How can we know – especiallyin studies which rely upon keyword searches indatabases – that we have not missed significant
evidence on the topic that does not happen to use
the exact terms we look for and analyze? Does theselection of those words skew our evidence andpredetermine what we discover? Topic modelingaddresses these critiques of the keyword approach
while offering us potentially even greater insights
into the politics and culture of the era. First, asa ‘distant reading’ approach it is comprehensive,
allowing us to analyze models that are drawn notfrom a selection but from the entirety of massive
corpora. Second, as it identifies word distributions(i.e. ‘topics’), topic modeling encourages – evenforces – us to examine larger groups of related words,
and it surfaces resonant terms that we might not haveexpected. Finally and perhaps most importantly,
the topics identified by this technique are all themore revealing because they are based on statistical
relationships rather than a priori assumptions andpreoccupations of a researcher.
This presentation will showcase research into Union
and Confederate nationalism and patriotism thatuses topic modeling to analyze the full runs of theRichmond Daily Dispatch and the New York Timesduring the war – taken together a corpus consistingof approximately 90 million words. It will make threeinterrelated arguments drawn from a combinationof distant and close readings of topic models of the
Dispatch and the Times.
First, I will argue that Confederates and Yankees used
the same patriotic language to move men to be risk
their lives by fighting for their countries. Distinct
topic models for the Dispatch and the Times eachcontain topics with substantially overlapping terms(see table below) – terms saturated with patriotism.
Typically celebratory of the sacrifices men made inbattle, the patriotic pieces (often poems) in thesesimilar topics from each paper aimed to accomplish
the same thing: to evoke a love of country, God,home, and family necessary to move men to risk their

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lives and believe that it was glorious to die for theircountry.

Table 1: The top 24 predictive words for two topics from the
Dispatch and the Times, with the words they shared in bold

Second, I will suggest that southerners (or at least
the editor of the Dispatch) developed a particularly
vitriolic version of Confederate nationalism toconvince southern men to kill northerners. The
Dispatch was full of articles that insisted that
northerners were a foreign, unchristian, anduncivilized people wholly unlike southerners; invicious editorials the Dispatch’s editor maintainedthat northerners were infidels and beasts who it was
not only okay but righteous to kill. The remarkably
similar signatures evident in a graph of two topics(Figure 1) – one consisting of patriotic poetry
aimed at moving men to die, the other of vicious
nationalistic editorials aimed at moving them to kill –from a model of the Dispatch suggests, first, the close
relationship between these two topics and, second,
the particular moments when these appeals needed
to be made: during the secession crisis and the earlymonths of the war in the spring and summer of1861 when the army was being built, immediately
following the implementation of the draft in April
1862, and at the end of the war in early 1865 asConfederates struggled to rally the cause as they
faced imminent defeat.

was false to the country as a Southern bosom’ (‘Not a
War against the South,’ 1861). Northern nationalism
is evident in the model for the Times in a morepolitically inflected topic on Unionism and a second
topic consisting of patriotic articles and poems. The
graphs of these two topics (Figure 2) with spikes
during elections seasons suggest the instrumental
purpose of nationalistic and patriotic rhetoric in theTimes: not to draw men into the army but rather
to drive them to the polls. The editor of the Times(correctly, I think) perceived not military defeat but
flagging popular will as the greatest threat the Union
war effort, and victory by copperhead Democrats who
supported peace negotiations would have been themost potent expression of such a lack of will.
In briefly making these historical and historiographic
arguments about nationalism and patriotism andabout dying and killing in the American Civil
War, this presentation aims to demonstrate theinterpretative potential of topic modeling as a
research methodology.

Figure 2

References
Gallagher, G. W. (1997). The Confederate War.
Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Gallagher, G. W. (2011). The Union War.
Cambridge: Harvard UP.

Figure 1

Finally, I will argue the kind of nationalism
evident in the Dispatch was not and could not be
used by northerners for the same purpose. Whilenortherners and southerners used the same languageof patriotism, there is no analog to the vicious
nationalistic topic from the Dispatch in the topic
model for the New York Times. Unionists insisted
that the South was part of the United States andsoutherners had been and continued to be Americans– though traitorous Americans, to be sure. As atitle of one article in the Times proclaimed, this was‘Not a War against the South.’ It was a war against
traitors, the Times insisted, and the ‘swords [of Union
soldiers] would as readily seek a Northern heart that66

Linderman, G. F. (1997). Embattled Courage:
The Experience of Combat in the American Civil
War. New York: Free Press.
Not a War Against the South. (1861).
New
York
Times.
10
May.
Available
at: http://www.nytimes.com/1861/05/10/news/n
ot-a-war-against-the-south.html [Accessed on
13 March 2012].
Prior, D. (2010). Civilization, Republic, Nation:
Contested Keywords, Northern Republicans, and theForgotten Reconstruction of Mormon Utah. Civil
War History 56(3): 283-310.
Varon, E. R (2008). Disunion!: The Coming of theAmerican Civil War, 1789-1859. Chapel Hill: U of
North Carolina P.

Digital Humanities 2012

PAPER 3Telling New Stories about
our Texts: Next Steps for
Topic Modeling in the
Humanities
Brown, Travis

travisrobertbrown@gmail.com
University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling has
quickly become one of the most prominent methods
for text analysis in the humanities, with projects suchas the work by Yang et al. (2011) on Texas newspapers
and Robert Nelson’s Mining the Dispatch (Nelson2010) demonstrating its value for characterizing
large text collections. As an unsupervised machinelearning technique, LDA topic modeling does not
require manually annotated training corpora, which
are often unavailable (and prohibitively expensive to
produce) for specific literary or historical domains,and it has the additional benefit of handlingtranscription errors more robustly than many othernatural language processing methods. The fact thatit accepts unannotated (and possibly uncorrected)
text as input makes it an ideal tool for exploring
the massive text collections being digitized and madeavailable by projects such as Google Books and theHathiTrust Digital Library.
LDA is an example of a generative model, and assuch it has at its heart a ‘generative story,’ which is ahypothetical narrative about how observable data are
generated given some non-observable parameters.
In the LDA story, we begin with a set of topics,
which are simply probability distributions over the
vocabulary. The story then describes the process bywhich new documents are created using these topics.
This process (which has been described many times
in the topic modeling literature; see for example
the original presentation by Blei et al. (2003))
is clearly not a realistic model of the way thathumans compose documents, but when we apply
LDA topic modeling to a set of documents we assume
that it is a useful simplification. After making thisassumption, we can essentially ‘play the story inreverse,’ using an inference technique such as Gibbs
sampling to learn a set of topic distributions from ourobserved documents. Despite the simplicity of thegenerative story, the method can produce coherent,
provocative, and sometimes uncannily ‘insightful’characterizations of collections of documents.

While LDA topic modeling has a clear value
for many applications, some researchers in thefields of information retrieval and natural language
processing have described it as ‘something of afad’ (Boyd-Graber 2011), and suggest that more
attention should be paid to the broader context ofgenerative and latent variable modeling. Despite therelatively widespread use of LDA as a technique for
textual analysis in the humanities, there has been
little work on extending the model in projects witha literary or historical focus. In this paper I argue
that extending LDA – to incorporate non-textual
sources of information, for example – can resultin models that better support specific humanities
research questions, and I discuss as examples two
projects (both of which are joint work by the author
and others) that add elements to the generative story
specified by LDA in order to perform more directed
analysis of nineteenth-century corpora.
The first of these projects extends LDA to incorporate
geographical information in the form of a gazetteerthat maps place names to geographical coordinates.1
We propose a region topic model that identifies
topics with regions on the surface of the Earth,and constrains the generative story by requiring
each toponym to be generated by a topic whose
corresponding region contains a place with that
name, according to the gazetteer. This approachprovides a distribution over the vocabulary for eachgeographical region, and a distribution over thesurface of the Earth for each word in the vocabulary.
These distributions can support a wide range oftext analysis tasks related to geography; we haveused this system to perform toponym disambiguation
on Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War
and a collection of nineteenth-century American andBritish travel guides and narratives, for example.
The second project applies a supervised extensionof LDA (Boyd-Graber & Resnik 2010) to acollection of Civil War-era newspapers.2 In thisextension the model predicts an observed response
variable associated with a document – in our casecontemporaneous historical data such as casualty
rates or consumer price index – on the basis ofthat document’s topics. We show that this approach
can produce more coherent topics than standard
LDA, and it also captures correlations between the
topics discovered in the corpus and the historical data
external to the corpus.
Both of these projects preserve the key advantages
that the unsupervised nature of LDA topic modelingentails – the ability to operate on large, unstructured,and imperfectly transcribed text collections, forexample – while adding elements of supervision that
improve the generated topics and support additionalkinds of analysis. While we believe that our results inthese experiments are interesting in their own right,
67

Digital Humanities 2012

they are presented here primarily as examples of thevalue of tailoring topic modeling approaches to theavailable contextual data for a domain and to specificthreads of scholarly investigation.
This work was supported in part by grants fromthe New York Community Trust and the Institute ofMuseum and Library Services.

References
Blei, D. M., A. Ng, and M. Jordan (2003). Latent
Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning
Research 3: 993–1022.
Boyd-Graber, J. (2011). Frequently Asked
Questions. http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jbg/st
atic/faq.html (accessed 23 March 2012).
Boyd-Graber, J., and P. Resnik (2010).
Holistic Sentiment Analysis Across Languages:
Multilingual Supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation.
In Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing. Cambridge, MA, October2010.
Nelson, R. K. (2010). Mining the Dispatch.
(accessed
23 March 2012).

http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/

Speriosu, M., T. Brown, T. Moon, J.
Baldridge, and K. Erk (2010). Connecting
Language and Geography with Region-Topic
Models. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop
on Computational Models of Spatial Language
Interpretation. Portland, OR, August 2010.
Yang, T., A. Torget, and R. Mihalcea (2011).
Topic Modeling on Historical Newspapers. In
Proceedings of the 5th ACL-HLT Workshop on
Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social
Sciences, and Humanities. Portland, OR, June
2011. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W11-1
513 (accessed 23 March 2012).
Notes
1. Joint work by the author with Jason Baldridge, Katrin Erk,
Taesun Moon, and Michael Speriosu. Aspects of this work were
presented by Speriosu et al. (2010) and will appear in an article
in an upcoming special issue of Texas Studies in Literature andLanguage.
2. Joint work by the author with Jordan Boyd-Graber andThomas Clay Templeton. We have also presented resultsfrom this work at the 2011 Chicago Colloquium on Digital
Humanities and Computer Science on experiments using
casualty rates as the response variable.

68

PAPER 4The Open Encyclopediaof Classical Sites: Nonconsumptive Analysis from20th Century Books
Mimno, David

david.mimno@gmail.com
Princeton University, USA

Traditional scholarship is limited by the quantity oftext that a researcher can read. Advances in largescale digitization and data analysis have enabled
new paradigms, such as ‘distant reading’ (Moretti2000). These data-driven approaches, though notapproaching the subtlety of human readers, offer theability to make arguments about entire intellectual
fields, from collections spanning hundreds ofyears and thousands of volumes. Unfortunately,
although such corpora exist, the current legal
environment effectively prohibits direct access tomaterial published after 1922, even for the great
majority of works that are not commercially available(Boyle 2008). This paper explores the feasibility ofscholarly analysis on the limited, indirect view oftexts that Google Books can legally provide.
The proposed Google Books settlement (Google, Inc.
2011) presents the concept of ‘non-consumptive’ use,
in which a researcher does not read or display‘substantial portions of a Book to understand theintellectual content presented within the Book.’
The most common mode of access supported byarchives such as JStor and Google Books is keyword
search. When a user provides a query, the searchengine ranks all documents by their relevance toa specific user-generated query and then displays
short text ‘snippets’ showing query words in context.
This interface, though useful, is not adequate forscholarship. Even if researchers have a specific queryin mind, there is no guarantee that they are notmissing related words that are also relevant. Wordcount histograms (Michel et al. 2011) suffer similar
problems, and are also vulnerable to ambiguous
words as they do not account for context.
Another option is the application of statistical latentvariable models. A common example of such amethod for text analysis is a statistical topic model(Blei, Ng Jordan 2003). Topic models represent
documents as combinations of a discrete set of
topics, or themes. Documents may be combinationsof multiple topics; each topic consists of a probability
distribution over words.

Digital Humanities 2012

Statistical topic models have several advantages
over query-based information retrieval systems.
They organize entire collections into interpretable,
contextually related topics.
Semantically related words are grouped together,
reducing the chance of missing relevant documents.
Instances of ambiguous words can be assigned todifferent topics in different documents, dependingon the context of the document. For example, if theword ‘relief’ occurs in a document with words such as‘sculpture’ or ‘frieze, ’ it is likely to be an artwork andnot an emotion.
Topic modeling has been used to analyze large-scale
book collections published before 1922 and therefore
available in full-text form (Mimno & McCallum2007). In this work I present a case study on the useof topic modeling in digitized corpora protected bycopyright that we cannot access in their entirety, inthis case books on Greco-Roman and Near-Easternarcheology that have been digitized by Google.
The resulting resource, the Open Encyclopedia ofClassical Sites, is based on a collection of 240character search result snippets provided by Google.
These short segments of text represent a small
fraction of the overall corpus, but can nevertheless beused to build a representation of the contents of thebooks.
The construction of the corpus involved first
selecting a subset of the entire books collectionthat appeared relevant to Greco-Roman and NearEastern archeology. I then defined a set of query
terms related to specific archeological sites. These
terms were then used to construct the corpus of
search result snippets. In this way I was able to use
a non-consumptive interface (the search engine) tocreate a usable sub-corpus without recreating large
sections of the original books.
Preprocessing was a substantial challenge. I faced
problems such as identifying language in highly
multilingual text, recognizing improperly split words,
and detecting multi-word terms. This process
required access to words in their original sequence,and therefore could not be accomplished on unigram
word count data.
Finally I trained a topic model on the corpus andintegrated the resulting model with the Pleiades
geographic database. This alignment between
concepts and geography reveals many patterns. Somethemes are geographically or culturally based, suchas Egypt, Homeric Greece, or Southern Italy. Other
themes cut across many regions, such as descriptionsof fortifications or research on trade patterns.
The resulting resource, the Open Encyclopedia ofClassical Sites, links geography to research literature
in a way that has not previously been available.

Users can browse the collection along three major
axes. First, they can scan through a list of topics,
which succinctly represent the major themes of thebook collection, and the specific sites and volumes
that refer to each theme. Second, they can selecta particular site or geographic region and list thethemes associated with that site. For example, thecity of Pylos in Greece is the site of a major
Mycenaean palace that contained many Linear B
tablets, is associated with a character in the Homericepics, and was the site of a battle in the Peloponnesian
war. The topics associated with the site distinguishwords related to Linear B tablets, Mycenaean palaces,characters in Homer, and Athens and Sparta. Finally,users can select a specific book and find the themes
and sites contained in that volume.
This project provides a model both for what is
possible given large digital book collections andfor what is feasible given current copyright law.
Realistically, we cannot expect to analyze the fulltext of books published after 1922. But we should
also not be satisfied with search and simple keyword
histograms. Short snippets provide sufficient lexical
context to fix many OCR-related problems andsupport semantically enriched searching, browsing,and analysis.
Funding
This work was supported by a Google Digital
Humanities Research grant.

References
Blei, D. M., A. Ng, and M. I. Jordan (2003).
Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine
Learning Research 3: 993-1022.
Boyle, J. (2008). The Public Domain. New Haven:
Yale UP.
Google, Inc. (2011). Amended Settlement
Agreement. http://www.googlebooksettlement.
com , accessed Mar 24, 2012.
Michel, J., Y. Shen, A. Aiden, A. Veres, M.
Gray, J. Pickett, D. Hoiberg, D. Clancy, P.
Norvig, J. Orwant, S. Pinker, M. Nowak, andE. Aiden. (2011). Quantitative analysis of cultureusing millions of digitized books. Science 331(6014):
176-82.
Mimno, D., and A. McCallum (2007).
Organizing the OCA. In Proceedings of the Joint
Conference on Digital Libraries. Vancouver, BC,
June 2007.
Moretti, F. (2000). Conjectures on World
Literature. New Left Review (Jan/Feb): 54-68.

69

Digital Humanities 2012

Facilitating Researchthrough Social-Document
Networks
Pitti, Daniel

dpitti@Virginia.edu
Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities, University of Virginia, USA

Simon, Agnès

agnes.simon@bnf.fr
Bibliothèque nationale de France, France

Vitali, Stefano

vitali.stefano@gmail.com
La Soprintendenza archivistica per l’EmiliaRomagna, Italy

Arnold, Kerstink.arnold@barch.bund.de
Bundesarchiv, Germany

People live and work in socio-historical contexts:
over the course of their lives they produce a
range of records that document their lives andthe contexts in which they lived: birth records,
correspondence, books, articles, photographs, works
of art, films, notebooks, collected artifacts, school
records, manuscripts, employment records, etc.
Social relations between people, relations among
documents, and relations among people and theartifacts created by them constitute a vast socialdocument network1 that can be drawn on by scholars
needing to reconstruct and study the lives, works, andevents surrounding historical persons.
In the past, cultural heritage professionals havelargely viewed document networks and social
networks in isolation, with a primary focus
on documents. Increasingly, in parallel with(and perhaps inspired by) the emergence ofsocial computing on the Web, cultural heritage
professionals and scholars are expanding theirfocus to social-document networks. Scholarly
projects that focus on social-document networks orsocial networks, such as Research-oriented Social
Environment (RoSE)2 and The Crowded Page,
3 have begun to emerge. The cultural heritage
communities (library, archive, and museum) havebegun to make explicit the implicit networks foundin the descriptions of books, articles, manuscripts,
correspondence, art objects, and other artifacts
in their care, and the authority files used todescribe people who created or are documented
in the resources described. Particularly important

70

examples are the Virtual International Authority File
(VIAF, a collaboration between OCLC Research andmajor national and research libraries)4 and WorldCat
Identities5.
This panel will focus on three national and one
international cultural heritage projects facilitating
humanities research by providing innovative accessto social-document networks that provide access toboth resources and the socio-historical contexts inwhich the resources were created.

1. Interconnecting French cultural
heritage treasures on the Web:
data.bnf.fr – France
Agnès Simon (Curator, Département Information
bibliographique et numérique, Bibliothèquenationale de France (BnF)), will discuss data.bnf.fr,
a service the BnF is developing to facilitate
the discovery of its holdings, interrelated andinterconnected to other resources on the Web.
The BnF is the most important heritage institution
in France, with a history going back to the 16th
century. It has fourteen divisions located over manysites. A large variety of materials are processed indifferent catalogues, reflecting not only the history of
the materials themselves but also that of the methods
and technologies used for their description. However,the descriptions are maintained in disparate BnF
catalogues and databases, complicating discovery ofthese resources and their interrelation.
data.bnf.fr will leverage both new conceptual models,for organization of the bibliographic information(such as FRBR), and Linked Data technologies,
to provide integrated access to both the holdingsof the BnF and related resources available on
the Web. A high-level ontology has been designed
to make the bibliographic, archival, or othermetadata models used in the BnF interoperable.
RDF is used to express and expose data extracted
from the various library descriptive systems andother complementary systems available on theWeb. Incorporating other Semantic web-related
ontologies, data.bnf.fr provides a scalable foundation
for interconnecting diverse resources, particularly
cultural heritage.
The project’s effectiveness is made possible byinnovative use of the semantics and quality ofthe structured data contained in the various
BnF catalogues. Persons, corporate bodies, andworks, accurately identified through authority files,
constitute nodes in a network of descriptionsof related resources, regardless of the type.
Descriptions of persons and corporate bodies areenhanced with information about those entities

Digital Humanities 2012

from Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding
aids. Other Internet resources are used in asimilar, complementary way. The bibliographic data
is remodeled and collocated according to FRBR
categories, and displayed in a user-friendly way, withdirect links to the digitized material from the Gallica
digital library, whenever they exist.
data.bnf.fr began in July 2011 with a significant
amount of information and is continuously
broadening its scope and exploring new ways tocollaborate with ongoing initiatives in other cultural
heritage institutions in France, namely current work
remodeling the French Archives’ databases to better
fit in the Web landscape of the French and European
cultural heritage treasures.

2. Social Networks and Archival
Context (SNAC) Project – UnitedStatesDaniel Pitti, Associate Director of the Institute forAdvanced Technology in the Humanities, Universityof Virginia, will describe the SNAC project.
The initial phase of the two-year SNAC researchand demonstration project began in May 2010
with funding from the National Endowment for the
Humanities (U.S.). The project’s objectives are to:- extract data describing creators of and others
documented in records from EAD-encoded
descriptions of records (finding aids),- migrate this data into Encoded Archival ContextCorporate Bodies, Persons, Families (EAC-CPF)encoded authority descriptions,- augment authority descriptions with additional
data from matching library and museum authority
records,- and, finally, use the resulting extracted andenhanced archival authority descriptions to build aprototype system that provides integrated access tothe finding aids (and thus the records) from which
the descriptions of people were extracted and to thesocio-historical contexts in which the records werecreated.
In the initial phase of SNAC, the primary sourceof data was 28,000 finding aids. In the second
phase, the source data will vastly expand andinclude not only descriptions of archival records
but also original archival authority descriptions.
The number of finding aids will increase to
more than 148,000, and up to two million OCLCWorldCat collection-level descriptions will be added.
The National Archives and Records Administration(NARA), British Library, Smithsonian Institution,

BnF, and Archives nationales will contribute nearly
500,000 archival authority descriptions.
While SNAC’s immediate objectives are to
significantly refine and improve the effectivenessof the methods used in building an innovative
research tool, its long-term objective is to provide
a solid foundation of both methods and data forestablishing a sustainable national archival program
cooperatively governed by and maintained by theprofessional archive and library community.

3. Catalogo delle Risorsearchivistiche (CAT) – Italy
Stefano Vitali, Soprintendente archivistico perl’Emilia Romagna (Supervising Office for theArchives in Emilia Romagna Region), will describe
the Catalogo delle Risorse archivistiche (CAT). CAT
provides integrated access to archival resources heldin national, regional, and local repositories. Access tothese holdings will be provided via a central system
based on archival descriptions of the custodians andcreators of archival records.
CAT will sketch a general map of the nationalarchival heritage, providing initial orientation toresearchers and guiding them towards more
informative resources available in the systems
participating in the National Archival Portal. It
will contain descriptive records of both the current
custodians and original creators of archival records.
Data harvesting techniques based on the OAIPMH protocol will be used to aggregate descriptive
data from systems distributed throughout Italy. In
addition, CAT will explore direct submission ofXML-based descriptions of archival repositories andcreators, as well as direct data entry into the CAT
maintenance interface.
CAT’s goal is to provide a comprehensive list of
all of the creators of archival records (persons,corporate bodies, and families) held in Italianrepositories, and a comprehensive guide to thecustodians (institutional and non-institutional) of
the archival records. In addition to providing accessto and context for archival records in Italy, CAT will
be a bridge to other catalogs and descriptive systems
in the cultural heritage domain, include the National
Library System.
The Archives Portal Europe: Research andPublication Platform for European Archives–
EuropeKerstin Arnold, Scientific Manager, Bundesarchiv,and Leader of the Europeana interoperability work
package of APEx, will describe the APEx project andits predecessor, APEnet.

71

Digital Humanities 2012

The Archives Portal Europe has been developed
within APEnet, a collaboration of nineteen
European national archives and the Europeana
Foundation, to build a common access point
for searching and researching archival content6.
Funded by the European Commission in theeContentplusprogramme, APEnet began in January
2009 and celebrated the release of Archives Portal
Europe 1.0 in January 2012. At the moment theportal contains more than 14.5 million descriptive
units linked to approximately 63 million digitizedpages of archival material. By joining the materials of
currently 62 institutions from 14 European countries,
the portal has become a major actor on the European
cultural heritage scene.
The tasks achieved in APEnet will be taken one
step further with its successor, APEx, which recently
has held its kick-off meeting at The Hague, The
Netherlands. Funded by the European Commission
in the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT-PSP),
APEx will inlcude 28 European national archives plus
ICARUS (International Centre for Archival Research)as project partners.
While APEnet focused on integrating access to EADencoded archival finding aids contributed by theparticipating national archives and to EAG (Encoded
Archival Guide)-encoded descriptions of the nationalarchives themselves, APEx will increase the numberof participating archives, enhance and improve thetraining of archival staff in participating institutions,and improve the quality of the integrated accesssystem, in particular via Web 2.0 functionality andexamining Linked Data approaches to be adapted
within the Archives Portal Europe.
A primary objective will be incorporating EACCPF, the international standard for describing record
creators and the people documented in them.
The resulting archival authority descriptions will
enhance access to archival records, and provide
socio-historical context for understanding them.

Digital Humanities as auniversity degree: The
status quo and beyond
Thaller, Manfred

manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de
Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany

Sahle, Patricksahle@uni-koeln.de
Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany

Clavaud, Florence

Florence.Clavaud@enc.sorbonne.fr
Ecole Nationale des Chartes, Paris, France

Clement, Tanya

tclement@ischool.utexas.edu
University of Texas, Austin, USA

Fiormonte, Domenicofiormont@uniroma3.it
Università Roma Tre, Rome, Italy

Pierazzo, Elena

elena.pierazzo@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College, London, UK

Rehbein, Malte

malte.rehbein@uni-wuerzburg.de
Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

Rockwell, Geoffrey

geoffrey.rockwell@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Schreibman, Susan

schreibs@tcd.ie
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Sinclair, Stéfan

stefan.sinclair@mcgill.ca
McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Notes
1. In the describing the RoSE project to Daniel Pitti, Alan Liu
described this network as a ‘social-document graph.’
2. RoSE: http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/
category/research-project/rose
3. The Crowded Page: http://www.crowdedpage.org/
4. VIAF: http://viaf.org/
5. WorldCat Identities: http://www.worldcat.org/identi
ties/
6. Archives Portal Europe: http://www.archivesportaleu
rope.eu/ and APEnet: http://www.apenet.eu/

72

As Desmond Schmidt’s recent posting on Humanist
revealed (Humanist 24 September 2011), there havebeen an increasing number of positions advertisedin the Digital Humanities (DH). This uptick inhiring has been, while possibly not uniform acrossdisciplines and countries, impressively diverse. It
seems that the impact of Digital Humanities as arecognized field of study is increasing.
Over the past decade a plethora of training activity
in the form of summer schools, workshops, andfocused training events has taken place. There has
also been work in building academic programs. While
the field has seen a flowering of individual seminars

Digital Humanities 2012or modules as part of more traditional curricula
over the past decade, the recent announcement ofmany new degree programs marks a new phasein the discipline. These degree programs, fromthe undergraduate to the PhD level, are extremely
diverse, reflecting not only individual institutional
needs and opportunities, but also national scholarly
cultures and circumstances.

- Unclear profiles, making it difficult for students tosee which opportunities a specific degree offers;

In Germany, for instance, the national branch of
the European project DARIAH (Digital Research
Infrastructures for the Arts and Humanities) isaddressing current teaching issues through ananalysis of DH related teaching in traditional
degrees, having created a brochure on existing
German DH programs (Sahle 2011), working towarda national reference curriculum, and bringing this
discussion to the international level.

With these potential pitfalls in mind, panelists willaddress the following broad questions, (particularly
at the national level) about the current state DH
education at university level:

This session continues the dialogue begun at
DH 2010 and DH 2011, as well as in recent
publications (see references), around Digital
Humanities education by bringing together Digital
Humanities educators who have been pivotal inoriginating, designing, or teaching degree courses in
the field. The panelists will bring a wide international
perspective to the discussion in order to move beyond
individual academic landscapes.
This panel will also take an historical approach.
One should not forget that over a decade ago
it seemed that digital humanities programs (orhumanities computing as it was then known)
would continue to flourish. In the status reporton ‘Computing in Humanities Education: A
European Perspective’, published in 1999, twentyfive degree programs of various brands of Digital
Humanities were presented and discussed. Nine havesurvived. Of these, five represent various brandsof Computational Linguistics. In two workshops
aimed at an international curriculum for ‘History
and Computing’ in the early nineties, fifteen study
programs at European universities were discussed.
Of these, one has survived as is, a second survived
with a changed focus. Of at least six Italian degree
courses created in the nineties, only one has survived.
It is also unfortunate, that only three institutionsin the UK are continuing their Digital Humanities
degrees.
To ensure that new degree courses succeed, weshould analyze why programs and courses did notsurvive. Some reasons for past failures are:- Trying to start a degree course with insufficient
resources;- Starting courses that are dependent on one person;- Focusing a degree only on a small specific branch,thus limiting the number of participants;- Computer science orientation with a high levelof mathematical background frightening away
potential Humanities students;- Very shallow requirements, giving courses a poor
reputation;

1. Are there degree courses which are explicitlylabeled ‘Digital Humanities’ (or with an equivalentlabel, like ‘Humanities Computing’ or ‘eHumanities’)
in your country?
2. Are there degree courses which are not explicitlylabeled Digital Humanities but are dedicated to someform of interdisciplinary study between a Humanities
subject and the IT tools needed for this field (e.g.
degree courses dedicated to IT methods in philology,
linguistics, history, cultural studies, archeology, art
history etc.)
3. What degree courses exist which are flavors oflibrary and information science degrees, directed
explicitly at Humanities’ graduates or including asignificant amount of Digital Humanities content?
4. Are there any degree courses offered at Computer
Science faculties that are targeting humanitiesstudents with DH-flavored degrees?
5. Are there programs or courses at the intersectionof DH and other emerging fields of study? Are ‘digitalpreservation’ or ‘game studies’ real DH programs or
DH inflected?
6. On which levels do such course programs exist?
(BA, MA, PhD, vocational add-on qualifications after
a first degree, etc.)
7. Are such programs well established or recently
created? How big is the student demand? How visible
are these courses outside the DH community?
8. How are they organized? By a DH Department, a
DH Center in collaboration with a more traditional
department, or as part of the teaching offeredby departments that support traditional academic
fields?
9. Are there required / optional courses on Digital
Humanities embedded in other Humanities degree
programs (beyond “computer literacy” courses)?
10. What content is taught in these classes ordegree programs? Is there some consensus between
different institutions within a national context on
the content of a ‘DH degree’? Is there possibly a73

Digital Humanities 2012

consensus on such content within a specific subfield– i.e. ‘Computing in Archeology’ – even if there is no
generalized consensus on DH-curricula as such
11. What can or should be done to arrive at a core
DH curriculum with a clearly defined bundle ofknowledge and skills?
12. Do differences in culture and language makea case for ‘national’ or ‘local’ DH, or is DH a
‘universal’ field in terms of methodologies? Can DH
tools, research and curricula be culturally neutral,
regardless of where they are designed and produced?
How can we best address the problem of cultural
diversity within DH?
13. Can a consistent understanding of Digital
Humanities as a field be traced in the courses whichclaim to teach it?

Gouglas, S. et al. (2010) Computer Games andCanada's Digital Economy: The Role of Universities
in Promoting Innovation http://ra.tapor.ualbe
rta.ca/~circa/?page_id=307 .
Hanlon,C.
(2005).
Historyonthe
Cheap: Using the Online Archive to Make
Historicists out of Undergrads. Pedagogy 5(1):97-101 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagog
y/v005/5.1hanlon.pdf .
Brett, D. H., ed. (2012, forthcoming). Digital
Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles,
Politics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P.
Kirschenbaum, M. (2010). What is Digital
Humanities, and What’s it Doing in English
Departments? ADE Bulletin 150 http://bit.ly/h

QQ1vI

Perspectives for the Digital Humanities lookparticularly bright at the moment. We should see
this as a chance to lay the groundwork for morestable curricula that are comparable at least within,preferably across, different national landscapes inacademia. As digital humanities pedagogy continues
to flourish, there is a clear desire in the community
to compile resources and compare experiences –this panel will be of broad interest to conference
participants.

Norcia, M. (2008). Out of the Ivory
Tower Endlessly Rocking: Collaborating acrossDisciplines and Professions to Promote Student
Learning in the Digital Archive. Pedagogy 8(1):91-114 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagogy/v008/8.1norcia.pdf .

References

Parodi, M. (2009). Oltre le due Culture.
Informatica Umanistica http://www.ledonline.it/informatica-umanistica/ .

Clement, T., et al. (2010). Digital Literacy for
the Dumbest Generation – Digital Humanities
Programs 2010. Paper presented at the DH
2010. http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-

programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-815.htm
l . [references there have been skipped here] (allonline resources in this bibliography accessed 23
March 2012).

de Smedt, K., et al. (1999). Computing in
Humanities Education: A European Perspective.
Bergen http://www.hd.uib.no/AcoHum/book/ .
Drucker, J., et al. (2002). Final Report for
Digital Humanities Curriculum Seminar, Universityof Virginia http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/hcs/dhcs/ .
Fiormonte, D. (2010). The International Scenario
of Digital Humanities. In T. Numerico et al. (eds.),
L’umanista digitale. Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 201-210.
Gouglas, S., et al. (2006) Coding Theory:
Balancing Technical and Theoretical Requirements
in a Graduate-Level Humanities Computing
Programme. Mind Technologies: Humanities
ComputingandtheCanadian
Academic
Community, pp. 245-256.

74

Orlandi,T.
(2007).
Ultimobilanciodell’informatica umanistica http://rmcisadu.let.uniroma1.it/~orlandi/pubbli/informatica/m
ontevarchi.pdf .

Ragone, G., et al. (2011). Lo statuto
dell’Informatica umanistica. Session at theConference “Dall’Informatica umanistica alle culture
digitali”, Rome 2011 http://digilab.uniroma1.it/news/news.aspx?IDnews=82 .
Rockwell, G. (1999). Is humanities computing an
academic discipline? http://www.iath.virginia.
edu/hcs/rockwell.html .
Rockwell, G., ed. (2009). The Academic
Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada( http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.
php/The_Academic_Capacity_of_the_Digital_H
umanities_in_Canada

Sahle, P. (2011). Digitale Geisteswissenschaften.
Cologne. [Printed catalog on study programs inGermany] (online version: http://www.cceh.unikoeln.de/Dokumente/BroschuereWeb.pdf .)Sinclair, S., and S. W. Gouglas (2002). Theory
into Practice: A Case Study of the Humanities
Computing Master of Arts Programme at the
University of Alberta. Arts and Humanities in Higher
Education 1(2): 167-183 http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/1/2/167 .

Digital Humanities 2012

Spiro, L. (2011). Knowing and Doing:
UnderstandingtheDigitalHumanities
Curriculum.
Paper
presented
at
the
DH
2011.
See
blogpostforfurther
information: http://digitalscholarship.wordp
ress.com/2011/06/20/making-sense-of-134-dh-syllabi-dh-2011-presentation/

Svensson,P.
(2010).
The
LandscapeofDigitalHumanities.
DHQ:
DigitalHumanities Quarterly 4(1) digitalhumanities.org/
dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html (digitalhuman
ities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html) .

75

Papers

Digital Humanities 2012

Exploring Originality inUser-Generated Content
with Network and Image
Analysis Tools
Akdag Salah, Alkim Almila

alelma@ucla.edu
University of Amsterdam, New Media Studies
Department, The Netherlands

Salah, Albert Ali

asalah@boun.edu.tr
Bogazici University (BU), Computer Science
Department, Turkey

Douglass, Jeremy

jeremydouglass@gmail.com
University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Visual
Arts Department & Software Studies Lab, USA

Manovich, Lev

manovich@ucsd.edu
University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Visual
Arts Department & Software Studies Lab, USA

In this paper, we visit the question of originality
in the context of creative influence across social
networks, using with the tools of network analysis
and digital image analysis. Our data sets comefrom a specialized online social network site (oSNS)
called deviantArt, which is dedicated to sharing usergenerated artworks. Currently, deviantArt (dA) is
the 13th largest social network in the U.S. with 3.8
million weekly visits. Operating since 2000, dA is
the most well known site for user-generated art;
has more than 15 million members, and hosts avast image archive of more than 150 million images.
The social network infrastructure allows us to gather
all sorts of rich data from this platform: which
artist is following which other artist, what comments
are posted under each artwork and by whom, thetemporal unfolding of the connection structure,demographic information about artists, category anduser generated tag information for artworks, numberof hits per artwork and per artist, etc.
Our main research question: how can we define‘originality’ in computable terms when analyzing
such a massive dataset of visual artworks? Apart fromits obvious relevance, we choose dA over other online
platforms of art, because 1) unlike (online) museums,dA contains many derivative works, and at the sametime provides sufficient information to trace theseto their origins; 2) it has a category structure thatdefines stylistic boundaries; 3) it encompasses many

artistic styles, some of which coming with culturaland artistic peculiarities that create unique analysis
opportunities (e.g. ‘stock’ images, see below).
For this specific case study, we perused the vastarchive of dA and focus on a subset of content,
created specifically for being highly volatile andusable. These are the so-called ‘stock’ images; images
that are freely available for other members to use. We
extracted a set of stock images, linked to a second setof art works created through the use of these stock
images, as well as a temporal cross-section of the dA
network that encapsulates the social interactions of
the producers and consumers of these stock images.
Using this dataset, it becomes possible to trace thetransformation of ‘visual’ ideas, both in terms ofsimilarities in the image space, and in terms of
distances in the social interaction space.

1. Construction the Social
Interaction Space
A social network is a graph representation ofsocial relations. Graphs are the most popular andwell-researched data structure for representing andprocessing relational data. In a graph, each node
represents one entity (a person in a social network;a researcher or a work in a citation network, etc.)
and the edges (or arcs, if they are directed) of thegraph represent some relation. One can also indicate
the strength of the relation by associating weights
with the edges of the graph. Network graphs are very
useful for studying social networks.1
The dA network is very rich, not only because
it consists of 15 million nodes and billions ofedges, but because it represents a multigraphof relations: Different social interaction patterns
superpose different arcs on the node structure,and these are amenable to joint analysis, as wellas individual inspection. Furthermore, each node(i.e. artist) is complemented with demographic
information, and with site statistics showing the
popularity of each member and each individual
image. Obviously, the ‘re-creation’ of specialized
networks from this immense set is crucial inclarifying and then interpreting it via network
analysis and visualization tools.
As a preliminary research for this study, we
have crawled the dA site to extract a subset of‘professional’ members. Professional members are
the paying subscribers, and thus contain the highest
concentration of users that make a living out of
producing artworks, as well as being more regular in
their usage of the site in general. In order to obtaina vibrant core of the dA network, we have used anumber of assumptions about these members. This
helped us reach a manageable and relevant set of79

Digital Humanities 2012users. The first heuristic is the subscription status;
the paying members of the site are more serious
users and have access to more services. These canbe automatically determined through scraping. Our
first data reduction followed these members, and wethus obtained a network with 103.663 vertices andabout 4.5 million arcs, the latter representing a user
being ‘watched’ by another user (average degree is
43.25). (Buter et al. 2011) These data are further
scrutinized with a k-Core algorithm that helped
us to identify the most important members of the
network. In this work we use this core-network as
our starting point. Thus out of 103.663 vertices, i.e.
members, we extracted a core of 3402 members.
Among these, we focus on those who publish stock
images, which constitute 642 members with 13762
images. To further analyze how these stock images
are reused by other members, we employ digital
image analysis.

how a stock-image and the images that make useof this stock image look. The research questions inthis study are 1) to determine in what (measurable)
terms to define ‘originality,’ (i.e., how we can rate andcompare different ways in which dA members use
a stock image); 2) to determine if we can scale thisdefinition for larger image sets.

2. Image Tool Analysis
Image analysis is a vibrant research area at theintersection of signal processing, computer vision,
pattern recognition and machine learning. From
medical image processing to image retrieval andbiometrics, image analysis techniques are used ina variety of applications. Among these applications,the Digital Humanities community would find thescattered work done around automatic artwork
analysis techniques interesting (Hurtut, 2010).
These are used in a number of applications
such as virtual restoration, image retrieval,studies on artistic praxis, and authentication. The
scientific community also shows an interest in theever expanding professional image archives frommuseums, galleries, professional artist networks, etc.
(Chen 2001, 2005, 2007).
One of the authors, Lev Manovich has founded
Software Studies Initiative at UCSD in 2007 to
apply image analysis techniques for the analysis
of digital content that were not necessarily basedon institutionalized archives (Manovich 2008). For
example, in How to Analyze Million Manga Pages,
Manovich, Douglass and Huber showed how image
analysis techniques could be applied to answer
humanities research questions, especially the ones
that have to deal with the fast growing user-generated
image sets, and their cultural dimensions (Manovich
et al. 2011).2 In our dA project, we make use of thesetools in order to first extract ‘features’ (quantified
descriptions of visual properties) from the images
that we have located as stock image collections of coredeviantArt members. As a second set, we download
and analyze the images of members who indicate thatthey have used these images via the commenting toolof deviantArt. In Fig. 1, one can see an example of80

Figure 1: An example of a stock image (right,
upper corner), and images that use this stock.

Today it is possible to submit image queries tocommercial search engines, where the subsequent
image retrieval is not only based on the metadata,
but also on the content of the images (for examples,see Li et al. 2007a, 2007b; Wang et al. 2008).
Here, the ‘semantic’ component is retrieved from theimages themselves: first, some low quality featuresof images are extracted; these features are used fortagging the images according to a pre-defined image
vocabulary. A different approach to image retrieval
is suggested by (Hertzmann et al. 2001), whereparts of images themselves are used to locate images
similar to those parts. Hertzmann terms this practiceas finding ‘image analogies’. Our data set is basedon such ‘image analogies’, but for us, it is more
important to find the most ‘original’ works – i.e.,
images that uses the stock image creatively, changing
to arrive at different content and visual style than theoriginal version.

3. Conclusion
deviantArt is listed among the top ten most visited
websites in the category of art. With 32 million
unique visitors, dA has both the world’s biggest
artist community and the largest active art audience.
To thoroughly understand dA’s cultural and artistic
value, one has to use computational methods becauseof its massive scale. In this study, we use subsets
of dA images (stock images and images which usethem) to explore how computational analysis canbe used to define ‘originality’ in user-generated art

Digital Humanities 2012

in computable terms. To select and then analyze
relevant subsets of the data, we designed a work
flow which uses network and image analysis methods
together. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is
the first project that combines network and image
analysis from a humanities point of view. We submit
our research as an example that might inspire andguide other researchers who have to deal with hugearchives of user generated content.

References
Buter, B., N. Dijkshoorn, D. Modolo, Q.
Nguyen, N. van Noort, B. van de Poel, A. A.
Akdag Salah, and A. A. Salah (2011). Explorativevisualization and analysis of a social network for arts:
The case of deviantArt. Journal of Convergence 2(2):87-94.
Chen, C., H. Wactlar, J. Wang, and K. Kiernan(2005). Digital imagery for significant cultural andhistorical materials. Int. Journal on Digital Libraries
5(4): 275-286.

its application to image retrieval. Soft Computing in
Image Processing, pp. 97-120.
Wang, W., and Q. He (2008). A survey on
emotional semantic image retrieval. ICIP 15th IEEE
International Conference on Image Processing, pp.
117-120.
Notes
1. In our work we use Pajek for network analysis ( http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek ). We also makeuse of R for building networks ( http://cran.r-project.org/ ), Sci2 for calculating basic network measurements( http://https://sci2.cns.iu.edu/user/index.php ), as well as Gephi for visualizing the networks ( http://www.gephi.org ).
2. Software Studies Initiative created Image-Plot, the first set ofimage analysis and image visualization tools for humanities
researches, http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/ima
geplot.html

Chen, H. (2001). An analysis of image retrieval tasks
in the field of art history. Information Processingand Management 37(5): 701-720.
Chen, H. (2007). A socio-technical perspective ofmuseum practitioners’ image-using behaviors. The
Electronic Library 25(1): 18-35.
Hertzmann, A., C. E. Jacobs, N. Oliver,
B. Curless, and D. H. Salesin (2001).
Image analogies. Proceedings of the 28th annual
conference on Computer graphics and interactive
techniques, pp. 327-340.
Hurtut, T. (2010). 2D Artistic images analysis, acontent-based survey. http://hal.archives-ouve
rtes.fr/docs/00/45/94/01/PDF/survey.pdf(accessed 10 January 2011).

Manovich, L. (2008). Cultural Analytics:
Analysis and Visualization of Large Cultural Data
Sets. http://www.manovich.net/cultural_analy
tics.pdf (accessed 10 January 2011).
Manovich, L., J. Douglass, and W.
Huber(2011).
Understanding
scanlation:
how to read one million fan-translated
manga pages. Image & Narrative 12(1):206-228. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/viewFile/13
3/104 (accessed 10 January 2011).

Li, Q., S. Luo, and Z. Shi (2007). Semantics-based
art image retrieval using linguistic variable. Fuzzy
Systems and Knowledge Discovery 2: 406-410.
Li, Q., S. Luo, and Z. Shi (2007). Linguistic
expression based image description framework and81

Digital Humanities 2012

Patchworks and FieldBoundaries: Visualizing theHistory of English

useful for visualization: each individual point in
the hierarchy can contain both word entries forthe concept represented by that point, and also all
the conceptual descendants which follow it, eachsurrounded by siblings of similar meaning.

Alexander, Marc

The size of the HT also makes it amenable tocomputational analysis. The current version of thedatabase (as of mid 2011) contains 793,747 entries,
compared to OED2’s 616,500 (Algeo 1990: 137),
all within 236,346 categories, each representing
a distinct concept. Taking into account eachfield stored within it, the database itself contains
approximately 22.7 million pieces of data.

marc.alexander@glasgow.ac.uk
University of Glasgow, UK

1. Introduction
This paper uses the database of the Historical
Thesaurus of English (Kay et al. 2009; hereafter
abbreviated to HT) to visualize change in thehistory of English, and in particular in the English
lexicon. The HT, published in 2009, is the world’s
largest thesaurus and the most complete thesaurus
of English, arranging into hierarchical semantic
categories all the recorded meanings expressed in
the language from Anglo-Saxon times to the present.
The underlying HT database (see Kay & Chase
1987; Wotherspoon 1992), held at the University ofGlasgow, is a massive computational resource foranalyzing the recorded words of English with regards
to both their meaning and dates of use.
The present paper describes a methodology ofvisualizing English using data from the HT,
developed from an earlier pilot project (Alexander
2010). By combining visualization techniques withthe high-quality humanities data provided in the HT,
it is possible to give scholars a long-range view ofchange in the history, culture and experiences of
the English-speaking peoples as seen through theirlanguage.

2. The Data
The data stored within the HT is a fine-grained
conceptual hierarchy containing almost all of therecorded words in English, arranged semantically.
Each category of words is nested within other,
wider categories, so that, for example, the verb
category Live dissolutely is within Licentiousness,
itself adjacent to Guilt and Rascalry and within thewider category Morality. This hierarchical structure
differs from the organization of many other thesauri;
HT categories relate to others not just linearly,
but can operate either horizontally (on the samehierarchical level) or vertically (on a higher or lower
level, either containing or being contained by anothercategory). In addition, each concept is able to containa series of subcategories within itself, separate fromthe main sequence. It is this complex hierarchicalstructure which helps make the HT database so82

3. Visualization
The normal metaphor for visualizing hierarchy is atree-like system, like that often used in organisation
charts. HT data is, however, far too large to be usedin such a way – even a spider-like tree or hypertree
could not represent the thesaurus, whose largest
category alone (the adverb Immediately) contains
over 250 synonyms.
Instead, the present paper will describe an alternative
way of displaying the HT hierarchy, representing
each category as a nested rectangle on a plane. This
technique produces a ‘treemap’ (see Shneiderman2009), wherein each entry in a hierarchy isrepresented by a rectangle which is large enoughto contain smaller rectangles representing its
descendants while simultaneously being itself smallenough to nest within further rectangles representing
its parent categories. In short, a treemap structure
takes the organisational chart metaphor of senior isup and replaces it with senior is big.
Doing this for the full hierarchy of the HT lets us
view the semantic structure of the English language
as a whole. Figure 1 is therefore a treemap showing
all of present-day English in the HT, with every
word represented by a small dot of ink. Those
black dots are present-day words which originated in
Old English, and white dots represent those which
entered the language much more recently. The map
is arranged by semantic field, so words in closesemantic proximity are also physically close to one
another on the diagram. An interactive display ofthis visualization allows an analyst to see which areas
correspond to which categories and lexemes.

4. Patchworks and FieldBoundaries
One effect which is visible from Figure 1 isthat modern English has a ‘patchwork’ effectin the visualization. Areas such as Physics andChemistry are quite light, as are parts of Number

Digital Humanities 2012

(which includes Mathematics) and Language. Thisphenomenon makes it possible to visually view theareas where the English language has ‘stretched’
in order to accommodate new vocabulary. Theselight patches within the greater patchwork are areasof recent lexical innovation, made up of clusters
of words first cited in the OED and recorded in
the HT from recent years. Therefore, we would
expect this patchwork effect in areas affected by
rapid social, technological or academic growth,such as Computing (inside Number, adjacentto Mathematics), Physics, Chemistry, Linguistics,
Communication, Travel, and so on. Conversely,
darker and therefore older patches cover existencein Time and Space, Creation, Causation, Faith,
Emotion, and the parts of Number which refer toArithmetic or Enumeration.

English (eg in the time of Chaucer or Shakespeare),and in illustrating lacuna in our knowledge of earlier
periods of the language, and will outline areas of
future development of this approach.

This effect is pronounced in present-day English, but
if other selections of the data are taken, it reduces
somewhat. If the present-day data is thought ofas a ‘slice’ of the HT, then other such slices canbe taken between the Old English period and thepresent day. Other slices reveal that this patchwork
effect, with its pronounced edges between new andold semantic fields, do not occur throughout therest of the history of the language. Proceeding
backwards from the present day through the Late
Modern, Early Modern and Middle English periods,
there is a visible reduction in the patchwork effectobserved above, so that by Middle English almost no
delineated rectangular patches of innovation can befound. The paper compares these slices and offers
an interpretation of various areas of patchwork andpatchwork-like effects across time, which, as a resultof rapid growth, generally indicates fundamental andrapid progress in the context of the language.

Figure 1: Present-day English fromthe HT, shaded by first cited date

5. Conclusion
In the ways outlined above, such visual displaysof HT data can provide useful entry points toa large, complex lexicographical and lexicologicaldataset. Firstly, in a pedagogical sense, these displays
can give students and the public a new way oflooking at humanities data, and of exploring theminteractively. Secondly, as computer displays andonline dictionary interfaces become more polished,
new ways of encouraging exploration of lexical data
online are needed to replace the lost experienceof browsing a printed dictionary, rather than only
providing users with a blank search interface. And
finally, such visualizations can point analysts towards
areas of possible semantic, lexical or cultural interest,
whether areas of trauma in the history of thelanguage, areas of rapid growth, or areas of relative
stability. The paper will conclude by demonstratingsome of these, including ‘slices’ of the data giving
visualisations of various points in the history ofReferences
Alexander, M. (2010). ‘The Various Forms ofCivilization Arranged in Chronological Strata’:
Manipulating the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.
In M. Adams (ed.), ‘Cunning passages, contrived
corridors’: Unexpected Essays in the History of
Lexicography. Monza: Polimetrica.
Algeo, J. (1990). The Emperor’s New Clothes:
The second edition of the society’s dictionary.
Transactions of the Philological Society 88(2):131-150.
Kay, C., and T. J. P. Chase (1987). Constructing
a Thesaurus Database. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 2(3): 161–163.
Kay, C., J. Roberts, M. Samuels, and I.
Wotherspoon (2009). Historical Thesaurus of the
OED. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Shneiderman,B.
(2009).
Treemapsforspace-constrained
visualizationofhierarchies. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/tree
map-history/index.shtml (accessed 26 October2011).
Simpson, J., and E. Weiner, eds. (1989). The
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd. ed. Oxford: Oxford
UP.
Wotherspoon, I. (1992). Historical Thesaurus
Database Using Ingres. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 7(4): 218-225.

83

Digital Humanities 2012

Developing TransculturalCompetence in the Study ofWorld Literatures: Golden
Age Literature Glossary
Online (GALGO)
Alonso Garcia, Nuria
nalonsog@providence.edu
Providence College, USA

Caplan, Alison

acaplan@providence.edu
Providence College, USA

The technological demands of today’s global society
call into question the use of traditional approaches tolanguage and literary studies and challenge educators
to think about ways to integrate multimedia
creatively in their scholarship and teaching. The
project presented in this paper and currently
under construction offers an innovative approach to
studying literature that employs tools from the fieldof the digital humanities.
The
Comprehensive
DigitalGlossaryofGoldenAge
SpanishLiteratureor
GALGO (GoldenAgeLiteratureGlossaryOnline) is asearchable Spanish-English online glossary thatconsists of select words, from the most commonly
studied literary texts of the 16th and 17th centuries,
whose meanings and multiple connotations reflect
important linguistic and cultural concepts. The
selection of words is broadly consistent with the
keyword theory developed by Raymond Williams
in the mid-20th century. Keywords are lexical units
that comprise a network of associations, triggering‘different memories and imaginings,’ centeredaround dominant cultural notions and practices(Hart et al. 2005: 6). Keywords illustrate ways ofperceiving the world and reflect the shared interest or
ideology of a particular society and find expression in
a common vocabulary (Williams 1983: 15). Analyzing
keywords is an exercise in examining their usages
in context and in considering the evolution of their
meanings over time (Burgett & Hendler 2007: 1).
Keywords research is rooted in historical semantics
and focuses on how meaning is constructed andaltered through conflict and negotiation amongcertain social groups and movements; it is about
exploring the possibilities of language and unlocking
meaning.
GALGO is a vocabulary of keywords that explores
the canonical prose texts of Golden Age Spanish

84

literature – El abencerraje, Lazarillo de Tormes,
Miguel de Cervantes’ twelve Novelas ejemplares,
and principal comedias by Calderón de la Barca,
Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina –from the perspective of a history of ideas. The
digital glossary tags socially charged words thatreverberate through the texts and beyond. The
glossary stimulates students to evaluate criticallytheir own assumptions and reflect on philosophicaland ethical questions that continue to be of current
importance. The polysemic nature of the terms
selected, words such as esfuerzo, fuerza, gentileza,
and honra, offers valuable insight into the complex,
idiosyncratic Golden Age Spanish lexicon. We believethat identifying the different uses of the same word
in a literary work is both essential to reading
comprehension and to an understanding of societal
attitudes of the period.
GALGO is organized in such a way that the specificcontextualized definition is given in each instance
where the keyword is tagged. The literary works havebeen digitized and are available in the glossary incomplete electronic versions. The box containing thedefinition can remain open and is moveable, andusers are able to compare and contrast immediately
the word’s varied meanings in the text. Furthermore,with the support of a search algorithm, the glossary’s
multilayered design gives students the option to view
the same keyword in all of the texts in the database.
GALGO also contains a Javascript snippet that will
highlight and group together each distinct definitionof a search term across texts, thereby allowing
students to chart the prevalence of a particular usageof the word.
The methodology of GALGO combines the richword inventory of literary concordances with theideological interpretations of medieval and earlymodern manuscript glosses. The entries reveal aword’s different shades of meaning and, borrowing
from the exegetical tradition popularized in the
Middle Ages, function as brief explanatory notes thatgive broader significance to literary passages. For
example, in the novella El abencerraje, the noun
gentileza and its adjective form gentil are defined in
the following ways, depending on the context:
gentileza:
Unrequired goodwill shown by the more powerful tothe less powerful (magnanimity).
gentil:1. Of cultivated manner and appearance.
2. The best of its kind (exemplary).
When necessary, an additional feature called
Expansion of meaning appears alongside thedefinition in order to identify further semantic

Digital Humanities 2012

connections. The entry for honra in the line ‘…tuyo es
mi corazón, tuya es mi vida, mi honra y mi hacienda’from El abencerraje reads:
Definition:
Publicesteemreceived
inacknowledgement of one’s strength of character,specifically here, a woman’s chastity and/or marital
fidelity.
Expansion of meaning: In this period, honor(good reputation) was based on the following factors:social status, material wealth, strength of character,achievements, and in the case of a woman, herchastity and/or marital fidelity. Here, in pledging
vida, honra, and hacienda, the noblewoman wascommitting everything she was and had to the man.
By integrating qualitative analyses of literarytexts with quantitative computer derived methods,
GALGO promotes a novel form of active readingand engagement in language and culture. In thelast two decades, the pedagogical approach toforeign language study has moved beyond a primaryemphasis on developing functional communication
skills to an equally compelling interest in acquainting
students with representative literary and cultural
texts in the target language. The Modern Language
Association’s 2007 report places the acquisition oftranscultural and translingual competencies, namely
the ability to reflect on how realities are shaped
differently across languages, historical periods andcultures, at the core of the foreign languages
discipline. GALGO engages learners in the analysisof classic literary texts in a meaningful way, allowing
them to test their hypotheses as to possible lexicaland cultural preconceptions through immediate
feedback.

References
Burgett, B., and G. Hendler (2007). Keywords
for American Cultural Studies. New York: New YorkUP.
Hart, D. P., S. E. Jarvis, W. P. Jennings, and D.
Smith-Howell (2005). Political Keywords. Using
Language that Uses Us. New York: Oxford UP.
MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign
Languages (2007). Foreign Languages and Higher
Education: New Structures for a Changed World.
New York.
Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society. 2nded. New York: Oxford UP.

Trees of Texts – Models andmethods for an updated
theory of medieval text
stemmatology
Andrews, Tara Leetara.andrews@arts.kuleuven.be
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Macé, Caroline

caroline.mace@arts.kuleuven.be
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

The construction of a stemma codicum from themanuscript witnesses to a given text remains asomewhat divisive issue in philology. To a classicalphilologist, it is a necessary first step toward
creating a critical edition of the text;1 to a scholar
who adheres to the principles of new philology,
the assumptions inherent in the construction ofa stemma are so fundamentally unsound that theexercise is pointless.2
The advent of digital philology demands a fresh lookat the practice of stemmatology; indeed there has
been a great deal of work in the past two decades on
the subject, and in particular on the applicability ofsimilar work from the field of evolutionary biology
on the reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships
between species.Among the numerous works on
this subject are: 3 More recent work has begun toovercome the limitations of these techniques whenapplied to manuscript texts, such as the biologicalassumption that no extant species is descended fromanother, or the assumption that any ancestor species
has precisely two descendants, or the converse
assumption that any descendant species has precisely
one ancestor.4
Despite this considerable methodological progress,
the fundamental assumptions at the core ofstemmatology have yet to be formalised, or evenseriously questioned. The purpose of this paper isto revisit these assumptions and simplifications; topropose a model for the representation of texts inall their variations that is tractable to computational
analysis; to set forth a method for the evaluation ofstemma hypotheses with reference to text variants,
and vice versa; and to discuss the means by which
we can provide the field of stemmatology with aformal underpinning appropriate for the abilities
that modern computational methods now provide us
to handle vast quantities of data.

85

Digital Humanities 2012

1. Modelling a text tradition
The first step to computational analysis of any text
tradition is to model it programmatically. This actof object modelling is distinct from, and orthogonal
to, text encoding – the component texts may reach
us in a variety of forms, including TEI XML andits critical apparatus module, CSV-format alignment
tables, a base text and a list of variants exported froma word processor, or even individual transcriptions
that remain to be collated. All of these must be
parsed into a uniform computational object model
for further programmatic analysis.
Our model is relatively simple, taking into
account only those features of the text that arecomputationally useful for our purposes. We define
a tradition as the union of all the versions of a textthat exist, represented by its witnesses. A collation is
the heart of the tradition, representing in a unified
way the entire text with all its known variations.
We have adapted the variant graph model proposedby Schmidt and Colomb5 for this purpose. Whereas
the Schmidt/Colomb model is a single graph, wherereadings are represented along edges, ours is a pair ofgraphs, in which readings are represented by vertices.
The set of vertices is identical in both graphs; inthe ‘sequence’ graph, the witnesses themselves are
represented as a set of paths. Each witness path
is directed and acyclic, taking a route through thereading vertices from beginning to end, according tothe order of its text. The witness path may branch,
if for example the text contains corrections by theoriginal scribe(s) or by later hands; the branches arelabeled appropriately. If transpositions are present,
the graph as a whole is not directed and acyclic(DAG); we have therefore found it most useful torepresent transposed readings as separate vertices,
linked through a relationship as described below.
A DAG may then be trivially transformed into analignment table, with transpositions handled either
as separate rows in the table or as variant characterswithin the same row.

Figure 1: A portion of a variant graph, with directed
witness paths and undirected relationships

The second graph concerns relationships between
readings, or types of variation that occur within the
text. We may specify that two different readings are
orthographic or syntactic variants of the same root
word, or that they have some semantic relationshipto each other. We may also specify transpositions in
86

this way. The result is an unconnected and undirected
graph that adds extra information to the sequencegraph without compromising its properties. The
relationship information allows association andregularization of reading data, producing thereby
more exact versions of alignment tables for our
statistical procedures.

2. Modelling a stemma hypothesis
The goal of our research is to arrive at an empiricalmodel of medieval text transmission, and set forth aformalized means of deducing copying relationships
between texts. As such, we have two tasks before us.
We must be able to evaluate a stemma hypothesis
according to the variation present in a text tradition,
and we must be able to evaluate variants in a tradition
according to a given stemma hypothesis.
The problem becomes computationally tractableonce we realize that a stemma hypothesis is alsoa DAG. No matter the complexity of the stemma,
no matter the degree of ‘horizontal transmission’,a stemma can be represented as a connected androoted DAG, where each extant or hypothesizedmanuscript is a vertex, and each edge describes asource relationship from one manuscript to another.
(In our model, any stemma has a single archetype;where multiple archetypes exist in a text tradition, wemust either consider a common theoretical origin forthese archetypes, or speak of multiple stemmata.)

Figure 2: An arbitrarily complex stemma, represented as a DAG

In cooperation with the Knowledge Representation
and Reasoning group within the KU Leuven
Computer Science faculty,6 we have developed amethod for evaluating sets of variants against astemma hypothesis of arbitrary complexity, testingDigital Humanities 2012

whether any particular set of variants aligns withthe stemma hypothesis, and measuring the relative
stability of particular readings (defined in terms of
how often they are copied vs. how often they arealtered). In conjunction with the variant graphs of
our text model, we are also able programmaticallyto draw some empirical conclusions about therelationships between readings as they are altered
within the text.

3. An empirical approach to text
variation
The idea of distinguishing ‘text-genealogical’ variantsfrom the coincidental sort is not new;7 with the
exception of U. Schmid (2004), however, noneof the approaches taken have been empirical, in
accordance with text relationships known fromoutside the variant tables. Given the means toquickly evaluate a stemma in detail according to
the variants present in the text, distinguishing thosevariants that follow the stemma from those that donot, we should now easily be able to arrive at an
empirical classification of genealogically ‘significant’and ‘insignificant’ variants. This threatens to createa problem of circular logic: how to retrieve thegenealogical variants in the real world? We build
hypotheses on the basis of variation; we accept
or reject variants as ‘genealogical’ based on the
hypothesis. How do we break the cycle?8
We may adopt two approaches to anchor our
methods in external results. First we test our methods
on artificial traditions that have been created for thetesting of stemmatological methods. These traditions
are convenient in that the true stemmata are
known, but they cannot reflect the true conditions
under which medieval texts were copied. Thus wemust also use ‘real’ text traditions, whose truestemmata are not fully known; in many medieval
traditions, however, some paratextual information(e.g. colophon notations, physical damage or otherphysical characteristics of the texts) survives and canbe used to establish or verify copying relationships. In
our presentation we will discuss the results obtainedon three artificial traditions, and three real medieval
traditions with credible stemma hypotheses derived
from external characteristics.

4. Conclusion
When examining a medieval tradition, we can rarely
be certain what the scribe has copied in a text, andwhat has changed coincidentally or independently.
To date, stemmatic reasoning has relied on thequestion of whether the scholar finds it likely thata given variant was preserved in copies. Given themodels and methods for analysis proposed herein,

we have an opportunity to remove this limitation of‘assumed likelihood’ and take all the evidence of a text
into account, to build a statistical model independentof the constraints of evolutionary biology, using
statistical probability rather than scholarly instinct
alone.

References
Blockeel, H., B. Bogaerts, M. Bruynooghe,B. de Cat, S. de Pooter, M. Denecker,
A. Labarre, and J. Ramon (2012). Modeling
Machine Learning Problems with FO(·). Submitted
to the 28th International Conference on Logic
Programming.
Cameron, H. D. (1987). The upside-down
cladogram. Problems in manuscript affiliation. In
H. M. Hoenigswald and L. F. Wiener (eds.),
Biological metaphor and cladistic classification :an interdisciplinary perspective. Philadelphia: U of
Pennsylvania P.
Cerquiglini, B. (1989). Éloge de la variante :histoire critique de la philologie, Paris: Éd. du Seuil.
Howe, C. J., A. C. Barbrook, M. Spencer, P.
Robinson, B. Bordalejo, and L. Mooney (2001).
Manuscript Evolution. Trends in Genetics 17: 147-52.
Maas, P. (1957). Textkritik. Leipzig: Teubner.
Macé, C., and P. Baret (2006). Why Phylogenetic
Methods Work: The Theory of Evolution and Textual
Criticism. In C. Macé, P. Baret, A. Bozzi, and L.
Cignoni (eds.), The Evolution of Texts: Confronting
Stemmatological and Genetical Methods. Pisa,
Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali.
Pasquali, G. (1962). Storia della tradizione e criticadel testo. Firenze: F. Le Monnier.
Reeve, M. D. (1986). Stemmatic method: ‘Qualcosa
che non funziona?’ In P. F. Ganz (ed.), The role of thebook in medieval culture : proceedings of the Oxford
International Symposium, 26 September-1 October1982. Turnhout: Brepols.
Roos, T., and Y. Zou (2011). Analysis of
Textual Variation by Latent Tree Structures. IEEE
International Conference on Data Mining, 2011
Vancouver.
Salemans, B. J. P. (2000). Building Stemmas with
the Computer in a Cladistic, Neo-Lachmannian,
Way: The Case of Fourteen Text Versions ofLanseloet van Denemerken. Ph.D., Katholieke
Universiteit Nijmegen.
Schmid, U. (2004). Genealogy by chance! On thesignificance of accidental variation (parallelisms).
In P. T. van Reenen, A. den Hollander, and M.

87

Digital Humanities 2012

van Mulken (eds.), Studies in Stemmatology II.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Schmidt, D., and R. Colomb (2009). A data
structure for representing multi-version texts online.
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
67: 497-514.
Spencer, M., and C. J. Howe (2001). Estimating
distances between manuscripts based on copying
errors. Literary and Linguistic Computing 16:
467-484.

Mapping the Information
Science Domain
Arazy, Oferofer.arazy@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Ruecker, Stansruecker@ualberta.ca
Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

P. T. van Reenen, A. den Hollander, andM. van Mulken, eds. (2004). Studies in
Stemmatology I., Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Rodriguez, Omar

West, M. L. (1973). Textual Criticism and Editorial
Technique: Applicable to Greek and Latin Texts.
Stuttgart: Teubner.

Giacometti, Alejandro

Notesomar.rodrigueza@gmail.com
University of Alberta, Canada
alejandro.giacometti@gmail.com
University College London, UK

Zhang, Lu

1. Maas 1957; Pasquali 1962; West 1973.

lu.eva.zhang@gmail.com
University of Alberta, Canada

2. See, among many references on this question Cerquiglini 1989;
Reeve 1986.

Chun, Su

3. Cameron 1987; Howe et al. 2001; Macé & Baret 2006; Spencer& Howe 2001.

schun@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

4. Roos & Zou 2011.
5. Schmidt & Colomb 2009.
6. Blockeel et al. 2012.
7. Salemans 2000. See also papers by Wachtel, van Mulken,
Schmid, Smelik, Schøsler, and Spencer et al in van Reenen etal. 2004.
8. See the critique of concerning the work of Salemans.

In the scholarly community, there has been forthe last fifteen years an increasing interest ininterdisciplinary projects, where researchers withdifferent disciplinary backgrounds form teams tocollaborate in addressing problems that are either
not clearly within a single research domain, or thatcan best be approached by combining a variety of
approaches. However, there also remain a numberof research areas where interdisciplinary approaches
seem to be warranted, but scholars in single
disciplines have continued to work largely in isolationfrom their colleagues in other domains. We focus on
one specific scientific field – information science –which is investigated in various disciplines: library
and archival studies, computer science, management(and specifically, management information systems),
and engineering, to name just a few.
Prior works in the area have discussed the disconnect
between various areas within the broad field of
information science, relying primarily on co-citation
techniques and content analysis. These studies
concluded that although all domains within this area
are focused on the concepts of information, people,and (information and communication) technologies,
the disciplines remain disjunct in terms of theirdisciplinary recognitions and topic of research.
Despite some similarities in research methodology(‘research approach’ and ‘level of analysis’) (Glasset al. 2004), there are substantial differences in

88

Digital Humanities 2012

terms of co-citation patterns (Ellis et al. 1999; Sawyer& Huang 2007), indicating the fields are distinct.
Furthermore, although the research in these various
areas may often appear to be similar on the surface,
the contents of research are varied as well (Ellis et al.
1999). Glass et al. (2004) concluded that ‘overall, we
see that there was minimal topic overlap’ among thevarious disciplines, and Sawyer and Huang (2007)
summarize that these areas of scholarship ‘haveoverlapping, but substantively different, researchfoci.’
Despite these interesting findings, extant researchsuffers from three primary limitations. First,
previous studies are limited in scope, often focusing
on just a subset of the academic units that publish
articles in the domain. Second, prior research often
relied on manual analysis, limiting the number ofarticles that are studied. Third, previous researchin the area made little usage of information
visualization techniques; recent advancements in thefield of visualization have provided tools for exposing
intricate relationships in data, and have the potential
to reveal interesting patterns in interdisciplinaryscience.
Furthermore, although research on earlier data
describes a disjoint domain, recent years have seen
what appear to be the first signs of convergence inthe various sub-fields within the broad information
science discipline. We see more and more crossdepartmental collaborations, journals with a muchbroader scope (e.g. JASIST), and there is a moveacross North America to amalgamate these various
departments under one institutional roof (often
referred to as the ‘information school’ or simply‘iSchool’).
The objective of this paper is to address theseprevious limitations and map developments in theinformation science domain in the last fifteen years,
using novel visualization techniques. We revisit
the question of the divergence/convergence within
the sub-disciplines, and propose a scalable method
for analyzing (through both statistical analysis andadvanced visualizations) the semantic and usage
patterns in information science research articles.
We focus our attention on three pre-defined topics
that cross boundaries and are investigated in many
sub-domains. For example the notion of ‘Trust’ wasdefined as ‘designing tools that would help alleviate
the problem of trust in e-commerce, e.g. rating
and reputation mechanisms’, and was represented
using the following keywords: ‘trust’, ‘online’, ‘web’,‘e-commerce’, ‘electronic commerce’, ‘e-business’,‘trustworthiness’, ‘rating’, ‘reputation’, ‘reputation
mechanism’, ‘system’, and ‘information system’.
Our method involved the following steps: (a) defining
each of the three topic areas – ‘trust’, ‘text mining’,and ‘web services’ - through a series of search
keywords; (b) running these keywords on theThompson Reuters Web of Knowledge ( http://wok
info.com/ http://wokinfo.com/) corpus of research
articles, repeating the query separately for the 15
years under investigation, and choosing the 500
highest ranked (in terms of matching the query)research articles at each time period; (c) analyzing
the relationships between the 500 articles in eachtime period using both co-citation and content
analysis; and (d) developing novel visualization to
expose how the patterns of relationships develop overthe fifteen years.
Traditionally, citation patterns have been visualizedusing a network diagram, where the articles are
represented as nodes and the citations are shown aslines connecting the nodes (e.g. Shen et al. 2006).
Others have developed variations on this form ofvisual representation (Nakazono et al. 2006; Brandes& Willhalm 2002; Ibekwe-SanJuan & SanJuan2009).
Our approach builds on the Eigenfactor method(Bergstrom & West 2008), which applies analgorithm similar to Google’s PageRank (Brin & Page
1998) to determine which nodes in a networks (inthis case, journals) are most important, and how
nodes connect with one another. The importancedepends on where a journal resides in this mesh ofcitation links: the more citations a journal receives,
especially from other well connected journals, themore important the journal is.
We model our visualization technique after thewell-formed eigenfactor method (Stefaner 2009)that utilizes Eigenfactor, and was used in thepast to track the evolution of the Neuroscience
domain ( http://well-formed-data.net/archiv
es/331/neuroscience-infoporn ). That analysis
pre-determined the association of journals to
disciplines, and then analyzed the relationships
between disciplines as they evolve over time. We,
however, sought a more organic approach, which
recognizes that a journal could publish articles
belonging to various areas (and even a specificarticle may belong to more than one area). Thus, weemployed the classification of articles to categories
provided by the Web of Knowledge.
Building on prior work in the field (Ellis et al. 1999;
Glass et al. 2004), we analyze relationships both interms of content and citation patterns. For each of
the three topics, and for each of the time periods, weanalyzed the 500 research articles to create similarity
matrixes – in terms respectively of content andcitation pattern – and then aggregated the data tocalculate similarities between Web of Knowledge
categories. These categories similarity matrixes were
the input for our visualization method.
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Digital Humanities 2012

The results of our analysis are 3 pairs ofvisualizations, where each pair represents theevolution in the information science domain interms of content and citation pattern for one topic.
Figures 1a-c below depict the evolution in the ‘trust’area, when using citation patterns as the method ofanalysis.

Figure 2, below, represents the visualization for thesame topic – ‘Trust’ – this time based on the content
of the research articles.

Figure 2: the evolution in the ‘Trust’ topic, whenanalysis is based on the contents of articles

Figure 1a: the evolution in the ‘Trust’ topic; each line representsa Web of Science category; each cluster is made up of similar
categories, corresponding to a specific scientific discipline

Figure 1b: the ‘Information Science & Library Science’ category,and how it evolved in terms of clustering with other categories

There are two interesting findings from our analysis.
First, we see substantial differences between cocitation patterns and the patterns based on content(i.e. comparing Figures 1a and 2a). While thetopical analysis shows one primary cluster, the cocitation visualization depicts many small clusters.
Thus, while there is a substantial convergence interms of contents, the information science fieldremains disjoint in terms of citation patterns. Someof the primary clusters correspond to the domainsof management information systems, computerengineering, medical informatics, health information
systems, physics, law, and computer science. Second,
there are differences between topics. While the‘Trust’ topic seem to have emerged from one area,
and then broken into smaller sub-areas over theyears (see Figure 1a), the ‘Text mining’ topic remains
relatively consistent in terms of its decomposition toclusters.
We conclude that our novel data analysis andvisualization methods have revealed patterns thathave never been described before, highlighting thedifferences between topics of investigation within
the broad information science discipline. In our
next iteration of the project will include (a) the
analysis of a larger corpus of research articles,
trying to capture this entire domain, (b) refined data
analysis methods, and (c) the exploration of new
visualization techniques, which would help us todiscover additional hidden patterns.
Funding

Figure 1c: the cluster that includes the ‘Information
Science & Library Science’ category; on theright: the list of categories in this cluster; eachcolored line represents a category and its origins

90

This research was supported in part by SSHRC, theSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.

Digital Humanities 2012

References
Bergstrom, C. T., and J. D. West (2008).
Assessing Citations with the Eigenfactor™ Metrics.
Neurology 71: 1850-1851.
Brandes, U., and T. Willhalm (2002).
Visualization of Bibliographic Networks with a
Reshaped Landscape Metaphor. Proceedings of
the Symposium on Data Visualisation, Barcelona,
Spain, May 27-29, 2002.

Words made Image.
Towards a Language-Based
Segmentation of Digitized
Art Collections
Armaselu, Florentina
armaselu@ymail.com
ZoomImagine, Germany

Brin S., and L. Page (1998). The Anatomy ofa Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.
Computer Networks 30: 107-117.
Ellis, D., D. Allen, and T. Wilson (1999).
Information Science and Information Systems:
Conjunct Subjects Disjunct Disciplines. Journal of
the American Society for Information Science andTechnology 50(12): 1095-1107.
Glass, R. L., V. Ramesh, and I. Vessey (2004).
An Analysis of Research in Computing Disciplines.
Communications of the ACM 47(6): 89-94.
Ibekwe-SanJuan, F., and E. SanJuan (2009).
The Landscape of Information Science: 1996-2008.
Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint
Conference on Digital Libraries, Austin, TX, USA,
June 15-19, 2009).
Nakazono, N., K. Misue, and J. Tanaka(2006). NeL2: Network Drawing Tool for Handling
Layered Structured Network Diagram. Proceedingsof the 2006 Asia-Pacific Symposium on information
Visualisation, – Volume 60 (Tokyo, Japan). K.
Misue, K. Sugiyama, and J. Tanaka (eds.). ACM
International Conference Proceeding Series, vol.
164. Australian Computer Society, Darlinghurst,
Australia, pp. 109-115.
Sawyer,S.,
andH.
Huang (2007).
Conceptualizing Information, Technology, andPeople: Comparing Information Science andInformation Systems Literatures. Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science andTechnology 58(10): 1436-1447.
Shen, Z., M. Ogawa, S. T. Teoh, and K.
Ma (2006). BiblioViz: a System for Visualizing
Bibliography Information. Proceedings of the2006 Asia-Pacific Symposium on information
Visualisation - Volume 60 (Tokyo, Japan). K. Misue,
K. Sugiyama, and J. Tanaka, Eds. ACM International
Conference Proceeding Series, vol. 164. AustralianComputer Society, Darlinghurst, Australia, 93-102.
Stefaner,M.
(2009).
Well-Formed
Eignefactor, http://well-formed-data.net/archives/192/well-formed-eigenfactor

1. Introduction
Within the framework of computer vision, the fieldof image segmentation is becoming increasingly
important for a set of applications aiming to anunderstanding of the visual content, like object
recognition and content-based image retrieval. The
goal of the segmentation process is to identify
contiguous regions of interest in a digitized image
and to assign labels to the pixels corresponding toeach identified area. While most of today’s searchingcapabilities are based on metadata (keywords andcaption) attached to the image as a whole, one canobserve a tendency towards more meaning-oriented
approaches intending to split the analyzed image intosemantically annotated objects.
From this perspective, research efforts have been
dedicated, on one hand, to the task of automatedimage annotation (Barnard et al. 2003; Johnson
2008; Leong & Mihalcea 2009; Leong et al. 2010),
and on the other hand, to the construction of semiautomatically annotated datasets used for supervised
image processing (MSRC-v2; Russel, Torralba et
al. 2008; CBCL StreetScenes; PASCAL VOC 2007;
Welinder et al. 2010). The visual data used forautomated annotation may consist, for instance, inimages extracted from the Web and the surrounding
text in the html pages used as a source ofcandidate labels (Leong and Mihalcea; Leong etal.). The datasets are mainly derived from digital
photographs with the goal to allow recognition of
objects belonging to a number of classes like person,
animal, vehicle, indoor (Pascal VOC), pedestrians,cars, buildings, road (CBCL StreetScenes), birds
species (Caltech- UCSD Birds 200) or to categories
interactively defined by users in a Web-based
annotation environment (LabelMe).
Our proposal is related to the latter group of
applications, i.e. the construction of an interactively
annotated dataset of art images (to our knowledge
a category less represented in the field), taking
into account the textual descriptions of the images
intended for analysis. The set of images for91

Digital Humanities 2012segmentation will include digitized icons on themes
described in the Painter’s Manual by Dionysius
of Fourna. The choice was not arbitrary, given
the highly canonical nature of the Byzantine
and Orthodox iconography, almost unchanged for
centuries, and the close relationship between the
text and the pictorial content of the associatedicon. Another reason concerns the potential for
subsequent applications of learning algorithms to thesegmentation of new sets of icons depicting the same
themes (and therefore relatively similar content),starting from the initial annotated training set. The
choice of a largely circulated text like the Painter’s
Manual, translated in several languages, may also
serve as a basis for multilingual annotation of thedataset.

according to their importance in the analyzed image,by selecting sample points on the image for eachcolour. We defined four colours: Amber, Blue,
Brown, and Yellow. The phenotype training (b)implied the choice of representative points for every
object in the picture that should be identified by
the program in the segmentation phase. From theprocessed text with the Stanford parser, we used
the following nouns as objects labels: angel, bank,
Christ, fish, Forerunner, Holy_Spirit, Jordan, ray,and word. For each phenotype, a colour for thecorresponding segment was also chosen (b, c). The
program required as well the specification of a NONphenotype, i.e. an area in the image which does notinclude any of the above defined objects, in our casethe black background representing the sky in the
picture.

2. The Experiment
The project consists in the use of two types ofsoftware, one intended to the segmentation of thevisual content, the other to the processing of the
textual fragments in order to provide the user withcandidate labels for the annotation of the segments.
The experiment described below makes use of two
open source Java packages, GemIdent – a statisticalimage segmentation system, initially designed to
identify cell phenotypes in microscopic images(Holmes et al. 2009), and the Stanford parser, anatural language statistical parser for English, which
can be adapted to work with other languages suchas German, French, Chinese and Arabic. Figure 1
presents the original image, The Baptism of Christ(Nes 2004: 66), and the corresponding text from the
Painter’s Manual book.

Figure 1 a: 'The Baptism of Christ'. b: The Baptism of Christ(Dionysius of Fourna 1996: 33). Greek variant. Cretan school.
Egg tempera on pine. 78.5 x 120 cm (1989) (Nes 2004: 66)

The image processing involved two phases of colour
and phenotype (class or category of objects to be
distinguished) training and a phase of segmentation(classification) (see Fig. 2). In the phase of colour
training (a), the user can define a set of colours,

92

Figure 2: GemIdent. a. Colour training; b.
Phenotype training; c. Segmented image

One can observe that the result of the segmentation
process (c) is not perfect. There are small regions
belonging to a segment but included in anotherobject: for instance, the light blue (Forerunner) andred (Christ) areas inside the angel objects. GemIdent
allows error correction and re-segmentation in orderto improve the segmentation process. Although moretests are needed, the results obtained so far seemto indicate a performance depending on the colour
selection (tests with same theme pictures, using thetrained colour set without colour training on the new
pictures, showed less satisfactory results), and on thenumber and position of the sample points for thephenotype training (ranging from 20 points for small
objects like word to 150 for larger objects like bank;selection of sample points from border areas adjacent
to different objects seem also particularly important).
On the other hand, the experiment supposed theuse of the Type dependency Viewer to visualize thegrammatical relationships produced by the Stanfordparser, according to the typed dependencies model(Marneffe & Manning 2011). Figure 3 presents
the parsing results on the Dionysius of Fourna’s
text. The directed edges in the graphs show theDigital Humanities 2012

dependencies between a governor element (or head)
and a dependent, both corresponding to words in thesentence. The edge labels express the grammatical
relations between the two words. For example, nsubj
refers to a nominal subject relation between a verb
(standing, surround) and the syntactic subject of aclause (Christ, fish). Similarly, pobj, dobj connecta preposition (in, of, to) with its object - the headof a noun phrase following the preposition (midst,
Jordan, head, Christ) – or, respectively, a verb
(surround) and its direct object (Christ). Other
relations may refer to adverbial, prepositional or
relative clause modifiers (advmod, prep, rcmod),determiners (det), coordination (cc), conjunct (conj),
undetermined dependency (dep), etc.

example, the computer-assisted detection of legal
gestures in medieval manuscripts (Schlecht et al.
2011);- extension of the segmentation process andencoding to include language-based information,i.e. not only objects labels (nouns) but also
dependencies reflecting the objects relationships
in the textual description (relative positioning,actions agents and objects, by means of verbs,
adjectival, adverbial, prepositional modifiers), as
they are captured by the pictorial content;- implementation of a semi-automatic tool
combining segmentation and parsing capabilities
as in the presented experiment; the tool andimages corpus will be available on line so that
potential users (students, teachers, researchers in
art history or image analysis) can reproduce theresults or use them in their own applications.
The DH 2012 presentation will focus on the
preliminary stage aspects of the project, e.g. generalframework, goals and expectations, experiments andpartial results, tools and data choices, model design,
more than on an overall quantitative and qualitative
results analysis.

References
Figure 3: Stanford parser results displayed using
the Typed dependency viewer. Excerpts. The
Baptism of Christ (Dionysius of Fourna 1996: 33)

A parallel between the pictorial and textual
representation of The Baptism of Christ may
be further explored. The introductory sentence
describing Christ, as a subject of the clause, standing
in the midst of the Jordan, is actually pointing to
the central figure of the painting. Prepositional or
adverbial phrases (such as to the right, to the left,
above, below) act as mediators positioning the otherelements in the icon relatively to the central figure.
Likewise, Christ occurrences in the text as direct or
prepositional object (of verbs like rest, descend, lookback, surround) are emphasising the ‘focal point’
projection towards which all the other agents’ actionsin the pictorial composition seem to converge.

3. Further development
Since the project is a work in progress, further
development will be required:- more tests, involving new sets of images andassociated art-historical description or annotationin another language (if translated variants of thetext and an adapted parser for that language
are available); tests using similar tools, as theFiji/ImageJ segmentation plugins, result analysis
and comparison with other approaches like, forBarnard, K., et al. (2003). Matching Words with
Pictures. Journal of Machine Learning Research 3.
CBCL StreetScenes.

http://cbcl.mit.edu/s(accessed 25
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March 2012).

Typed Dependency Viewer. http://tydevi.so
urceforge.net/ (accessed 25 March 2012).
MSRC-v2 image database, 23 object classes.
Microsoft Research Cambridge. http://research.
microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ObjectClassRe
cognition (accessed 25 March 2012).

Dionysius of Fourna (1996). The Painter’s
manual. 1989, 1996, Torrance, CA : Oakwood
Publications.
http://fiji.sc/wiki/index.php/FijiFiji,(accessed 25 March 2012).

Holmes, S., A. Kapelner, and P. P. Lee (2009).
An Interactive Java Statistical Image Segmentation
System: GemIdent. Journal of Statistical Software
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Johnson, M. A. (2008). Semantic Segmentation
and Image Search. Ph.D. dissertation, University ofCambridge.
Leong, C. W., and R. Mihalcea (2009).
Exploration in Automatic Image Annotation using
Textual Features. Proceedings of the Third
93Digital Humanities 2012

Linguistic Annotation Workshop, ACL-IJCNLP
2009, Singapore, pp. 56-59.
Leong, C. W., R. Mihalcea, and S. Hassan(2010). The Mining for Automatic Image Tagging.
Coding 2010, Poster Volume, Beijing, pp. 647-655.
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Marneffe,
M.-C.,andC.
D.
Manning (2011). Stanford typed dependencies
manual.
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dependencies_manual.pdf (accessed 25 March2012).
Nes, S. (2009). The Mystical Language of Icons.
Michigan/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans Publishing.
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cs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/voc2007(accessed 25 March 2012).
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http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml (accessed 25

March 2012).

Russell, B. C., A. Torralba, K. P. Murphy, andW. T. Freeman (2008). LabelMe: a database andweb-based tool for image annotation. International
Journal of Computer Vision 77(1-3): 157-173.
Schlecht J., B. Carqué, and B. Ommer(2011). Detecting Gestures in Medieval Images.
IEEE International Conference on Image
Processing (ICIP 2011), September 11-14, Brussels,
Belgium. http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/C
OMPVIS/research/gestures/ICIP11.pdf(accessed 25 March 2012).

Welinder, P., et al. (2010). Caltech-UCSD Birds
200, California Institute of Technology, CNSTR-2010-001. http://vision.caltech.edu/visi
pedia/CUB-200.html (accessed 25 March 2012).

HisDoc: Historical
Document Analysis,
Recognition, and Retrieval
Baechler, Micheal

micheal.baechler@unifr.ch
University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Fischer, Andreas

afischer@iam.unibe.ch
University of Bern, Switzerland

Naji, Nadanada.naji@unine.ch
University of Neuchatel, Switzerland

Ingold, Rolfrolf.ingold@unifr.ch
University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Bunke, Horst

bunke@iam.unibe.ch
University of Bern, Switzerland

Savoy, Jacquesjacques.savoy@unine.ch
University of Neuchatel, Switzerland

The HisDoc project aims at developing automatic
generic tools to support cultural heritage. Moreprecisely, we have designed and implemented asystem that performs a fully automated conversionof manuscripts into the corresponding electronic
format and provides effective search capabilities.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposedsolution, we have conducted a large-scale experimentusing medieval handwritten manuscripts writtenin Middle High German. The corpus used in our
experiments is based on a well known medieval
epic poem called Parzival and attributed to Wolfram
von Eschenbach. The first version dates to the firstquarter of the thirteenth century. Currently, we canfind several versions (with variations) but the St.
Gall collegiate library cod. 857 is the one used forexperimental evaluation.
The complete system does not make strong
assumptions about the current corpus, and it canbe adapted with little effort to handle other typesof documents and languages. The proposed HisDoc
system is subdivided into three main components,
namely: image analysis, text recognition andinformation retrieval.
The image analysis module basically has two
essential goals, namely image enhancement, whichaims at improving image quality in order to make94

Digital Humanities 2012

handling all the subsequent processing steps aneasier task. The second goal is to perform layout
analysis that provides a structural description of
the scanned document pages. This meta-information
may correspond to the number of columns, thenumber of lines per column, the location of theheadline, etc. It is known that these old manuscripts
suffer from ink bleeding, holes and stitches onparchments in addition to the artifacts surrounding
the non-uniform handwritten text which represents
a difficult challenge at this phase as well as in thephases that follow.
The resulting digital images and their metainformation are then passed to the text recognition
phase, the second module of HisDoc, in orderto produce the corresponding digital transcription.
Here, flexible and robust recognition systems basedon Hidden Markov Models (Marti & Bunke 2001)
and Neural Networks (Graves et al. 2009) are used
for the task of automating the transcription ofhistorical texts (Fischer et al. 2009). In this context,
flexibility means that the system can be adapted
to new writing styles without great effort, androbustness means that the recognizer should attaina high rate of correctly recognized words. Besides
the automatically generated version, an error-freetranscription was created manually with the help ofexperts. This latter version forms our ground-truth
text and is used to assess the performance levels inthe different stages of our project.
For the analysis and recognition of historical
documents, only little work has been reported
in the literature so far, (Bunke & Varga 2007;
Likforman-Sulem et al. 2007) present surveys ofapproaches to off-line handwriting recognition andon different state-of-the-art text line extraction
methods respectively. Commercial systems with ahigh recognition accuracy are available only for
restricted domains with modern handwritten scripts,
e.g., for postal address (Srihari et al. 1996) and bankcheck reading (Gorski et al. 2001).
The HisDoc recognition module has evolved interms of performance and achieved its current wordaccuracy which is close to 94% thus a word-error
rate of around 6% using Hidden Markov Models andcharacter similarity features (Fischer et al. 2010). As
can be seen, it is unfortunately impossible to obtain
flawless recognition especially with the existence of
all of the aging and decorative issues mentioned
above. The level of the error rate depends on various
factors such as the accuracy of the recognition
system, the quality of the contrast between the
background and the ink, and the regularity of thehandwriting. Finally, the size of the training set also
plays a role, but relatively good performance can beachieved with a relatively small training set (around6,000 words).

In order to reduce the human effort needed togenerate training samples, HisDoc’s text recognition
module also includes methods for efficient groundtruth creation and text-image alignment in case of an
existing electronic text edition (Fischer et al. 2011).
Performing effective searches on the resulting
transcriptions is the goal of the third and lastmodule in HisDoc, the information retrieval (IR)module. The cascading effects of manuscript quality,
graphical characteristics and recognition error rate
will have an impact on the performance level.
But we must also consider additional factors
particularly related to medieval writing. Our corpus
was handwritten during the thirteenth century, whenspelling was not standardized which introduces yet
an additional challenge. Moreover, the co-existenceof different spellings referring to the same entity inthe same manuscript would also reduce the retrieval
effectiveness. Besides that, one should also keep
in mind the fact that grammar used in medieval
languages was clearly different once compared to thatof our modern days, which allowed more flexibility
for the writer, thus varying from one region toanother, or even from one writer to another residingin the same region. All these grammatical andorthography-related matters (spelling variations,punctuation, initials’ capitalization, etc.) in addition
to the challenges faced in the first two modules of
HisDoc would absolutely burden the retrieval process
as they impose their negative impact on retrieval
effectiveness causing the performance level to fall if
the retrieval system is built the conventional way. To
quantify this, the retrieval effectiveness is comparedto that obtained using the error-free transcription.
In HisDoc’s retrieval module, certain techniques
were introduced in order to integrate the possible
variants to accordingly enhance the retrieval
effectiveness by allowing some sort of soft-matching
between the query terms representing the user’s
information needs and four different text surrogatesof the transcription, each of which incorporates acertain intensity level of variants’ inclusion. As aconcrete example, the term ‘Parzival’ appeared in
the original manuscript as ‘Parcifal’, ‘Parcival’ and‘Parzifal’. All of these variants are possible andmust be considered as correct spellings. At thislexical level, one might also consider the inflectional
morphology where various suffixes were possibly
added to nouns, adjectives and names to indicate
their grammatical case. With this additional aspect,
the proper name ‘Parcival’ may also appear as‘Parcivale’, ‘Parcivals’ or ‘Parcivalen’, increasing thenumber of potential spelling variants that we need totake into account.
Regardingtext
representations,
we
have
implemented whole words representation, shortoverlapping sequences of characters within each95

Digital Humanities 2012

word (n-gram) or the first n characters of eachword (trunc-n). During this indexing stage, wehave also evaluated the effect of different word
normalization procedures such as stemming. This
procedure tries to extract the stem from a surface
form by automatically removing its inflectionalsuffixes (number, gender) (light stemmer) or bothinflectional and derivational suffixes (aggressive
stemmer). As for search strategies, we have evaluatedthe classical vector-space model tf idf and its variants
as well as several probabilistic models.
Based on our experiments and using a well-known
evaluation methodology (Voorhees & Harman,
2005), using either short (single term) or long
queries (three terms), we found that probabilistic IR
models tend to produce better retrieval effectiveness(Naji & Savoy 2011). Regarding the stemming
procedure, aggressive stemming tends to produce
slightly better retrieval performance when facingwith longer queries. On the other hand, ignoring thestemming normalization with short queries usuallyoffers the best performance.
The presence of compound words was also analyzed
in order to improve the quality of retrieval. The
German language is known for this compoundconstruction which occurs more frequently than inEnglish. The main concern here is the fact that thesame concept can be expressed with or without acompound form (e.g., Bankpräsident or Präsident
der Bank). Applying an automatic decompounding
strategy may provide some successful improvement,
particularly for longer queries.
We have assessed the various recognition corpora
against the ground-truth version. Compared tothis error-free version, the simplest transcription
surrogate (the classical output of recognition system,
i.e., including no variants) shows a mean degradationin retrieval performance around -10.24% for singleterm queries. Considering systematically three orseven variants per input word usually tends
to cause the retrieval effectiveness to decreasesignificantly (from -5.42% for 3-term queries to-64.34% with single-term queries). Including more
possible terms per recognition is therefore not aneffective solution. We have thus proposed a wiser
strategy that includes word variants according totheir likelihood probabilities obtained during therecognition stage. This approach produces clearly
better retrieval performance. To somehow illustrate
our achievement, we can compare the best results
obtained using two versions of an English language
corpus having character error rates of 5% and 20%.
The retrieval performance degradation was around-17% and -46% respectively (Voorhees & Harman,
2005). While our best results for the Parzival corpus,
which has a word-error rate of around 6%, the96

retrieval performance degradation was only limited
to around -5%.
The best practices found and the conclusions drawn
from our experiments can then be applied tofurther manuscripts, hence making them digitally
accessible and effectively searchable with the least
cost possible by partially or totally eliminating theneed to having them manually transcribed which inturn will result in saving a lot of resources (time,
human effort, finances, etc.). With these documents
being completely searchable via digital means, moreuser’s information needs can thus be satisfied via
the facilities provided by web-service-based searchengine.
Acknowledgement
The authors wish to thank Prof. Michael Stoltz,
Dr. Gabriel Viehhauser (University of Bern,
Switzerland), Prof. Anton Näf and Mrs. Eva
Wiedenkeller (University of Neuchatel) for theirvaluable support. This research is supported by the
Swiss NSF under Grant CRSI22_125220.

References
Bunke, H., and T. Varga (2007). Off-line
Roman Cursive Handwriting Recognition. In B.
Chaudhuri (ed.), Digital Document Processing:
Major Directions and Recent Advances Berlin:
Springer, pp. 165-173.
Fischer, A., M. Wüthrich, M. Liwicki, V.
Frinken, H. Bunke, G. Viehhauser, and
M. Stolz (2009). Automatic Transcription ofHandwritten Medieval Documents. Proceedingsof the 15th International Conference on Virtual
Systems and Multimedia, pp. 137-142.
Fischer, A., K. Riesen, and H. Bunke(2010). Graph Similarity Features for HMM-Based
Handwriting Recognition in Historical Documents.
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on
Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, pp. 253-258.
Fischer, A., E. Indermühle, V. Frinken,
and H. Bunke (2011). HMM-Based Alignment ofInaccurate Transcriptions for Historical Documents.
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on
Document Analysis and Recognition, pp. 53-57.
Gorski, N., V. Anisimov, E. Augustin, O. Baret,and S. Maximor (2001). Industrial Bank Check
Processing: The A2iA Check Reader. International
Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition
3(4): 196-206.
Graves, A., M. Liwicki, S. Ferdnandez, R.
Bertolami, H. Bunke, and J. Schmidhuber(2009). A Novel Connectionist System for
Unconstrained Handwriting Recognition. IEEE

Digital Humanities 2012

Transactions on Pattern Analysis and MachineIntelligence 31(5): 855-868.
Likforman-Sulem, L., A. Zahour, and B.
Taconet (2007). Text Line Segmentation ofHistorical Documents: A Survey. International
Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition
9(2): 123-138.
Marti, U.-V., and H. Bunke (2001). Usinga Statistical Language Model to Improve
the Performance of an HMM-Based Cursive
Handwriting Recognition System. International
Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial
Intelligence 15(1): 65-90.
Naji, N., and J. Savoy (2011). Information
Retrieval Strategies for Digitized Handwritten
Medieval
Documents.
ProceedingsoftheAsian Information Retrieval Symposium, Dubai,
December 2011, LNCS #7097. Berlin: Springer, pp.
103-114.
Srihari, S. N., Y. Shin, and V. Ramanaprasad(1996). A System to Read Names and Addresses
on Tax Forms. In Proceedings of the IEEE 84(7):1038-1049.
Voorhees, E. M., and D. K. Harman(2005).
TREC. Experiments and Evaluation in Information
Retrieval. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Research infrastructures
for Digital Humanities: The
local perspective
Bärenfänger, Maja

Maja.Baerenfaenger@germanistik.uni-giessen.de
Justus-Liebig-University Gießen, Germany

Binder, Frankfrank.binder@germanistik.uni-giessen.de
Justus-Liebig-University Gießen, Germany

A number of research infrastructure projects are
currently constructing the next generation research
environments for digital humanities (Wynne 2010;
ESFRI 2011). They are also conducting activities tointeract with potential users, early adopters and key
multipliers in the field. With this paper, we reporton our experience of conducting such activities atthe local institutional level in order to (1) identify
potential users, to (2) survey their needs and current
practice with regard to digital humanities, to (3)try and stimulate them towards adopting research
infrastructures where appropriate and, (4), where thecase, to identify remaining barriers. We report on ourwork in progress that is taking these communicative
activities to the local level of several humanities
faculties of a large German university.
Research infrastructures (Wittenburg et al. 2010;
ESFRI, 2011) are complementing a portfolio of
established models of supporting computationallyintensive research processes in the humanities: (1)the professional intermediary and (2) competence
centers (Edmonds 2005; McCarthy & Kirschenbaum,2003). Some recent infrastructure initiatives
have already engaged in bringing research
infrastructures to the user, for instance TextGrid
and D-SPIN (Binder et al. 2010), others havecontacted prospective users to sharpen the research
infrastructures’ visions and priorities (e.g. Herold etal. 2010). We believe that these activities need tobe complemented at the local levels of universities
as well and thereby taking a local perspective on
the users and the conditions under which they arecarrying out their research activities.
A consideration of the local perspective has two
initial foci: The first one lies on general local
conditions. These are conditions concerning the
local status quo and local infrastructures in digital
humanities (henceforth: DH). The second focus
has to lie on the local user itself, or better:
potential or real users of DH infrastructures, theirknowledge about DH infrastructures, their attitude
towards DH infrastructures, their requirements
97

Digital Humanities 2012

and wishes, especially concerning local support
structures. Consecutively, a consideration of the local
perspective has to lead to an appropriate local DH
infrastructure strategy. In the following, we will
outline the questions which have to be consideredin an analysis of the local perspective, and themethods which can be used for this analysis, before
we will conclude with the elements of a local DH user
strategy.
An analysis of the local conditions should begin
with a detailed analysis of local DH-related research
activities: What is already happening (maybe without
naming it DH)? Which current and past projects
have an affinity with DH? Who are the experts?
Which DH support structures already exist, andwhich current and future roles do local libraries
and computing centers have? Methods to be usedin this stage are web-based inquiries (on current
and past research activities and on existing DH
support structures) and expert interviews (oncurrent and future DH strategies). In a second
step, it is necessary to further shed light on the(potential or real) users of DH infrastructures, e.g.
the local researchers in the humanities. Do theyknow about existing national and international DH
infrastructures? Do they use national or international
DH infrastructures? Do they cooperate with DH
centers? Which attitude do they have towards
DH infrastructures? Which apprehensions or hopes
do they have? What requirements and wishes
concerning DH infrastructures do they have? Expert
users should also be asked whether they are willing orable to serve as professional intermediaries for theirlocal colleagues. This survey on local users should
differentiate between experts and non-experts. This
could be realized by a qualitative analysis ofinterviews with two kinds of groups, an expert group
and a non-expert group. Furthermore, an onlinesurvey could be used to quantify the findings of thequalitative study.
The analysis of the local conditions and users
may then be used to develop a local DH
user-strategy which should include elements like
local community building, local public relations
activities and local support structures. Several
such elements have already been described andimplemented in DH infrastructure projects andinitiatives like TextGrid, D-Spin, CLARIN, and
DARIAH. Established community building events
like summer schools (e.g. Binder et al. 2010), or the
THATCamp series, can also be instantiated as lightweight events, such as a local ‘Data Day’ (WoutersenWindhouwer 2011). Instruments such as newslettersor mailing lists can be used and adapted for local
contexts. Apart from these existing event types
and strategic elements, a local perspective on DH
infrastructures should also be complemented by local

98

support structures like a DH competence center andlocal professional intermediaries.
At the Justus-Liebig University Giessen, we
conducted a survey of the local DH-related research
activities and local DH support structures. We foundthat more than 25 ongoing or recently completed
projects in two of five faculties for humanities
could be regarded as DH related projects. Thisis a surprisingly large amount of projects, if you
consider the size of the faculties observed. For
the categorization procedure, we defined digital
humanities with regard to methods and digitalpractices. Projects which are classified as DH
related projects therefore have to use computerbased methods (e.g. ‘Die Ordnung von Wissen in
Texten’), use or produce digital linguistic corpora(e.g. ‘English as a lingua franca in science andbusiness communication’), digital archives (e.g.
the ‘Prometheus’ image archive), digital editions(e.g. the digital edition ‘Chronik des Gettos Lodz
Litzmannstadt’), or other digital material (e.g. ‘ecampus Altertum’).
The crucial point is that most of these projects do
not define themselves as DH projects, which is fatal
if you want to build up a local digital humanities
community. This finding, which complements
previous observations and discussions (e.g. Joula
2008; Svensson 2010; Prescott 2012), is mostimportant for a local DH strategy. What has to bedone first, is to make researchers aware that they are
already working in the field of digital humanities, andthat they could gain a lot from identifying themselves
as part of a local and global DH community. We
think that this first step, becoming aware of the
field of digital humanities and becoming aware that
one is already part of the game, is one of the mostunderestimated and at the same time most important
points, if we would like the digital humanities
community to grow and if digital humanities research
infrastructures should be used by more researchers
than at present time.

References
Binder, F., S. Ahlborn, J. Gippert, and H.
Lobin (2010). Connecting with User Communities:
D-SPIN Summer School 2010. Poster at SDH+NEERI 2010. Vienna/Austria. http://www.dspin-sommerschule.de/ (accessed 22nd March 2012).
Edmond, J. (2005). The Role of the Professional
Intermediary in Expanding the Humanities
Computing Base. Literary and Linguistic Computing
20(3): 367-80.
ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on
Research Infrastructures) (2011). Strategy
Report on Research Infrastructures – Roadmap

Digital Humanities 20122010. Luxembourg: Publications Office of theEuropean Union. http://dx.doi.org/10.2777/23
127 (accessed 22nd March 2012).
Herold, A., T. Warken, F. Binder, and G.
Gehrke (2011). D-SPIN Report R3.4 Case Studies,
Final Results. http://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/Reports/D-SPIN_R3.4.pdf (accessed 22nd
March 2012).

Pelagios: An Information
Superhighway for theAncient World
Barker, Eltone.t.e.barker@open.ac.uk
Open University, UK

Juola, P. (2008). Killer Applications in Digital
Humanities. Literary and Linguistic Computing
23(1): 73-83.

Simon, Rainer

McCarthy, W., and M. Kirschenbaum (2003).
Institutional Models for Humanities Computing.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 18(4): 465-89.

Isaksen, Leif

Prescott, A. (2012). Consumers, creators orcommentators? Problems of audience and mission
in the digital humanities. Arts and Humanities inHigher Education 11(1-2): 61-75.
Svensson, P. (2010). The Landscape ofDigital Humanities. Digital Humanities Quarterly4(1).
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html(accessed 22nd
March 2012).
Wittenburg, P., N. Bel, L. Borin, G. Budin,
N. Calzolari, E. Hajicova, K. Koskenniemi,
L. Lemnitzer, B. Maegaard, M. Piasecki, J.
Pierrel, S. Piperidis, I. Skadina, D. Tufis, R.
van Veenendaal, T. Váradi, and M. Wynne(2010). Resource and Service Centres as the
Backbone for a Sustainable Service Infrastructure.
Proceedings of the Seventh International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
http://www.lrec-conf.org/procee(LREC’10).
dings/lrec2010/summaries/679.html (accessed
22nd March 2012).
Woutersen-Windhouwer, S. (2011).
Longterm experiences with repositories. Invited talk at
CLARIN-D tutorials. http://www.clarin.eu/syst
em/files/woutersen-experiences.pdf (accessed
22nd March 2012).
Wynne, M. (2010). The humanities research
environment of the future. Opening keynote at the DSPIN Summer School 2010 http://www.clarin.eu/node/3286 (accessed 22nd March 2012).

Rainer.Simon@ait.ac.at
Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria
leifuss@googlemail.com
University of Southampton, UK

On-line resources that reference ancient places are
multiplying rapidly, bringing huge potential for the
researcher provided that they can be found; butusers currently have no way of easily navigating
between them or comparing their contents. Pelagios,a growing international cooperative of online ancientworld projects,1 addresses the problems of discovery
and reuse with the twin aims of helping digital
humanists to make their data more discoverable,
and of empowering real-world users (scholars,
students and the general public) to find information
about particular ancient places and visualize it inmeaningful ways. While the project focuses on theancient world, the methodology and tools developed
will be of interest to anyone working with datacontaining spatial references. The Pelagios family
purposefully includes partners maintaining a wide
range of different document types including texts,
maps and databases. In doing so we take some of thefirst steps towards building a Geospatial Semantic
Web for the Humanities.2
In this paper we discuss two of the major workflows
underpinning Pelagios. First, we address the methodby which the partners prepare their data so that it
can be linked together in an open and transparent
manner: i.e. what are the processes that you should
undertake if you want to make your data Pelagios
compliant? Second, we consider the various ways
in which the results can be visualized, paying
particular attention to the tools and technologies
used and the problems encountered. We end witha brief description of our visualization services –both a Graph Explorer and various embeddable
web widgets – which, we believe, demonstrate thevalue of taking a lightweight Linked Open Data
approach to addressing problems of discoverability,interconnectivity and reusability of online resources.
At the same time, however, we use this paper to99

Digital Humanities 2012

discuss real-world practical concerns as well as
engage in deeper speculation about the significanceof this type of approach for escaping the ‘siloing’
mentality that inhibits many other data integration
initiatives.

1. Ontology
The first part of the paper will sketch out andreflect upon the architectural aspects of Pelagios, inparticular the requirements necessary to maximize
the exposure and interconnectivity of the data
themselves. The structure of the data is targeted at
helping the user groups of each partner accomplish
two kinds of task:A) Discovering the references to places within a single
document (text, map, database);B) Discovering all the documents (texts, maps,
databases) that reference a specified place.
In order to achieve this we (i) use a common
RDF model to express place references (the OAC
model); and (ii) align all local place references
to the Pleiades Ancient World Gazetteer. The
OAC annotation ontology provides an extremely
lightweight framework for associating global
concepts (such as places) with specific documents(and fragments of them).3 An OAC annotation is aset of RDF triples which identify a target document(by means of its URI) and the body of the annotation
itself, in our case a URI identifying a specific place in
Pleaides. An example is given below:
ex:ann1 rdf:Type

oac:Annotation

dcterms:title “Example annotation”
oac:hasTarget <some resource>
oac:hasBody <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/[PLEIADES ID]>
The decision to use the OAC model typifies ourpragmatic lightweight approach, which has notbeen to reinvent the wheel but to reduce, reuse
and recycle wherever possible. Using a publicly
available, lightweight core ontology permits modular
extensions for different kinds of document so thatdetails specific to each type do not add unnecessary
complexity for users wishing to publish data inconformance with the core ontology. We have also
found that Pelagios partners are afforded a great
deal of flexibility in implementation. For example,
the RDF may be expressed in a number of different
formats (RDF/XML, Turtle, RDFa, SPARQL, etc.)
and the simplicity of the ontology allows partners
to focus on the considerably more challenging taskof aligning local place referencing systems with theglobal Pleiades gazetteer.

100

Pelagios has been documenting the various processes
by which each partner has identified place references
and aligned those references to Pleiades: one
significant outcome of the project will be a ‘cookbook’
guide for those looking to adopt a lightweight Linked
Open Data approach to related domains, which
we outline here. The Pelagios process, however,has greater extensibility than provision for digitalclassicists. Although we are using URIs for placesin the ancient world, the OAC ontology is equallyapplicable to other gazetteers (including those basedon modern placenames, such as GeoNames) or evennon-spatial entities such as periods or people.

2. The Pelagios Explorer andEmbeddable Widgets
The second part of the paper assesses the possibilities
for data exploration once different projects haveadopted the core model for representing placereferences. Here we discuss the technologies
exploited in developing the Pelagios Explorer, aprototype Web application that makes discovery
and visualization of the aggregated data simple,
and various web widgets that can sit on partner
websites to provide a window onto the Pelagios
linked data world. By aggregating Pelagios partners’
place metadata in a Graph Database, the Explorer
supports a number of common types of query using
visually-oriented interaction metaphors (‘whichplaces are referenced in these datasets?’, ‘whatis the geographical footprint of these datasets?’,‘which datasets reference a particular place’) anddisplays results using a graph-based representation.4
In addition, the Pelagios Explorer exposes all data
available in the visualizations through an HTTP
API to enable machine-access. For their part thewidgets that we are currently developing provide
more specific views on Pelagios data than the graphexplorer allows (such as an overview of the data abouta particular place). But equally we are exploring
ways of making these widgets easy to configure
to, customise for and embed in external Websites,
thereby maximizing the potential reuse value of thedata.
There are at least two different user groups whose
interests and concerns we address. For the ‘superusers’ interested in contributing data, adhering to thetwo principles of the OAC model and Pleiades URIs
is the essential step in order to prepare data for use
in these various Pelagios visualizations. With thesebasic issues established, we go on to discuss moredetailed control over how data can be represented in a
generic interface, for instance using names and titles
to label data, or structuring a dataset hierarchicallyinto subsets, such as individual books, volumes,
chapters, and pages. Toolset and methods are still at

Digital Humanities 2012

an early stage but some useful resources have alreadybeen made available for general use via our blog.5
Our second user group represents scholars, students
and members of the public who may wish to discover
the resources that reference an ancient place ofinterest. We consider how the Pelagios framework is
beginning to bring together an enormous diversity of
online data – such as books that reference places, andarchaeological finds discovered there – which a user
can search through, combine and visualize in various
ways depending on their needs.6 In particular,
we consider the challenges, both technological andintellectual, regarding the development, production
and use of such tools or services that aim to provide
a useful and intuitive resource for non technicallyminded subject specialists.
We conclude with a brief reflection on the processes
by which the Pelagios family has been developing.
In particular we stress the digital services that havemade the coordination of such an international
initiative possible, and outline the challenges thatremain to anyone wishing to add their data to thePelagios multiverse.7
Funding
This work has been supported by JISC (the Joint
Information Systems Committee) as part of the
Geospatial and Community Outreach programme(15/10) and the Resource and Discovery programme(13/11).
Screenshots of the Pelagios Explorer:

References
Elliott, T., and S. Gillies (2009). Digital
Geography and Classics. DHQ: Digital Humanities
Quarterly 3(1).
Harris, T. M., L. J. Rouse, and S. Bergeron(2010). The Geospatial Semantic Web, Pareto GIS,
and the Humanities. In D. J. Bodenhamer, J.
Corrigan, and T. M. Harris (eds.), The Spatial
Humanities: GIS and the Future of Scholarship.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Sanderson, R., B. Albritton, R. Schwemmer,and H. van de Sompel (2011). SharedCanvas:
A Collaborative Model for Medieval Manuscript
Layout Dissemination. Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Ottawa,
Canada.
Schich, M., C. Hidalgo, S. Lehmann, and J.
Park (2009). The network of subject co-popularity inClassical Archaeology. In Bolletino di Archaeologia
On-line.
Notes
1. Pelagios includes: Arachne, http://www.arachne.unikoeln.de ; CLAROS, http://explore.clarosnet.or
g ; GAP, http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.
com ; Nomisma, http://nomisma.org ; Open Context,
http://opencontext.org ; Perseus, http://www.per
seus.tufts.edu ; Pleiades, http://pleiades.stoa.org ; Ptolemy Machine, http://ptolemymachine.appsp
ot.com ; SPQR, http://spqr.cerch.kcl.ac.uk ; Ure
museum, http://www.reading.ac.uk/Ure .
2. See Harris et al. (2010).
3. OAC is a powerful information model in its own right andhas recently been used as the basis for the SharedCanvas
annotation system. See Sanderson et al. (2011)
4. Network visualizations are ideal for representing bipartite
networks such as this. See, for example: Schich et al. (2009).
5. http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/p/useful-resources.html

101

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6. Seescreencastsat:http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/screencasts/exploring-datasets.html ,and http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/screencasts/
exploring-places.html .
7. A vision that coincides well with the discussion of the future ofClassical scholarship by Elliott and Gillies (2009).

Putting TEI Tite to use– generating a databaseresource from a printed
dictionary or reference type
publication
Barner-Rasmussen, Michael

mbr@hum.ku.dk
Danish National Research Foundation Centre for
Language Change In Real Time, Denmark

The motivation to write this paper stems froman experience we had a few years ago. We
needed to digitize a large reference work called
Danmarks Stednavne (DS 1922-2006, ‘Place Namesof Denmark’) which contains most, if not all, of theplace names in Denmark.
We wanted and needed the end result to be in a
database-style format, that is, capturing or otherwise
marking the place name of each record, and including
all the sources, scholarly interpretations, historicalnames and dates, and so on. But we discovered thatno one was willing to sign up for the task, eventhough we had a quite decent budget (capped at
approximately $20 a page and 10,000 pages in total).
We were uniformly informed that the task was toocomplex.
This paper presents the solution we came up with:
we bought a TEI Tite (Trolard 2009) encoded
digitization procedure from an outside vendor, but
did the post processing into a database format
ourselves.
Cost and practicality have weighed heavily and areimportant aspects of the methodology presented. It
might seem more interesting to try and create some
genetic, self-learning algorithm to automaticallyeke out the semantics of a large collection ofreference entries and mark them up appropriately.
We are eagerly awaiting such a marvelous algorithm.
However, in our particular circumstances, digital
humanities is about developing methods and toolsthat leverage accessible and affordable competencies
and resources in order to reach a practical goal costeffectively. In this case, it will curate (and thus save)a vital piece of Danish cultural heritage, resulting
in a new digital resource usable by anyone with aninterest in the origin and history of place names
in Denmark, and providing Denmark’s place-nameauthorities with a modern repository for future placename registration and research (the first, rough102

Digital Humanities 2012

presentation of which can be viewed at http://danmarksstednavne.navneforskning.ku.dk/ ).
Since the task had been deemed ‘highly complex’ by
the vendors we had approached, we put some effort
into the analysis. This paper presents the analysis,along with some ‘mid-term’ results since we have now
parsed approximately 50% of the source material.
To date, approximately two thirds of Denmark iscovered by the DS publication, which spans 25 (soonto be 26) volumes published in the period from
1922 to 2006. The individual place-names articles
list a selection of the earliest known source types,
historical forms of the name, and pronunciations,and provide scholarly interpretations and annotationof the name’s origin and meaning. An example isgiven below.

Figure 1: An entry in DS

TEI Tite is a subset of the TEI created to standardize
off-site text encoding somewhat, so that vendors andbuyers can arrange for it by simply agreeing to adhere
to TEI Tite at both ends. It captures all the printed
material, all characters, and all structural divisions(like chapters, line breaks, etc.).
Given this, our initial data analysis showed usthat it should be possible to parse individual‘records’ (entries in DS) by ‘switching’ on
typographical cues – for example, using the semicolon character ‘;’ to differentiate between different
source references, long hyphens to extract theinterpretation, and so on.
The lexicography of the publication has never beenformally specified, but it was quickly obvious that atleast each individual volume had a fairly consistentlexicography; thus, a volume-by-volume parsing
might reasonably succeed. Another practical problem
was that since the publication has been ongoing for
more than 90 years, the volumes exhibited small
differences that are significant for parsing and must
be dealt with individually.
The prospect of having to code 25 parsers gave
us pause, however, so we set ourselves the task of
producing a single program that could be configured
from the outside to allow for (more or less)minute differences in lexicography and even new
lexicographical instances – the roman numeral after
the place name in Figure 1 was such an undiscovered
item.
Very briefly stated, what we came up with isa modular, outside-of-code configurable, easily

extended program/platform for parsing TEI Titeformatted XML representations of dictionary or
reference data, or textual data that exhibit ‘semantic
typesetting’.
The general idea is that a module takes care of only
one singular task in the whole parsing procedure,
operates via a standard interface, and is callable
outside the code via a configuration file.
The program is written in a modern high level
programming language (C#) so that the skills needed
to produce additional modules are readily available
on most university campuses and in the population
at large.
So: no super computers, no state-of-the-art statisticalanalysis, no genetic algorithms or natural language
comprehension, no crowd-sourcing the production of
new knowledge – at least not while digitizing existingsources of knowledge. Moreover, we claim no ‘newforms of scholarly inquiry’, not immediately at least,
derived maybe, but not new and probably not thatmany new questions posed that could not have beenanswered albeit very laboriously before.
We do, however, believe that the methodology would
likely add value to various TEI-encoded digital
artifacts at not only a reasonable cost, but also by
utilizing skills and competencies that are readily
available. Billed hours for the parsing activity ended
up in the low hundreds (~450 hours), so costeffectiveness would appear acceptable.
The paper presentation will present and discuss
the following elements vital/interesting to themethodology.
1. 80-20 The roughly 50.000 place name entries in
DS are of more or less the same lexicography butof vastly differing length and complexity, so theprogram is designed to quickly pick up all ‘low
hanging fruits’, parsing the simpler entries in their
entirety and handing them off to the databaseteam.
2. Scoping of the modules Examples from the code
will be presented to illustrate that there is almost
no lower limit as to how little a single module
should do. The salient point being the number ofvolumes that the module would be relevant for ismore important than doing a lot of stuff all at once.
3. When in doubt ask Another key element of thedesign is that every choice the program has tomake is estimated as to how long it would taketo produce working code versus simply asking theuser/parser. As it turned out this principle has
been the biggest time and cost saver on the projectsince it eliminates much of the risk of making thecode brittle and having the programmer(s) takeoff on a quest for ‘a clever hack’™. Differentiating
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Digital Humanities 2012

between source references and name instances will
be demonstrated and discussed.
4. Iterative, iterative, iterative Writing the parser
modules proved to be at least as much data analysis
as the, err, data analysis.
5. Creating the framework and remembering what
was done Taking into account item 4. above theframework was designed so it ‘remembers’ thesteps taken on a given volume or subset of the
publication so that ‘reparative’ steps/modules canbe added on as they become evidently needed.
6. Lessons learned
1. Tools, as they are often envisioned in DH
publications are most often ‘done deals’, completed
software artifacts that can accomplish this thingor that with humanistic digital artifacts. The ‘tool’
this paper presents is the TEI Tite, a programming
language and a methodology for putting the three
together to achieve a specific end. As programming
languages become more and more ‘user friendly’
the barrier to entry into this type of interactive,
iterative, collaborative tool building lowers to thepoint where a project like ours became possible andthis seems to be the way of the future.
2. Also, last but verily not least: We believe that if it
has lexicography, it can be parsed.
However, they are not stringent (database) schemaand cannot be fully automatically parsed into such.
Enter our technology/methodology for iteratively
parsing lexicographically organized digital data (inthe form of a TEI Tite encoded digitization).
The digital version of DS is paid for by the DigDagproject ( http://www.digdag.dk )From the DigDag website:
The DigDag project, short for Digital atlas of theDanish historical-administrative geography, is a
research project funded by The National Programme
for Research Infrastructure under the Danish Agency
for Science, Technology and Innovation.
Running from 2009 to 2012, the aim of the projectis the establishment of a database structure which
can tie the Danish administrative districts together
geographically and historically. This will provide a
historical-administrative GIS platform for the digital
humanities allowing to:- establish a historical-administrative research
infrastructure of Denmark c. 1600–- form the backbone of future historical andadministrative research- create a powerful search engine for use in theservice functions of archives, collections andlibraries

104

As source data will be used Det digitale matrikelkort,
the digital cadastre, and the basic unit will be theejerlav, the townland.
Participants in the project are a range of major
Danish research institutions with a focus on
historical and administrative research together withthe major Danish heritage institutions and archives.

References
Trolard,P.
(2009).
TEI
Tite
—
A
recommendation for off-site text encoding.

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-e
xemplars/html/tei_tite.doc.html

DS 1922-2006. Danmarks Stednavne vol 1-25.
Volumes 1-15 published by the Place Names
Committee, Volumes 16-24 by the Department ofName Research, Volume 25 by the Department ofName Research at University of Copenhagen. See
also http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danmarks_
Stednavne and/or http://nfi.ku.dk/publikati
oner/trykte_serier/danmarks_stednavne/

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers,
Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Second
Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Levy, P. (1998). Becoming Virtual: Reality in the
Digital Age. Da Capo Press.
Weinberger, D. (2002). Small Pieces Loosely
Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. New York:
Perseus Publishing.
Lowy, J. (2005). Programming .NET Components:
Design and Build .NET Applications Using
Component-Oriented Programming. Sebastopol,
CA: O’Reilly Media; 2 edition.

Digital Humanities 2012

Digital Humanities in theClassroom: Introducing
a New Editing Platform
for Source Documents inClassics

Project (see Blackwell and Smith 2009). We intend
to investigate ways to take advantage of the chain of
authority supported by the SoSOL environment tofacilitate the process of the long-term archiving of theresources in the Tufts institutional Fedora repository.
We will make the data from this project available
to the broader humanities community through the
Perseus Project.

Beaulieu, Marie-Claire

Initially, the students will be working with Latin
manuscripts (ranging in date between the 12th and19th centuries) held in the Tufts University Librarywhich have been digitized and published online. The
students will also edit and translate ancient Greek
funerary inscriptions which relate to Marie-Claire
Beaulieu’s research on the poetics of Greek epitaphs.
The collection created by the students will form acohesive dataset of Latin and Greek texts which will
be used at Tufts for ongoing research projects onancient literature but will also be a valuable addition
to corpora being developed by scholars worldwide
such as the EpiDoc databases (see Cayless et al. 2009,esp. 34).

Marie-Claire.Beaulieu@Tufts.edu
Tufts University, USA

Almas, Bridget

bridget.almas@tufts.edu
Tufts University, USA

In this paper, I will introduce a new online
teaching and research platform on which students
can collaboratively transcribe, edit, and translate
Latin manuscripts and Greek inscriptions, creating
vetted open source digital editions. This platform wascreated by a group of faculty, software developers,
and library professionals at Tufts University toenable students to work with original untranslated
documents. By doing so, students not only develop
their own language skills and research abilities, butthey also contribute to the efforts of the scholarly
community worldwide to meet the challengeof publishing large numbers of primary source
documents online while preserving high editorial
standards as described by Robinson (2010). The
platform will be made available as open-source
software and since it is language-independent, it canbe used to edit and translate any source document inany language and any Humanities field.
The platform is an adaptation of Image J and Son of
Suda Online (SoSOL). It allows students to transcribe
ancient texts directly from a high-resolution digital
image while mapping the text onto the lettering.
The transcriptions thus produced are automaticallyencoded in accordance with the EpiDoc markup
guidelines, a standard developed by an international
consortium of scholars for the accurate descriptionof inscriptions and manuscripts in TEI XML (seeSosin 2010). This ensures greater visibility for thecollection and fosters scholarly dialogue since all
documents published under the EpiDoc standard
are compatible and can be exploited together inan open-access collaborative context (see Bodard2008). The students’ work therefore contributes toa worldwide effort to make ancient manuscripts
and inscriptions available online. To link all theseresources and present the web interface, we used
the CITE services (‘Collections, Indexes, and Texts,
with Extensions’) developed by the Homer Multitext

Students will begin their work with a high resolution
image of a Latin or Greek document published in
our online collection. After receiving training on thedecipherment of ancient Greek and Latin scripts,
they will transcribe the texts and map them onto theimage of the document using the software describedabove. The transcription step is important since itallows for careful review: thanks to the direct visuallink created by the software between the image of the
document and the transcription, the instructor andthe audience can instantly evaluate the accuracy of
the transcription (see figures 1 and 2).
The second step is to produce a normalized editionof the texts, including the resolution of abbreviations
and lacunae, wherever possible. At this stage, twoimportant digital tool sets are integrated with eachtext. The Alpheios Greek and Latin tools provide
interactive lexical and grammatical analysis of each
word, and the Perseus tools compute dynamic wordlists and help the students and their instructors
keep track of the progress accomplished in language
learning (see figure 3). The Perseus tools can also
be used to design personalized reading lists andexams for each student. Although this project uses
Latin and Greek language tools, the design can easily
accommodate the integration of similar tools for any
language.
The third and final step is translation and annotation,
which is crucial for making the texts accessible toa wide-ranging audience of students and scholars
in other disciplines as well as the general public.
At this stage, students will translate the texts into
English and gather as much information as possibleon each text, including its date and historical and105

Digital Humanities 2012

literary significance. They will establish parallels withother similar texts, which can be implemented as
hyperlinks. The entries are finally rounded out with acomplete bibliography of the scholarship available oneach text and credits naming all contributors to theentry.
After their publication online, the entries will belinked to the SAKAI/Trunk software, an open-accesscollaborative learning management resource thatallows students to design personalized electronic
portfolios. These portfolios can be used by instructors
to evaluate a student’s overall performance andprogress and can also serve in applications for
grants, graduate school admission, or in the context
of a job search. An entry in this online collection
should feature prominently in a student’s portfolio,
since it constitutes a valuable and quantifiablelanguage learning experience as well as a piece oforiginal scholarship on a previously unedited and/or
untranslated text. Throughout this process, students
participate in the efforts of the scholarly community
worldwide while perfecting their own language andresearch skills, thus becoming true citizen scholars.

Figure 3: The Alpheios tools provide interactive
lexical and grammatical analysis of each word

References
Blackwell, Chr., and D. N. Smith (2009). Homer
Multitext – Nine Year Update. Digital Humanities
2009 Conference Abstracts, (June 2009):
6-8. http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/wp-conte
nt/uploads/dh09_conferencepreceedings_fina
l.pdf (accessed March 9, 2012).

Bodard, G. (2008). The Inscriptions of Aphrodisias
as Electronic Publication: A User’s Perspective
and a Proposed Paradigm. Digital Medievalist
4. http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journa
l/4/bodard/ (accessed March 9, 2012).
Cayless, H., Ch. Roueché, T. Elliott,and G. Bodard. (2009). Epigraphy in2017. Digital Humanities Quarterly 3 (January2009). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000030.html (accessed March 9, 2012).
Robinson, P. (2010). Editing Without Walls.
Literature Compass, 7: 57-61. http://dx.doi.or
g/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00676.x (accessed
March 9, 2012).
Figure 1: The transcription step

Sosin, J. (2010). ‘Digital Papyrology.’ Congressof the International Association of Papyrologists,
Geneva, Switzerland. http://https://exchange.t
ufts.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=582e4a9690a04632
b2997bc4c6836f47&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.stoa.org%2farchives%2f1263(accessed March 12,2012).

Figure 2: The submission and evaluation step106

Digital Humanities 2012

DiaView: Visualise Cultural
Change in Diachronic
CorporaBeavan, Davidd.beavan@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

1. Introduction
This paper will introduce and demonstrate DiaView,1a new tool to investigate and visualise word usage
in diachronic corpora. DiaView highlights culturalchange over time by exposing salient lexical items
from each decade or year, and providing them tothe user in an effortless visualisation. This is madepossible by examining large quantities of diachronic
textual data, in this case the Google Books corpus(Michel et al. 2010) of one million English books. This
paper will introduce the methods and technologies
at its core, perform a demonstration of the tool anddiscuss further possibilities.

2. Applicable Corpora
Key to the success of any large-scale culturalinspection is a large corpus of writing, both in termsof chronological span, and also depth of samplingfrom each year. Two corpora stand out as candidates
for this approach: The Corpus of Historical American
English (COHA) (Davies 2010) and the Google Books
corpus. The COHA dataset, while being 400 million
words and having been more rigorously compiled,
is restricted in terms of its availability. Google
Books, on the other hand, is 155 billion words,
spanning from the sixteenth century to the present,
although the precise corpus make-up is less lucid.
Google have provided n-gram frequency lists fordownload, and consequently this visualisation has
been based upon the Google Books English One
Million data set. It should be stressed that thetechniques DiaView are applicable to many otherdata sets, from very focused specialised corpora tolarge-scale newspaper archives. The choice of corpus
used for this demonstration is mainly driven by two
factors: public availability and re-use in addition to
the need for general content leading to a wider public
appreciation of the results this tool provides.

3. Established Query Methods
The standard tools available to current corpus users
revolve around two methods: word searches orthe comparison of frequencies (either over time or

between two focussed points). These tools are inwidespread use, and while well understood and used,
they do not present the whole linguistic picture to
their users.
The Google Books n-gram Viewer,2 for instance isvery capable at allowing users to chart the usage oflexical items over time. While illuminating, it implies
that users already know what they are looking for (thelexical item) and also that frequency (the numberof times that word is used) provides enough data to
make assertions. Choosing the term of interest at theoutset means this resource delivers a powerful searchfunction, but it fails at browsing or exploration. In
other terms you only find what you look for.
The alternative method, based upon comparing
frequencies over time, is best exemplified (using
the same corpus) by the Top Words 1570-2008.3
This tool meticulously visualises the most frequentwords in the Google Books corpus and charts theirrise and fall across every decade the corpus covers.
Word frequency alone does not tell us enough. Just
because a lexical item is frequently occurring ina particular time span, it may not be of interest,
particularly if you find it frequently elsewhere. Thatword soon downgrades from important to commonand suddenly becomes much less interesting.
DiaView takes a different approach, one that
promotes browsing (not searching) and transcends
basic word frequency methods (it strives to deliversalience).

4. DiaView Concept
DiaView is designed to operate at a more
opportunistic conceptual level than the examples
above; in this case summarising and browsing datatakes precedence over specific focussed searches.
DiaView aims to complement other approaches, andas such will operate as a gateway to other methods,
particularly lexical searches.
The tool divides its corpus into a number ofchronological divisions, i.e. years or decades. In each,statistical measures are used to extract those lexicalelements that are salient or focussed on that timespan. This does not necessarily imply frequently
used words, but, rather, words which are foundpredominantly in that time, a possible key into
the cultural issues experienced or explored at thatmoment in time.

5. DiaView Method
A relational database has been used to realise
DiaView, however other technologies are equallyapplicable to producing similar results. Equally, any
number of statistical measures or comparators can
107

Digital Humanities 2012be used to ascertain the salient words for eachyear, mutual information or log-likelihood are goodcandidates for use.

Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science (Published
online ahead of print: 12/16/2010)

For this demonstration DiaView requires word
frequency lists for each year. In this case the corpus
was trimmed to 1900-1950. Fundamentally this is atabulated list of lexical items, followed by the numberof occurrences in each year.

Notes

DiaView then creates an aggregated view of thesefrequency lists, gathering each type (individual word)
and the total number of occurrences across the entire
corpus (summing the data above). A further optional
stage is to cull this list; either by disposing of the least
frequently used types (e.g. remove words not used
more than ten times each year) or by concentratingon the most frequently used types (e.g. keep the
100,000 most often used words).
Extracting salient terms from each year is now
performed. Taking each type (identified previously)
in turn, its frequency in each year is inspected andcompared to its global frequency. Here the statisticalmeasure is used to gauge its connection to eachparticular year. This removes the dependence ofraw frequencies: a word may occur few times or agreat number, what is of prime importance is if its
distribution is skewed or focussed on a particularchronological range. For each year a ranked list ofsalient types are created.
The visualisation is created by extracting the salient
types from each year and displaying the top 25 indescending order. Each type in each year can be usedto hyperlink other resources, such as the Google Bookn-gram Viewer.

6. Future possibilities
While DiaView offers new ways to view large data
sets, it is open to further enhancements. Access tocorpora divided by genre would add valuable benefits
to the visualisation, allowing users to narrow down
the corpus to include material only of their choice.
Linguistic stemming could also be used to gather
words around their root form, e.g. to cluster run,running, runs, ran etc.

References
Davies, M. (2010). The Corpus of Historical
American English: 400 million words, 1810-2009.
Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.
Michel, J., Y. Shen, A. Aiden, A. Veres,
M. Gray, W. Brockman, The Google Books
Team, J. Pickett, D. Hoiberg, D. Clancy, P.
Norvig, J. Orwant, S. Pinker, M. Nowak, andE. Aiden (2010). Quantitative Analysis of Culture108

1. http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/corpus/diaview/
2. http://books.google.com/ngrams
3. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~gleicher/Hacks/tops.html

Digital Humanities 2012

Catch + Release: Researchand Creation of a Digital
New Media Exhibition in
the Context of a Culturaland Heritage Museum
Beer, Ruthrbeer@ecuad.ca
Emily Carr University of Art and Design,
Vancouver, Canada

We will present, Catch + Release: Mapping
Stories of Geographic and Cultural Transition(2009-2012), a research and creation project fundedby the Social Sciences and Humanities Councilof Canada. It is a case study of a collaborative,
interdisciplinary digital new media practice incommunity engagement and informal learning. It
looks at local/global environmental, socio-culturaland historical interplays related to multi-culturalcommunity perspectives, including First Nations, onchanges due to the demise of the fishing industry.
Historically, fishing was one of the primary reasonsfor the multi-cultural immigration that helped tofoster the settlement, economic development, andsocial growth on the west coast of Canada.
We will discuss our interactive digital new media
exhibition Catch + Release installed in The Gulf
of Georgia Cannery Museum National HistoricSite, a social history museum in Steveston, British
Columbia, a small city on Canada’s Pacific coast.
The exhibition proposes to advance an encounter
with history as critical inquiry into contemporary
life of the region. The researchers’ backgrounds
in new media art, new media education, cultural
theory, and interactive design, come together toexplore how research and creation contributes toinformed discourse that engages with the region’s
cultural history and social, cultural and ecologicalpresent. Our new media exhibition that uses sensor
technologies and immersive interactivity to overlay
stories from the community together with thoseof the museum, is intended to foster a sense of
belonging and deeper understanding of historicaland current circumstances. While our study islocalized, these conditions and stories resonate
in other coastal communities that once relied onfishing, thus, our project addresses cultural andmarine environmental sustainability in many similar
contexts.
This project draws on qualitative inquiry informed bypractice-based research methodologies in educationand visual art and is impacted by the fields of new
media art, cultural studies, museum studies and thehistory of art as a discipline vital to the analysis
of how history, including the past and just-past, ismediated through images, objects, and experiences(Benjamin 1968).
Our project at the intersection of socially-engaged
interactive new media art and pedagogy, views themuseum as an essentially social institution that
requires interdisciplinary analysis as an informalsite of learning and as space for promoting criticalthinking. The Gulf of Georgia Cannery Museum
National Historic Site, a museum since the closingof the cannery in 1970 and that still features theintact production line, is an important pedagogicalspace for school groups, tourists and local visitors,
and subsequently a major source of regional identity.
For the Catch + Release exhibition, we designed
situation-specific, new media interactive art
experiences for contributing diverse perspectives;
catching and releasing stories that challenge theseamlessness of those historical narratives typically
represented by museum displays of artifacts andinformation panels. The exhibition is intended togenerate polyphony of diverse voices to make viewers
feel a part of their regional museum, and exposes
them to multiple viewpoints about their (local)
relationship to the (global) ecology-making visitors
more aware of their relationship to and impact on
the local ecology and history. In this way, the project
did not seek to create an exhibition in the space, butrather used the space to exhibit the place in which it
is situated.
Our presentation will describe the conceptual basis
and rationale for the inclusion of the new media
artworks that comprise the exhibition. They include:interactive projections of live-stream visualizationof data from underwater sensors of Canada’s ocean
observatory; clusters of light and sound digital sensor
activated interactive sculptures that reference themarine geoscape and communication devices used byfisherman; and a montage of video interviews withpeople whose stories expose sometimes oppositionalviews on the fishing industry. The polyphony ofmultiple and diverse voices argues for a more
open-ended and complicated way of dealing withthe representation of history. We will discuss
how immersive technology can provide unique
opportunities for teaching and learning experiencesand embodied ways of knowing through a rich multisensory environment that engages the viewer withhow culture and memory come together in newforms.
Our study is also intended to stimulate interest
the historical role of the museum by inviting
the community to participate in the creation and109

Digital Humanities 2012

complication of historical narratives. Cultural andheritage museums, specifically, have become multipurpose, spaces where museum professionals strive
to expand their programmes and define newcommunication approaches capable of engaging
broader publics (Prior 2008). In this context,
recent interactive technologies are seen to offer
museums an ability to create a sense of spectacleand excite audiences (Hemsley, Cappellini & Stanke2005). Increasingly, however, the reification oftechnologized display raises concerns about the typeand quality of museum experience (Griffiths 1999).
Despite the potential of multi-media displays toaddress the diverse needs of different audiences
or audience members by combining informationand physical spaces and presenting interactive
storytelling, there is still a tendency to rely on
basic interactive terminals with mouse, keyboard
and monitor. While this may be an efficient way todeliver information, our project contributes aesthetic
and expressive possibilities for actively engaging
audiences. Recent discourse around new media
art practices and new museums has encouraged
an interest in technology beyond fixed modalitiesof story authoring, to sensory-driven, interactive
processes of learning that allow visitors to engage
with interactive art forms and digital technologies
to construct their own learning experience in themuseum (Henry 2010; Rogoff 2010). However
more research is needed to assess new models
for establishing and maintaining dialogues withvisitors and new ideas about how to connect these
dialogues with the broader audiences (Cutler 2010).
Contemporary new media artwork that invites users
to interpret or experience content and function
through a range of physical and sensorial interactions
are seen to be extremely promising (Hornecker& Buur 2006). Their ability to author embodied,responsive engagements are well suited to themuseums’ pedagogical programs.
As contemporary art is transformed through theincorporation of new media practice, works like
Catch + Release offer a potentially innovative
approach to learning. If as Ellsworth (2005)
contends, new digital media contribute to pedagogic
disruption and call for new ‘routes’ of relational
thinking, they establish the ground of sharedsocial interest drawing together artists, museum
professionals and educators to discuss how the public
becomes co-creators of meaning (or active learners)
through experiential, participatory engagement(Bishop 2006).
Social history museums have begun to invite artistic
inquiry, presenting temporary digital new media
art exhibitions such as Catch + Release that
advance the idea of a complex cultural and social
history, challenge conventional displays and provide

110

alternate modes of visitors’ participation, meaning
making and knowledge construction (Bishop 2006),
in these new spaces of artistic exchange or encounter.

References
Benjamin, W. (1968). The Work of Art in theAge of Mechanical Reproduction. In H. Arendt (ed),Illuminations. Translated from German by H. Zohn.
New York: Shocken Books, pp. 217-251.
Bishop, C., ed. (2006). Participation. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Cutler, A. (2010, Spring). What is tobedone,
Sandra?
Learning
inculturalstinstitutions in the 21
century. Tate Papers
13. http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateres
earch/tatepapers/10spring/cutler.shtm(accessed 1 October 2011).

Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of Learning: Media,
Architecture, Pedagogy. New York: Routledge.
Griffiths,
A.
(1999).
Media
technology
andmuseumdisplay:A
centuryofaccommodation and conflict. MIT communications
forum. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/griffiths.html#1 (accessed 1 October 2011).
Hemsley, J., V. Cappellini, and G. Stanke(2005). Digital Applications for Cultural and
Heritage Institutions. Burlington: Ashgate.
Henry, C. (2010). The Museum Experience:
The Discovery of Meaning. Reston: National Art
Education Association.
Hornecker, E., and J. Buur (2006). Getting a
Grip on Tangible Inter action: A Framework on
Physical Space and Social Interaction, Proceedingsof the SIGCHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors
in Computing System. New York: ACM Press, pp.
437-446.
Prior, N. (2008). Having One’s Tate and Eating It:
Transformations of the Museum in a Hypermodern
Era. In McClellan, A. (ed.), Art and its Publics:
Museum Studies at the Millenium. Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 51-76.
Rogoff,I.
(2010,
Summer).
Practicing
research: Singularising knowledge. MaHKUzine, 9:37-42. http://www.mahku.nl/download/maHKUzi
ne09_web.pdf (accessed 1 October 2011).

Digital Humanities 2012

Opportunity andaccountability in the‘eResearch push’

institutionalisation of eResearch-infrastructures in
the humanities over the past decade, and inparticular, reference the countries in which I havethe most experience, Australia and the UK. The
landscape in Australia is particularly problematic as
unlike other countries, the eResearch agenda is stillat its height whilst the digital humanities is stilldeveloping its own institutional addenda.

Bellamy, Craig

txt@craigbellamy.net
Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI),
Australia

In this paper I will present an examination of theinstitutional and epistemological tensions between
particular national ‘eResearch’ infrastructure
agendas (or ‘eScience’, ‘cyber-infrastructure’) andparticular aspects of the digital humanities. Whilstmuch of the digital humanities positions itself within
the research ‘infrastructures’ of the humanities(journals, academic departments, conferences,
libraries, and sober ethics committees) – and ispartly responsible for building the ‘human capital’
to work in the humanities – eResearch has largely
emerged outside of the perspectives and training of
the digital humanities, primarily driven by a ‘bigscience’ agenda (ie. an emphasis on mass data storageand infrastructures that largely support scientificmethods and ways of collaborating). This has creatednumerous complexities for the digital humanities,
particularly in the UK and Australia where it may,for better or worse, be emerging as a competing setof discourses and practices to the digital humanities(Examples will be given in the presentation).
Admittedly, the eResearch agenda has createdmany opportunities for research in the humanities,
however, the way in which this agenda has been
institutionalised in a number of countries means thatit doesn’t always serve the needs of the humanities.
This is because eResearch largely exists outside ofhumanities research structures and is principally
measured and driven by different accountability
metrics. Its technical development also sits withinrarefied institutional hierarchies between ‘service
staff and researcher’, and biases a mistaken industrial
utility; neither of which seem particularly useful forthe contemporary challenges of digital humanities
nor humanities research. As Geoffrey Rockwellstates:[there are] dangers in general and especiallythe issue of the turn from research to research
infrastructure [...] we need to be careful about
defining the difference and avoid moving into therealm of infrastructure [...] those things we are still
studying (Rockwell 2010: 5).
Through presenting key examples, inpresentation I will broadly explore

this
the

The main tension appears to be a ‘two cultures’
one; it is the misunderstandings between appliedcomputing, largely focused upon meeting the many
practical needs of large-scale scientific endeavours,
and the digital humanities that has its own particularunderstandings of the efficacy of computing
within its heterogeneous research endeavours.
Many infrastructure investors unavoidably claim a‘research enabling’ or even a research pedigree for
their work, but the exact nature of this researchand how it helps us understand humans society
and culture is, on occasions, yet to be determined(and this is far from an easy task and is largely
an experimental practice; rarely a utilitarian one).
Plus the institutional positioning of eResearch
infrastructure in university service divisions, remotenational services, and monolithic government andscience-led programmes, means that the tradition ofcritique, and synthesis of eResearch infrastructure
within contemporary digital humanities scholarship,
is barely possible.

1. What can be done?
As a trained historian and long-time digital
humanities advocate who has benefited frominvestments in eResearch – and indeed, I am
employed by a particularly flexible strategiceResearch programme in the State of Victoria inAustralia – I caution against retreating too eagerly
from the ‘infrastructure turn’ as there are still
healthy opportunities in many countries between
the cracks of otherwise clumsy agendas. Howeverthese opportunities need to be positioned within aresearch-led digital humanities agenda and not ascience led-agenda (and there is a perhaps a darkside to the #alt-ac movement in the United States if
new digital outputs are not well supported within ahumanities research setting) (Nowviskie 2011).
Perhaps a better approach for the humanities thancambering to a science led ‘e-infrastructure’ funding
model, along with its often abrasive tectonic plates
of incongruous collaborations, would be to lobby forthe funding model to strengthen digital humanities
research. The digital humanities has a sophisticatedinternational network of centres, undergraduate
and graduate degrees, associations, conferences,
journals, and research accountability structures thatare largely internal to the humanities and is thus111

Digital Humanities 2012much better equipped to lead computing in thehumanities than eResearch (and there are somepositive institutional developments in this direction).
And if led by the digital humanities, new research
infrastructures such as data and text centres, virtualenvironments, and digital libraries would be more
relevant to humanities research, thus insuring theirlong term sustainability. But this would require ‘einfrastructure’ to be institutionalised in a much more
responsive way; in a way that isn’t unequally coupledwith the needs of science. Again Geoffrey Rockwellstates:Perhaps things like the Text Encoding Initiative
Guidelines are the real infrastructure of humanities
computing, and the consortia like the TEI are
the future of light and shared infrastructure
maintenance (Rockwell 2010: 5).
I would like to think that this is because the TEI
and derivatives such as EpiDoc exist within a deeply
scholarly and vibrant international research culturethat is both embedded within and accountable tohumanities research; this is not always the case witheResearch infrastructure. However, for the digital
humanities to take a greater lead in terms of guiding
the implementation of eResearch infrastructure, in
its various institutional settings, would require thedigital humanities to be strengthened institutionallyto rise to the challenge, especially in countries
where ‘eResearch’ is much stronger than the digital
humanities. All infrastructure, despite its veneer ofutilitarian simplicity, is ‘among the complex and
expensive things that society creates’ (Hauser 2011).
‘e-Infrastructure’ for the humanities may provide
opportunities, but aspects of the present modelin various countries lacks a complex humanities
research environment and is wedded to an empirical,
engineering, and industrial instrumentalism that isoften at odds or even hostile to the humanities.
It is not that eResearch does not do some things
very well, it is the promise of research that it
doesn’t do particularly well. The goals of eResearch
infrastructures are often so monumental; that theyshould perhaps be a set of research questions inthemselves rather than practical goals. Based on
my experience within eResearch and the digital
humanities I will propose a number of alternative
directions in this presentation and seek insight fromothers in the audience from various national andinstitutional contexts.

References
Barjak, F., J. Lane, M. Poschen, R. Proctor,
S. Robinson, and G. Weigand (2010). eInfrastructure adoption in the social sciences
and humanities: cross-national evidence from the
AVROSS survey. Information, Communication andSociety 13(5): 635-651.
112

Capshew, J. H., and K. A. Rader (1992). Big
science: price to the present. Osiris 7: 2-25, http://

www.jstor.org/stable/301765

Edwards, P., S. Jackson, J. Bowker, andK. Knobel (January, 2007). Understanding
infrastructure:dynamics,
tension,design.
Report of a Workshop on History &TheoryofInfrastructure:
Lessonsfor
New
Scientific
Cyberinfrastructures,
Rice
University, http://cohesion.rice.edu/Conferen
ces/Hewlett/emplibrary/UI_Final_Report.pdf

Hauser,Th.
(2011).
Cyberinfrastructure
anddatamanagement(presentation).
Research Computing, University of Bolder,
Colorado, http://www.stonesoup.org/meetings/
1106/work3.pres/2b-CI-DM-TH.htm

Katz, R. N. (2008). The tower and the cloud:higher education in the age of cloud computing
educause, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/PUB7202.pdf

Nowviskie, B. (2011). #alt-ac Alternative academic
careers for humanities scholars, http://nowviskie.org/2010/alt-ac/

Rockwell,
G.
(14
May
2010
).
As
Transparent as Infrastructure: On the research of
cyberinfrastructure in the humanities’. Connexions,
http://cnx.org/content/m34315/1.2/

http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/ou
rculturalcommonwealth.pdf

Svennsson, P. (2011). From optical fibre
to conceptual cyberinfrastucture. DHQ: Digital
Humanities Quarterly 5(1), http://digitalhuman
ities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html

Turner, G. (September, 2008), Report from the
HASS capability workshop, Old Canberra House,
Australian National University, 15 August 2008
(unpublished report).
Turner, G. (2009). Towards and Australian
Humanities Digital Archive. A report of a scoping
study of the establishment of a national digital
research resource for the humanities, AustralianAcademy of the Humanities, http://www.humaniti
es.org.au/Portals/0/documents/Policy/Resea
rch/Towards_An_Australian_Digital_Humaniti
es_Archive.pdf

Unsworth, J., Chair (2006) ‘Our culturalcommonwealth: The report of the American
Council of Learned Societies Commission on
Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social
Sciences, American council of learned societies.

Digital Humanities 2012

Connecting European
Women Writers. The
Selma Lagerlöf Archive and
Women Writers Database
Bergenmar, Jenny

jenny.bergenmar@lir.gu.se
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Olsson, Leif-Jöran

leif-joran.olsson@svenska.gu.se
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

1. Introduction
Arguments for investing time and resources in digitalscholarly editions are often based upon the culturaland literary dignity of the authorship (Shillingsburg
2004). In the case of Selma Lagerlöf, as in thecase of for example Ibsen, one can argue that her
authorship is one of the most important in Swedish
literary history and one of the most well known
internationally of all Swedish authors. Following thisline of argument, literary scholarly editions tend tobe focused on single, canonized authorships, andsince letters to the author and translations of his/her work are not usually included, the authorship isrepresented in splendid isolation.

2. From Work to Reception
We will discuss why and how the Selma Lagerlöf
Archive (SLA), which makes the Selma Lagerlöf
collection at the National Library of Sweden
accessible and provides digital scholarly editions of
her work, aims to create a broader historical context,
including the intensive contacts within networksof European women translators and writers whichwere important for her success in Europe. What
the research on Selma Lagerlöf until now lacks,
is a more complete mapping of these patternsof dissemination, and also, of course, evidence ofreception of her work in different countries. Thishas consequences for the Selma Lagerlöf Archive too.
Charting the translations is not a small task, andinvestigating legal rights to be able to publish thesetranslations online is perhaps even more difficult.
This also needs to be a collective effort, since thesource material is spread over Europe and written indifferent languages.

3. Collaborative Methods
The Selma Lagerlöf Archive’s participation in
the COST Action ISO901 ‘Women Writers in
History: Towards a New Understanding of European
Literary Culture’ (2009-2013), facilitates thediscovery of unknown or forgotten connections
between European women in the literary field. Bystandardizing ‘author’ and ‘work’, but not ‘reception’,the Selma Lagerlöf Archive and the WomenWriters
database ( http://www.databasewomenwriters.nl/ ) can exchange information on these levels.
‘Reception’ is expressed as a relation between ‘author’and ‘work’. Thus the ‘author’ can function in different
roles – as ‘reader’, ‘critic’, ‘admirer’ etc. ‘Work’ canbe specified by type – ‘letter’, obituary’ etc. This is a
flexible model, since it covers many different kindsof research material, and there is no need to agree
on a common definition of ‘reception’, which would
not be adequate for all research material and researchquestions of the projects using the database.
By way of microservices that are currently being
developed, the metadata in the xml-databases of
SLA, can be shared within the agreed frame of
Women Writers-database, in addition to our otherAPIs. This collaboration benefits the SLA in two
ways. Considering the international reach of Women
Writers-database, it may function as an important
output to the otherwise limited target group of SLA.
SLA can also collect the relevant data on translations
or receptions registered in the WomenWriters
database and thereby making the time consuming
task of finding and registering this information
unnecessary.
The development of microservices follows thecollective work carried out in COST Action‘Interedition’ (van Zundert 2011), where the Selma
Lagerlöf Archive also participated (although Sweden
was not formally a member). The modular
microservices developed will vary in implementation
language and platform, but will be web-accessible toother services using REST-like interfaces. As for now,the Selma Lagerlöf Archive has not yet developed any
standard format tool for visualizing the connections
between European women writers, but evidently
this will be an important task for the future and apowerful method for rewriting the European map ofliterary history.

4. Comparing Translations andReception Documents
An inventory of translations is a first step towards
discovering the mechanisms of dissemination ofthis – and other – authorships. But a qualitative
analysis of the translations to different languages
and of reception documents such as reviews, are also113

Digital Humanities 2012

necessary for understanding the different nationaland cultural contexts in which the authorship wasused. A possible tool in the qualitative analysis of
the European translations of Selma Lagerlöf’s workis the development of Juxta and CollateX, which
was also previously carried out in ‘Interedition’.
The modularisation initiated in the previous COST
Action ‘Open Scholarly Communities on the Web’known as the Gothenburg model, had the objective totransform the collation from a ‘black box’ to a clear
process with discrete chainable steps.
The web service versions of the collation step of Juxta
and CollateX are primarily used interactively forcomparing variants of Selma Lagerlöf’s work online
within our own interface. But in addition to this,it allows for any electronic texts to be compared,
thus creating the possibility of comparing different
translations. Collation of translations is usually aslaborious as collation of variants, but in this way
we can more effectively trace how Selma Lagerlöf’s
work has been transformed in different translations.
Since the German translations were often used assources for other European translations (for example
to Czech and Russian), it is important to examine
to what extent the translations were rewritten toaccommodate to the cultural climate. For example,
some of the German translations were explicitly
directed towards the Heimatkunstbewegung, which
can be described as a precedent to the Blut und
Boden-literature in the 1930s (Ljung Svensson 2011).
It is a question still unexplored, how this ideologicalrhetoric was translated into other languages, nations
and ideologies.
The possibility of comparing electronic texts throughcollation may also be applied for other purposes
than showing the deviations between two editions ortranslations. It can be used to discover similarities
between texts. One ambition of the COST Action‘Women Writers in History’ is to bring data together,which has, up until now, been dispersed among
different archives, physical and digital. This allows
for a quantitative approach in estimating the reachof female writers activities in Europe. The collected
data will also be used qualitatively, for example
in exploring patterns in the reception of women
writers by critics, and if these patterns correspondto specific themes in the literary texts. Provided
that the reception documents (for example reviews)
are in the same language and in an electronic
format, reviews might also be compared through themicroservices, in order to find out if certain waysof describing female authors, or focusing on certain
themes in their texts, recur. The same method –although still at an experimental stage – may be used
to compare texts by different female authors as ashortcut to discovering common topics or themes.
The advantage of this method is that the researchers

114

don’t have to know beforehand what to search for,as when you search electronic texts for certain
keywords. Similarities may appear that researchers
would not have imagined.

5. Conclusion
In order to revitalize the field of scholarly editing,the author’s work must be presented as nodes
in cultural networks, involving different contexts
and countries, where the texts were received, used
and transformed, as well as different agents andinstitutions, participating in the dissemination of theauthorship. This kind of scholarly editing is feasible
if existing databases and tools are used to share andcompare data. This method of working emphasizes
both the text as a social object and digital scholarly
edition as a collaborative activity (Robinson 2009).

References
Ljung Svensson, A. S. (2011). Jordens
dotter.
Selma
Lagerlöf
och
den
tyska
hembygdslitteraturen/Die Tochter der Erde. Selma
Lagerlöf und die deutsche Heimatliteratur um 1900,
Göteborg och Stockholm: Makadam förlag.
Robinson, P. M. W. (2009). The Endsof Editing. Digital Humanities Quarterly
3(3). http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000051/000051.html .
Shillingsburg, P. (2004). Hagiolatry, CulturalEngineering, Monument Building, and Other
Functions of Scholarly Editing. In R. Mondiano,
L. F. Searle, and P. Shillingsburg (eds.), Voice,Text, Hypertext. Emerging Practices in Textual
Studies. Seattle, Washington: U of Washington P, pp.
412-423.
van Zundert, J., et al. (2011). Interedition:
Principles, Practice and Products of an OpenCollaborative Development Model for Digital
Scholarly Editions. Book of Abstracts DH 2011, June
19-22, Stanford, http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-227.xml .

Digital Humanities 2012

Stylometric Analysis ofChinese Buddhist texts:
Do different Chinesetranslations of the‘Gandhavyūha’ reflect
stylistic features that are
typical for their age?
Bingenheimer, Marcus
m.bingenheimer@gmail.com
Temple University, USA

Hung, Jen-Jou

Jenjou.Hung@gmail.com
Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Taiwan

Hsieh, Cheng-en

chengen.xie@ddbc.edu.tw
Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Taiwan

Buddhist Hybrid Chinese is a form of ClassicalChinese that is used in the translation of Buddhist
scriptures from Indian languages to Chinese between
the 2nd and the 11th century CE. It differsfrom standard Classical Chinese of the period
in vocabulary (esp. the use of compounds andtranscriptions of Indian terms), register (esp. theinclusion of vernacular elements), genre (esp. theuse of prosimetry), and rarely even syntax (at times
imitating the syntax of the Indian original). Texts in
Buddhist Hybrid Chinese are central to all traditionsof East Asian Buddhism, which is practiced in China,
Korea, Japan and Vietnam.
No comprehensive linguistic description of Buddhist
Hybrid Chinese has been attempted so far andperhaps never will, due to the great diversity between
translation idioms that at times use different Chinese
terms for one single Indian term, and in other cases
one single Chinese term for different Indian terms.
In as far as Buddhist Hybrid Chinese has been
described, the research generally concentrates ongrammatical particles (e.g. Yu 1993), single texts (e.g.
Karashima 1994), single terms (e.g. Pelliot 1933) oreven single characters (e.g. Pulleyblank 1965). The
stylometric study of Buddhist Hybrid Chinese – asthat of Classical Chinese in general – has only justbegun. Only since 2002, when the Chinese Buddhist
Electronic Text Association (CBETA) distributed thetexts in XML are the canonical texts available in a
reliable digital edition.1

The Chinese Buddhist canon was printed first in the10th century and regarding texts before that date its
contents have been relatively consistent since then.
The currently most widely referenced edition (theTaishō edition, published 1924-34) is based on a
Korean edition from the 14th century. It contains ca.
2200 texts from India and China. Due to insufficientand unreliable bibliographic information for texts
translated before the 7th century, the attributions
to individual translators – where they exist at all– are often questionable. This again has an impact
on the dating of the early texts, as they are usually
dated via their translator(s). Since most stylometricmethods, including those for authorship attribution,
were developed for European languages, they often
rely on easily parsable word-boundaries, which in thecase of Buddhist Hybrid Chinese do not exist. Our
wider aim is therefore to develop methods to identify
stylistic clues for certain eras in Chinese translations
from Indian texts. Can we, based on stylometricfeatures, find a way to date Chinese Buddhist texts
or at least to meaningfully corroborate or contradict
traditional attributions?
In this study we have compared three translationsof the same text, i.e. the Gandhavyūha section (ch.
Ru fajie pin 入法界品) of the Avatamsakamsūtra(ch. Huayan jing 華嚴經). The Gandhavyūha, whichcontains a long narrative of the quest of theyoung man Sudhana to visit spiritual teachers, wastranslated into Chinese three times:
T. 278 by Buddhabhadra 佛陀拔陀羅et. al. (Chang’an
418-20 CE)
T. 279 by Śiksānanda實叉難陀 et. al. (Chang’an
695-699 CE)
T. 293 by Prajña 般若et. al. (Chang’an 796-8 CE)
Our task in this particular case was to develop an
algorithm that can demonstrate that the T.278 wastranslated three to four hundred years earlier than
T.279 and T.293, and show which of its features canidentify a translation idiom that is earlier or at leastdifferent from that of T.279 and T.293. Can it beshown that the two Tang dynasty translations (T.279
and T.293) truly are more closely related to eachother than to the translation from the Eastern Jin(T.278)?
Our approach here combines a general statisticalweighing of n-grams with a focus on grammaticalparticles (xuci 虛詞). A ranking of their importancefor our corpus must factor in occurrence as well as
variance. The algorithm must also provide for thefact that characters that function as particles canalso be used in nominal or verbal compounds. These
instances must be filtered out by applying a list ofcompounds from a large dictionary of Buddhist terms

115

Digital Humanities 2012

(Soothill & Hodous 1937). The algorithm for this isdeveloped in the first section.
The following sections describe the sampling
procedure and the preparation of the corpus.
Although ostensibly all versions of the same
Indian text, the three translations differ greatly inlength, mainly because the volume of the Indian
Gandhavyūha expanded between the 5th and the 8th
centuries. To counter this problem and to produce
enough samples for our analysis, each translation will
be divided into sub-divisions of equal length. Then,the frequencies of grammatical particles in thesedivisions will be calculated and used for defining thestylometric profile of the three translations. We will
therefore deal with text clusters on which we canuse Principle Component Analysis (PCA), which wehave used in a previous study (Hung, Bingenheimer,
Wiles 2010). Using PCA on the extracted profiles andplotting the values of first and second components
in 2-d charts we are able to discern clearly thatT.279 and T.293 are closer to each other and moredistant/different from T.278. The two Tang dynasty
translations seem indeed to differ from the Jin
dynasty translation in its use of particles, and thefirst and second component of the PCA analysis resultshows, which particles create the distinction.
Thus stylometric analysis can give us abetter understanding of the translation styles
of Buddhabhadra, Śiksānanda and Prajña. Alltranslators have several other translations attributed
to them and comparing their Gandhavyūhatranslation to the rest of their corpus, and then again
their corpora with each other, could in the future help
us to improve our algorithms that ideally would be
able to describe and demarcate the work of different
translators. The general aim is to get a first handle
on the quantitative analysis of the corpus written
in Buddhist Hybrid Chinese and extract significant
features, which can then be used for a more accurate
linguistic description of the idiom.
What the analysis does not account for is changes
in the Indian text. The Eastern Jin translation
was translated from a somewhat different versionof the Indian text than the two Tang translations
300-400 years later. This does, however, notimpact our analysis. It is possible to distinguish
how grammatical particles were used by different
translators, because they reflect different styles of
Buddhist Hybrid Chinese, which is what we arelooking to describe. Even taking into account that
the Sanskrit text of the Gandhavyūha has evolved
between the 5th and the 8th century, its grammar
could not have changed to the degree as there arechanges in the translation idiom.

116

References
Hung, J.-J., M. Bingenheimer, and S. Wiles(2010). Quantitative Evidence for a Hypothesis
regarding the Attribution of early Buddhist
Translations. Literary and Linguistic Computing
25(1): 119-134.
Karashima, S. 幸嶋靜志 (1994). Chōagonkyō
no gengo no kenkyū – onshago bunseki o chushin
toshite 長阿含經の原語の研究 – 音写語分析を中心として[Study of the language of the Chinese
Dīrghāgama]. Tokyo: Hirakawa平河出版社.
Pelliot, P. (1933). Pāpīyān > 波旬 Po-siun. T’oung
Pao (Sec. Series), 30 (1-2): 85-99.
Pulleyblank, E. G.. (1965). The Transcription of
Sanskrit K and Kh in Chinese Asia Major 11 (2):
199-210.
Soothill, W. E. and L. Hodous (1937). A
Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms. London:
Kegan. [Reprint Delhi: Motilal, 1994]. Digital as
XML/TEI file at http://buddhistinformatics.dd
bc.edu.tw/glossaries/ .
Yu, L. 俞理明 (1993). Fojing wenxian yuyan 佛経
文献語言 [The Language of the Buddhist Scriptures].
Chengdu: Bashu shushe巴蜀書社.
Notes
1. The CBETA edition is an openly available digital edition of
the Chinese Buddhist Canon (the texts can be downloaded invarious formats at http://www.cbeta.org/ .

Digital Humanities 2012

Information Extraction on
Noisy Texts for Historical
Research
Blanke, Tobias

tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Bryant, Michaelmichael.bryant@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Speck, Retoreto.speck@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Kristel, Connyc.kristel@niod.knaw.nl
NIOD, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure(EHRI)1 project aims to create a sustainable
Holocaust Research Infrastructure that will bring
together documentary evidence from dispersed
archives for historical research. EHRI involves 20
partner organisations in 13 countries. It aims toprovide open access to Holocaust material such as
documents, objects, photos, film and art. One of
the challenges of the project is that the dispersed
archives of interest to EHRI often do not havethe means to sufficiently digitise their resources.
Even if the resources are digitally available, theyremain inaccessible to searching and browsing byresearchers.
For EHRI, we investigated how we can use open
source OCR infrastructure developed at King’s
College London for the Ocropodium project (Bryant
et al. 2010) so that its output can feed the semantic
extraction of metadata useful for research discovery
and analysis. Current commercial OCR technology
does not serve well such specific research interests
in historical document collections, as it cannot beeasily customised. Most commercial OCR software
products are proprietary ‘black boxes’ which provide
digitisation staff with little scope for understanding
their behaviour and customising parameters underwhich they run. At the source level, there is amarked reluctance of OCR software manufacturers
to allow access to their code even in a collaborativeenvironment.
In the context of Ocropodium, we developed aworkflow tool Ocropodium Web Processing (OWP),
with which various open source OCR tools can be
combined to create the best possible OCR solution

for specific document types. The OWP workflow
environment is based on the principles of visualprogramming environments (Cox & Gauvin 2011). It
allows the user to build custom workflows comprisedof discrete processes. The workflows need not be
purely linear; instead they take the form of a graph,
specifically a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The
DAG is comprised of connected nodes, which eachperform a discrete function. Nodes can be thoughtof as functions which take one or more inputs andevaluate these to produce a result. Thus, OWP allows
archive staff to embed further services beyond OCR.
For this paper, we experimented with information
extraction (IE) services to semantically enricharchival descriptions. We present our experiments
to evaluate how common off-the-shelf IE services
behave against potentially noisy OCR’d texts.
Semantically enriched library and archivefederations have recently become an important partof research in digital libraries (Kruk & McDaniel2009). Especially so, as research users often havemore demands on semantics than is generally
provided by archival metadata. For instance, inarchival finding aids place names are often only
mentioned in free-form narrative text and notespecially indicated in controlled access points
for places. Researchers would like to search forthese locations. Place name extraction from thedescriptions might support this. For the future EHRI
infrastructure, we want to use IE services to enrich
the researchers’ experience. In our experiments, weconcentrated on extracting names and places facets,
both immensely important for Holocaust research.
Our experiments demonstrate the principal workflow
using IE tools. In our proof-of-concepts, we did
not address larger problems of IE from historicaltexts, which are manifold. As for OCRing, off-theshelf commercial IE software has often problems
with delivering acceptable results here. For the
problems of extracting semantic information fromlow quality textual data, please compare (Packer et
al. 2010), while (Warner & Clough, 2009) describeplans for a larger extraction project from the
UK National Archives. Instead of concentrating on
improving the IE itself, we were mainly interested
in mapping and evaluating the current state-ofthe-art. For the presentation at DH2012, we will
deliver exact evaluations of using off-the-shelf IE
tools against various levels of underlying ‘dirty’ OCR
text, commonly encountered in OCRed historicalresources.
Even the off-the-shelf IE tools have already delivered
encouraging results. For instance, we OCR’d PDF
files of survivor testimonies sent by the Wiener
Library,2 an EHRI partner. The documents weretypical fairly low resolution (612x790) grey-scalescans of typed documents. Due to the low resolution
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Digital Humanities 2012

we needed to do some advanced preprocessing of
the images and scaled the images by a factor of four
using an anti-aliasing filter to approximate a typicalresolution from 300 DPI scan and finally binarised
them (converting a colour or grey-scale image to one
containing only black and white). After binarisation,
additional filters were applied to deskew the images
and remove edge noise.
The resulting transcript produced by the open source
Tesseract OCR engine (>Smith 2007) was fairly low
quality, with around 90% character accuracy. We
ignored further possible improvements by combining
Tesseract with more advanced binarisation andpre-processing tools. As said, in this particularexperiment, we were interested how standard IE
services would react to low-quality textual input.
We used the off-the-shelf OpenCalais service byThompsonReuters to extract semantic information(Goddard & Byrne 2010). Even this standard setup
has proven to produce useful results. OpenCalais
proved successful at detecting the presence of apersonal name in the transcript, even when the
OCR was imperfect. For example, it detected that
‘Dmulaltsr Tappe’ (Dr. Walter Tappe) was a name.
It also marked up several instances of places, suchas Berlin and Wilmersdorf. Other incorrectly OCR’dlocations such as ‘Slchsischestraeae’ (Schlesisches)
were also marked up as places, due to the (correctly
OCR’d) preceding phrase ‘lived in’. Further semantic
data marked up by OpenCalais included positions(‘lawyer’, ‘auditor’, ‘actor’) and industry terms(‘food’). In several OCR transcripts it detected the
topic as ‘politics’. Social tags given included ‘Berlin’,‘Geography’ and ‘Geography of Europe’. We repeated
our experiment with other IE tools such as theopen source Annie tool from GATE (>Bontcheva etal., 2002) and could further improve our results,
especially as we could rely on advanced gazetteersof place and person names of the Holocaust that are
based on long-running community projects.3
These initial successful results will mean that wewill develop our OCRing of finding aids into a fullservice in the context of the EHRI project. We think
we can thereby significantly enhance the researchexperience of using historical archives.

References
Bontcheva, K., H. Cunningham, D. Maynard,
V.
Tablan,andH.
Saggion(2002).
Developing reusable and robust language processing
components for information systems using GATE.
In Database and Expert Systems Applications.
Proceedings 13th International Workshop. Berlin:
Springer, pp. 223-227.
Bryant, M., T. Blanke, M. Hedges, and R.
Palmer (2010). Open Source Historical OCR:118

The OCRopodium Project Research and Advanced
Technology for Digital Libraries. In M. Lalmas etal. (eds.), Research and advanced technology for
digital libraries. Berlin: Springer.
Cox, P. T., and S. Gauvin (2011).
Controlled dataflow visual programming languages.
Proceedings of the 2011 Visual Information
Communication - International Symposium. HongKong: ACM.
Goddard, L., and G. Byrne (2010). Linked Data
tools: Semantic Web for the masses. First Monday
15, 1.
Kruk, S. R., and B. McDaniel (2009). Semantic
Digital Libraries. Berlin: Springer.
Packer, T. L., J. F. Lutes, A. P. Stewart, D.
W. Embley, E. K. Ringger, K. D. Seppi, andL. S. Jensen (2010). Extracting person names fromdiverse and noisy OCR text. Proceedings of the fourthworkshop on Analytics for noisy unstructured text
data. Toronto, ON, Canada: ACM.
Smith, R. (2007). An Overview of theTesseract OCR Engine. Document Analysis
and Recognition. Proceedings 9th International
Conference. Berlin:Springer, pp. 629-633.
Warner, A., and P. Clough (2009). A Proposal forSpace Exploration at The National Archives. 2011.
Available: http://ir.shef.ac.uk/cloughie/papers/York2009.pdf
Notes
1. http://www.ehri-project.eu/
2. http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/
3. http://resources.ushmm.org/hsv/

Digital Humanities 2012

Modeling Gender: The ‘Rise
and Rise’ of the Australian
Woman Novelist

all the author names in AustLit to discover any
pseudonyms and to determine if the authors weremale or female. I explored the data in Excel, using thepivot table function to query the data and the chart
function to visualize of trends over time.

Bode, Katherine

My approach to this data is based on a combinationof book history’s awareness of the contingency
and limitations of data, and the paradigm ofcomputer modeling as outlined by Willard McCarty
in Humanities Computing.3 Although there has
been virtually no conversation between the two
fields, the methodological underpinnings of book
history and the digital humanities together signal
important directions for developing a critical andtheoretically aware approach to working with datain the humanities. Quantitative book historians
explicitly acknowledge the limited and mediatednature of data, and provide clear and detailed
accounts of the origins, biases and limitations of theliterary historical data they employ. In presenting
their results, such scholars insist that quantitative
results provide a particular perspective, suited to theinvestigation of some aspects of the literary field
but not others, and offer indications rather thanproof of literary trends. As Robert Darnton writes,‘In struggling with [literary data], the historian works
like a diagnostician who searches for patterns insymptoms rather than a physicist who turns hard
data into firm conclusions’.4

katherine.bode@anu.edu.au
Australian National University, Australia

1. Overview
Drawing on the AustLit: the Australian Literature
Resource database,1 this paper uses quantitative andcomputational methods to offer new insights into
literary history: in this case, gender trends in thecontemporary Australian novel field.
AustLit is currently the most comprehensive andextensive online bibliography of a national literature.
Created in 2001, AustLit merged a number ofexisting specialist databases and bibliographies, andhas subsequently involved well over a hundredindividual researchers – from multiple Australian
universities and the National Library of Australia– in an effort ‘to correct unevenness and gaps
in bibliographical coverage’ and continually update
the collection. The database has received significant
government and institutional funding and support,
and includes bibliographical details on over 700,000
works of Australian literature and secondary works
on that literature. In addition to its high degreeof comprehensiveness, AustLit is well suited toquantitative and computational analysis due to its
construction according to established bibliographicalstandards and fields, which gives the data ahigh degree of consistency across the collection.
This study focuses on Australian novels, the mostcomprehensively recorded aspect of AustLit. Evenso, AustLit notes that its ‘coverage of some popular
fiction genres such as westerns and romances, andof self-published works, is representative rather thanfull’.2

3. Methodology
Although AustLit is generally used by researches
for individual queries, it also has a guided searchfunction that allows a large number of results tobe extracted as tagged text. Using this function
I constructed searches that returned information,
including the author, date and place of publicationand genre, for all Australian novels publishedbetween 1945 and 2009. I then used Apple OS X
command lines to organize the data before exportingit to CSV format. Once in this format, I searched

Although developed for use with language, McCarty
notion of modeling – as an exploratory andexperimental practice, aimed not at producing
final and definitive answers but at enabling aprocess of investigation and speculation – canbe adapted for analysis and visualization ofliterary historical data, and employed in waysthat resonate productively with quantitative book
historical methods. Specifically, I used a modelingapproach to explore a series of hypotheses about
trends in Australian literary history. For instance,
the gender trends in authorship in a given period
might lead me to suppose a particular hypothesis(such as the influence of second-wave feminism
on constructions of authorship). In enabling
modification of or experimentation with data –for instance, subtracting particular publishers or
genres – modeling provides a way of testing suchideas, with the results of different models either
fulfilling and strengthening, or challenging, theoriginal hypothesis. This methodological frameworkshows how relatively simple computational processes
in Excel can enable a process of thinking withthe computer that reveals trends, conjunctions andconnections that could not otherwise be perceived.
This combination of book historical and digital
humanities methods avoids what I see as limitationsin other ‘distant readings’ of the literary field,
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Digital Humanities 2012

including Franco Moretti’s well-known ‘experiment’in literary history: Graphs, Maps, Trees.5 In
particular, the skeptical approach to data encouraged
by book history avoids the portrayal of quantitative
results as objective and transparent. Meanwhile,
McCarty’s notion of modeling – as a means of
thinking with the computer – avoids the assumptionthat the computer is a passive tool in the process ofanalysis and interpretation.

4. Results
Extracting data from this online archive, visualizing
and modeling it, has allowed me to address questionsof long-standing interest to literary scholars andto explore new and hitherto unrecognized trendsin Australian literary history. This paper illustrates
the potential of such research for literary studies
with a case study that responds to the conference
theme of ‘digital diversity’. A major issue in literary
historical discussions of ‘diversity’ is the presence– or absence – of women authors in the literary
field. In contemporary literary studies (in Australia
and other national contexts), such discussion has
focused on the period from the late 1960s to thelate 1980s, when second-wave feminism is said tohave had its major impact. This period is cited asa time of substantial growth in women’s presencein the literary field, leading to increased diversity
and a deconstruction of the canon of male authors.
Visualisations of the AustLit data allows me to
explore whether this perception of gender trends iswarranted, while the process of modeling enables
investigation of the causes of the trend.
In relation to gender trends from the late 1960s to
the late 1980s, the results of this study support thelongstanding perception that women’s involvementin the Australian novel field increased at this time(see Figure 1, showing the proportion of Australiannovels by men and women from 1945 to 2009).
However, the outcomes of the modeling process
significantly complicate the standard interpretationof this trend, and the relationship between politics
and the literary field it implies. Contextualising thisgrowth in women’s writing in relation to the genreof Australian novels shows that the largest area ofgrowth was in romance fiction, a form of writing
usually seen as inimical to second-wave feminism.
Another challenge to existing interpretations of therelationship between gender, politics and fiction
emerges in the past two decades, when gender trendsin authorship are explored in the context of gender
trends in critical reception. In the 1970s and 1980s,
even as romance fiction represented the largest
proportion of women’s publishing, critical attention
to Australian women writers in newspapers andacademic journals increased (see Figure 2, depicting120

the proportion of men and women among the top
twenty most discussed Australian novelists in thesedifferent forums and overall). The proportion ofAustralian novels by women has continued to growin the past two decades, such that they write wellover half of all Australian novels published in the
2000s (see Figure 1), and the proportion of romancefiction in this field has declined. Yet in this same
period, women writers have been less and less the
subject of critical discussion in newspapers. These
results resonate with those recently presented byVida, an advocacy group for women writers, showing
the same prevailing focus on male authors in thebook reviews of a wide range of major American andEuropean newspapers and magazines in 2010 and2011, including The Atlantic, the London Review ofBooks, the New York Review of Books and the Times
Literary Supplement.6
Although women continue to be well represented
in academic discussion of Australian literature,
the focus in that forum is on nineteenth-century
authors, whereas both contemporary and historicalmale authors are discussed. Despite the impact
of feminism on the Australian literary field, theseresults suggest that the longstanding perception of
the great author as a man is still influential. Presenceor representation is not, I argue, the only issue indetermining the success of diversity in the literary
field. Other constructions – relating to the genre
in which fiction is written and gender trends in its
reception – shape the field in ways that only comeinto view on the level of trends: when the literary
field is approached as a system, using data-rich andcomputer-enabled methods.

Notes
1. AustLit. (2001-). AustLit. http://www.austlit.edu.au/(accessed 25 March 2012).
2. AustLit. (2001-). About Scope. http://www.austlit.edu.au/about/scope (accessed 25 March 2012).
3. McCarty, W. (2005). Humanities Computing. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
4. Darnton, R. (1996). The Forbidden Best-Sellers of PreRevolutionary France. New York: Norton, p. 169.
5. Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a
Literary History. London: Verso.
6. Vida: Women in Literary Arts (2010). The Count 2010.
http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count (accessed
19 June 2011); Vida: Women in Literary Arts (2011). The Count2010. (accessed 9 March 2012).

Digital Humanities 2012

Contextual factors inliterary quality judgments:
A quantitative analysisof an online writing
community
Boot, Peter

peter.boot@huygens.knaw.nl
Huygens Institute of Netherlands History, The
Netherlands

1. Introduction
Some literary works and authors acquire enduring
reputation, whereas others do not. What causes
the difference is a contested issue. Fishelov (2010)
distinguishes between a ‘beauty party’ and a ‘power
party’, where the beauty party argues for the
existence of aesthetic qualities, inherent in the work,
while the power party argues that social power
structures determine the outcome of canonisation
processes. As argued by Miall (2006), the question
should be decided empirically. However, because
there is no objective measure of literary quality(if there were one, the discussion would be over)empirical investigation of the issue has been fraught
with difficulty. Both parties can lay some claim toempirical evidence. For the power party, Rosengren(1987: 295-325) and Van Rees and Vermunt (1996:
317-333), among others, have shown that reputations
to some extent are made by newspaper reviewers.
For the other side, some of the evidence that
Miall adduces suggests that foregrounded linguisticfeatures (deviant from normal, non-literary usage)
may be responsible for some of the (emotional)
response that literary reading evokes. It is long way,
however, from that finding to showing that this sortof textual properties can actually explain a work’s
longer-term reputation.
As a way forward in this debate, I propose to look
into online writing communities, i.e. websites where
communities of amateur writers publish and discuss
their poems and stories. The sites offer the potential
for empirical and quantitative research into literary
evaluation because they contain large quantities ofworks and responses to these works. Text analysis
can be combined with statistical analysis of numberof responses and ratings.
In this paper I will look at Verhalensite, a Dutchlanguage online writing community, unfortunately
no longer active. At the basis of the paper isa site download that contains ca. 60,000 stories

and poems, written by 2500 authors. The texts
received 350,000 comments and the comments
drew another 450,000 reactions. 150,000 comments
were accompanied by a rating in terms of 1 to 5
stars. I reported about Verhalensite and its researchpotential in (Boot 2011a). In (Boot 2011b) I discussavailable data and use them in an analysis of thepossibility to predict long-term activity on the site
based on activity and response in the first four weeks
of site membership.

2. Context factors
I focus here on the role of context factors indetermining commenters’ response to the works
published on the site. I look at pairs of one author
and one commenter, where the commenter has
responded to at least one of the author’s works.
I select only those pairs where both author andcommenter have published at least ten works. This
makes it possible to compute linguistic similarity
between authors’ and commenters’ texts and thesimilarity of their genre preferences. There are49,437 of author-commenter pairs fulfilling theserequirements, and we can compute statistical
relationships between the contextual factors and the
response variables. As an example I give correlations
between some of the context variables and thenumber of comments the commenter has given
the author, presumably reflecting the commenter’s
opinion of the author’s works:
Variable

Partialcorrelation

Variablegrouping

Similarity creative
texts

0.06

Author-commenter
similarity

Similarity
commentary texts

0.11

Difference in
numbers of poems-0.11

Same preferred
genre

0.09

Replies by author to 0.07
comments (fraction)
Comments byauthor on others

0.15

Comments
by author oncommenter

0.57

Ratings by author

0.13

Prose writers

0.08

Author networking
activity

Text properties

Table 1: Partial correlations with number of comments fromcommenter to author, given author productivity, commenter’s
average number of comments per week and overlap in
the commenter’s and author’s active periods on the site

The first four variables are measures of similarity
between the author’s and commenter’s texts. The
correlations show that the closer commenter andauthor are in terms of language, in the amount

121

Digital Humanities 2012of poetry they write, and in genre, the more
likely the commenter is to respond to the author’s
works. I use two aspects of textual similarity.
The similarity between authors’ and commenters’creative texts (poems and stories) is computed using
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), argued
by Pennebaker (e.g. Pennebaker & Ireland 2011:34-48) to reflect important psychological properties.
LIWC counts words in grammatical, psychologicaland semantic categories (e.g. pronouns, positive
emotions, or work-related words). I use the cosine
distance over all LIWC categories as a measureof textual similarity. For the commentary texts, I
created a number of site-specific vocabulary lists
corresponding to certain aspects of the response:
compliments (good, nice, cool), greetings (hi,welcome, grtz), critical (not necessarily negative)
discourse (dialogue, stanza, suspense), negative
response (disappointing, boring, missing), and someothers. I computed frequencies for each of thesecategories. Textual similarity between author andcommenter was computed from the weighted
differences between their frequencies in the sitespecific categories.
The next four variables are measures of the author’s
networking activity, which was shown by Janssen(1998: 265-280) to be an important factor in
determining the amount of critical attention that
an author receives. They represent respectively thefraction of received comments that the author replies
to (usually to say thank you, sometimes with a longer
reaction), the number of times the author comments
on others’ works, the number of comments the author
has given to the specific commenter (the quid-proquo effect), and the number of ratings that the author
has given. All four have positive influence on theamount of comments. The next variable shows that
if the shared genre is prose (and not poetry), thecommenter is more likely to rate the author’s works
highly. At present I have no hypothesis as to why thisshould be the case.
In terms of the discussion about literary evaluation,
the numbers are interesting because none of thecontext variables reflect properties of the texts(except for the prose/poetry distinction). They showthat to some extent literary evaluation depends on
linguistic agreement between author and evaluatorand on an author’s networking activities. While ata general level this is perhaps hardly surprising, it
is interesting to obtain a measure of the (relative)
strengths of these influences, including the quidpro-quo effect. It is also interesting to note LIWC
is to some extent able to capture linguistic distance
between authors.
As a next step in this analysis, I hope to look moreclosely into alternative measures of textual similarity
and the extent to which they can predict the number
122

of comments exchanged in an author-commenter
pair. One interesting candidate would be Latent
Semantic Analysis, possibly using only words fromcertain semantic fields. It would also be interesting
to investigate the differences between commenters insensitivity to the discussed variables. The numbers
given here reflect average behaviour, and it seems
very likely that some commenters will care morethan others for e.g. linguistic agreement between
their own works and the works that they comment
on. A follow-up question would then be whether
it is possible to cluster commenters based on theirpreferences.

3. Discussion
To some extent a paper such as this one is unusualin the Digital Humanities context. Work in Digital
Humanities has tended to focus on texts, theirstylistics, authors, their sources, and the vehicles(editions) that bring texts to their modern students.
Reader response has been largely ignored in ourfield. The discussion above shows some of theinfluence of contextual factors on literary evaluation,
but many other sorts of analysis could and should
be undertaken on the basis of this material. For
one thing, I have not yet investigated the effectsof ‘power’ (i.e. the influence of third persons oncommenters’ behaviour). Similarly, many analyses
at the level of the individual work have yet to be
performed. The existence of digital environments
such as online writing communities has madethese analyses feasible and can thus contribute tobroadening the scope of Digital Humanities.

References
Boot, P. (2011a). Literary evaluation in online
communities of writers and readers [to appear].
Scholarly and Research Communication.
Boot,
P.
(2011b).
Predicting
long-term
activity in online writing communities: A
Quantitative Analysis of Amateur Writing. Paper
presented at Supporting Digital Humanities 2011,
Copenhagen. http://crdo.up.univ-aix.fr/SLDR
data/doc/show/copenhagen/SDH-2011/submissi
ons/sdh2011_submission_1.pdf(accessed 23

March 2012).

Fishelov, D. (2010). Dialogues with/and greatbooks: the dynamics of canon formation.
Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press.
Janssen, S. (1998). Side-roads to success: The effectof sideline activities on the status of writers. Poetics
25(5): 265-280.
Miall, D. S. (2006). Literary reading: empirical &theoretical studies. New York: Peter Lang.

Digital Humanities 2012

Pennebaker, J. W., and M. E. Ireland (2011).
Using literature to understand authors: The casefor computerized text analysis. Scientific Study of
Literature 1(1): 34-48.
Rosengren, K. E. (1987) Literary criticism: Future
invented. Poetics 16(3-4): 295-325.
Van Rees, K., and J. Vermunt (1996). Eventhistory analysis of authors’ reputation: Effects ofcritics’ attention on debutants’ careers. Poetics 23(5):317-333.

Violence and the Digital
Humanities Text as
Pharmakon
Bradley, Adam Jamesadam.bradley@uwaterloo.ca
The University of Waterloo, Canada

There has long been a tendency of tools in the digital
humanities to be objects through which literaryscholars are intended to perform meta-analyses oftexts. One of the inconsistencies with this act is thatin the process of displaying a data visualization we
destroy the actual text that is being studied. Thisact is a type of pharmakon, creative because it shifts
the aesthetic of the text for re-interpretation anddestructive because the original artifact is lost in thisprocess of creation. By appropriating Rene Girard’s
definition of violence – namely that the attempt
to represent texts visually and digitally is a formof mimetic rivalry that leads to violence in termsof the text itself, and using Denis Diderot’s threefold vision of creation (‘enthousiasme’), I will showthat the mimetic nature of digital humanities tools
creates an allowing condition for a type of violence
that is both destructive (Girard’s ‘violence’) andcreative (Diderot’s ‘enthousiasme’). By juxtaposing
the work of Girard and Diderot in this way it
becomes possible to see digital humanities projects(specifically data visualization projects) as acts ofviolence. It was this line of reasoning that broughtme to my primary research question: Is it possible
to develop a visualization technique that does not
destroy the original text in the process, one in which
the digital humanist can be a creator in terms ofDiderot’s enthusiasme?
My paper will suggest a new method for visualizing
texts that specifically addresses this question. The
proposed method uses rigorous mathematics –developed with the aid of an interdisciplinary
team of mathematicians and computer scientists
at the University of Waterloo – that addresses
this problem of violence and suggests that throughinterdisciplinary study and mathematical precision
we can produce digital humanities tools that encode
the original texts in their entirety without any
violence towards the text. This project is an attempt
to ‘form a new kind of literary study absolutely
comfortable with scientific methods yet completely
suffused with the values of the humanities’ assuggested by R. G. Potter in Literary Computing andLiterary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essayson Theme and Rhetoric.

123

Digital Humanities 2012

Using the resources of the University of Waterloo’s
Digital Media Lab, I created a data visualization
technique that was originally intended to study formin poetry but has proven to have wide reaching
applications. What differentiates this project fromother similar work, such as the TextArc project, isthat the algorithm created to model the visualization
creates a one-to-one relationship between thevisualization and the original text. What this means
specifically is that unlike a meta-analysis tool, thisproject encodes the original layout and punctuationof a text within the algorithm that produces thevisualization making it both a tool for meta-analysis
and a keeper of the original text. This removes theneed for an analyst that intimately understands thevisualization and allows for a transition between
the two states (aesthetic visualization and originaltext) without any hindrances. This effectively solves
the problem of losing the text in the analysis, ormore specifically, of traditional literary scholars
complaints that they do not know how to interpretthe visualization created by the digital humanities
model. By including a one-to-one correspondence
between the text and the visualization, the intuition
that is being engaged in the criticism spawned by
the visualization can take on a second dimension
between the original text and the literary critic.
The actual program was written in python and uses
an aesthetic inspired by avant-garde art, namely theshifting of perspectives to try to gain insight into theoriginal text. This is accomplished by creating 3Dgraphs in an infinitely countable box that represents
all of the possible words from a null string to an
infinitely long word using the alphabet. Each word of
the original text is then encoded with an algorithm
that uses a combination of mathematics, developedby Georg Cantor, and a method of my own devising
to create a unique set of co-ordinates for each wordin the English language and graph them in 3d space.
This creates a unique 3d object for every poem
and engages a shifted aesthetic to try to find new
insights into the arrangement of the original words.
In terms of the actual aesthetics of the visualization
the program claims nothing new, but the focus of thisstudy was to try to devise a method for maintaining
the text within the mathematics of data visualizationand that is what I have done. I envision this project
as axiomatic in nature and call in my paper for
all data visualizations to live up to the standard ofnon-violence towards texts. I believe this exercise inmathematical rigor will inspire the digital humanist
to consider the use of data visualization in a new
way that will ultimately lead to better and morethoughtful tools for use in literary study.

124

Towards a bibliographic
model of illustrations in theearly modern illustrated
book
Bradley, Johnjohn.bradley@kcl.ac.uk
Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College
London, UK

Pigney, Stephens.pigney@gold.ac.uk
Goldsmith’s College, London, UK

James Knapp, in his book Illustrating the Past in
Early Modern England (Knapp 2003) points outthat the History of the Book research has been
‘re-evaluating the relation of books to texts’ (p9). However, he then goes on to say that an‘overwhelmingly large amount of visual material’
could be found ‘on the pages of early modern English
books’ (p 37), and that these books tell a complex
story that interconnects books not only with theirtexts but with their illustrations too. In this paper
we will take up Knapp’s observation about visualmaterial in books and will present a bibliographic
conceptual model of the relationship of images,
texts, and their makers that could support theenhancement of our understanding of the creation ofbooks from the early modern period.
We come by an interest in this topic honestly, since
we were collaborators, with the project’s Principal
Investigator Professor Michael Hunter (Birkbeck) ona project called British Printed Images until 1700
(BPI1700) that has resulted in what the front page of
its website calls ‘a database of thousands of prints andbook illustrations from early modern Britain in fullysearchable form’. At present, bpi1700’s materials
come from the extensive collection of primarily
single-sheet prints held by the British Museum’s
Department of Prints and Drawings and the Victoria
and Albert Museum. Clearly, although the focus of
bpi1700 has been on single-sheet prints up to now,the project is anxious to progress into the question ofillustrations in printed books.
To understand the scale of such an undertaking,it is useful to realise that many early printed
books contained illustrations. James Knapp claims
that English printers in the mid 16th century
commonly used many illustrations for books onhistorical subjects (Knapp 2003: 2). Luborsky and
Imgram catalogued more than 5,000 woodcuts andengravings in English books printed between 1536

Digital Humanities 2012

and 1603 alone, and a further study publishedby bpi1700 reveals thousands more for the period
1604-1640. There is plenty of material to work with.
However, the numbers tell only a part of the story:
what is the nature of the interaction between an
intellectual study of the illustrations as prints with
the intellectual study of the books as books, so that
their parallel, but interconnected, histories can be
more clearly recognised?
To help us explore these issues from a bibliographic
perspective, we took up the approach describedin the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic
Records (FRBR) (Tillet 2004) to identifying thenature of the published illustrations and the books
themselves. FRBR was developed primarily to clarify
the bibliographic analysis of modern printed books,
and is developed out of four different senses in which
the word ‘book’ can be used. The base sense ofbook, as a physical item that takes up space in alibrary, is called an ‘item’. A particular publication
is called a ‘manifestation’, and roughly corresponds
to an edition in modern publishing. FRBR identifies
a higher level of structure in its entity ‘expression’,
which, as Tillett describes it, organises a particular
text by a specific language or media of delivery.
Finally, the fourth and top level of abstraction is the‘work’, the ‘conceptual content that underlies all the
linguistic versions’, and represents things like thestory being told, or the ideas in the author’s head
(Tillett 2004: 3).
Although bpi1700 was about printed images rather
than modern printed books, FRBR had alreadyproven to be useful in our growing understandingof the nature of prints. Bpi1700’s ‘impressions’ were
the actual paper objects held by the museums, andrepresented by digital surrogates in bpi1700, andthese seemed to be modelled best by FRBR’s ‘item’.
Metadata about them were provided for bpi1700 by
our partner museums. Of course, many impressions
would be printed from a single plate that had beencreated by the print maker. Thus, among all theholdings in the museums it was not unusual forthe same print to turn up more than once. Outof this realisation came the concept of bpi1700’s‘work’ that fit FRBR’s ‘work’ category: a bpi1700 work
represented a single plate or woodcut and captured
the creative act of the print maker when she or hecreated it. Finally, in early modern times a plate wasoften modified over time, and these modifications
would then be witnessed in surviving prints. A printof Charles I might first show him as a boy, but anotherimpression from what was manifestly the same plate
would show him as a young man instead. Between
the production of these two impressions, the imageof the king on the plate had been modified. Bpi1700
called each of these surviving versions of the platea ‘state’ (using terminology already in use by print

cataloguers), and concluded that this most closely
corresponded to FRBR’s ‘manifestation’ category.
Early Modern printed books (in the time of the handpress), on the other hand, although apparently closer
in nature to what FRBR was developed for than print
images might be, did not turn out to be entirelyaligned to modern print practice for which FRBR
had been designed. Works and editions were much
more fluid than they are today and early modern
books have therefore presented a challenge to theconventional cataloguing rules developed to handle
more modern material (see the discussion of this in
the context of ‘rare books’ in Moriarty 2004). We
chose to examine the British Library’s English Short
Title Catalogue (ESTC 2011) for information about
our books. It operates at two levels. Its top levelconsists of records that correspond broadly to bookprintings – this, in turn, maps broadly to FRBR’s‘manifestation’ category, since Moriarty (Moriarty
2004: 40) reminds us that in the hand-press era areprinting of a book was really often like a new edition
because it required the hand re-assembly of the typeto print the pages again. Within each printing entry
ESTC stores information about particular copies(which broadly correspond to FRBR’s ‘Items’) which
are grouped by holding institution. There is no
explicit structural object corresponding to FRBR’s‘Work’ or ‘Expression’ in ESTC, although one can use
the search forms provide to filter data by author andtitle, which conceptually allows for materials to be
selected by something similar to FRBR’s Work.
So, if we consider both the books’ texts and theirillustrations as both having an intellectual history
that interests us, we have, then, two parallel andinterconnected FRBR hierarchies in operation inearly modern printed books. The issue is made moreinteresting by the fact that in the early modern
period plates and/or woodcuts for illustrations were
owned by printers and were often reused in morethan one book. So, the same illustration might
appear accompanying two completely different texts.
Although a printer might decide to reprint a book,he or she could at the same time decide to change
the illustrations that appeared in it to, say, increase
the market for it. Furthermore, illustrations fromplates had to be printed by a process separate fromthat used for the text, and these illustrations had to
be inserted into the text pages by hand – a process
subject to variability and error. Finally, because bookbinding was often arranged by the book buyer to be
applied after she or he purchased the printed pages,
book buyers often added illustrations they liked into
printed books – a process called extra-illustrationand described in more detail in the Folger library’s
online exhibition ‘Extending the Book’ (2010). Thus,a bibliographic model that accommodates both thetext and the illustrations – that represents the125Digital Humanities 2012intellectual history of these two intertwined objects
needs to accommodate a complex set of reasons
why a set of illustrations (with their creative history)
appears with the text of a particular book (with its
separate history too).
In our presentation, we will examine some examplesof illustrations in early modern books and show how
this intertwining operated in practice. We believethat the parallel and intertwined existence of books
and illustrations reveals a new and interesting story
in the history of the book. We will present our modelthat represents the parallel FRBR-like nature of theimages and the book with their complex web of
possible interconnections, and we will discuss someof the possible significance of this for those interested
in exploring the role of illustration in these early
printed volumes.

Automatic Mining of
Valence Compounds forGerman: A Corpus-BasedApproach
Brock, Anneanne.brock@uni-tuebingen.de
University of Tuebingen, Germany

Henrich, Verena

verena.henrich@uni-tuebingen.de
University of Tuebingen, Germany

Hinrichs, Erhard

erhard.hinrichs@uni-tuebingen.de
University of Tuebingen, Germany(This paper is based on a presentation given by theauthors at the Digital Humanities Day at Sheffield
Hallam University on 13 December 2010, but will be
extended beyond what was presented there with amore detailed presentation of the model for the data,
as is suitable for a DH audience.)

Versley, Yannick

References

1. Introduction

Bbi1700. British Printed Images before 1700.
Online at http://www.bpi1700.org.uk

The availability of large-scale text corpora in digitalform and the availability of sophisticated analysis
and querying tools have profoundly influenced
linguistic research over the past three decades. The
present paper uses this eHumanities methodology
in order to automatically detect and analyze valencecompounds for German. Valence compounds (inGerman: Rektionskomposita) such as Autofahrer‘car driver’ have been subject to extensive researchin the German linguistics. They are composed of adeverbal head (Fahrer ‘driver’) and a nominal nonhead (Auto ‘car’). As the corresponding verb fahren‘to drive’, from which Fahrer is derived, governs its
accusative object Auto, the compound Autofahrer isconsidered a valence compound.

ESTC (2011). English Short Title Catalogue. British
Library. Online at http://estc.bl.uk/
Folger Shakespeare Library (2010). Extending
the Book: The Art of Extra-Illustration. An exhibition
January 28-May 25, 2010. Online version available
at http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=3346

Knapp, J. A. (2003). Illustrating the Past in Early
Modern England: the representation of History in
Printed Books. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
Luborsky, R., and E. Ingram (1998). Guide to
English Illustrated Books 1536-1603. Tempe, AZ:
MRTS.
Moriarty, K. S. (2004). Descriptive Catalogingof Rare Materials (Books) and Its Predecessors: A
History of Rare Book Cataloging Practice in the
United States. A Master’s paper for the M.S. in L.S.
degree. November, 2004. 100 pages. Advisor: Jerry
D. Saye.
Tillett, B. (2004). FRBR? A Conceptual Model for
the Bibliographic Universe. Washington: Library ofCongress Cataloguing Distribution Service. Online at
http://www.loc.gov/cds/downloads/FRBR.PDF

126

yannick.versley@uni-tuebingen.de
University of Tuebingen, Germany

The automatic detection and semantic interpretationof compounds constitutes an important aspect of text
understanding for a language like German wherecompounding is a particularly productive means ofword formation and accordingly occurs with highfrequency. Baroni et al. (2002) report that almost half(47%) of the word types in the APA German news
corpus, which they used as training material for aword prediction model for German, are compounds.
Due to their productivity, compounds in German do
not form a closed class of words that can be listed inits entirety in a lexicon. Rather, as Lemnitzer (2007)
has shown, new German compounds are coined daily,and some of them attain sufficient frequency to beeventually included in print dictionaries such as theDigital Humanities 2012

Duden. Novel compounds that are not yet listed ina dictionary pose a particular challenge for natural
language processing systems that rely exclusively on
dictionaries as their underlying knowledge source forword recognition.
Since the analysis of compounds constitutes amajor challenge for the understanding of natural
language text, the structural analysis and thesemantic interpretation of compounds have received
considerable attention in both theoretical andcomputational linguistics. Syntactic analysis ofcompounds focuses on the correct (left- vs. rightbranching) bracketing of the constituent parts ofa given compound, e.g., [[rock music] singer]
vs. [deputy [music director]]. Research on thesemantic interpretation of compounds has focusedon the semantic relations that hold between theconstituent parts of a compound. The present paper
focuses entirely on the semantic interpretation ofcompounds; however see Henrich and Hinrichs(2011) for previous research on the syntactic analysis
of nominal compounds in German.

2. Corpus-Based Experiments
The aim is to determine whether corpus evidence
can form the basis for reliably predicting whether agiven complex noun is a valence compound or not.
For example, if we want to determine whether thecomplex noun Taxifahrer is a valence compound,
we inspect a large corpus of German and investigate
whether there is sufficient evidence in the corpus thatthe noun Taxi can be the object of the verb. The
question of what exactly constitutes sufficient corpus
evidence is of crucial importance. Three different
measures were applied to answer this question:

be conducted. The TüPP corpus was automaticallyparsed by the dependency parser MaltParser (Hall et
al. 2006).
Each of the 22,897 potential valence compounds
has been split into its deverbal head and its
nominal modifier with the help of the morphologicalanalyzer SMOR (Schmid et al. 2004). For example,
the compound Autofahrer receives the analysis
Auto<NN>fahren<V>er<SUFF><+NN> in SMOR.
From the TüPP corpus, all occurrences of thoseobject-verb pairs are extracted from those corpus
sentences where either the verb in the sentence
matches the deverbal head of the complex noun(e.g., fahren) or the accusative object of the sentence
matches the nominal modifier (e.g., Auto) of thecompound.
Figure 1 gives an example of the type of dependency
analysis of the MaltParser from which the verbobject pairs are extracted. The dependency analysis
represents the lexical tokens of the input sentence
as nodes in the graph and connects them withvertices which are labeled by dependency relations.
Recall that the MaltParser annotation is performed
automatically and thus not 100% accurate. In thecase of the sentence Aber dann würde doch niemand
mehr Auto fahren. (‘But then, no one would drivecars anymore.’) shown in Fig. 1, mehr is erroneously
attached to the noun Auto instead of to the noun
niemand.

1. Relative frequency: The percentage of the verbobject pairs in the corpus among all co-occurrencesof the two words in the same sentence with any
dependency relations,2. The association score of mutual information for theverb-object pairs, and3. The Log-Likelihood ratio for the verb-object pairs.
The measure in (1) above constitutes a simplified
variant of the data-driven approach that Lapata(2002) applied for the purposes of automatically
retrieving English valence compounds from the
British National Corpus.
The starting point of the corpus-based experiments
was a list of 22,897 German complex nouns andthe Tübingen Partially Parsed Corpus of Written
German (TüPP-D/Z).1 This corpus consists of 200
Mio. words of newspaper articles taken from the taz(‘die tageszeitung’) and is thus sufficiently large toprovide a reliable data source for the experiments to

Figure 1: A MaltParser dependency graph for a TüPP corpus
sentence Aber dann würde doch niemand mehr Auto fahren

Both the mutual information and the log-likelihood
measures determine the association strength
between two words by considering the relative cooccurrences shown in the contingency table (Table 1).
Accusative object
Auto

Accusative object¬Auto

Verb fahren

Auto fahren

Fahrrad fahren

Verb ¬fahren

Auto waschen

Wäsche waschen

Table 1: Contingency table for verb-object pairs

The association strength increases for both measuresthe more the number of co-occurrences in the upper
left corner of the contingency table outweighs thenumber of occurrences in the remaining cells.
127

Digital Humanities 2012

3. Evaluation
From the list of 22,897 putative valence compounds,
a balanced sample of 100 valence compounds and
100 non-valence compounds was randomly selected
in order to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of themethods described above. Each entry in this sample
was manually annotated as to whether they represent
valence compounds or not. The sample as a wholeserves as a gold standard for evaluation.2
For all three association measures described above
recall, precision, and F-measure were computed.
The results are shown in Fig. 2, 3, and 4, for
log-likelihood, mutual information, and relative
frequency, respectively. The first two measures yielda continuous scale of association strength values. The
graphs in Fig. 2 and 3 plot, on the x-axis, association
strength thresholds that correspond to a quantile
between 100% and 10% of the values observed forthese measures. The y-axis shows the corresponding
effect on precision and recall for each measure.

Figure 2: Precision, Recall, and F1 for Log-Likelihood

Figure 4: Precision, Recall, and F1 for Relative Frequency

For the relative frequency approach (Fig. 4) thedecision to reject or accept a candidate pairis made by weighting occurrences as a verbobject pair against occurrences in other contexts.
The weights can consist of any value between
zero and positive infinity. Unlike the association
measures (log-likelihood and mutual information),
this approach does not yield a ranking of candidates;in consequence, the precision (shown in Fig. 4) does
not decrease monotonically but shows an optimal
parameter setting for values between 1.0 and 2.0.
The results show that all three measures
are independently valuable in the corpus-based
identification of valence compounds. Relative
frequency and log-likelihood yield the best recall(up to 81%), while mutual information affords thebest precision (up to 100%). Future research willaddress the effective methods for combining thecomplementary strengths of all three measures into
an optimized classification approach.
In sum, the eHumanities method presented in thispaper for the identification of valence compounds
in German has proven effective and can thus nicelycomplement traditional methods of analysis which
focus on the internal structure of valence compounds
as such.

References

Figure 3: Precision, Recall, and F1 for Mutual Information

Baroni, M., J. Matiasek, and H. Trost (2002).
Predicting the Components of German Nominal
Compounds. In F. van Harmelen (ed.), Proceedingsof the 15th European Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (ECAI). Amsterdam: IOS Press, pp.
470-474.
Hall, J., J. Nivre, and J. Nilsson(2006). Discriminative Classifiers for Deterministic
Dependency Parsing. In Proceedings of the
21st International Conference on Computational
Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of128

Digital Humanities 2012

the Association for Computational Linguistics(COLING-ACL) Main Conference Poster Sessions,pp. 316-323.
Henrich, V., and E. Hinrichs (2011).
Determining Immediate Constituents of Compounds
in GermaNet. In Proceedings of Recent Advancesin Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2011),
Hissar, Bulgaria, pp. 420-426.
Lapata, M. (2002). The disambiguation of
nominalizations. Computational Linguistics 28(3):357-388.
Lemnitzer, L. (2007). Von Aldianer bis
Zauselquote: Neue deutsche Wörter, woher sie
kommen und wofür wir sie brauchen. Tübingen:
Narr.
Schmid, H., A. Fitschen, and U. Heid (2004).
SMOR: A German Computational Morphology
Covering Derivation, Composition, and Inflection. In
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on
Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004).
Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 1263-1266.
Notes
1. See http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/en/tuepp.s
html
2. Precision measures the fraction of retrieved valencecompounds that are correctly analyzed. Recall measures thefraction of actual valence compounds that are retrieved.

Networks of networks: acritical review of formal
network methods inarchaeology throughcitation network analysis
and close reading
Brughmans, Tom

tb2g08@soton.ac.uk
Archaeological Computing Research Group,
University of Southampton, UK

This paper will argue that archaeological network
researchers are not well networked themselves,
resulting in a limited and sometimes uncriticaladoption of formal network methods within thearchaeological discipline. This seems to havefollowed largely from a general unawareness ofthe historicity of network-based approaches whichspan at least eight decennia of multi-disciplinary
research. Many network analytical techniques thatwould only find a broader use in the last 15 years werein fact introduced in the archaeological discipline
as early as the 1970s. This paper does not aim
to argue that every archaeological network study
should include a historiography. It merely wishes tostress the need to explore the full range of existing
network techniques and models. I will illustratethat knowledge of the diversity of archaeologicaland non-archaeological network methods is crucial
to their critical application and modification withinarchaeological research contexts.
This paper will for the first time trace the academic
traditions, network concepts, models and techniquesthat have been most influential to archaeologists.
I will do this by combining a close reading of
published archaeological network applications withcitation network analysis techniques (Batagelj 2003;
Hummon & Doreian 1989; White 2011), an approachthat has not been applied to archaeological literature
before. A citation network was created consisting ofover 10,000 publications and their internal citations.
This network consists of all archaeological network
analysis applications, all publications cited by themand the citations between those publications. Thisdata was extracted from Web of Knowledge (http://wok.mimas.ac.uk/ ) and manually when
the publications were not included on Web ofKnowledge.
The analysis revealed a number of issues surrounding
the current use of network methods in archaeology,

129

Digital Humanities 2012

as well as possible sources and explanations forthese issues. They include the following: (1) Althoughmany network techniques are rooted in graph theory,archaeological studies in graph theory were notinfluential at all to more recent archaeologicalnetwork studies. The introduction of graph theory
and social network analysis into the archaeologicaldiscipline happened largely independently and,unlike social network analysts, archaeologists did
not collaborate with graph theorists to develop
mathematical techniques tailored for their needs. (2)The potential of social network analysis techniques
was explored (largely theoretically) by Cynthia IrwinWilliams no later than 1977. Many of the techniques
she described were not applied in archaeologicalresearch until the last ten years, possibly because thelimited availability of cheap and potent computing
power and large digital datasets in the late 1970s.
(3) Some social network analysis techniques (e.g.
centrality measures) have received more attention
than others (e.g. ego-networks). The popularity ofthese techniques seems to be related with theiruse by social network analysts rather than how
archaeologists have used them before. (4) The
archaeological use of complex network models islargely limited to the extremely popular small-worldand scale-free models. Archaeologists have neglected
to explore the potential use of alternative complex
network models. (5) The availability of user-friendly
software seems to determine the popularity of social
network measures used by archaeologists. (6) On
the other hand, simulations of complex networkmodels by archaeologists are rare due to the required
technological and mathematical skills.
The results of the citation analysis expose theinsufficiently explored potential of formal networkbased models and techniques and points out
publications in other disciplines that might haveinteresting archaeological applications. The paper
concludes that in order to move towards richer
archaeological applications of formal network
methods archaeological network analysts should
become better networked both within andoutside their discipline. The existing archaeologicalapplications of network analysis show clear
indications of methods with great potential for our
discipline and methods that will remain largely
fruitless, and archaeologists should become awareof these advances within their discipline. The
development of original archaeological network
methods should be driven by archaeological research
problems and a broad knowledge of formal network
methods developed in different disciplines.

130

References
Batagelj, V. (2003). Efficient Algorithms for
Citation Network Analysis. Arxiv preprint cs/03090
23: 1-27.
Irwin-Williams, C. (1977). A network model forthe analysis of Prehistoric trade. In T. K. Earle, andJ. E. Ericson (eds.), Exchange systems in Prehistory.
New York: Academic Press, pp. 141-151.
Hummon, N. P., and P. Dereian (1989).
Connectivity in a citation network: The developmentof DNA theory. Social Networks 11(1): 39-63.
White, H. D. (2011). Scientific and scholarly
networks. In J. Scott, and P. J. Carrington (eds.), The
SAGE handbook of social network analysis. London:
Sage, pp. 272-285.

Digital Humanities 2012

On the dual nature of
written texts and its
implications for theencoding of genetic
manuscripts
Brüning, Gerrit

bruening@faustedition.deFreies Deutsches Hochstift, Germany

Henzel, Katrin

henzel@faustedition.de
Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Germany

Pravida, Dietmar

pravida@faustedition.de
Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am
Main, Germany

1. Introduction
Discussions about a markup language for the genetic
encoding of manuscripts have reached a crucial
point. The endeavours undertaken by a couple ofnotable projects over the last years promise to yielda new encoding standard for the description of thegenesis of texts. In our talk we will survey the past andcurrent states of affairs and outline some problems ofgenetic encoding within and without the frameworkof the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

2. Crucial issues in genetic
encoding
Early conceptions of a computer-aided genetic
edition trace back to the 1970s (Gabler 1998). The
absence of any established standard for projects
that aim to record revised manuscripts and genetic
relations across numerous witnesses was still felt
at the end of the 20th century. Through the
1990s and early 2000s, the then available TEI
guidelines did not meet the requirements of genetic
textual criticism, for genetic manuscripts often lacktextual structure in a more conventional sense
and show complicated series of revisions. This
incompletenesses gave rise to the construction of
the HyperNietzsche Markup Language (Saller 2003,
esp. note 3) which was a kind of spin-off, but nosustainable alternative.1Some of the problems that
led to HNML resolved themselves with the previous
version of the Guidelines (Burnard et al. 2008: 72-78,
335-374). Other expectations, however (Vanhoutte
2002; Pierazzo 2009), remained unfulfilled:- A documentary or ‘diplomatic’ transcription which
focuses less on the as yet privileged textual
structure of the examined material.
- The possibility to record the temporal course of thegenesis of texts.
The‘Encoding
Modelfor
Genetic
Editions’ (Workgroup on Genetic Editions, 2010)
was to satisfy both requests. Now that it has been
largely incorporated in chapter 11 of the second
version of ‘Proposal 5’ (Burnard et al. 2011), successes
and shortcomings can be discussed. As for the
documentary transcription, a way of encoding has
been made possible which could not be thoughtof in former versions of the TEI Guidelines up
to the first version of P5 (Burnard et al. 2008).
However, the suggested approach to transcribe texts,
taking into account the spatial distribution of theinscription falls short of completion (Brüning etal., forthcoming). The conceptual tension between
the documentary and the textual perspective whichgave rise to the proposed encoding model has
become even more pronounced. As for the markup
of textual alterations, it is not always clear how the
newly introduced elements relate to well-establishedpractice.2 The former stringency of chapter 11 of
the Guidelines corresponded to the limited goalof providing ‘methods for encoding as broad avariety of textual features as the consensus of
the community permits’ (Sperberg-McQueen et al.
1993). This consensus came to be known under thename of an ‘agnostic’ view on the issue of textuality.
However, when chapter 11 was revised for the actual
version, this consensus was tacitly and perhaps
unawares abandoned. for the sake of much specificneeds that parts of the new version of the chapter
try to fulfill. Many of the needs which the newly
introduced parts of the chapter try to fulfill are notcovered by a broad consensus, but are based on very
specific aims. Therefore the conceptional problems
inherent in the genetic module cannot any longer besolved with reference to an alleged ‘agnostic’ basis.
A discussion on the nature of text is not only of
theoretical interest but also inevitable for practicalreasons.

3. The dual nature of written texts
We would like to submit as a basic principle that any
written text is, by virtue of being a linguistic entity, ofa double-sided nature: First, it is by virtue of being awritten text, a physical object that can be identified inspace and time as a document or an inscription (thematerial or documentary dimension). Second, it is –by virtue of being a written text – an abstract object(the textual dimension), which has to be materialized
in some way, not necessarily in one specific material
form (Goodman 1977; Genette 1997). As can belearned from the epistemology of general linguistics
131Digital Humanities 2012

(Saussure 1916: introduction, ch. 3; cf. Bouquet1997), it is imperative for sound methodology to keep
irreducible points of view distinct, each of whichallows a coherent strategy of inquiry. Any attempt tocollapse two entirely different dimensions into one,will ultimately run up on a reef of methodologicalincoherence. Within the digital humanities, the useof the word ‘text’ is often inspired by the way texts
are represented in the digital code: as an orderedhierarchy of content objects (Renear et al. 1996) or
as a strictly linear sequence of characters (cf. Buzzetti& McGann 2006: 60). But the hierarchical and/or
linear representation of a text in a computer file is
not and cannot by principle be a text in a linguisticallyrespectable sense of the word (Sperberg-McQueen
1991: 34).

4. Consequences

letters is recorded. Therefore a documentaryoriented encoding will usually look like this:3ii.

From the textual perspective, a whole word issubstituted by another, ‘Band’ (ligament) by‘Land’ (land):

Adherence to our basic principle will lead to some
important consequences for encoding written texts
and to some proposals for the application and further
development of the available TEI Guidelines.
1. The documentary perspective (1) takes theinscriptional point of view and focuses on thematerialization of the text. The basic elementsof this perspective are written letters and otherinscriptional phenomena, such as cancellations
and other sediments of the writing process.
Inscriptional analyses can be focussed on units
smaller than letters (e.g. allographic forms orelements below the niveau of the letter, see Feigs
1979). But due to the specific aims of our project,units smaller than letters are ignored. Letters canas well be regarded as linguistic units, and alinguistic understanding of what is written is aprecondition for any manuscript to be deciphered.
However, it is possible to disregard from thisunderstanding for the purpose of a documentary
edition. – The textual perspective (2) focuses on
linguistic entities. Its basic elements are linguistic
units. Depending on the perspective chosen, thefollowing example has to be treated in two different
ways:This way of encoding focuses on the textual
impact of the overwriting of (a part of) one
letter: the substitution of a whole word. It
does not mean that the textual perspective isconfined to the level of word forms. In fact,sometimes only the spelling is corrected, andthe alteration can very well be recorded on thelevel of graphemic units alone – no matter how
many letters of the word have been replaced,no matter if the complete word is rewritten
for the sake of clarity in the manuscript.
However, in the given case the substitution
does not concern only single letters but the
linguistic unit of the next level (the word),
although the scribe carefully avoided to deface
the manuscript more than was necessary.
How can the sediments of the writing process andthe textual genesis be given their equal due?

i.

132

From the documentary perspective, one letter(B) is changed into another (L). As said,even the fact that only a part of the original
letter has been modified, might be of interest.
But for the above reason, a replacement of

As is clear from the above example, not only
the markup is concerned by the difference of thetwo perspectives but also the marked up content(‘BLand’ vs. ‘BandLand’). This is one of the reasons
why a split-up of the encoding which we tried to
avoid for a long time finally proved inevitable.
We decided to introduce two separate transcripts:
a documentary and a textual one (Bohnenkamp
et al., forthcoming). The separate transcripts areDigital Humanities 2012

the source for different parts of the edition: thedocumentary for the diplomatic rendering and the
textual for the reading text and the apparatuses.
The disadvantages of the split-up will be dealt
with by help of automatic collation (Brüning et al.,forthcoming). Logically, it is possible to integrate
both perspectives in a single transcript, under
the only condition that the markup is dominatedby one of the two perspectives (Renear et al.
1996). Practically, however, it is very difficult
to give adequate information on the writing
process and on the text with equal regard to bothsides. Detailed information of one of both will
inevitably get lost. Furthermore, the interminglingof both perspectives complicates the subsequent
data processing.
2. Thanks to the split-up, the documentary transcript
is kept free from the limitations inherent to
the markup of the textual structure, so that all
the information that is needed to generate asatisfying diplomatic rendering can be placed.
Likewise, the textual transcript is kept free fromdescriptive information about the record. In turn,an aspect of the linguistic structure can be taken
into account the importance of which for genetic
encoding has not yet found sufficient perception.
As a concatenation of linguistic entities is not amere sequence but a structure, it is necessary
to distinguish between syntagmatically defined
positions and paradigmatically selected items
occupying them.4 In the above example, a position
is initially occupied by the word ‘Band’, andsubsequently by the word ‘Land’. The surrounding<subst>-tag indicates the paradigmatic relation
between both items, although this is not explicitin the definition (Burnard et al. 2011: 1348).5
Problems arise in cases which deviate from thenormal one-to-one-correspondence of items topositions, for example where the wording of thepassage is held in abeyance as a consequenceof an unfinished alteration.6 Introducing thedifferentiation between positions and items into
genetic encoding might help to spot, clarify, andsolve these problems.

References
Bohnenkamp, A., G. Brüning, S. Henke,
K. Henzel, F. Jannidis, G. Middell, D.
Pravida, and M. Wissenbach (forthcoming).
Perspektiven auf Goethes Faust. Zur historischkritischen Hybridedition des Faust. Jahrbuch desFreien Deutschen Hochstifts 2011.
Bouquet, S. (1997). Introduction à la lecture deSaussure. Paris: Payot & Rivages.
Brüning, G., K. Henzel, D. Pravida(forthcoming). Rationale of multiple encoding in the

Genetic Faust Edition. Journal of the Text Encoding
Initiative (submitted).
Burnard, L., and S. Bauman, eds. (2004).
TEI P4. Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding
and Interchange. XML-compatible edition. Oxford,
Providence, Charlottesville and Bergen: The TEI
Consortium.
Burnard, L., and S. Bauman, eds. (2008).
TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding
and Interchange by the TEI Consortium. Oxford,
Providence, Charlottesville, Nancy: Tei Consortium.
Burnard, L., and S. Bauman, eds. (2011). TEI
P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding andInterchange by the TEI Consortium. Charlottesville:
Text Encoding Initiative Consortium.
Buzzetti, D., and J. McGann (2006). Electronic
Textual Editing: Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon.
In L. Burnard, K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, and J. Unsworth(eds.), Electronic Textual Editing. New York: MLA,
pp. 51-71.
Feigs, W. (1979). Deskriptive Edition auf
Allograph-. Wort- und Satzniveau, demonstriert
an handschriftlich überlieferten, deutschsprachigen
Briefen von H. Steffens. Teil 1: Methode. Bern: Peter
Lang.
Gabler, H. W. (1998). Computergestütztes Edieren
und Computer-Edition. In H. Zeller and G. Martens(eds.), Textgenetische Edition. Tübingen: Niemeyer,
pp. 315-328.
Genette, G. (1997). The Work of Art. Immanence
and Transcendence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.
Goodman, N. (1977). Languages of Art. An
Approach to a Theory of Symbols. 2nd ed.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Huitfeldt, C. (1998). MECS – a Multi-Element Code
System (Version October 1998), Working Papers
from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University ofBergen, 3. http://www.hit.uib.no/claus/mecs/
mecs.htm (accessed 9 March 2012).
Owens, J. (1988). The Foundations of Grammar.
An Introduction to Medieval Arabic Grammatical
Theory. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Pierazzo, E. (2009). Digital Genetic Editions: The
Encoding of Time in Manuscript Transcription, In M.
Deegan and K. Sutherland (eds.), Text Editing, Print
and the Digital World. Farnham and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, pp. 169-186.
Renear, A., E. Mylonas, and D. Durand(1996). Refining our Notion of What Text
Really Is: The Problem of Overlapping
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Digital Humanities 2012263-280. http://www.stg.brown.edu/resources/stg/monographs/ohco.html (accessed 9 March2012).

Saller, H. (2003). HNML – HyperNietzscheMarkupLanguage.
JahrbuchfürComputerphilologie 5: 185-192. http://computerp
hilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg03/saller.html(accessed 9 March 2012).

Saussure, F. de (1916). Cours de linguistiquegénérale. Lausanne: Payot.
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. (1991). Text in theElectronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encodingwith Examples from Medieval Texts. Literary and
Linguistic Computing 6: 34-46.
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M., and L. Burnard,
eds. (1993). Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding
and Interchange (P2). Chicago, Oxford: Text
Encoding Initiative. http://www.tei-c.org/Vault/Vault-GL.html (accessed 9 March 2012).
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M., and L. Burnard,
eds. (1999). Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding
and Interchange. 1994. Revised Reprint. Chicago,
Oxford: Text Encoding Initiative.
Vanhoutte, E. (2002). Putting Time back in
Manuscripts: Textual Study and Text Encoding,with Examples from Modern Manuscripts, paper
presented at the ALLC/ACH 2002, Tübingen, 25 July
2002. http://www.edwardvanhoutte.org/pub/20
02/allc02abstr.htm (accessed 9 March 2012).
Workgroupon
Genetic
Editions
2010. An Encoding Model for Genetic
Editions. http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Co
uncil/Working/tcw19.html (accessed 9 March2012).
Notes
1. ‘HyperNietzsche’ nowadays operates under the name of‘Nietzsche Source’, where the HNML based contents areregrettably cut off. They are still available by the following
address: http://www.hypernietzsche.org/surf_pag
e.php?type=scholarly . To become affiliated with thegroup of ‘Source’ projects, the ‘Bergen Text Edition’ of
the Wittgenstein papers was converted from the specificallydeveloped MECS to XML-TEI (P5) ( http://www.wittgensteinsource.org/ ; Huitfeldt 1998). There are other ways
to mark up transcriptions of modern manuscripts (see ‘Les
manuscrits de Madame Bovary’, http://www.bovary.fr/; ‘Les Manuscrits de Stendhal’, http://manuscrits-de-s
tendhal.org/ ). But the set of tools provided by the TEI isclearly the one that is likely to become standard.
2. See esp. sect. 11.3.4.4 of the second version of P5 (Burnard etal. 367 sq.).
3. In fact, we do not use <subst> to record overwritings.
Especially in the case of discarded starts overwriting letters134

do not positively substitute their predecessors. But we will not
address this issue here.
4. he terminology of position-in-structure and of itemsoccupying-positions are very common in various schools of
linguistics (cf. Owens 1988: 31-35) and in the computersciences as well.
5. It is doubtful, therefore, if items which occupy ‘different
positions’ (ibid., 352) can enter such a relation, as is, perhaps
inadvertently, implied in the name of the newly introduced<substJoin> (ibid., 351 sq.).
6. For an example of the further, see sect. 11.3.4.6 of the TEI
Guidelines (Burnard et al. 2011: 369). The suggested encoding(ibid., 370) neglects the symmetrical relation between the items‘before’ and ‘beside’. From a textual point of view, the latter canbe considered added only insofar as the former is considered
deleted.

Digital Humanities 2012

Automatic recognition of
speech, thought and writing
representation in German
narrative texts
Brunner, Annelen

annelen_brunner@gmx.de
Institut für deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, Germany

This paper presents a subset of the results of a larger
project which explores ways to recognize and classify
a narrative feature – speech, thought and writing
representation (ST&WR) – automatically, using
surface information and methods of computational
linguistics.
Speech, thought and writing can be represented invarious ways. Common categories in narratology
are direct representation (He thought: ‘I am
hungry. ’), free indirect representation, which takes
characteristics of the character’s voice as well as thenarrator’s (Well, where would he get something
to eat now?), indirect representation (He said that
he was hungry.) and reported representation, which
can be a mere mentioning of a speech, thought or
writing act (They talked about lunch.). ST&WR
is a feature central to narrative theory, as it isimportant for constructing a fictional character andsheds light on the narrator-character relationshipand the narrator’s stance. The favored techniques
not only vary between authors and genres, but havechanged and developed over the course of literary
history. Therefore, an automated annotation of thisphenomenon would be valuable, as it could quickly
deal with a large number of texts and allow anarratologist to study regularities and differences
between different time periods, genres or authors.
The approach presented here specifically aims atapplying digital methods to the recognition offeatures conceptualized in narrative theory. This sets
it apart from other digital approaches to literary texts
which often operate purely on a vocabulary level andare more focussed on thematic issues or on author
or group specific stylistics. Recent approaches to thegoal of automatically identifying ST&WR are either
not concerned with narrativity at all, like Krestel etal. who developed a recognizer of direct and indirectspeech representation in newspaper texts to identify
second hand information, or not interested in thetechniques themselves, like Elson et al. who use
recognition of direct speech representation to extracta network of interrelations of fictional characters.
Also, both approaches are for the English language
and can therefore not be used in this project.

Basis for the research is a corpus containing 13
short narratives in German written between 1786 and1917 (about 57 000 tokens). The corpus has been
manually annotated with a set of ST&WR categories
adapted from narratological theory. This step iscomparable to the annotation project conductedby Semino and Short for a corpus of English
literary, autobiographical and newspaper texts, but
is something that has never been done for German
literary texts before. The manual annotation gives
empirical insight into the surface structures andthe complex nature of ST&WR, but also serves as
training material for machine learning approaches
and, most importantly, as reference for evaluation of
the automatic recognizer.
The main focus of this paper is the automatic
recognition. Rule-based as well as machine learning
approaches have been tested for the task of detecting
instances of the narratological categories. In thescope of this paper, a subset of these strategies ispresented and compared.
For the rule-based approach, simple and robust
methods are favored, which do not require advanced
syntactic or semantic preprocessing, automatic
reasoning or complex knowledge bases. The modules
make use of conventions like punctuation, as
well as lexical and structural characteristics fordifferent types of ST&WR. A central feature isa list of words that signal ST&WR, e.g. to say(sagen), to whisper (flüstern). For the recognitionof indirect ST&WR specifically, patterns of surfaces
and morphological categories are used to matchthe dependent propositions (e.g. E r sagte, dasser hungrig sei. [He said that he was hungry.]:
signal word – followed by comma – followed bya conjunction – followed by a verb in subjunctivemode). This methods achieves F1 scores of up to 0.71
in a sentence-based evaluation. Direct representation
can be detected with an F1 score of 0.84 by searchingfor quotation patterns and framing phrases (e.g. hesaid). Annotating reported representation, which isquite diverse, achieves an F1 score of up to 0.57.
The machine learning approach uses a random
forest learning algorithm trained on the manuallyannotated corpus. Features like sentence length,
number of certain word types and types ofpunctuation are used as attributes. The advantageof this approach lies in the fact that it can also
be used to handle types of ST&WR which do haveless obvious structural or lexical characteristics, likefree indirect representation, for which an F1 scoreof 0.43 can be achieved when performing sentencebased cross validation on the corpus. The F1 score fordetecting direct representation is 0.81, for indirect
representation 0.57 and for reported representation
0.51.

135

Digital Humanities 2012

The components of the automatic recognizer are
modular and realized as working prototypes in theframework GATE (General Architecture for Text
Engineering) (http://gate.ac.uk). When the project isfinished, it is intended to publish these components
as GATE plugins and make them available as a freedownload.
In the paper, the advantages and disadvantages ofrule-based and machine learning approaches as wellas possibilities for combination are discussed. For
example, rules can be used for ST&WR strategies
with clear patterns and conventions, like direct and– to an extent – indirect representation, but machinelearning for the more elusive types like free indirect
representation. It is also possible to get results for thesame ST&WR category from different modules anduse those to calculate scores. E.g. merging the resultsof rule-based and ML methods improves the overall
F1 score for recognizing direct representation in the
corpus.
Though the figures above give a rough ideaof expected success rates, evaluation is in fact
an analytic task itself: Results are not only
quite different for different types of ST&WR
and dependent on the exact configuration of therecognizer modules. There is also the questionof what kind of results should be prioritized fornarratological research and how to deal with cases
which are problematic even for a human annotator.
However, the modular structure of the recognizer
is designed to allow for customization and themain goal of the project is to shed light on
the relationship between the manual annotation,
generated with narratological concepts in mind, andthe possibilities and limitations of ultimately surfacebased automatic annotation.

References
Cunningham, H., et al. (2011). Text Processing
with GATE (Version 6): http://www.tinyurl/gatebook (accessed 14 March 2012).
Elson, D. K., N. Dames, and K. R. McKeown(2010). Extracting Social Networks from Literary
Fiction. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meetingof the Association for Computational Linguistics
2010, pp. 138-147.
Krestel, R., S. Bergler, and R. Witte (2008).
Minding the Source: Automatic Tagging of Reported
Speech in Newspaper Articles. Proceedings of
the Sixth International Language Resources and
Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008), Marrakech,
Morocco, May 28-30 2008.
Semino,stylistics.

136

E., and M. Short (2004). Corpus
Speech,writing
andthought

presentation in a corpus of English writing.
London, New York: Routledge.

Digital Humanities 2012

Bringing Modern Spell
Checking Approaches toAncient Texts – AutomatedSuggestions for Incomplete
Words
Büchler, Marcombuechler@e-humanities.net
Leipzig University, Germany

Kruse, Sebastianskruse@eaqua.net
Leipzig University, Germany

Eckart, Thomas

teckart@e-humanities.net
Leipzig University, Germany

One of the most challenging tasks for scholars
working with ancient data is the completion of
texts that have only been partially preserved. In
the current situation, a great deal of scholarly
experience and the use of dictionaries such as Liddell
Scott Jones or Lewis & Short are necessary to
perform the task of text reconstruction manually.
Even though text search tools such as Diogenes
or papyri.info exist, scholars still have to workthrough the results manually and require a very goodknowledge about the text, its cultural backgroundand its documentary form in order to be able
to decide about the correct reconstitution of thedamaged text. Therefore, a ‘selective and relatively
small scope’ especially of younger scholars restricts
the set of potential candidates.
To overcome these barriers an unsupervised
approach from the field of machine learning is
introduced to form a word prediction system basedon several classes of spell checking (Kukich 1992;
Schierle et al. 2008) and text mining algorithms.
Both spell checking and text completion can beseparated into two main tasks: identification ofincorrect or incomplete words and the generation ofsuggestions. While the identification of misspelledwords can be a very difficult task when working withmodern texts (such as with spell checking support
provided by modern word processing suites), existing
sigla of the Leiden Conventions (Bodard et al. 2009)
can be used when dealing with ancient texts. The
second step of the process is then to generate likely
suggestions using methods such as:- Semantic
approaches:
Sentencecooccurrences (Buechler 2008) and document co-occurrences (Heyer et al. 2008) are used to identify
candidates based on different contextual windows(Bordag 2008). The basic idea behind this typeof classification is motivated by Firth’s famousstatement about a word’s meaning: ‘You shallknow a word by the company it keeps’ (Firth
1957).
- Syntactical approaches: Word bi- andtrigrams (Heyer et al. 2008): With this method,
the immediate neighbourhood of a word isobserved and likely candidates are identified basedon a selected reference corpus.
- Morphological dependencies: Similar to theLatin and Greek Treebank of Perseus (Crane etal. 2009) morphological dependencies are used tosuggest words by using an expected morphologicalcode.
- String based approaches: The most common
class of algorithms for modern texts compareswords by their word similarity on letter level.
Different approaches like the Levenshtein distance(Ottmann & Widmayer 1996) or faster approaches
such as FastSS (Bocek et al. 2007) are used tocompare a fragmentary word with all candidates.
- Named Entity lists: With a focus on deletions of
inscriptions, existing and extended named entity
lists for person names, cities or demonyms likethe Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Fraser
et al. 1987-2008) or the Wörterlisten of Dieter
Hagedorn are used to look for names of persons
and places and give them a higher probability.
- Word properties: When focusing on Stoichedon
texts, word length is a relevant property. For thisreason the candidate list can be restricted by both
exact length as well as by min-max thresholds.
From a global perspective, every found word in a
vocabulary is a potential suggestion candidate. To
reduce this list of anywhere from several hundred
thousand to several million words to a morereasonable size, the results of all selected algorithms
are combined to a normalised score between 0 and 1(Kruse 2009). In the last working step of this process,the candidates list (ordered by score in descendingorder) is then provided to the user.
Based on the aforementioned approaches thefull paper will explain three different completion
strategies:
1. Using only known information about a word (wordlength and some preserved characters),
2. using only contextual information such as wordbigrams, co-occurrences, and classification data,
3. using all available information (combination ofstrategy a) and b)) of a word.

137

Digital Humanities 2012

The main objective of this step by step explanation is
to highlight both strengths and weaknesses of such acompletely automatized system.
A
video
demonstrationofimplementation can be viewed atthecurrent

http://www.e-humanities.net/lectures/SS201
1/2011-DigClassSeminar/THATCamp_DevChallen
ge_BuechlerEckart_TextCompletion.ogv

References
Bocek, T., E. Hunt, and B. Stiller (2007).
Fast Similarity Search in Large Dictionaries.
Department of Informatics, University of Zurich.
Bodard,G.,etal.
(2009).
EpiDocCheat Sheet: Krummrey-Panciera sigla &EpiDoctags,
2006-2009.
Version1085,
lastaccessed:
Nov.,
10th,
2009
[date]
URL:
http://epidoc.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/
epidoc/trunk/guidelines/msword/cheatsheet.doc.
Bordag, St. (2008). A Comparison of Cooccurrence and Similarity Measures as Simulationsof Context, 2008. In CICLing, Vol. 4919. Berlin:
Springer (Lecture Notes in Computer Science).
Büchler, M. (2008). Medusa. Performante
Textstatistiken
auf
großenTextmengen:
Kookkurrenzanalyse in Theorie und Anwendung.
Saarbrücken: Vdm Verlag Dr. Müller.
Crane, G., and D. Bamman (2009). The Latin
and Ancient Greek Dependency Treebanks, 2009.
URL: http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/syntax/treebank/last accessed: Nov., 10th 2009.
Firth, J. R., A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory.
Oxford.
Fraser, P. M. E. Matthews, and M. J. Osborne(1987-2008). A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names.
(In Greek and English), Vol. 1-5, Suppl. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Heyer, G., U. Quasthoff, and T. Wittig (2008).
Text Mining: Wissensrohstoff Text – Konzepte,
Algorithmen, Ergebnisse. 2nd edition. Herdecke:
W3L-Verlag.
Kruse, S. (2009). Textvervollständigung auf
antiken Texten. University of Leipzig, Bachelor
Thesis. pp 48-49. URL http://www.eaqua.net/~skruse/bachelor, last accessed on Nov., 10th 2009.
Kukich, K. (1992). Technique for AutomaticallyCorrecting Words in Text. ACM Computing Surveys
24(4).
Ottmann,T., and P. Widmayer (1996).
Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen. Heidelberg:
Spektrum Verlag.
138

Schierle, M., S. Schulz, and M. Ackermann(2008). From Spelling Correction to Text Cleaning– Using Context Information. In Data Analysis,
Machine Learning and Applications: Proceedings ofthe 31st Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fürKlassifikation e.V.

Digital Humanities 2012

Designing a national‘Virtual Laboratory’ for thehumanities: the Australian
HuNI project
Burrows, Toby Nicolas

toby.burrows@uwa.edu.au
University of Western Australia, Australia

1. Context
This paper looks at the design and architecture of
the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI),
a national ‘Virtual Laboratory’ which is being
developed as part of the Australian government’s
NeCTAR (National e-Research Collaboration Tools
and Resources) programme. One of NeCTAR’s main
goals is the development of up to ten discipline-based‘Virtual Laboratories’. The aims of this programme
are to integrate existing capabilities (tools, data
and resources), support data-centred research
workflows, and build virtual research communities toaddress existing well-defined research problems.
Beginning in May 2012, HuNI has been funded until
the end of 2013. It is being developed by a consortiumof thirteen institutions, led by Deakin University in
Melbourne.

2. Design Framework
HuNI is specifically designed to cover the whole ofthe humanities (defined as the disciplines covered by
the Australian Academy of the Humanities). It uses
scientific e-Research consortia as its model: largescale, multi-institutional, interdisciplinary groups
with an e-Research framework covering the entire
field of research.
This approach has a sound academic basis.
It emphasizes the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary reach of the e-Research services andtools which are included in the ‘Virtual Laboratory’environment – and its value to researchers across thefull range of humanities disciplines.
HuNI aims to join together the various digital
services and tools which have already beendeveloped for specific humanities disciplines, both bycollecting institutions (libraries, archives, museums
and galleries) and by academic research groups. It
builds on these services and strengthens them, rather
than superseding them.
Data-Centred Workflows

The very concept of ‘data’ can be problematic forthe humanities. Nevertheless, a distinctive typeof humanities data can be identified, different
from the quantitative and qualitative data of thesocial sciences. This ‘humanities data’ consists ofthe various annotations, tags, links, associations,ratings, reviews and comments produced during
the humanities research process, together with theentities to which these annotations refer: concepts,
persons, places and events.
It is important to draw a distinction between ‘data’ inthis sense and primary source materials, particularly
in digitized form (Borgman 2007: 215-217 fails to
make this distinction). Primary materials – even in
the form of digital objects – are sources of data, rather
than data per se.
A data-centred virtual laboratory for the humanities
needs to include services for identifying thesesemantic entities and their relationships (using the
Linked Open Data technical framework), and for
capturing and sharing the annotations and other
scholarly outputs which refer to them. While the
Linked Open Data framework is a relatively recent
development, there are already a sufficient numberof projects and services underway in Europe andNorth America which can serve as case studies todemonstrate clearly the viability and value of thisapproach (Bizer, Heath & Berners-Lee 2009).
Integration of Existing Capabilities
Many significant Australian collections of digitalcontent relevant to humanities research already exist.
Some of these are descriptions of physical objects(e.g., books, museum objects and art works) andentities (e.g., people and places), some are collectionsof digital objects, and others are a mixture of the two.
In most cases, these collections were not connectedwith each other except to the extent that they could besearched by services like Google. Working effectively
across such a disparate range of sources has been amajor challenge for humanities researchers.
The production-level tools for working with thesecollections of digital content are relatively limited.
Most tools are designed to work with a single
service or a single type of content, such as thevisualization tools developed by AusStage1, the user
tagging developed by the Powerhouse Museum in
Sydney2, and the Heurist software3 developed by
the University of Sydney for archaeology. The LORE
tool (for annotation and the construction of virtual
collections) works mainly with AustLit4, though its
federated search also covers some other content
services.
To meet NeCTAR’s Virtual Laboratory criteria,
content sources need to be integrated (or at least
inter-linked), and tools need to be usable across as139

Digital Humanities 2012

many sources and types of content as possible. It
is neither practical nor desirable to merge content
from multiple disciplines into a single enormous
database, given the extensive variations in standards
and approaches. Federated searching across many
services, on the other hand, will not build thedata-centred platform required to support the otherfunctions of the Virtual Laboratory. The only feasible
solution for data integration is to deploy a Linked
Open Data environment on a national scale.
Architecture and Services
The project has defined a data-centred workflow for
the humanities, with three main stages:- Discovery (search and browse services);- Analysis (annotation, collecting, visualization andmapping);- Sharing (collaborating, publishing, citing andreferencing).
For the Analysis and Sharing functions, a suite ofexisting Open Source tools developed in Australia arebeing used and adapted as part of the project. These
include:- LORE – developed by AustLit for annotation,federated searching, visualization, aggregation andsharing of compound digital objects (Gerber,Hyland & Hunter 2010);- Visualization tools developed by AusStage (Bollen
et al. 2009);- OHRM5 – developed by the University of
Melbourne to model entity relationships andpublish information about collections into
aggregated frameworks;- Heurist and FieldHelper – developed by the
University of Sydney to aggregate data, model
entity relationships and publish collections of data
to the Web (including maps and timelines).
The main adaptation required is to extend theirfunctionality to work with Linked Data URIs andto be hospitable to cloud-based hosting. Where noAustralian tool can be used or adapted, international
Open Source tools will be used.
The annotations, compound objects and tags createdby researchers using the Analysis tools will be stored
in RDF as part of HuNI’s Linked Data Service.
Descriptions of these data collections will also bemade available for harvesting in RIF-CS format by
the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) for its
Research Data Australia service.
HuNI’s Discovery environment builds on thetechnologies used by a variety of Australianand international services to provide sophisticatedsearching and browsing across data extracted from140

heterogeneous data sets and combined into a
Linked Data Service. These models include theAtlas of Living Australia6, as well as generalhumanities-related services like SOCH (Swedish
Open Cultural Heritage) and discipline-specificservices like CLAROS. The British Museum’s new
ResearchSpace will also serve as a key exemplar.
The Discovery environment is underpinned by the
Linked Data Service. The preferred solution forsupporting and presenting Linked Data is the Vitro
software developed by Cornell University, which
serves as the basis for the VIVO research profilingservice. VIVO has been implemented at two of
the HuNI partner institutions: the University of
Melbourne and the University of Western Australia.
The outputs from the Discovery environment will
be produced in formats which can be consumed
by tools performing Analysis and Sharing functions.
The Linked Data Service will support an API for
exposing data in RDF/XML and JSON formats. This
API will form the basis for reuse of the data by service
providers other than HuNI, as well as enabling thecustodians of data sets which contribute to HuNI tobuild workflows for pulling new content from theLinked Data Store into their own data sets.
A
necessary
prerequisiteforassemblingheterogeneous data from different data sets into a
Linked Data format is a Semantic Mediation and
Mapping Service. There will be two main components
to this service:- Tools for extracting, exposing and transforming
entity data contained in existing cultural data sets
and in digital objects;- An environment for harvesting, ingesting,matching, aligning, and linking the entity data.
For extracting and exposing entity data, two different
approaches will be supported. The major content
providers will develop and provide RESTful Web
APIs for their data sets. A service will also beestablished to allow smaller data providers to expose
their data for transformation and ingest without
the need to develop an API. This service will use
the harvest and ingest functionality of the Vitro
software. Tools for converting static databases andspreadsheets to RDF will also be deployed. Data
ingest from entity identification using text mining
will follow at a later stage.
The Semantic Mediation and Mapping Service willdraw on a range of vocabulary and identifier
services, which will be managed through a controlled
vocabulary registry with links to the ANDS
identifier and vocabulary services. HuNI’s initial
focus will be on matching, aligning and linking
data relating to people, places and objects, using
several high-level vocabularies and ontologies. TheseDigital Humanities 2012

include Australian vocabularies like the Gazetteer ofAustralia7 and the PeopleAustralia service (Dewhurst2008).
The HuNI service will enable researchers to find andanalyse data across a range of humanities disciplines,
and to save the outputs of their analysis in avariety of forms, including compound digital objects,
annotations, maps, timelines, and graphs. They will
be able to share their results and outputs with otherresearchers.

Notes
1. AusStage is the Australian performing arts
(www.ausstage.edu.au (www.ausstage.edu.au) )service

2. www.powerhousemuseum.com (www.powerhousemuseum.
com)
3. www.heuristscholar.org (www.heuristscholar.org)
4. AustLit is the Australian literature service (www.austlit.edu.au(www.austlit.edu.au) )5. www.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/ohrm/ (www.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/ohrm/)
6. www.ala.org.au (www.ala.org.au)
7. www.ga.gov.au/place-names/ (www.ga.gov.au/place-na
mes/)

Figure 1: HuNI Architecture

References
Bizer, C., T. Heath, and T. Berners-Lee (2009).
Linked Data – The Story So Far. International
Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems
5(3): 1-22.
Bollen, J., N. Harvey, J. Holledge, and G.
McGillivray (2009). AusStage: e-Research in the
Performing Arts. Australasian Drama Studies 54:
178-194.
Borgman, C. L. (2007). Scholarship in the Digital
Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Dewhurst, B. (2008). People Australia: a
Topic-Based Approach to Resource Discovery. In
VALA2008 Conference proceedings. Melbourne:
VALA. http://www.valaconf.org.au/vala2008/
papers2008/116_Dewhurst_Final.pdf (accessed
30 March 2012).
Gerber, A., A. Hyland, and J. Hunter (2010).
A Collaborative Scholarly Annotation System for
Dynamic Web Documents – A Literary Case Study.
In The Role of Digital Libraries in a Time of Global
Change (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6102).
Berlin: Springer, pp. 29-39.

141

Digital Humanities 2012

Beyond Embedded Markup
Buzzetti, Dino

dino.buzzetti@gmail.com
formerly University of Bologna, Italy

Thaller, Manfred

manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de
University at Cologne, Germany

1. Introduction (Manfred Thaller)
The unquestionable success of embedded markup
methods and practice for the encoding of texts in thehumanities is indisputably confirmed by the several
projects and the authoritative collections of encoded
texts now made available to the scholarly community.
The reasons of this success are many and diverse.
An important one, however, consists in the influencethat technological innovations have had on theaccepted methodological principles of humanities
computing. As John Unsworth has shown, we
have been witnessing different phases of prevailingconcerns in humanities computing projects andresearch: the chief orientation of interests has shiftedfrom ‘tools,’ in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, to ‘sources,’in the ’80s and ’90s, and now seems to be turning
back from sources to tools (Unsworth 2004). Froma computational point of view, what this change inorientation entailed was a shift of the attention focus
from processing to representation, from developing
algorithms applicable to information contents, toproducing digital surrogates to replicate and visualise
primary surce materials. The introduction of graphic
interfaces, the development of WYSIWYG word
processing systems on PCs, and the astounding
explosion of the World Wide Web have undoubtedly
favoured the expansion of this process.
The original purpose of the Web was actually toallow remote access to documents and to visualise
them, and the languages developed to produce
Web resources, HTML and now increasingly XML,are data representation languages and not dataprocessing languages. Processing Web resources isheavily dependent on the structure these languages
assign them, i.e. on hierarchical tree structures.
XSLT, the language used to process XML data, ‘takes
a tree structure as its input, and generates anothertree structure as its output’ (Kay 2005). The pointof view of the so-called ‘document community’ as
opposed to that of the ‘data processing’ or ‘databasecommunity’ – i.e. ‘to standardize the representationof data’ vs ‘to standardize the semantics of data’ – washeavily influential on the decisions of the scholarly

142

community, where ‘attempts to define semantics […]met with resistance,’ and ‘most notably’ so in the
Text Encoding Initiative. Thus, ‘the route proposedby SGML,’ and later XML, was to them ‘a reasonable
one’ and embedded markup established itself as astandard for the encoding of texts in the humanities(Raymond 1996: 27-28).
However, from the original surmise that what text
‘really is,’ is nothing but an ‘ordered hierarchy ofcontent objects,’ – the so-called OHCO thesis (DeRose et al. 1990) – the inadequacies of embedded
markup have soon come to the fore, just for thesake of representing textual variation, not to mention
processing textual information content. The need
to overcome these difficulties has prompted several
attempts to propose different approaches to text
encoding. Among them we may mention the Layered
Markup and Annotation Language (LMNL), (Piezs.d.), the eCommentary Machine web application(eComma), (Brown s.d.), the ‘extended string’ model,(Thaller 2006), and the Computer Aided Textual
Markup and Analysis (CATMA) desktop application(CATMA s.d.).
One of the most efficient implementations of similar
attempts to meet the difficulties of embedded
markup is the proposal of ‘standoff properties’ as
introduced by Desmond Schmidt. Properties canbe assigned to given ranges of text that may
nest and overlap, and can be stored separatelyfrom the text and in different formats suitableto specific needs. Standoff properties can be used
to represent different textual features, for either
interpretation or rendition purposes, and they
can be organised in different sets, that can beeasily merged, thus allowing for different encoding
perspectives. The same technique is applicable tosemantic annotation needs and stands as a viable
and efficient alternative to it. But most importantly,
as Desmond Schmidt has pointed out, whereas‘it is virtually impossible to freely exchange andinteroperate with TEI-encoded texts,’ with standoff
properties ‘interoperability and interchange areenhanced because the components are small andcan be freely recombined and reused’ (Schmidt,
forthcoming). Moreover, the afforded flexibility ofthe standoff representation of property sets allows its‘textualisation’: it can be expressed as a simple stringof characters and its variations can be represented
in the Multi-Version Document (MVD) format, i.e.
as an oriented graph with a start-node and an endnode. Possible interpretative variants and encodings
can then be easily compared and analysed.
In sum, approaches of this kind seem to beaffording viable solutions to the challenge ofputting to good use the invaluable wealth of data
now made accessible and encoded, by ‘building
tools’ that would enable us to proceed ‘beyond

Digital Humanities 2012

representation’ (Unsworth 2004) and to process
their information content. Standoff solutions canprovide suitable means to deal with the different
kinds of information conveyed by textual data
structures and to assign them adequate data models
for purposeful processing.
As it happens, however, the basic distinction between
data and information is often overlooked, just as
the clear severing of the two basic components
of a text, its expression and content. This lack of
distinction often leads to technical and conceptual
shortcomings, sometimes intrinsic to the use ofembedded markup. In this respect, standoff solutions
can usefully complete and supplement embedded
markup techniques with additional contrivances todistinguish between rendition and content features
and to treat them appropriately. Specific casestudies (see Buzzetti 2012, and Thaller 2012)
can better exemplify the kind of problems thatwould require solutions that go beyond the mere
representational scope of embedded markup andheed basic conceptual distinctions, such as thosebetween data and information, or interpretation andrendition. To what extent these solution may also
converge with the new technologies developed in thecontext of the Semantic Web would deserve a careful
and more documented enquiry.

1.1. References
Brown, T. (s.d.). eComma: A commentary
machine. http://ecomma.cwrl.utexas.edu/e392k/ (accessed 23 March 2012).
Buzzetti, D. (2012). Bringing Together Markup andSemantic Annotation. In this volume.
CATMA (s.d.). CATMA – Computer Aided Textual
Markup & Analysis.
http://www.catma.de/(accessed 23 March 2012).
DeRose, St., et al. (1990). What Is Text, Really?
Journal of Computing in Higher Education 1(2):3-26.
Kay, M. (2005). What Kind of Language is XSLT? An
analysis and overview. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslt (accessed 23 March2012).
Piez, W. (s.d.). LMNL Activity. http://www.piez.org/wendell/LMNL/lmnl-page.html (accessed 23
March 2012).
Schmidt, D. (forthcoming). Standoff Properties in
HRIT.
Thaller, M. (2006). Strings, Texts and Meaning.
In Digital Humanities 2006: Conference Abstracts.
Paris: CATI – Université Paris-Sorbonne, pp.
212-214.

Thaller, M. (2012). What Is a Text within the Digital
Humanities, or Some of Them, at Least? In thisvolume.
Unsworth, J. (2004). Forms of Attention: Digital
humanities beyond representation. Paper deliveredat The Face of Text: Computer-Assisted Text
Analysis in the Humanities, the third conferenceof the Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis(CaSTA), McMaster University, November 19-21,
2004. http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unswo
rth/FOA/ (accessed 13 March 2012).

2. What is a text within the Digital
Humanities, or some of them, atleast? (Manfred Thaller)(i) The Humanities are a very broad field.
The following ideas relate to those Humanities
disciplines, which are dealing with ‘historical texts’– or at least they started from them. ‘Historical’in this context defines any text, which has beencreated by actors, which we cannot consult any more.
This creates a complication when we understandan existing text as a message from a sender to arecipient – an understanding which is absolutely
fundamental to modern information technology,
as it is the model which has been used within
Shannon’s article of 1948, one of the corner stones ofmodern information theory and for most computerscientist, the corner stone of Computer Science uponwhich the later has been built. All of the measures
Shannon proposes require an understanding, what
the message that has been transmitted by the sendercontained before transmission. Another important
restriction Shannon acknowledges himself:
The fundamental problem of communication isthat of reproducing at one point either exactly orapproximately a message selected at another point.
Frequently the messages have meaning; that is theyrefer to or are correlated according to some systemwith certain physical or conceptual entities. Thesesemantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to
the engineering problem.
(Shannon 1948: 379)
The fact that information processing systems startwith a model which ignores semantics from page
one. is ultimately the reason, why meaning has to be
added to the signal stream in ways, which allow thetransmission (or processing) of that information as
an integral part of the signal stream – today usually asembedded markup. Embedded into a signal stream,
which has been created by a sender; so embedding
anything into it would, according to the model of
Shannon, require the markup being part of thetransmitted message. This is indeed, what SGML
has been created for: To enter the intentions of the143Digital Humanities 2012producer of a document about the formatting (and,up to a degree the meaning) of a data stream insuch a way, that they would be independent of therequirements of specific devices.
When we are not able to check the meaning ofa message with the sender we have to distinguishbetween the message, even if we do not understand it,
and our assumptions about interpreting them. As we
do not know the intent of the sender, the result of the‘transmission’ of a historical text across time cannot
be determined conclusively.
(ii) That data – as transmitted in signal streams– and information, as handled by humans, are not
identical is a truism. They have long been seen as
separate strata in information theory. (For a recent
overview of the discussion see Rowley 2007.) A
main difference between Shannon and the ‘data –information – knowledge – wisdom’ hierarchy has
always been, that the former leads directly to an
intuitive understanding of systems which can berealized by software engineering, while the latercannot. This is also true of attempts to use a similar
scheme to understand information systems, notably
Langefors (1995) infological equation.
(1)

I = i (D, S, t)

Information (I) is understood here as the resultof a process of interpretation (i) that is applied todata (D), applying previous knowledge (S) within thetime available (t). The great attraction of this modelis that – unlike Shannon’s – it explicitly promises
to model the meaning of messages, which are
explicitly excluded from consideration by Shannon.
To emphasize the difference between the models,
we could say that Shannon assumes information
to exist statically, therefore it can be broken into
discrete units, independent of any process dealing
with it, while Langefors understands information to
be the result of a dynamic process, which, having a
relationship to time, goes through different stages: So
the amount of information existing at tn is not – or
not necessarily – equal to the amount of information
at tn-1, the ongoing process i having had the chance
to produce more of it in the meantime.
The previous knowledge – S – can of course beeasily seen as embodied in the interpreting scholar,
who looks at the data. For the creation of systems
of information processing Thaller (2009a: 228)
has shown that Langefors original equation can be
developed further. When we assume that knowledge
is transformed from a static entity into a dynamic
process, as Langefors has proposed for information,
we can – via a few steps omitted in this abstract –
reach
(2)

144

Ix = i (Ix-α , s(Ix-β , t), t)

Roughly: Information at point x is the result of theinterpretation of an earlier level of information, in thelight of knowledge generated from earlier knowledge,
at a point of time t. As this allows the interpretationof data – e.g. a ‘transmission’ of a sender not living
any more – as a process, which does not have toterminate, it is a better model for the handling of
Humanities’ texts as Shannon’s.
(iii) This abstract model can be turned into anarchitecture for a representation of information,
which can be processed by software. Thaller(2009b) has lead a project team within thedigital preservation project PLANETS (cf. http://
www.planets-project.eu/), which used this abstract
model for the development of tools, which work on
the comparison of the information contained within
two different representations of an item according
to two different technical formats. (Roughly: Doesa PDF document contain exactly the same ‘text’ asa Word document.) For this purpose it is assumed,that all information represented in persistent form
on a computer consists of a set of tokens carrying
information, which exists within an n-dimensional
interpretative space, each dimension of that spacedescribing one ‘meaning’ to be assigned to it. Such ameaning can be a request directed at the renderingsystem processing the data to render a byte sequencein a specific way, or a connection to a semantic label
empowering an information retrieval system. As sucha representation is fully recursive, the requirementsof formalism (2) above are fulfilled. For texts this canbe simplified to an introductory example, where atext is seen as a chain of characters, each of which
can be described by arbitrarily many orthogonal
properties. (Whether the string Biggin within a text
describes a person or an airfield is independent of
whether that string is represented as italics or not;whether the string ‘To be or not to be’ is assigned
to the speaker Hamlet is independent of whether it
appears on page 13 or 367 of a book.)(iv) Returning to the argument of section (i) we
can see, that there is a direct correspondence
between the two arguments. On the one hand thenecessity to keep (a) the symbols transmitted withina ‘message’ from a sender who is irrevocably inthe past and (b) our intellectual interpretationsof them cleanly and unmistakably separate. On
the other hand the necessity to distinguish clearly
between (a) the tokens which transmit the datacontained within a byte stream and (b) the technicalinformation necessary to interpret that byte stream
within a rendering system. If it is useful to transfer
information transported within files with different
formats into a representation, where the transmitted
data are kept completely separate from the technicaldata needed to interpret them on a technical level, it
is highly plausible, that that is even more the case,Digital Humanities 2012

when we are discussing interpretations of texts left to
us by authors we can not consult any more.
This in turn is highly compatible to an architecture
for virtual research environments for manuscript
related work, where Humanities’ work on historicaltexts is understood to consist of adding layers ofchanging and potentially conflicting interpretation
unto a set of images of the manuscript to beinterpreted. Ebner et al. (2011) have recently
described an architecture for a virtual research
environment for medieval manuscripts which
implements this overall architecture, though using
embedded markup for some of the layers for the time
being.
To summarize the argument: (1) All texts, forwhich we cannot consult the producer, should beunderstood as a sequence of tokens, where weshould keep the representation of the tokens andthe representation of our interpretation thereof
completely separate. (2) Such representations canbe grounded in information theory. (3) These
representations are useful as blueprints for softwareon highly divergent levels of abstraction.

2.1. References
Ebner, D., J. Graf, and M. Thaller (2011). A
Virtual Research Environment for the Handling ofMedieval Charters. Paper presented at the conference
Supporting Digital Humanities: Answering theunaskable, Copenhagen, November 17-18, 2011
(forthcoming).
Langefors, B. (1995). Essays on Infology. Lund:
Studentliteratur.
Rowley, J. (2007). The Wisdom Hierarchy:
Representations of the DIKW hierarchy. Journal of
Information Science 33(2): 163-180.
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A Mathematical Theoryof Communication. Bell System Technical Journal
27(3): 379-423 and 27(4): 623-656.
Thaller, M. (2009a). The Cologne Information
Model: Representing information persistently. In
M. Thaller (ed.), The eXtensible Characterisation
Languages – XCL. Hamburg: Kovač, pp. 223-240.
Thaller, M., ed. (2009b). The eXtensible
Characterisation Languages – XCL. Hamburg:
Kovač.

3. Bringing together markup
and semantic annotation (Dino
Buzzetti)
Far from having been convincingly clarified, therelation between markup and semantics still appears

to be a perplexing one. The BECHAMEL project,a consistent and systematic attempt to provide
a semantics for document markup (Renear etal. 2002), aimed at introducing mechanisms andrules for mapping syntactic markup structures
into semantic domains of objects, properties andrelations. In a convincing article, however, Dubin
and Birnbaum (2004) acknowledge that ‘all the
distinctions that we’re able to explicate using
BECHAMEL’ could either ‘guide the re-tagging of
documents with richer markup’ or ‘be serialized
in the form of RDF or a topic map.’ (p. 8) But,in the first case, is the prospect of expressing all
semantic information through the markup a viable
solution? As it has been pointed out, semantic andinterpretative encoding prevents interoperability,
and since any ‘attempt to make a document
interoperational’ is ‘likely to result in decreased
expressiveness,’ markup scholars are ready to admitthat interoperability is ‘the wrong goal for scholarly
humanities text encoding.’ (Bauman 2011) On theother hand, a purely semantic description is clearly
incomplete, for it might disregard equally possible
and semantically equivalent textual variants.
Keeping inline markup and semantic information
distinctly severed proves to be a more appropriate
approach. In the case of scholarly digital editions,the sole concern with markup has left us with ‘aproblem that still exists,’ for ‘we need (we still need)to demonstrate the usefulness of all the stuff wehave digitized over the last decade and more –and usefulness not just in the form of increased
access, but specifically, in what we can do with the
stuff once we get it’ (Unsworth 2003). How can
we proceed ‘beyond representation’ and build toolsthat shall ‘put us into new relationships with our
texts’ and enable us to process their information
content? (Unsworth 2004) Embedded markup canbest serve as a comprehensive information carrier
for textual information content, but we need further
solutions to process content in an efficient andfunctional way. For embedded markup provides adata structure, but it does not beget a suitable data
model. (Raymond 1992, 1996) It defines a format,
not a semantics to process its information content.
Whether Semantic Web technologies do provide
satisfactory data models for humanities research isstill an open question, but the problem yet remains
how markup and semantic description techniques
can be suitably related, by heeding carefully the basic
distinction between data and information content.
TEI extensions on the one side and the RDFa syntax
on the other, do not seem to provide an adequate
approach, failing as they do to keep format andcontent concerns duly severed. The apparent markup
overload they produce carries with it a dubious
Ptolemaic flavour.

145

Digital Humanities 2012

The
relation
betweenembeddedmarkupand semantic description languages is anindetermination relationship. Dubin and Birnbaum(2004) fully recognise its very nature: ‘the same
markup can convey different meanings in different
contexts,’ and ‘markup can communicate the same
meaning in different ways using very different
syntax.’ It is, on both sides, a one-to-many relation. If
you fix the syntax, the semantics may vary in various
contexts, and vice versa, if you fix the semantics,
you can use a different syntax to express the samecontent. Contrary to the tenets of hard artificial
intelligence – ‘if you take care of the syntax, thesemantics will take care of itself’ (Haugeland 1985:
106) – and of current analytic philosophy of language– ‘to give the logical form of a sentence’ is to ‘bringit within the scope of a semantic theory’ (Davidson
1980: 144) – there is no one-to-one correspondence
between the logical form of a phrase and the structureof its semantic content. We should not take for
granted that by processing a string of characters
representing a text, we process its information
content, for we can, and often do, process a string
without processing the content. And far from being adrawback, this circumstance is actually an advantage,
for by dealing with indetermination we can effectively
chart variation.
Both the expression and the content (Hjelmslev 1961)of the text are open to variation. Dealing with
textual variants is the task of textual criticism, justas dealing with interpretative variants is that of theliterary critic. But we are not at loss in tacklingthese problems with computational means. We can
exploit the ambivalent status of markup to represent
the dynamics of variation. (Buzzetti 2009) As adiacritical mark, the markup can be construed either
as belonging to the text or as providing an external
description of its structure. We may therefore
attribute to the markup both a descriptive and aperformative function. (Renear 2000) Assumed in its
performative capacity, the markup can be seen as an
instruction, or as a rule, to determine the semantic
structure of the text, whereas taken declaratively it
can be equated to a variant of the string of charactersthat constitutes the text. Referring to a stand-off
metadata representation of the textual information
content, or to a stand-off markup of sorts withsemantic import, we can all the same assume theirstructural marks in both acceptations, declarativeand performative, and get an overall dynamic modelof textual and interpretative variation, as shown in
Figure 1:

146

Figure 1

In this diagram, ei represents a specific element or
construct of the expression of the text, conceived ofas the set of all tokens that compose it, or E = {e1 , e2 , ... , en }. In its performative capacity thatelement assumes a different logical status, and can beconstrued as a function f ( ei ) = ci mapping into theset of all tokens of a given content representation C ={ c1 , c2 , ... , cn }, whose specific elements ci act in asimilar way as a function f ( ci ) = ei mapping into theset E of all the elements of the expression of the text.
Both kinds of variants, textual and interpretative,
can be collectively represented, as a kind of ‘logicalsum’ (Thaller 1993: 64), by means of an MVD (MultiVersion Document) graph, as shown by Schmidt
and Colomb (2009). Each path of an MVD graph– a directed graph with a start-node and an endnode – represents a different version of the text.
A totally isomorphic graph can be obtained also
for interpretative variants. In the case of a Topic
Maps representation of textual content, an MVD
graph was obtained by collating textualized XTM
representations of different maps referring to thesame text (Isolani et al. 2009).
A comprehensive representation of this kind, ofboth textual and interpretative variants throughMVD graphs, aims at finding efficient ways todetermine which paths of the one graph, or which
versions of the text, are compatible with specificpaths of the other, or with different interpretationsof its information content. Both graphs can beused to process the information they represent:
the textual variants graph in order to visualiseand display different views and versions of thetext of a digital edition; the interpretative variants
graph in order to process its information content.
Promising and different approaches to that end
have been proposed by Schmidt (forthcoming), in
the context of the HRIT (Humanities Resources,
Infrastructure and Tools) project, and by Thaller

Digital Humanities 2012(2009), through the development of the XCL(eXtensible Characterisation Language) language.
The two methods can offer different implementationsof the model here described for specific tasks of theeditorial practice, and the pursuit of interoperability
between them sets the goal for further development
and research.

References
Bauman,S.
(2011).
Interchangevs.
Interoperability. In Proceedings of Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2011. Balisage Series
on Markup Technologies, vol. 7, doi:10.4242/
BalisageVol7.Bauman01 (accessed 13 March 2012).
Buzzetti, D. (2009). Digital Editions and Text
Processing. In M. Deegan and K. Sutherland(eds.), Text Editing, Print, and the Digital World.
Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 45-62.
Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on actions and events.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dubin, D., and D. Birnbaum (2004).
Interpretation Beyond Markup. In B. T. Usdin (ed.),Proceedings of the Extreme Markup Languages
2004 Conference, Montreal, Quebec, August 2-6,
2004 http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstr
eam/handle/2142/11838/EML2004Dubin01.pdf(accessed 13 March 2012).

Haugeland, J. (1985). Artificial Intelligence: Thevery idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hjelmslev, L. (1961). Prolegomena to a Theory of
Language. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P.
Isolani, A., C. Lorito, Ch. Genovesi, D.
Marotta, M. Matteoli, and C. Tozzini (2009).
Topic Maps and MVD for the Representations ofInterpretative Variants. In Digital Humanities 2009:
Conference Abstracts, Proceedings of the 2nd ALLC,
ACH and SDH-SEMI Joint International Conference(University of Maryland, College Park, June 22-25,
2009), College Park, The Maryland Institute forTechnology in the Humanities (MITH), pp. 8-11.

Renear, A. (2000). The descriptive/procedural
distinction is flawed. Markup Languages: Theory &Practice 2(4): 411-20.
Renear, A., M. Sperberg-McQueen, and C.
Huitfeldt (2002). Towards a semantics for XML
markup. In R. Furuta, J. I. Maletic, and E. Munson(eds.), DocEng’02: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM
Symposium on Document Engineering, McLean, VA,
November 8-9, 2002, New York, NY: ACM Press, pp.
119-126.
Schmidt, D., and R. Colomb (2009). A Data
Structure for Representing Multi-version Texts
Online. International Journal of Human Computer
Studies 67(6): 497-514.
Thaller, M. (1993). Historical Information Science:
Is There Such a Thing? New Comments on an Old
Idea. In T. Orlandi (ed), Discipline umanistiche e
informatica: Il problema dell’integrazione. Roma:
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, pp. 51-86.
Thaller, M., ed. (2009). The eXtensible
Characterisation Language: XCL. Hamburg: Kovač.
Unsworth, J. (2003). Tool-Time, or ‘Haven’t We
Been Here Already?’ Ten Years in Humanities
Computing. Paper presented at the conference
Transforming Disciplines: The Humanities andComputer Science, Washington, DC, 17-18 Jnuary
2003. http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unswo
rth/carnegie-ninch.03.html (accessed 13 March2012).
Unsworth, J. (2004). Forms of Attention: Digital
humanities beyond representation. Paper deliveredat The Face of Text: Computer-Assisted Text
Analysis in the Humanities, the third conferenceof the Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis(CaSTA), McMaster University, November 19-21,
2004. http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unswo
rth/FOA/ (accessed 13 March 2012).

Raymond, D. R., et al. (1992). Markup
Reconsidered. Paper presented at the FirstInternational Workshop on Principles of Document
Processing, Washington, DC, 22-23 October
1992. http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~fwtompa/.
papers/markup.ps (accessed 13 March 2012).
Raymond, D. R., F. Tompa, and D. Wood
(1996). From Data Representation to Data Model:
Meta-Semantic Issues in the Evolution of SGML.
Computer Standards and Interfaces 18(1): 25-36.

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Digital Humanities 2012

Myopia: A Visualization
Tool in Support of Close
Reading
Chaturvedi, Manish
chaturm@muohio.edu
Miami University, USA

Gannod, Gerald
gannodg@muohio.edu
Miami University, USA

Mandell, Laura

Mandell@tamu.edu
Texas A&M University, USA

Armstrong, Helenarmstrh@muohio.edu
Miami University, USA

Hodgson, Eric

eric.hodgson@muohio.edu
Miami University, USA

Although the term ‘myopia’ typically has negative
connotations, focusing on what is nearby is notalways a bad idea. Literary critics value what theycall ‘close reading’, the process of carefully reading apoem or other literary work word-by-word and lineby-line in order to analyze how different features of
the text – sound, syntax and rhythm work together
to create meaning. Through close reading, literary
critics hope, the reader might eventually succeed inuncovering hidden connotations. Typically, multiple
readings are necessary to understand the structureof a literary work and to unearth multiple meanings,
especially in the case of poetry. Only then can thereader perceive the poem’s prosody. A non-abstract,enhanced visualization of the metrical, syntactical,
and sonic structures of a poem can greatly ease thislaborious process.
There has been a recurrent effort to develop text
visualization and visual statistical tools to better
understand the underlying structures of chosen
textual resources. Some of these tool suites provide
opportunities for exploration and collaboration inarea of textual analysis [5,6,9,10]; others are morenarrowly focused on comparison of plain or encoded
text, across versions [3, 7]. Despite attempts to do sothese digital tools have not resulted in significantly
easing the process of close reading [2]. The sideby-side method of highlighting differences is notconducive to spot connotations and analyses, andthus does not help in fully exploiting potential of
digital tools in literature.
148

At Miami University, we are developing the Myopia
Poetry Visualization tool to facilitate display of amultidimensional representation of TEI [8] encoded
poetry and text. Presenting an interactive visual
representation of differently encoded versions oftext, the Myopia tool seeks to amplify understanding
and uncover new knowledge in the context of close
reading. The tool currently is used to visualize text
from The Poetess Archive currently moving to Texas
A&M University. The Poetess Archive includes a
database of electronic documents encoded using
the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) schemas [8]extended with the Poetess Archive tag-set that has
been derived from widely used terms in literary
analysis and criticism. Even though one schema isused, a schema extended from the TEI schema, theelements of a poem that are interesting to literaryscholars have been formalized as tags and attributes
based on XML standards. But the tags relevant toany single poem must be spread across multiple
documents. XML by its very nature is hierarchical,
and these hierarchies cannot overlap within an XML
document. The elements of prosodic structures of
poetry however do overlap: a metaphor might begin
in the middle of one poetic line and end in the
middle of another. Different features thus need to be
encoded in separate XML files making a composite
analysis difficult. Moreover, the XML representationof literary texts is suitable for machine processing
and electronic exchange of information, but it is not
intuitively comprehensible even by those scholars
who know about poetry and would be most likely
to adopt an XML encoding system. A tool whichfuses TEI encodings spread over separate files intoa single visually integrated document could help
overcome the limitations of encoding literary texts
in XML. We are developing a visualization tool thatseeks to integrate multiple encodings while allowing
comparative analysis of multiple poems encodedusing the extended TEI tag-set. The proposedsolution is an interactive visual representation ofdifferently encoded versions of text that can enhancecognition, and aid in uncovering of new knowledge.
This approach facilitates identification of frequently
changing hotspots in encoded text and aids in theprocess of close reading.
Close reading means reading a poem word byword and then repeating the process line by line
in order to explore sound, syntax, tropologicalfigures, and the meter or underlying rhythm of
the work. The reader might eventually succeed inuncovering hidden connotations. Multiple iterations
are necessary to understand the structure and thus
to unearth meanings from a poem. Only then is thereader in a position to describe underlying prosodic
elements in literary text. A non-abstract, enhanced
visualization of syntax and sound structures of apoem can greatly ease this laborious process.

Digital Humanities 2012

The brain’s capacity to rapidly process visual
information, and discern visual patterns forms thebasis for any visualization. Pirolli and Card developeda theory of information access to help designinginterfaces to visual cognitive tools. People follow ascent as they forage for information, making just-intime decisions about which path to follow [11]. An
ideal cognitive loop between a computer and humanwould require the computer providing exactly the
information needed at any given time. Thus only
relevant information should be on screen, allowing
users to forage as they explore the interface. In the
Myopia tool, the cost of visual queries is reduced by
the minimal layering of visual information, a layeringthat users can control.
The effectiveness of a given visualization is directly
related to the properties of the mapping between theraw data and its rendering. In general any mapping
should allow the user to access the underlying data,so that he or she can be assured that the visualization
actually relates to the source data being rendered.
In our visualization tool the textual content of theencoded poetry being visualized is always available
to the user. The ability to revert to the source text at
any stage of the visualization from abstract graphicalmappings is a conscious design choice that we madein building our tool, and we believe that allowing
users to see the text enhances the tool’s effectiveness[12]. Myopia employs a direct representation of
textual content overlaid with graphical metaphors to
aid in literary analysis of poetry.
The User Interface of the Myopia tool is split into
three distinct visual regions- The Main Visualization Area that displays andallows users to interact with the rendered text.
- A Key/Legend at bottom of the visualization panelthat holds a tabbed display of keys associated withthe loaded visualization.
- GUI Panel at the right of the Visualization panel.
This allows loading and manipulating source TEI
documents and the resulting3D visual elements.

The Myopia Poetry Visualization tool has beendeveloped in Python and utilizes open-source Python
libraries for rendering multidimensional graphics
integrated with an intuitive user interface. The
framework used for multidimensional graphics iscalled Panda3D, which was developed at Carnegie
Mellon University [4]. It is useful to mix twodimensional interface design elements with higher
dimension graphical design elements. Navigational
controls should always be visible and accessible
to the user. In the Poetry Visualization tool thetwo-dimensional Graphical User Interface (GUI)elements are created using the wxPython framework.
We are conducting user studies to evaluate theeffectiveness of our approach in helping the processof close reading. To achieve this objective we utilize
the Pre-Experimental Design methodology known
as Pretest-Posttest Experiment design ex- plored byCampbell, Stanley et. al. [1]. The experiment seeks tomeasure the effective- ness, adequacy and usabilityof the Myopia Poetry Visualization tool. The researchquestions of the study seek to determine the three
aspects of the tool: its effectiveness, its adequacy, andits usability.
Reading literature closely is a time-consuming
activity. Often combining the results of close
reading can be difficult. By using Information
Visualization, new knowledge about text can besynthesized. We are presenting a method to
support close reading of literary texts using multidimensional composite visualizations. Offering aninteractive visual representation of a poem’s literary
qualities, the Poetry Visualization tool al lows fora multidimensional representation of TEI-encoded
poetry and text. Presenting an interactive visual
representation of differently encodedversions of text, the tool seeks to amplify
understanding and uncover new knowledge. This
tool will facilitate identifying hotspots in an encoded
text and will visualize the attendant changes inareas of interest across various TEI documents: apoem may be most interesting metaphorically in
one line, but metrically it may be more interestingin another. The goal is to help scholars analyze
the original documents in new ways and explore
information visualization as a rhetorical device inliterary criticism. The contributions of this research
are in the areas of Information Visualization and
Digital Humanities. The purpose of the research is tosupport reading literature closely using information
visualization. This will facilitate abstract analysis ofliterary texts by fusing multiple perspectives.

Figure 1: Myopia Tool – Principal Characteristics and Layout

149

Digital Humanities 2012[11] Pirolli, P., S. K. Card, and M. M. van derWege (2001). Visual information foraging in a focus+ context visualization. Proceedings of the SIGCHI

Figure 2: Myopia Tool – Multiple Perspectives

References[1] Campbell, D. T., and J. C. Stanley (1966).
Experimental and quasi-experimental designs forresearch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
[2] Bulger, M., E. Lagresa, et al. (2008). Close
reading re-visited. http://english236-w2008.pb
works.com/Visualization-Project (accessed 11
March 2012).
[3] Mittelbach, A. (2009). Tei-comparator in myelement. http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/jamesc/
2009/09/04/tei-comparator (accessed 12 March2012).
[4] Carnegie Mellon ETC (2010). Panda 3d free 3d game engine. http://www.panda3d.org/(accessed 12 march 2012).
[5] UC BerkeleyVisualization Lab (2010). Flaredata visualization for the web. http://flare.pref
use.org/ (accessed 12 march 2012). August 2010.
[6] IBM (2011). Many eyes. http://manyeyes.alp
haworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/ (ac- cessed 12 March2012).

[7] Juxta (2011). Juxta collation software forscholars. http://www.juxtasoftware.org/about.html (accessed 12 March 2012).
[8] TEI (2011). TEI: Text encoding initiative.
http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml (accessed 12
March 2012).
[9] University of Nebraska (2011). Tokenx: atext visualization, analysis, andplaytool. http://jetson.unl.edu:8080/cocoon/tokenx/index.html?file=../xml/base.xml (accessed
12 March 2012).
[10] Bradfford Paley, W. (2011). Textarc.org
home. http://textarc.org/ (accessed 12 March2012).

150

Digital Humanities 2012

Translation Arrays:
Exploring Cultural Heritage
Texts Across Languages
Cheesman, Tomt.cheesman@swansea.ac.uk
Swansea University, UK

Thiel, Stephan

mail@stephanthiel.com
Fachhochschule Potsdam, Germany

Flanagan, Kevin

K.FLANAGAN.667644@swansea.ac.uk
Swansea University, UK

Zhao, Geng

cszg@swansea.ac.uk
Swansea University, UK

Ehrmann, Alison

alison.ehrmann@t-online.de
Swansea University, UK

Laramee, Robert S.
R.S.Laramee@swansea.ac.uk
Swansea University, UK

Hope, Jonathan

jonathan.r.hope@strath.ac.uk
University of Strathclyde, UK

Berry, David M.

d.m.berry@swansea.ac.uk
Swansea University, UK

Astronomers use telescope arrays to create highresolution images of distant objects. In a Translation
Array, by aligning multiple divergent translations(target texts) we can produce new images of thehistorical and contemporary dynamics of translating
cultures, and also of the originals (source texts), byshowing how these are refracted through translators’
varying interpretations.
Text variation – multiple documentary and curatorial
witnesses – is a familiar challenge in digital editionmaking (Price 2006; Schmidt & Colomb 2009). But
in DH work so far, the ‘story’ which is told abouta text or oeuvre is normally confined to its original
language. (An exception is Rybicki 2003, 2006; andcf. Altintas et al. (2007) for a historical linguistics
application of a ‘time separated’ parallel translation
corpus.) In fact, the stories of ‘cultural heritage
texts’ (Schmidt 2010) are normally multilingual andmulticultural. Can we make it practically possible(and preferably enjoyable as well as informative)

to explore, share, and debate the rich knowledgeof texts and the world that is encoded in multiple
translations?
The fact that multiple translations have remained,
until now, an unsuspected resource for DH
comes as no surprise from the perspective ofCritical Translation Studies (CTS). The Scandals
of Translation and The Translator’s Invisibility
are two titles by the doyen of the field, Venuti(1995, 1998). Few outside it appreciate the scale ofdivergence, of multiple kinds, caused by multiple
factors, which is normal among multiple translations.
The causes of divergence include varying translator
competence and individual creativity, framed withintarget-context-specific norms: linguistic, cultural,political, legal, and ideological constraints andcompulsions, which all affect the acts and outputsof translation or retranslation (Gürcaglar 2009).
Multiple translations are therefore a very richresource for transcultural study. They are tailormade for digital approaches, because each one is
implicitly aligned with each other one, and with theoriginal – at least partially.
A Translation Array is a database (a multiple
translation text corpus with rich metadata
including rich segmental alignments to a sourcetext) with a browser-based interface. It exploits
existing and custom-built visualization tools for
multi-scale viewing, exploration and creativeinteraction. Arrays will capture user generated
content – both data (texts, text corpora) andmetadata: catalogue information, annotations,commentaries, interpretations, algorithmic analyses,
micro-alignments, and interlingual re- or backtranslations. Data and metadata can be read atvarious scales. By supporting distant readings (àla Moretti 2005), algorithmic readings (Ramsay
2007; Hope & Witmore 2010), and close, criticaland contextual readings, Translation Arrays can be
powerful instruments for humanities researchers indiverse fields.
Multiply translated texts include the sacredscriptures of all religions, as well as ancient andmodern literature and philosophy, political andhistorical texts, and so forth. Indeed, (re)translation
corpora are coterminous with recorded cultural
history. Beyond research applications, therefore,
Translation Arrays can become valuable tools
for presenting Digital Humanists’ work to wider
audiences in beguiling, interactive ways, andencouraging creative interaction with cultural
heritage, across global cultural and linguistic
barriers. They will be welcome in worldwide
classrooms – especially multilingual and crossculturally networked classrooms. Game-like andcreative engagement with cultural heritage material
is a key feature of translation itself. This will151

Digital Humanities 2012

be facilitated by Array interfaces, alongside more
‘serious’ modes of engagement. Artists and writers
will find this type of resource irresistible. In
short, Translation Arrays may become a signature
Digital Humanities format, coupling screen-based
exploration and interaction with truly global,
multilingual and multicultural content – content
which has (by definition) high internationalrecognition value.

and ‘rewritings’ shade into texts which are moreloosely ‘inspired by’ or ‘answer back to’ source texts
and previous reworkings of them, then our approacharguably reaches limits of vaildity. On the other
hand, by juxtaposing multiple translations, and by
reviving the cultural memory of obscure ones, aTranslation Array creates a new and rich context inwhich radically ‘unfaithful’ ‘un-translations’, too, canbe read and interpreted in new ways.

We will present at DH 2012 our work inprogress towards building a prototype. We have anexperimental corpus of over 50 different Germantranslations of Shakespeare’s Othello, 1766-2006,
plus samples from and metadata about hundreds ofother translations of the play, in (so far) over 40
languages, crowd-sourced at http://www.delighte
dbeauty.org/ . This site demonstrates the existenceof worldwide communities interested in engaging
with this type of work. As well as documenting
existing translations, some users are also creating
their own, ad hoc translations. The site also carries
outputs of our project so far, such as: a survey of text
visualisation tools, and prototype corpus overview
and comparison tools (Geng et al. 2011a, 2011b);
discursive text sample analyses (Cheesman 2011,2012); a Web Science presentation (Wilson et al.
2011); and a paper on using stylometrics to sort
multiple translation segments by ‘distinctiveness’,
thereby also enabling a source text to be read in a newway, through its translations’ variability (Cheesman
et al. 2012).

Funding

By summer 2012 we aim to demonstrate a working
Array prototype, with an interface designed by
Stephan Thiel (see Thiel 2009 for related work). It
will deploy Shakespeare’s Othello and c. 20 Germantranslations, which each reflect cultural-historicaland idiosyncratic differences, and which collectively
re-interpret the original text in ways which, within
the Array interface, can even excite the interest ofusers who know no German.
The technical and conceptual challenges are
fascinating. What is a translation? What is agood or interesting translation? What makes sometranslations last? Why do people keep retranslating
the same texts? Are they in fact ‘the same’texts? What do terms in Translation Theory like‘equivalence’, ‘adequacy’ or ‘appropriateness’ meanin practice? How can machine- and user-generated‘back-translation’ best be deployed in an Array?
From a Critical Translation Studies perspective,
our ‘source-text-centric’ approach is questionable.
The most interesting translations for CTS areoften scarcely source-focused (i.e. not very ‘faithful’,‘literal’, ‘close’, even ‘equivalent’). Often, this meansthat they cannot easily be aligned with the source.
Where diverse ‘translations’, ‘adaptations’, ‘versions’,
152

This work was supported in Feb-July 2011by Swansea University, College of Arts andHumanities, Research Innovation Fund. The work
is currently (Feb-Sept 2012) supported by the UK’s
Arts and Humanities Research Council, Digital
Transformations Research Development Fund [AH/J012483/1]. The AHRC-funded team consists of:Principal Investigator, Dr Tom Cheesman (Swansea
U); Co-Investigators, Dr Robert S. Laramee (SwanseaU) and Dr Jonathan Hope (U Strathclyde); Research
Assistant, Kevin Flanagan (Swansea U); Design
Consultant, Stephan Thiel (FH Potsdam / Studio
Nand, Berlin).

References
Altintas, K., et al. (2007). Language Change
Quantification Using Time-separated Parallel
Translations. Literary and Linguistic Computing
22(4): 375-93.
Cheesman, T. (2011). Thirty Times More Fair
Than Black: Shakespeare Retranslation as Political
Restatement. Angermion 4: 1-51.
Cheesman, T. (2012; forthcoming). "Far MoreFair Than Black”: Mutations of a Difficult Couplet.
In B. Smith and K. Rowe (eds), Cambridge World
Shakespeare Encyclopaedia, vol. 2: The World’s
Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Cheesman, T., and the Version Variation
Visualization
Team (2012; forthcoming).
Translation Sorting: Eddy and Viv in Translation
Arrays. In B. Wiggin (ed.), Un/Translatables.
Evanstone: Northwestern UP.
Geng, Z., T. Cheesman, D. M. Berry, A.
Ehrmann, R. S. Laramee, and A. J. Rothwell(2011a). Visualizing Translation Variation of Othello:
A Survey of Text Visualization and Analysis
Tools. http://cs.swan.ac.uk/~cszg/text/textS
urvey.pdf (accessed February 29, 2012).
Geng, Z., T. Cheesman, D. M. Berry,
A.Ehrmann, R. S. Laramee, and A. J.
Rothwell, .
(2011b). Visualizing Translation
Variation: Shakespeare’s Othello. In Bebis, G. etal. (eds.), Advances in Visual Computing: 7thInternational Symposium, ISVC 2011, Part I, LNCS

Digital Humanities 2012

6938, pp. 657–667. http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~
cszg/text/isvc.pdf (accessed February 29, 2012).

June 2011. Poster attached to http://www.delightedbeauty.org Outputs.

Gürcaglar, S. T. (2009). Retranslation. In M.
Baker and G. Saldanha (eds.), Encyclopedia ofTranslation Studies. Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, pp. 232-36.
Hope, J., and M. Witmore (2010). “The
Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ‘Green Sleeves”’:
Digital Approaches to Shakespeare’s Language of
Genre. Shakespeare Quarterly 61(3): 357-90.
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract
Models for a Literary History. London: Verso.
Price, K. M. (2008). Electronic Scholarly Editions.
In Schreibman, S. and Siemens, R. (eds.), A
Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford:
Blackwell. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/
companionDLS/ (accessed February 29, 2012).
Ramsay, S. (2007). Algorithmic Criticism. In
S. Schreibman, and R. Siemens (eds.), A
Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford:
Blackwell. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/
companionDLS/ (accessed February 29, 2012).
Rybicki, J. (2003). Original Characters. http://www.cyf-kr.edu.pl/~strybick/original_charact
ers.htm (accessed February 29, 2012).

Rybicki, J. (2006). Burrowing into Translation:
Character Idiolects in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy
and its Two English Translations. Literary and
Linguistic Computing 21(1): 91-103.
Schmidt, D. (2010). The Inadequacy of Embedded
Markup for Cultural Heritage Texts. Literary and
Linguist Computing 25(3): 337-56.
Schmidt, D., and R. Colomb (2009). A Data
Structure for Representing Multi-version Texts
Online. http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc
e/journal/10715819
International Journal of
Human-Computer Studies 67/(6): 497-514.
Thiel, S. (2009). Understanding Shakespeare.
http://www.understanding-shakespeare.com(accessed February 29, 2012).

Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A
History of Translation. London: Routledge.
Venuti, L. (1998), The Scandals of Translation:
Towards an Ethics of Difference. London:
Routledge.
Wilson, M. L., Z. Geng, R. S. Laramee, T.
Cheesman, A. J. Rothwell, D. M. Berry, andA. Ehrmann (2011). Studying Variations in Cultureand Literature: Visualizing Translation Variations in
Shakespeare’s Othello. Poster paper at the ACM Web
Science 2011 Conference, Koblenz, Germany, 14-17
153

Digital Humanities 2012

Constructing a Chinese as
Second Language Learner
Corpus for Language
Learning and Research

center sponsored by Ministry of Education fordeveloping various Chinese as a second language
proficiency tests. Based on the data provided by thesetwo centers, a 3 million word Chinese as a second
language learner corpus has been developed. The
MTC-TOP learner corpus includes the following two
different types of learner data:

Chen, Howard

1. CSL learners’ short essays written in various TOP
tests.

hjchen@ntnu.edu.tw
National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

Many researchers and language teachers aroundthe world believe that language corpora have great
potentials for improving second/foreign language
learning and teaching. Among various types ofcorpora resources, learner corpora in particularhave received much attention recently. One of themost influential projects is the ICLE (International
Corpus of Learner English) project led by Professor
Granger in University of Louvain, Belgium. The newversion of ICLE corpus contains 3.7 million wordsof EFL writing from learners representing 16 mothertongue backgrounds. The ICLE corpus has helped
to produce many research papers and pedagogicalmaterials within the past decade. Although useful
English learner corpora such as ICLE are widely
available, very few learner corpora for other target
languages are available.
Recently, because of the rapid economic growthin China, an increasing number of students arelearning Chinese as a second language. Although
the number of Chinese as second language (CSL)
learners is increasing rapidly around the world; very
few CSL learner corpora are available for teaching,learning, and research. For CSL research, learnercorpus can play an important role. CSL teachers
and researchers can conduct research on learners’
interlanguage development and gain insights about
leaner’s difficulties and needs. Material writers
can further use the results of error analysis to
produce useful pedagogical materials. CSL leaner
corpus might also be used to better understand thedifferences among learners at different proficiency
levels (cf. Cambridge English Profile Project).
This paper will introduce a new Chinese as
second language learner corpus and related corpus
search tools developed by MTC (Mandarin Teaching
Center) and SC-TOP (Steering Committee of Test ofProficiency) in Taiwan. MTC is located at National
Taiwan Normal University and it is the largest
Chinese teaching centers in Taiwan. There are morethan 1600 students enrolled in each quarter, andthere are more than 150 teachers in this center.
Students from more than 70 countries are studyingin this center. SC-TOP is a language testing research154

2. CSL students’ writing assignments at MTC
To facilitate corpus search, the learner corpus
was further automatically tagged with a Chinese
tagger called CKIP (Chinese Knowledge Information
Processing) tagger developed by Academia Sinica,
Taiwan. The POS-tagged CSL corpus is useful for
research and teaching. In addition to the learnercorpus, a web concordancer which has several
different search options was also developed. This web
concordancer allows users retrieve specific words
and phrases from CSL learner corpus. Thus, various
CSL learners’ usage can be retrieved and studied
more easily and systematically. Furthermore, thePOS-tagged learner corpus can be used to search forcollocates used by CSL learners.
In addition, it is also important to further analyze
various errors made by CSL learners. Since it is
not possible for computers to identify errors, native
speakers were asked to tag this learner corpus.
25 types of major errors were first identified, andabout 800000 words were tagged so far. Thesemanually tagged errors can also be searched via a web
interface. Because these learner data were producedby learners from various L1 language backgrounds,
teachers and researchers can also find errors andpatterns produced by CSL learners from different
native language backgrounds.
To illustrate how this MTC-TOP learner corpus canbenefit CSL research, we used this learner corpus
to conduct a study on the acquisition of Chineseclassifiers by various CSL learners. Chinese classifier
is a notoriously difficult language feature for many
CSL learners. In the past, most studies on Chineseclassifiers learning often involved few subjects andwere based on very limited number of learner errors.
With the help of this 3 million words CSL corpus,
the classifiers errors made by many learners fromvarious first language backgrounds can be foundmore easily and examined more systematically. The
analysis on classifier errors produced by different
CSL learners also helps researchers to better identify
the common Chinese classifiers errors. In addition
to classifiers, other common errors made by CSL
learners can also be investigated with the help ofcomputerized corpus. Several problematic areas(Chinese synonyms and Chinese particle le) will befurther discussed in this paper. The CSL learner

Digital Humanities 2012

corpus and the web concordancer should be able tohelp more researchers uncover CSL interlanguage
patterns and conduct various types of research. It
is evident that this CSL learner corpus can makesignificant impact on CSL teaching, learning, andresearch.

Social Curation of large
multimedia collections on
the cloudChong, Dazhi

dchong@odu.edu
Old Dominion University, USA

Coppage, Samuelscoppage@odu.edu
Old Dominion University, USA

Gu, Xiangyi

xxxgu001@odu.edu
Old Dominion University, USA

Maly, Kurt

maly@cs.odu.edu
Old Dominion University, USA

Wu, Harris

hwu@odu.edu
Old Dominion University, USA

Zubair, Mohammad

zubair@cs.odu.edu
Old Dominion University, USA

1. Introduction and Prior WorkIn previous Digital Humanities conferences we
presented the Facet System, a system that improves
browsing and searching of a large collection
by supporting users to build a faceted (multiperspective) classification schema collaboratively(Georges et al. 2008; Fu et al. 2010). The system istargeted for multimedia collections that have little
textual metadata. In summary, our system (a) allows
users to build and maintain a faceted classification
collaboratively, (b) enriches the user-created facet
schema systematically, and (c) classifies documents
into an evolving facet schema automatically. It is
hoped that through users’ collective efforts the
faceted classification schema will evolve along withthe users’ interests and thus help them navigate
the collection. For the browsing and classificationinterfaces of the Facet System see Fig. 1 andFig. 2. This paper discusses scalability challenges
and improvements made to the system, cloud
deployment, user studies and evaluation results.

155

Digital Humanities 2012

and facets from personal schema into the global
schema. The algorithm applies statistical techniques
to item-category associations, category-subcategory
and category-facet associations, and Wordnet-basedsimilarities. Figure 3 shows both global and personal
schemas that can be utilized by individual users oruser groups. More technical details will be presented
at the conference.

Figure 1: Browsing of the system enabled
by user-evolved faceted classification

Figure 3: Global and personal (or local) schemas

3. Cloud Deployment
A large repository with millions of multimedia
items may consume terabytes of storage. To support
millions of users, the system needs to be partitioned,
mirrored, or load balanced across an array of servers.
When user traffic and growth trends are not perfectlypredicable, cloud computing is not only the most costeffective but also likely the only viable option.
Figure 2: The click-and-drag classification screen

2. Scalability Issues and System
Improvement
Our Facet System allows users to collaboratively
evolve a common, global schema that contains
facets (perspectives such as colour) and categories(such as red and green in the colour facet) for alarge multimedia collection, using a wiki-inspired
interface. The global schema can then used byany users for browsing or searching the collection.
The variety of user perspectives increases with
the number of users. Even though we have taken
measures to cure and reduce the global schema, wefind that the global schema alone faces limitations
in supporting a large number of users. Many users
prefer to focus on a smaller subset of the schema orcollection. To address this issue, we have improved
the user interface to allow users switch between
global and personal schemas. The personal schema
allows users to organize digital documents in theirown way. A group of people can share the same
personal schema which applies to a subset of thelarge digital collection. On the backend, we developeda ‘merging’ algorithm that automatically enriches
the global schema by merging items, categories
156

After evaluating several cloud service providers,we find that Microsoft Azure Cloud provides thebest cost-effectiveness for us to host large digital
repositories that require scalable database support aswell as network bandwidth. Our Facet System wasbuilt on an open source technology stack including
Joomla, PHP and MySQL. Joomla is a leading open
source content management system implemented in
PHP. Initially we deployed the system on two server
layers, Web (Joomla/PHP) and Database (MySQL)
layers, utilizing Web and Worker roles in the Azure
cloud (see Fig. 4). The scalability and manageabilityof the MySQL database turned out to be prohibitive.
We found that true database scalability can beaccomplished only by cloud-tailored solutions suchas Microsoft SQL Azure. We spent significant efforts
in porting Joomla from MySQL to Microsoft SQL
Azure. In addition, we moved Joomla’s session
management from the default storage in operating
system files to Azure storage, to enable stateless loadbalancing across many servers on the Web layer.
During the conference we will present more technicaldetails which may benefit users of Joomla and otheropen source content management systems.

Digital Humanities 2012social curation by non-expert users supplemented bysuitable algorithms for reinforcing, combining andjudging user created associations and tags. From asocial science perspective, we are interested in therelationship between student’s prior experience andattitudes about social computing and their current
behavior in a social curation environment. We useda pre-usage instrument to assess the users’ priorexperience with common social sites, then a postusage instrument to measure post-usage attitudes
and conceptual understanding of the resulting
metadata among the users. We also measured
students’ knowledge in digital humanities andAfrican American activism before and after thesystem usage. The change in perceived usefulness of
the archive from the beginning of the experiment to
the end was also measured. We will present the resultof the data analysis at the conference and hope that
it will help future designs and implementations ofsocially curated archives.
Figure 4: The deployment architecture in Microsoft Azure

4. Evaluation and user studies
We evaluated the system using 15 classes (different
sessions of a university-wide undergraduate
introductory information technology class) during
Spring 2011, and continue the evaluation with 22classes during Fall 2011 semester using the cloud
deployment of our system. Each class has around30 students. The system was used to teach thedigital humanities and social computing componentof the class, by asking students to collaboratively
curate a special library collection of un-cataloged
local newspaper clippings and images on African
American activism in United States. We captured
detailed usage information as users completed aseries of tasks involving searching, classification,
tagging and voting (providing feedback on digital
items and metadata). Each class of students work as agroup using a single personal schema, which may bebetter labeled as ‘local schema’ in the future to avoid
confusion. A backend algorithm periodically merges
categories and facets from these local schemas into
the global schema. While global schema is useful,we find that the students spend a lot of efforts on
curating the collection through building the local
schemas for their own classes. Therefore we refer toour current system a Social Curation System. The
performance of the system and cloud deployment
proves to be satisfactory and actually exceeded our
expectation in certain aspects.
A common challenge to curating digital collections
is the lack of expertise necessary to classify,
catalog and create metadata structures for suchcollections. The evaluation shows the feasibility of

5. Related Work and Conclusion
There are many large scale multimedia collections
on the Internet. Few of them, however, containlibrary-grade metadata for digital items. Researchers
have proposed or studied how to build large,
curated collections on the Internet. Recent Digital
Humanities conferences have showcased efforts intrying to utilize multiple organizations’ collaborative
efforts in building federated or related collections(Timothy et al. 2011). Our project utilizes cloudcomputing to explore the scalability limitations ofcollaborative curation, and implement algorithmic
approaches to synthesize individual users’ or groups’
curation efforts. Our work on backend algorithms
are build upon recent advancements in ontology
building, text categorization and link mining (e.g. Wu
et al., 2006a, 2006b; Heymann et al. 2006; Joachims
et al. 1998;Schmitz et al. 2006). Evaluation results
show the promise of our social curation approach.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Science
Foundation [ grant number 0713290].

References
Fu, L., K. Maly, H. Wu, and M. Zubair (2010).
Building Dynamic Image Collections from Internet.
Digital Humanities 2010, London, UK, 2010.
Georges, A., K. Maly, M. Milena, H. Wu,
and M. Zubair (2008). Exploring Historical Image
Collections with Collaborative Faceted Classification.
Digital Humanities 2008, Oulu, Finland, 2008.
Heymann, P., and H.
(2006).Collaborative Creation

Garcia-Molina
of Communal

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Hierarchical Taxonomies in Social Tagging Systems.
Stanford Technical Report InfoLab.
Joachims, T. (1998) Text categorization withsupport vector machines. 10th European Conference
on Machine Learning. London, 1998.
Schmitz, P., and Yahoo! Research (2006).
Inducing Ontology from Flickr Tags. Workshop in
Collaborative Web Tagging, WWW 2006, 2006,
Edinburgh, UK.

Sounding for Meaning:
Analyzing Aural Patterns
Across Large Digital
Collections
Clement, Tanya

tclement@umd.edu
University of Texas at Austin, USA

Cole, T., N. Fraistat, D. Greenbaum, D.
Lester, and E. Millon (2011). Bamboo Technology
Project: Building Cyberinfrastructure for the Artsand Humanities. Digital Humanities 2011, Stanford,
CA, 2011.

Auvil, Loretta

Wu, H., M. Zubair, and K. Maly (2006).
Harvesting Social Knowledge from Folksonomies.
ACM 17th Conference on Hypertext andHypermedia, 111-114, Odense, Demark, August20-25, 2006.

davidtcheng@gmail.com
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Wu, H., M. Gordon, K. DeMaagd, and W. Fan(2006). Mining Web Navigations for Intelligence.
Decision Support Systems 41(3): 574-591.

Monroe, Megan

lauvil@illinois.edu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Tcheng, David

Capitanu, Boris

capitanu@ncsa.uiuc.edu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
madey.j@gmail.com
University of Maryland, USA

Goel, Ankita

gargankita@gmail.com
University of Texas at Austin, USA

1. Introduction
This paper will discuss a case study that uses
theories of knowledge representation and researchon phonetic symbolism to develop analytics andvisualizations that help users examine aural andprosodic patterns in text. This use case is supportedby the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through agrant titled ‘SEASR Services.’ Other collaborators
include Humanities professors from Stanford,
George Mason University, and University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign. All of the use cases within
the project include research on how humanities
scholars can use textual analytics and predictivemodeling with visualizations in order to help scholars
interpret large digital collections. In particular, while
this paper will briefly describe a new reading ofTender Buttons (1914) by Gertrude Stein that was
facilitated by text analysis, predictive modeling, andvisualization, but this discussion is primarily focusedon how the theories, research, and methodologies
that underpin this work facilitate digital diversity.

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2. The logic and ontologies ofaurality
Relying on the research of literary scholars andpsychologists concerning how humanists makemeaning with sound, we have chosen to use the logics
and ontologies of aurality to model and analyze soundin text. If we are unclear about what we mean andhow we mean when we seek to represent ‘sound,’we discourage diverse readings from those whowish to understand the results of the computational
analytics we apply to that model. In order to create
a methodological approach that supports digitaldiversity, we seek to be transparent about the logics
and ontologies of sound we are using. To this end, we
have listed below each of the five roles that knowledge
representation plays in a project according to Davis etal. (qtd. in Unsworth) and how these roles play out inthe methodologies we have chosen to use in our use
case.
(1) ‘A knowledge representation is mostfundamentally a surrogate, a substitute for the thingitself’ (Davis et al. 1993).
In this project, we are defining sound as the prespeech promise of sound as it is signified within
the structure and syntax of text. Charles Bernstein
focuses on the ‘aurality’ of text, which he calls the‘sounding of the writing’ (Bernstein 13). ‘Orality,’Bernstein writes, ‘can be understood as a stylistic
or even ideological marker or a reading style; incontrast, the audiotext might more usefully beunderstood as aural – what the ear hears . . .
Aurality precedes orality, just as language precedes
speech’ (Bernstein 13). Using textual analytics tocreate a surrogate of potential sound is an essential
aspect of the theory of aurality underpinning themethods in this project.
(2) Knowledge Representation ‘is a set of ontologicalcommitments, i.e., an answer to the question: In whatterms should I think about the world?’ (Davis et al.
1993).
In this project, we are committed to ontologies ofsound that define sound as a meaningful aspect oftext. This debate concerning whether or not soundmakes meaning and how has a long history.1 These
ideas, that the meaning of sound correlates to thestructure of the text underpins the ontologies we havechosen for this project. Ultimately, the act of reading
requires digital diversity since readers create theirown sense making systems by making connections
and understanding patterns. The same is true ofreading sound: computers do an excellent job ofmodeling the features with which readers make thesekinds of connections.

(3) Knowledge Representation ‘is a fragmentary
theory of intelligent reasoning, expressed in termsof three components: (i) the representation’s
fundamental conception of intelligent reasoning; (ii)the set of inferences the representation sanctions;and (iii) the set of inferences it recommends’ (Daviset al. 1993).
The above theories in aurality and research inphonetic and prosodic symbolism underpin our
choice to use OpenMary, an open-source textto-speech system, as a fundamental first step togenerate the features that correspond to soundin texts. Developed as a collaborative project of
Das Deutsche Forschungszentrum für KünstlicheIntelligenz (GmbH) (German Research Center for
Artificial Intelligence) Language Technology Lab andthe Institute of Phonetics at Saarland University,
OpenMary’s rule set or algorithm for ‘intelligent
reasoning’ is based on the research of both linguists
and computer scientists. Created to generate audio
files of spoken text from written transcripts,
OpenMary captures information about the structureof the text (features) that make it possible for
a computer to read and create speech that iscomprehensible to humans in multiple languages(German, British and American English, Telugu,
Turkish, and Russian; more languages are inpreparation). Specifically, OpenMary is a systemthat accepts text input and creates an XML
document (MaryXML) that includes ‘tokens alongwith their textual form, part of speech, phonologicaltranscription, pitch accents etc., as well as prosodic
phrasing,’ all of which are important indicators of
how the text could be ‘heard’ by a reader (‘Adding
support for a new language to MARY TTS’) (seeFigure 1)(4) Knowledge Representation ‘is a medium for
pragmatically efficient computation’ (Davis et al.
1993).
SEASR’s Meandre provides basic infrastructure fordata-intensive computation, and, among others,
tools for creating components and flows, a highlevel language to describe flows, and a multicore
and distributed execution environment based ona service-oriented paradigm. The workflow wecreated in Meandre processes each document in ourcollection through the OpenMary web service at aparagraph level to create a tabular representation of
the data that also includes features that maintain the
structure of the documents (chapter id, section id,
paragraph id, sentence id, phrase id). Each word isparsed out into accent, phoneme and part-of-speech
in a way that keeps the word’s association with thephrase, sentence, and paragraph boundaries. The
ultimate benefit to creating this flow in Meandre isdigital diversity: it is meant to be accessible to future

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Digital Humanities 2012users who wish to produce or tweak similar results(see Figure 2 and Figure 3).
In order to make comparisons evident with predictivemodeling, we have also developed an instance-based,machine-learning algorithm for predictive analysis.
We use an instance-based learning algorithm
because it was thought to make similar mistakes
as humans do (Gonzalez, Lerch, Lebiere). To focus
the machine learning on prosody, we only usedfeatures that research has shown reflects prosody
including part-of-speech, accent, stress, tone, andbreak index (marking the boundaries of syntactic
units) (Bolinger). To further bias the system towards
human performance, we selected a window sizeof fourteen phonemes, because it was the averagephrase length and research has shown that humanprosody comparisons are made at the phrase level(Soderstrom et al. 2003).
(5) Knowledge Representation ‘is a medium of
human expression, i.e., a language in which we saythings about the world’ (Davis et al. 1993).
An essential aspect of this project is ProseVis,
a visualization tool we developed that allows auser to map the results of these analytics tothe ‘original’ text in human readable form. This
allows for the simultaneous consideration of multiple
representations of knowledge or digital diversity.
Digital Humanities scholars have also used phonetic
symbolic research in the past to create tools thatmark and analyze sound in poetry (Plamondon
2006; Smolinsky & Sokoloff 2006). With ProseVis,
we also allow users to identify patterns in theanalyzed texts by facilitating their ability to highlightdifferent features within the OpenMary data (seeFigure 4) as well as the predictive modeling results(see Figure 5) mapped onto the original text.
The visualization renders a given document as aseries of rows that correspond to any level in the
document hierarchy (chapter/stanza/group, section,
paragraph/line, sentence, phrase). In these ways,
the reader can examine prosodic patterns as theyoccur at the beginning or end of these text divisions.
Further, ProseVis represents the OpenMary data2
within ProseVis by breaking down the syllables into
consonant and vowel components such as:
Word

Sound

Lead
Consonant

Vowel
Sound

End
ConsonantStrikes tr I ke

s

I

Ke

This breakdown provides the reader with a finergrained level of analysis, as well as a simplified
coloring scheme. See Figure 6 (beginning sound),Figure 7 (vowel sound), and Figure 8 (end sound).

160

3. Re-reading Tender Buttons by
Gertrude Stein
Our predictive modeling experiment was to predict
Tender Buttons out of a collection of nine books.
The prediction was based on comparing each moving
window of fourteen phonemes, with each phoneme
represented solely by its aural features listed above.
The hypothesis was that Gertrude Stein’s Tender
Buttons (1914) would be most confused with The
New England Cook Book (Turner 1905). Margueritte
S. Murphy hypothesizes that Tender Buttons ‘takes
the form of domestic guides to living: cookbooks,
housekeeping guides, books of etiquette, guides toentertaining, maxims of interior design, fashion
advice’ (Murphy 1991, p. 389). Figure 9 visualizes
the results of our predictive analysis by showing
the percentage of times the computer confuses its
predictions for each of the nine books. In thevisualization, row two shows the results for The New
England Cook Book with Tender Buttons as the
text that the computer ‘confuses’ with the highest
percentage when trying to predict the cookbook. By
modeling the possibility of sound with pre-speechfeatures marking aurality, we are inviting diverse
modes of discovery in textual sound.

Figure 1: Shows the phrase ‘Repeating then is in everyone,’from Gertrude Stein’s text The Making of Americans

Digital Humanities 2012

Figure 2: Shows the flow with the componentsthat are used for executing OpenMary and postprocessing the data to create the database tables

Figure 3: This is a sample of the tabular output of Tender
Buttons by Gertrude Stein created within Meandre

Figure 4: Sounds of each syllable in Tender Buttons
by Gertrude Stein visualized using ProseVis

Figure 5: Predictive Modeling data comparing Tender
Buttons to seven other texts visualized using ProseVis

Figure 6: Beginning Sound of each syllable in Tender
Buttons by Gertrude Stein visualized using ProseVis

Figure 7: Vowel sound of each syllable in Tender
Buttons by Gertrude Stein visualized using ProseVis

Figure 8: End sound of each syllable in
Tender Buttons visualized using ProseVis

Figure 9: These are the results of a predictive modelingalgorithm that was run on nine texts. Each color
represents the percentage of times the algorithm
predicts one of the nine in its attempt to pick a given text

References
Adding support for a new language to MARY TTS.
MARY Text To Speech. Web. 8 Sept. 2011.

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Bernstein, C. (1998). Close Listening: Poetry and
the Performed Word. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Bolinger, D. (1986). Intonation and Its Parts:
Melody in Spoken English. Stanford, CA: Stanford
UP.
Clement, T. (2008). ‘A thing not beginningor ending’: Using Digital Tools to Distant-Read
Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Literaryand Linguistic Computing 23(3): 361-82.

The Programming
Historian 2: A Participatory
Textbook
Crymble, Adam H.

acrymbl@uwo.ca
Network in Canadian History & Environment, UK

MacEachern, Alan

Notes

amaceach@uwo.ca
Network in Canadian History & Environment, UK

1. See Bolinger, Cole, Newman, Ong, Plato Sapir, Saussure Shrumand Lowrey, and Tsur.

Turkel, William J.

2. These sounds are documented here http://mary.opendfk
i.de/wiki/USEnglishSAMPA . However, over the courseof testing ProseVis, we uncovered two additional vowel
components, @U and EI, which are now included in theimplementation.

wturkel@uwo.ca
Network in Canadian History & Environment, UK

The second edition of The Programming Historian(PH2) is an open access and open source introductory
text designed to teach the fundamentals ofprogramming to humanists. The first edition (Turkel& MacEachern 2007), while popular, is basicallya traditional text presented online. It was limited
to the lessons that we provided and followed asingle narrative arc. The second edition, also online,
has been restructured to invite ongoing community
participation and authorship.
The project is designed with a core sequenceof lessons that get readers up to speed withbasic programming concepts. These show how
to programmatically download sources from theInternet, process them for keywords, and visualize
some textual attributes. Contributors can introduce
new lessons at any point by branching off from aprevious lesson. They might, for example, introduce
a related technique, or show how to implement
something in another programming language, on
another platform, or using different kinds of sources.
The branching structure allows members of thedigital humanities community to add lessons basedon their own specialties, or to create new sequences
for use in the classroom, while still guaranteeingthat readers will have the background required tounderstand a particular branch if their study of PH2
has taken them to that point. Each lesson is intended
to take two hours or less to complete.
For contributors, PH2 provides a peer-reviewed
platform for methodology. Both literary andtechnical reviewers vet all submissions with qualityemphasized over quantity. Lessons are presented ina custom WordPress installation and code snippets
are stored in GitHub for easy maintenance andsharing. To make the site as easy as possible to use,
code snippets are pulled directly into the WordPress
posts making GitHub essentially invisible for both162

Digital Humanities 2012

authors and readers not familiar with or interested
in its features. Individual lessons are attributed totheir authors, and reviewers and other contributors
receive public credit for their labour. For learners,
PH2 focuses on the use of programming to solve
problems common to academic research, such as
obtaining, analyzing, processing, and mashing up
sources. While there are hundreds of programmingbooks on the market, very few teach these kinds ofhands-on tasks that are crucial to the practice of thedigital humanities.

Multilingual and Semantic
Extension of Folk Tale
Catalogues

With the first edition of the Programming Historian,
we showed that there is a great demand forprogramming introduction that focuses on the dayto-day work of digital humanists both historians
and otherwise. We have commissioned a numberof new lessons from guest authors for the second
edition and hope to open our submission process
to the wider community shortly. From our pastexperience we know that people well beyond ourtarget audience of digital humanists can and will use
the project as a way to delve into programming. WhenPH2 launches publicly, we believe that the digital
humanities community will embrace and expand it
and we look forward to working with them.

lendvai.piroska@nytud.hu
Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungary

Funding
This work was supported by The Network in
Canadian History & Environment, and the Roy
Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

References
Github . http://github.com
Wordpress. http://wordpress.org (accessed 1
March 2012).
Turkel, W. J. and A. MacEachern (2007). The
Programming Historian 1st Edition. http://niche-canada.org/programming-historian (accessed
1 March 2012).
Turkel, W. J., A. Crymble, J. Boggs, M.
Posner, et al., eds. (2012). The Programming
Historian 2. http://chnm.gmu.edu/press/progr
amminghistorian/ (accessed 1 March 2012).

Declerck, Thierrydeclerck@dfki.de
DFKI GmbH, Germany, ICLTT, Austrian Academyof Sciences, Austria

Lendvai, Piroska
Darányi, Sándor

sandor.daranyi@hb.se
Swedish School of Library and Information Science,
Sweden1. Introduction
The modelling of phenomena related to higher-orderknowledge mechanisms poses significant challenges
to research in any domain, this being also valid
for narratives, which ‘are an important form ofknowledge representation’, as (Tuffield et al. 2006)
state. In the context of the AMICUS network1 we are
more specifically interested in the representation of
motifs in narratives. Motifs are recurring conceptual,
textual, audio or visual units appearing in artefacts –in folk tales, they can be seen as cognitively complex
notions (e.g. ‘Rescue of princess’, ‘Helpful animal’,‘Cruel stepmother’, etc.), expressed by lexicallyand syntactically variable narrative structures. The
modelling of such motifs, including their typicalrealizations in natural language form, can help in
supporting the automatic motif detection in large(multilingual) text collections2. But this kind offormal representation of motifs is so far unresolved,
and thus a large amount of cultural heritage
collections of which motifs are typical constructive
units can still only be manually indexed, whichsignificantly limits access to these resources andto this type of knowledge. Recently, we started toinvestigate the utility of linguistic and semantic
analysis and mark-up of motifs (Lendvai et al. 2010),
which we would like to extend and apply to studies on
motif sequencing (Darányi, Wittek & Forró 2012).
In the current study, we address two priorities of theDigital Humanities discipline: devising proceduresthat integrate semantic enhancement of legacy folk
tale indexes, classification systems and taxonomies(Declerck & Lendvai 2011) and their automatizedtranslation (Mörth et al. 2011). For this study
we are dealing with two extended catalogues that
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hold conceptual schemes of narrative elements fromfolktales, ballads, myths, and related genres: theThompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, TMI(Thompson 1955) and The Types of International
Folktales, ATU (Uther 2004). TMI has an available
on-line version3, only in English language, but thedigitized ATU is not yet available on-line in its
entirety, only some of its subsections are reproducedin Wikipedia, in various languages4.
TMI indexes and ATU types are both combinedwith extensive labels, and a novel approach tothose resources is that this combination can be
linguistically processed (Declerck & Lendvai 2011),
semantically represented, and, ultimately, turned
into domain-specific ontology classes that can beinterlinked. The upgrade leads to semanticallyenriched catalogues that qualify as interoperable
language technology resources that can be harnessedto assign text units to the folktale domain classes,
creating in an automatized way indexed folktale
corpora. As part of such a normalization process,catalogues have to be made interoperable with eachother, and stored in a semantically harmonizedrepresentation, like the SKOS5 standard, which isusing RDF6 as its formal representation language.

2. Towards Semantic andMultilingual Extensions of TMIThe Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folktale-Literatureis organized by alphanumeric indexes, which
resembles a taxonomy structure of motifs, but does
not express hierarchy or inheritance properties. i.e.
it is not made explicit that some elements of thetaxonomy introduce mere classification information
over a span of labels (‘A0-A99. Creator’, split into
finer-grained subclasses, e.g. ‘A20. Origin of thecreator.’), that some elements are abstractions ofmotifs (‘A21. /Creator from above./’), and thatsome elements are summaries of a concrete motif,
supplying source information as well (‘A21.1. /Woman who fell from the sky./--Daughter of thesky-chief falls from the sky, is caught by birds, andlowered to the surface of the water. She becomesthe creator.--*Iroquois: Thompson Tales n.27.--Cf.
Finnish: Kalevala rune 1.’).
We prepared a program that converts TMI to an XML
representation and marks such properties explicitly
by designated tags, as exemplified below:<labelclass="TMI_A0"
span="A0-A99"
type="abstract" lang="en">Creator</label><labelclass="TMI_A20"
span="A21-A27"
type="abstract"
Property_Of="A0"
lang="en">Origin of the Creator</label>

164<labelclass="TMI_A21"
span="A21.1-A21.2"
type="abstract"
SubClassOf="A20"
lang="en">Creator from Above</label><labelclass="TMI_A21.1"
span="A21.1-A21.1"
type="concrete"
SubClassOf="A21"
lang="en">Woman who fell from the sky</label>This representation makes explicit the fact that thenatural language expressions (like ‘Creator fromAbove’) are labels of classes that we explicitlyorganise in a class hierarchy. The feature ‘type’ cantake two values: ‘abstract’ or ‘concrete’. The latteris indicating that the index (for example: A21.1) ispointing to concrete examples in selected tales. The‘span’ feature is indicating the number (from 1 tomany) of subsumed indexes. We noticed that indexes(‘classes’ in our terminology), which are in fact leaves(spanning only over their own number) point all toconcrete tales, and can thus be considered as firstlevel motifs, whereas the other classes have more aclassification role.
Ongoing work is dedicated to upgrading the XML
representation to SKOS-RDF, to provide adequatemeans for differentiating between hierarchicalrealizations and properties associated with classes,
and the possibility to compute inheritance propertiesoof the class hierarchy. SKOS-RDF is also
appropriated for publishing the enriched TMI
resource on the LOD. We display below a simplified
example (where ‘TMI_A*’ are shortcuts for URIs):<TMI_A0> rdf:type skos:Concept ;skos:prefLabel "Creator"@en.
<TMI_A20> rdf:type skos:Concept ;skos:prefLabel "Origin of the Creator"@enskos:related <TMI_A0>.
<TMI_A21> rdf:type skos:Concept ;skos:prefLabel "Creator from Above"@en.
<TMI_A21.1> rdf:type skos:Concept ;sky"@en ;skos:prefLabel "Woman who fell from theskos:broader <TMI_A21>
In parallel, we target the extension of motifs listed
in TMI in English into a multilingual version. Thisis carried out by accessing the Wiktionary lexicon7,
via the LOD-compliant lexvo 8 service. Actual work
(Declerck et al. 2012) is aiming at extracting from
Wiktionary a multilingual lexical semantics network
for the labels included in TMI.

Digital Humanities 2012

3. Towards the Harmonization ofMultilingual ATU On-line Dataoccupy chimney corner.’ can be linked to ATU_545‘The Cat as Helper’:<TMI_A2223.1> rdf:type skos:Concept ;As we mentioned above, only segments of ATU
are available on-line, in the context of Wikipedia
articles, in different languages. We note the following
discrepancies in these:skos:prefLabel "Cat helps man build house:
may occupy chimney corner"@en.

- (EN) 310 Rapunzel (Italian,Italian, Greek, Italian)skos:prefLabel "The Cat as Helper"@en.

<ATU_545> rdf:type skos:Concept;- (DE) AaTh 310 Jungfrau im Turm KHM 12- (FR) AT 310: ‘La Fille dans la tour’(The Maiden in
the Tower): version allemande
The English Wikipedia links Rapunzel to four
Wikipedia pages on tales belonging to the same
ATU type. Rhe Wikipedia page for the original
Rapunzel tale is reached if the reader clicks on‘Rapunzel’. The German page links additionallyto the German classification KHM (Kinder- undHausmärchen). The French Wikipedia page gives an
English translation of the French naming, while theFrench title of the Rapunzel tale is accessible only
if the user clicks on the link ‘version allemande’,leading to the French Wikipedia page ‘Raiponce’).
There is a clear need to structure this disparate
information in one representation format. We turned
the basic information from the Wikipedia pages into
an integrated SKOS representation:<ATU_310> rdf:type skos:Concept;
skos:prefLabel "Rapunzel"@en;skos:altLabel "The Maiden in the Tower"@en;skos:prefLabel "Jungfrau im Turm"@de;skos:altLabel "Rapunzel"@de;skos:prefLabel "La Fille dans la Tour"@fr;skos:altLabel "Raiponce"@fr.
On the basis of a small fragment of such aligned
information from Wikipedia pages, a representative
multilingual terminology of ATU terms can be
aggregated, and this terminology can be re-used forsupporting the translation of other labels of ATU or of
TMI. We investigate for this terminology alignment
techniques used in the Machine Translation field,
adapting them to the short terms that are employedin the catalogues.

4. Relating the Upgraded
Representations of TMI and ATU
The SKOS vocabulary allows to establish matching
relations between the upgraded TMI and ATU
catalogues, so that for example the motif
TMI_A2223.1. ‘Cat helps man build house: may<ATU_545><TMI_AA2223.1> skos:relatedMatch

Whereas we still do not take decisions on
the type of matching relation, which could be‘broader’, ‘narrower’ or ‘close’. Additionally wecurrently investigate the concrete linguistic andsemantic markup of the tokens used in labels,
using another RDF-based formalism: the lemon 9
representation scheme. Precise linguistic mark-up
allows establishing in an automated way this kindof SKOS matching, since the noun ‘Helper’ can bemarked as a derivation of the verb ‘help’. This work
also supports the building of a lexical semantics
network for folktales, based on the labels used in TMI
and ATU.

5. Towards the AutomatedAnalysis of Motif Sequences inFolktale Plots
The semantically upgraded TMI and ATU resources
incorporate information about class hierarchy, whichallows potential users to query for motifs thatare connected on the same or on different levelsof the taxonomy. This is feature that could be
exploited for the analysis or generation of storytellingscenarios, since plot graphs of folktales are likewatersheds, progressing by connecting motifs atdifferent hierarchical levels as points at various
heights. Thus the semantically upgraded TMI could
help to learn about the concatenation patternsof motif categories used in tales In turn, one
could use such category information as a sourceof probabilities for network construction. Suchprobabilistic networks, prominently Hidden Markov
Models, are a highly significant research topic in
bioinformatics, a field as much utilizing the conceptof motifs as narratology, therefore methodologicalcross-pollination is a totally realistic option. Darányi
et al. (2012) have recently shown that ATU tale types
as motif strings exemplify the basic recombination
patterns of chromosome mutations already on alimited sample of types, and more new findings canbe expected by an extension of the quest for ‘narrativeDNA’. Further, the manual tagging of tale types by
motifs in ATU is known to be incomplete, so to repeat
this tagging by automatic means by annealing motif
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definitions and NLP-based term or phrase extraction
is an ultimately fruitful endeavour.

6. Conclusion
In this study, we focus on converting TMI andATU into adequate semantic resources, compliant
with linguistic and terminological requirements,
to enable multilingual, content-level indexing offolktale texts. TMI and ATU in their paper form
have mainly been used for manual assignmentof English-language metadata. To upgrade theseestablished classification systems of folk narratives,
we specify a development program that enhancesand links them using language processing andsemantic technologies. Recent work was dedicatedto establish terminological relationships between
both catalogues, using for this the SKOS framework
establishing semantic links between specific labels ofboth semantically enriched catalogues. Our work willlead to the deployment of such resources in the LOD
framework, complementing the work of national
libraries that already ported their bibliographic data
to the LOD. This may not only facilitate automatedtext indexing, but also allow for more detailed
analysis of motif sequencing.
Acknowledgements(2010). Integration of Linguistic Markup into
Semantic Models of Folk Narratives: The Fairy
Tale Use Case. Proceedings of the SeventhInternational conference on Language Resources
and Evaluation, Pages 1996-2001, Valetta, Malta,
European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
McCrae, J., E. Montiel-Ponsoda, and P.
Cimiano (2012).
Integrating WordNet and
Wiktionary with lemon. Proceedings of LDL 2012.
Mörth, K., T. Declerck, P. Lendvai, and T.
Váradi (2011). Accessing Multilingual Data on
the Web for the Semantic Annotation of Cultural
Heritage Texts. Proceedings of the 2nd International
Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web , Bonn,
Germany, Springer, 10/2011.
Thompson, S. (1955). Motif-index of folkliterature: A classification of narrative elements
in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, medievalromances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, andlocal legends . Revised and enlarged edition.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955-58.
Tuffield, M. M., D. E. Millard, and N.
R. Shadbolt (2006) Ontological Approaches toModelling Narrative. In: 2nd AKT DTA Symposium,
January 2006, AKT, Aberdeen University.

The contribution of DFKI to the work reported in thispaper has been partly supported by the R&D project‘Monnet’, which is co-funded by the European Union
under Grant No. 248458.

Uther, H.-J. (2004). The Types of International
Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography.
Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith
Thompson. FF Communications no. 284–286.
Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.

References

Zöllner-Weber, A. (2008). Noctua literaria : acomputer-aided approach for the formal descriptionof literary characters using an ontology. Ph.D.
Thesis, Bielefeld University.

Darányi, S., P. Wittek, and L. Forró (2012).
Toward Sequencing ‘Narrative DNA’: Tale Types,
Motif Strings and Memetic Pathways. Proceedingsof the Workshop on Computational Models of
Narrative, Istanbul, May 2012.
Declerck, T., and P. Lendvai (2011). Linguistic
and Semantic Representation of the Thompson’s
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Proceedings of theInternational Conference on Theory and Practice ofDigital Libraries, Berlin, Germany, Springer, 9/2011.
Declerck, T., and N. Koleva (2012). An
Iterative Ontology-Based Text Processing Strategy
for Detecting and Recognizing Characters inFolktales. Proceedings of Digital Humanities -2012.
Declerck, T., K. Mörth, and P. Lendvai (2012).
Accessing and standardizing Wiktionary Lexical
Entries for supporting the Translation of Labels in
Taxonomies for Digital Humanities. Proceedings of
LREC-2012.
Lendvai, P., T. Declerck, S. Darányi, P.
Gervás, R. Hervás, S. Malec, and F. Peinado
166

Notes
1. AMICUS (Automated Motif Discovery in Cultural Heritage andScientific Communication Texts), http://ilk.uvt.nl/am
icus .
2. The interconnection of Knowledge Representation systems andautomated textual analysis is being successfully applied tovarious domains. One of our goal is to adapt and apply suchtechnologies to the automated analysis of folk narratives, using
for example the approach presented in (Declerck & Koleva2012), to be extended among others by ontology elements
described in (Zöllner-Weber 2008).
3. See http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/thompson/index.htm .
4. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%
93Thompson_classification_system for the English
version, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne-Thompson-Index for the German version, and for the French
version http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifica
tion_Aarne-Thompson . Note that the online ATU data do
not reflect the layout of the original catalogue, as was the casefor TMI.

Digital Humanities 2012

5. SKOS stands for ‘Simple Knowledge Organization System’. See
for more details: http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/ .
6. RDF stands for ‘Resource Description Framework’. See
http://www.w3.org/RDF .
7. See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:M
ain_Page
8. ‘Lexvo.org brings information about languages, words,
characters, and other human language-related entities to the
Linked Data Web and Semantic Web.’ See http://www.lex
vo.org .
9. ‘lemon (LExicon Model for ONtologies) is an RDF model thatallows to specify lexica for ontologies and allows to publish
these lexica on the Web’ (see McCrae et al. 2012)). This model
was developed within the European R&D project “Monnet” (seewww.monnet-project.eu ( www.monnet-project.eu)

Digital Language Archives
and Less-Networked
Speaker Communities
Dobrin, Lise M.

dobrin@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

During the past decade, digital language archives
have flourished as the field of language
documentation has entered mainstream linguistics.
Major international funding bodies, both public
and private, support research on endangered
languages, and it is now possible to publish practicaland theoretical work on endangered languages
and documentary methods in dedicated journals
and book series. One of the themes that has
emerged most clearly in this literature is that ofcollaboration. It is now widely agreed that language
documentation should be equally responsive toboth the technical questions posed by linguists
and the more immediate practical interests of
speakers and their communities. Issues of rights
and access are no longer anxious afterthoughts; they
are fundamental matters for negotiation between
researchers and speakers, mandatorily addressedin research agreements and funding proposals,
and threaded through documentation projects fromtheir very conception (see, e.g., Yamada 2007;
Czaykowska-Higgins 2009).
Yet paradoxically, this intense focus on collaborative
methods seems to stop where the digital archivingof language data begins. Language archives are
doing their best to ensure that source communities
can in principle gain access to the language
materials they produce, but they are only justbeginning to consider possibilities for formally
integrating speaker communities into the process ofarchive curation. Such involvement could potentiallytransform language archives from repositories ofstatic objects into sites for ongoing dialogue andexchange with living communities.
The obstacles to collaborative archiving areparticularly acute in the case of source communities
located in hard-to-reach places – often the third
world – where many of today’s small, minor,
and endangered languages are spoken. As might
be expected, a disproportionate percentage of
documentary projects are being carried out insuch locations (see, e.g., http://www.paradisec.org.au/blog/2010/09/where-does-the-dosh-go ),with their outputs being deposited into first worldarchives. It is imperative that western scholars

167

Digital Humanities 2012

and institutions be cognizant of the impact their
documentation projects have on such communities.
In Melanesia, which is arguably the world’s most
linguistically diverse area, local value is validated
through relationships with outsiders. If community
input ceases once the fieldwork phase of a westernsponsored project is over, this can reinforce thefeelings of marginalization that motivate language
shift in the first place (Dobrin 2008).
In April 2012, the University of Virginia’s Institutefor Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH)
is hosting an international group of scholars,
technical experts, and community members for
an intensive two-day meeting, sponsored by
the National Endowment for the Humanities,
to explore appropriate social and technicalmodels for facilitating the ongoing involvementof less-networked source communities in thedigital archiving of their endangered languages.
Participants will present on the current state of
the art in language archiving, the cultural andinfrastructural situations of representative world
regions (Papua New Guinea and Cameroon), andpromising ‘bridging’ technologies. This paper willreport on the results of the meeting, describing theirimplications for language archiving and for thedigital humanities more generally.
There are a number of reasons why digital languagearchives must begin to find ways to support direct,
ongoing relationships with speakers and community
members, and not just with data depositors or
researchers. One of these is the unfolding nature andexperience-dependence of informed consent. When
speakers are first recorded, they may consent tocertain levels of access for the resulting materials(full access, access with conditions, researcher-only,
etc.; see http://elar.soas.ac.uk/node/32620
and http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/archive_access/access_procedures ). But they cannot possibly
foresee all potential future uses of the recordings.
And where communities have little or no familiarity
with the medium of distribution, how can they be
expected to grasp even the most basic uses to which
their material will be put? Given the opportunity
to make their wishes known, judgments made bycommunities at a given time may be modified,refined, or even reversed later.
Developing direct lines of communication between
archives and communities will also improve
the quality and discoverability of archived data.
Changing circumstances may make possible theengagement of knowledgeable stakeholders who
were formerly reluctant or inaccessible. Also, though
linguists may be diligent about collecting detailed
metadata when making recordings in the field, thisprocess inevitably leaves gaps. After fieldwork is over,missing information, such as the identity of a speaker168

or dialect, might only be known by difficult-to-reachcommunity members. Whole categories of metadatathat once seemed irrelevant (details of local history,
relationships between consultants, and so on) often
take on new significance as projects evolve. By
enabling mechanisms by which community members
can identify and attach metadata to recordings thatconcern them or their communities, endangered
language resources will be enriched, making themeasier to find and more useful for all users.
Finally, there is a practical need for the kind of
direct relationships we are proposing to facilitate,
as archives are now receiving expressions of interest
from individuals who speak the languages of
their collections. At the University of London’s
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS),
the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) has
registered speakers of Bena and Pite Saami asusers; IATH occasionally receives queries fromtown-dwelling Arapesh people interested in the
Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language Archive(AGDLA). ELAR depositors sometimes specify thataccess to their deposit requires community approval;
the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin
America (AILLA) sets up ‘community controlled’
as a systematic level of access (though at present
this must be mediated through the institution).
Increasingly, we can expect archives to be routinely
receiving user account applications from individuals
who were either directly involved as research
participants or who have ancestors, family members,
friends, or community associates who were involvedin language documentation projects. But at present
there is a clear disconnect between what depositors
are able to achieve using the tools and systems
provided by archives, and what community members
are able to do – especially those with limited internet
access.
Some digital language archives recognize these
problems and are seeking to overcome them. Edward
Garrett of ELAR has been experimenting with social
networking technologies such as the open-source
Drupal Content Management System in order tomake their archive more user-centered; a desire
to extend the ELAR system to include community
members is one of the motivations for our meeting.
The project BOLD-PNG (see http://www.boldpn
g.info/home ) has begun putting digital recording
equipment into the hands of community members in
Papua New Guinea and training them in techniquesof basic oral language documentation, giving people
the resources to become data collectors, if not
depositors. Kimberly Christen’s Mukurtu platform
was designed to facilitate community-controlled
archiving, digitally instituting traditional cultural
protocols to manage access to archived objects (see,e.g., Christen 2008). But none of these projects

Digital Humanities 2012

develops a generalizable approach to integrating
communities without internet access in the ongoing
curation of digital language materials they haveproduced.
We are particularly interested in the possibilities
afforded by the increasingly common presence ofmobile communication technologies in areas where
basic infrastructure such as electricity, runningwater, and even roads remain absent. In suchareas, new social institutions involving cell phones
have begun to evolve, for example, conventions forexchanging cell-phone minutes, or new gathering
spaces defined by signal access. Exploiting thisnew form of technology, the non-profit organization
Open Mind has developed a system called ‘Question
Box’ (see http://questionbox.org/about-mission ) which allows remote communities to accessinformation in critical domains such as health,agriculture, and business. Google’s voice-basedsocial media platform SayNow is being used to allow
cell phone users in Egypt and elsewhere to leave
voicemail messages that appear online immediately
as Twitter audio feeds ( http://www.nytimes.com/2
011/02/02/world/middleeast/02twitter.html ).
We believe that similar methods are worth
exploring as a means to creatively connect lessnetworked language communities with researchers
and archives.

References
Christen, K. (2008). Archival Challenges andDigital Solutions in Aboriginal Australia. SAA
Archeological Recorder 8(2): 21-24.
Czaykowska-Higgins, E. (2009). Research
Models, Community Engagement, and Linguistic
Fieldwork: Reflections on Working within
Canadian Indigenous Communities. Language
Documentation and Conservation 3(1): 15-50.
Dobrin, L. M. (2008). From Linguistic Elicitation
to Eliciting the Linguist. Language 84: 300-324.
Yamada, R.-M. (2007). Collaborative linguistic
fieldwork: Practical application of the empowerment
model. Language documentation and conservati on
1(2): 257-282.

Language Documentation
and Digital Humanities:
The (DoBeS) Language
Archive
Drude, SebastianSebastian.Drude@mpi.nl
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

Trilsbeek, PaulPaul.Trilsbeek@mpi.nl
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

Broeder, Daan

Daan.Broeder@mpi.nl
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

1. Overview
Since the early nineties, the on-going dramatic
loss of the world’s linguistic diversity has
gained attention, first by the linguists andincreasingly also by the general public. As a
response, the new field of language documentation
emerged from around 2000 on, starting withthe funding initiative ‘Dokumentation Bedrohter
Sprachen’ (DoBeS, funded by the Volkswagen
foundation, Germany), soon to be followed by otherssuch as the ‘Endangered Languages Documentation
Programme’ (ELDP, at SOAS, London), or, in theUSA, ‘Electronic Meta-structure for Endangered
Languages Documentation’ (EMELD, led by
the LinguistList) and ‘Documenting Endangered
Languages’ (DEL, by the NSF). From its very
beginning, the new field focused on digitaltechnologies not only for recording in audio andvideo, but also for annotation, lexical databases,
corpus building and archiving, among others. Thisdevelopment not just coincides but is intrinsicallyinterconnected with the increasing focus on digital
data, technology and methods in all sciences, inparticular in the humanities.
As one result, a number of worldwide and regional
specialized language archives have been established,devoted to a new type of corpora: digital, multimedia,
multi-purpose. The DoBeS archive alone contains
data on more than 60 languages; it is hosted at the
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI-PL)
in Nijmegen, where it is combined with data fromother field research projects, in total covering around

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two hundred languages. The Technical Group of
MPI-PL (now as a new unit, ‘The Language Archive’,TLA) has not only been developing new tools suchas ELAN and the language archiving technology
suite, but is also active in building regional archives
offering the same technology around the globe, andin networking with other archives, for instance in
DELAMAN.

the humanities’, ‘linguistic computing’ etc. actuallydates back long before the arrival of personal
computers (at least to the 1970ies, when todays
major DH associations were founded), the digital
humanities (DH) as we know them today existed in
the early nineties maximally in an embryonic state,
for neither sufficient digital data sets nor the needed
computational tools and methods existed.

Furthermore, The Language Archive (TLA) also
participates, based on our experience with the
DoBeS archive, in international initiatives suchas CLARIN, which have a much broader scopethan endangered languages. Still, the new typeof corpora, including the DOBES archive, have
only incipiently been explored with novel researchquestions and methods, and the full potentials ofcooperation between language documentation and,e.g., computational linguistics and automatic dataprocessing methods have only begun to be exploited.
This also holds for topics such as community
member participation and representation, engaging
wider audiences, access methods, ethical issues
around privacy and ‘publicness’, documentation
and archives’ relations to social networking andother mass participation platforms. In general it
seems obvious that neighbouring disciplines canbenefit from language documentations, and that
also language documentation and archiving cangain much from cooperation with similar activities
and research in other fields, which may evenchange the way language corpora are designed
and future documentation projects are carried out.
Nevertheless, the concrete details have still to be
determined in the quickly growing environment of‘digital humanities’.

The first call for applications for individual projectsof what would soon become to be called the DoBeS
programme was made in 1999. Despite the long
period of intense debate and planning, it was still
all but clear how language documentation (LD)exactly would be carried out. Himmelmann had
already published his seminal paper ‘Documentaryand descriptive linguistics’ (1998), but still the exact
goals of such a research program and especially
its methodologies had to be decided, tested andestablished, and the needed technology had tobe identified, designed and developed. Thus, thefirst year of DoBeS was designated to be a pilot
phase, where a consortium of linguists, leading eight
different documentation projects on a variety oflanguages all over the globe,1 together with thetechnicians of the technical project at the MPI-PL,
would discuss and eventually decide on fundamental,
methodological, technical and legal/ethical issues,
giving clear guidelines to the next generationsof projects and establishing the fundaments of atechnical infrastructure to support the building ofdigital language corpora of a new kind – focussed on
actual oral language use in a natural cultural context.

2. Outline of the DoBeS
programme and its relation to thedigital humanities
The DoBeS programme emerged from long
discussions between the Volkswagen foundation anda small group of linguists around the recently
founded German ‘society for endangered languages’,
concerned with language diversity and linguistic
field research. First result of this interaction
was a successful summer school about ‘language
description and field research’ in Cologne in 1993,
a very early response to the first public statements
urging to get active about the problem of ‘endangered
languages’, i.e. the imminent loss of humanities
linguistic (and cultural) diversity. To that time thevery first uses for the internet started to be developed,
such as the world wide web; email was rarely
used in business and academia, university term
papers were still often written on a typewriter orby hand. Although the beginning of ‘computing and170

By the beginning of the programme in 2000,
the general technological setting had changed
dramatically. Semi-professional audio and video
equipment with satisfactory quality for serious
documentation work were now available toaffordable prices (although to that time, video
recordings were often still analogue, e.g. in HI8
format, and audio recordings were often done in acompressed format, e.g. ATRAC). Most importantly,
digital storage capacities had grown to a point where
even video recordings with a reasonable resolution
and bit-rate could be stored on usual hard discs andeven on removable media such as DVDs. This allowed
LD to be a fundamentally digital enterprise, aiming
at the building of large digital language archives, i.e.,
multimedia corpora with natural speech data.
At the same time, the technical group (TG) at the
MPI-PL had started to tackle the problem of theincreasing amount of digital data produced andused at that institute. Some of the data obviously
were of relevance for the future – for re-use withdifferent research goals, or just for being able tocheck and reproduce the results, making the researchmore accountable. The TG had already started towork on a digital archive of research data (including

Digital Humanities 2012

data from linguistic field research) and was thus
in the best position to function as the technicalcentre for the DOBES programme, which in turnfor several years boosted the development at MPIPL. Most importantly, a meta-data-schema, IMDI,
was developed with decisive input from the DOBES
consortium of the pilot phase and in the first yearsof the main phase (most of the 8 projects of the
one-year pilot phase also participated in the firstyears of the main phase of the DOBES programme).
Also, the development of a multi-media annotation
tool, ELAN, started. Other tools and infrastructureelements were added over the years to what byaround 2008 came to be called the ‘Language
Archiving Technology’ suite.
These developments occurred basically without
connection to the first developments in themainstream ‘digital humanities’ or ‘E-Humanities’.
In the 1990ies, when larger data collections became
available, when individual computers became partof every university department, and when thedevelopment of tools tailored to specific needs was
easily done, research techniques and tools suchas text mining, quantitative text analysis, complex
databases were increasingly often employed bytechnophile humanities practitioners and computer
linguists. Language documentation, however, wasdeveloped by a completely different community offield researchers (linguists, anthropologists, musicethnologists etc.) which usually were not akin todigital technologies and computational methods. The
object of study had little overlap, too: computer
linguistics and the emerging digital humanities ingeneral were (and continue to be) mainly concernedwith major languages and predominantly in theirwritten form, whereas LD by definition is concerned
mainly with small and understudied languages, mostof which are only occasionally written.
So for about almost a decade, the two areas
developed mostly independently one from another.
The DoBeS program grew (each year between
five and ten new projects started, each with aduration of usually three to four years) and had
followers (see above) and became more mature,as the basic standard methodologies were clear
and new research questions were introduced anda stronger interdisciplinary approach consolidated.
The necessary tools became available, more stable
and increasingly easy to use. In particular, Language
Archiving Technology with the web-based programs
LAMUS for the upload and archive integration, AMS
for archive management, and other IMDI or ELAN
related tools were built, so that the DoBeS archive (atthe core of the larger digital archive with language
resources at MPI-PL, ‘TLA’) became an example for
digital archives.

In the last years, the two communities and researchtraditions (DH & LD) have begun to come closer. In
linguistics, language documentation has contributed
to raise the interest in linguistic diversity, linguistic
typology and language description. This general
movement also affects computational linguistics
which now increasingly shows also interest insmall languages. At the same time, language
documentation has from its beginning been
concerned with digital data and methods, even if
mostly for data management and archiving and lessfor linguistic analysis. Still, teams for LD projects
nowadays usually have quite good computational
expertise, and field workers are less distant fromdigital tools and data than they used to be, andthan many other linguists. Furthermore, soon it
became obvious that the time was ripe for novel
research questions and topics that would make use of
these linguistic corpora of small languages, which iswhere computational linguistics and other statisticalmethods come into play (see below).
In the opposite direction, the digital humanities
grow and consolidated to the point of engaging
in constructing major research infrastructures fortheir needs, integrating the numerous individual data
sets and tools ‘out there’ in the many departments
and individual computers, and allowing humanities
research to be carried out on a completely new higher
level. The DH projects such as DARIAH and inparticular CLARIN count with the experiences at the
MPI-PL, in particular with the DoBeS archive. The
Language Archive is now one of the backbone centres
in CLARIN and participates actively in developing
this DH infrastructure in Germany, the Netherlands
and in a European and international level.
With a total of about 70 major project funded,
the DoBeS programme is in its final phase now(the last call for projects was in 2011), andalready it has been one of the most successfulprograms of the Volkswagen Foundation, in termsof impact and public awareness. Internationally,
LD has grown into a respected sub-discipline of
linguistics and neighbouring fields on its own
right, as is witnessed by a successful on-line peerreviewed journal (Language Documentation andConservation, LD&C) and a bi-annual international
conference (ICLDC, 2009 and 2011 in Hawaii) thatis attended by many hundreds of participants fromall over the world. In this community, the DoBeS
programme is generally recognized as trendsetterand in several aspects as a model, and there are
numerous personal and technical links between
DoBeS and other LD initiatives (ELDP, DEL,
EMELD, PARADISEC, etc.).

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3. Some key issues of Language
Documentation and Digital
Humanities
One distinctive feature of The Language Archive isdiversity, on different levels. First, it is concernedwith the very linguistic diversity inner- andcross-language, uniting data from many different
languages with unique features and a broad varietyof communicative settings. But the data, producedby many different teams with different backgroundand research interests, are also diverse in theirformats and contents – what is annotated, and how
it is annotated. While with respect to metadata andarchiving, DoBeS was successful to create agreement
and consensus among the researchers, the same does
not hold with respect to levels and conventions ofannotation, from the labelling of ‘tiers’ in ELAN
or other annotation tools to the abbreviations
used for grammatical glosses and labels. This now
constitutes a major obstacle for advanced crosscorpora research, and even with the general ISOcat
data category registry, much manual work has tobe done before different corpora are interoperable.
The same holds for lexical data, as the work in the
RELISH project has shown which created interfaces
and conversions between different standards for
lexical databases (LMF & Lexus and LIFT & LEGO).
Another issue is the question of sustainability. Still,
too often one finds great initiatives that produce
wonderful tools and/or data sets, but without any
long term plan – when the funding ends and/or thedeveloper leaves, the resources are abandoned andnot rarely unusable after some years, when hardware
and software changes. There are different aspects tosustainability – one is the sheer preservation of the
bit stream, which is threatened by eroding media
such as hard disks or optical discs. The necessary
automatic copying of several backups to different
locations and the constant replacement of outphased hardware can only be done by data centres,with which smaller archives should cooperate. The
Language Archive was lucky enough to be able
to negotiate a 50 year guarantee for bit stream
preservation by the Max Planck Gesellschaft alreadyaround 2006. For data format accessibility, one
needs to rely on a manageable number of open
standards (such as XML and UNICODE for text data,or widely used open and preferably not compressed
codecs for audio and video data), and has to beprepared to migrate the whole corpus from one
format to another if new standards supersede theones used in the archives (although the original
files should always be preserved, too). Finally, theproblem of maintenance of tools is generally notsatisfactorily solved. Due to changing hardware,
platforms, drivers, standards, most tools are bound172

to need constant maintenance even if no new features
are to be implemented (which usually happens if atool is well received by a large user community), andfew funds are available for this kind of activity. One
has to be constantly considering how and with howmany resources the currently offered software canand should be maintained or further developed. All
these questions are by now well known in the DH andnow addressed by the infrastructure projects such as
DARIAH and CLARIN, but have been addressed at acomparatively early stage at The Language Archive.
It is interesting to notice that one of thestrengths of The DoBeS Language Archive is its
connecting character. Not only are the data in
the archive relevant for many different disciplines,
not just linguistics, but also anthropology, history,
psychology, music-ethnology, speech technology etc.
Also some of the tools developed at The Language
Archive are now more widely used, in particular
ELAN, which is now used not just by descriptive anddocumentary linguists, but fostered multi-modality(gesture) and sign language research and is even
employed in completely unrelated fields. Also ISOcat
has the potential to bridge the gap between different
traditions of labelling entities in areas much broader
than linguistics, and ARBIL, the successor of the
IMDI metadata-editor, is by now being prepared
to be the major tool for the creation of modular
and flexible CMDI metadata as used in CLARIN.
Finally, other archives using Language Archiving
Technology have been and continue to be set up at
different locations in the whole world, constituting a
network of regional archives which soon can interact,exchange their data for backup and ease of accesspurposes, and hence strengthen and consolidate notjust LD but generally the archiving of valuable digital
research data.
There are several big challenges ahead for language
documentation and the corpora it produces. Some,as the tension between the general movement toopen access to research data and the need to protect
the individual and intellectual property rights of
speakers and researchers are in principle solved
by providing different levels of (controlled andpossibly restricted) access and employing codes ofconducts and other ethical and legal agreements.
Still, this state of affairs has constantly to be rethought and discussed. The same holds for new
insights and methods for language strengthening
and revitalization, promoting multilinguality andthe fruitful interaction between coexisting cultures,and the digital inclusion of linguistic, social andcultural minorities. Obviously, these are questions
that cannot be solved by science (alone).
Others are only beginning to be properly addressed,
such as the mobilization language data: the future
shape of language documentation and archives

Digital Humanities 2012

will be radically different from its current state,in view of new opportunities, needs and goals
beyond data gathering, language description andrevitalization. How can be ensured that many users,from researchers via the speakers themselves and thegeneral public, make the best use of the data, thatnovel research questions are addressed and answeredwith the support from language documentation
corpora? How can the process of creating, annotating
and archiving new, high-quality documentation data
be made easier even for community members
without the presence and support of a LD project andresearchers from abroad?

The potential of using
crowd-sourced data to reexplore the demography ofVictorian Britain

The closer interaction of LD and computational
techniques as being developed in the context of
the DH will certainly help to improve the situation
with respect to one of the major impediments in
LD: the high costs for annotating the rich corpora.
This is currently done mostly by hand, albeit insome cases with semi-automatic support, such as in
the case of morphological glossing based on stringmatching with a lexical database. Still, segmenting
recordings into utterances, identifying the speaker,
transcribing the original utterance and providing
further annotation is a very time-intensive work
which is mostly done by experts and only to asmaller part can be delegated for instance to welltrained native speakers. Here new computational
methods which work reasonably well for written
major languages can be generalized or adapted forother languages, and statistical methods can be used
to segment and label audio and video data basedon speaker and/or gesture recognition. The team at
The Language Archive is working on the inclusionof such methods into their tools. The better thisintegration is, the broader are the possible uses inmany humanities disciplines way beyond the field of
language documentation.

This paper describes a new project which aims to
explore the potential of a set of crowd-sourced data
based on the returns from decennial censuses innineteenth century Britain. Using data created by anexisting volunteer based effort, it is hoped to extract
and make available sets of historical demographic
data.

Notes
1. Three projects on geographically close languages in the Upper
Xingu area in central Brazil formed a collaborative project
within the consortium.

Duke-Williams, Oliver Williamo.duke-williams@ucl.ac.uk
University of Leeds, UK

Crowd-sourcing is a term generally used to referto the generation and collation of data by a groupof people, sometimes paid, sometimes interested
volunteers (Howe 2007). Whilst not dependent on
Web technologies, the ease of communication andability to both gather and re-distribute digital datain standard formats mean that the Web is a verysignificant enabling technology for distributed data
generation tasks. In some cases – the most obvious
being Wikipedia – crowd-sourcing has involved
the direct production of original material, whilst
in other cases, crowd-sourcing has been applied
to the transcription (or proof-reading) of existing
non-digitised material. An early example of this– predating the Web – was Project Gutenberg(Hart 1992), which was established in 1971 andcontinues to digitize and make available texts
for which copyright has expired. A more recent
example in the domain of Digital Humanities is theTranscribe Bentham project (Terras 2010), which
harnesses international volunteer efforts to digitize
the manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham, including many
previously unpublished papers; in contrast to Project
Gutenberg, the sources are hand-written rather thanprinted, and thus might require considerable humaninterpretative effort as part of the transcription
process. Furthermore, the Transcribe Bentham
project aims to produce TEI-encoded outputs rather
than generic ASCII text, potentially imposing greaterbarriers to entry for novice transcribers.
FreeCEN1 is a project which aims to deliver a
crowd-sourced set of records from the decennial
British censuses of 1841 to 1891. The data arebeing assembled through a distributed transcription
project, based on previously assembled volumesof enumerator’s returns, which exist in physicalform and on microfiche. FreeCEN is part of173

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FreeUKGEN, an initiative aiming to create freely
accessible databases of genealogical records, foruse by family historians; other member projects
being FreeREG, a collection of Parish Registers,
and FreeBMD a collection of vital events registers.
The database has grown steadily since its inception
in 1999, but coverage is variable with differinglevels of completeness between censuses, and forindividual counties within each census. The current
delivery of data from the FreeCEN project istargeted explicitly at genealogists, and is alreadyof benefit to family historians, by delivery freely
accessible data. However, the data (and associatedinterfaces) are not designed for demographic analysisof the content. Two main approaches may be ofinterest to demographers, historical geographers andhistorians in this regard: a series of cross-sectional
observations, and a linked sample (such that anindividual and hir/her circumstances at decennial
intervals might be observed).
The first aim of the project reported in thispaper is to extract aggregate counts of individuals
grouped by their county of enumeration (that is,their place of residence at the time of the census)
and their county of birth. Together, these forma ‘lifetime net migration’ matrix, which can be
disaggregated by age and sex to allow explorationof differential patterns of mobility for a variety of
sub-populations in nineteenth century Britain. An
associated requirement will be the aggregation ofarea level population counts (disaggregated by thesame age and sex categories to be used in the
migration analysis) in order to permit systematic
calculation of migration rates (as opposed to absolutevolumes). A second phase of analysis will be touse individual and household level records in orderto classify households into ‘household types’ (i.e.
persons living alone, married couples with andwithout dependent or co-resident children etc,
households with domestic staff present, householdswith lodgers present etc).
As usable lifetime migration data sets are extracted,
they will be made available via CIDER2, theCentre for Interaction Data Estimation and Research(Stillwell & Duke-Williams 2003). CIDER is fundedas part of the ESRC Census Programme 2006-2011,
and currently provides access to interaction(migration and commuting) data sets from the1981, 1991 and 2001 Censuses, together with anincreasing number of flow data sets from a varietyof administrative sources. The addition of data from
historic censuses will require the modification andextension of existing metadata structures, in order toeffectively document the data.
The FreeCEN project aims to transcribe data fromthe 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 Censuses ofBritain. The 1841 Census can be seen as a transitional
174

census. Whereas the first British censuses - from1801 onwards - had been completed at an arealevel by local officials and members of the clergy,
the 1841 Census was based around a householdschedule which listed each individual together
with basic demographic details (rounded age, sex,
profession and details of place of birth). However avariety of organisation weaknesses (Higgs 1989) werereflected in idiosyncratic results. A much more robust
administrative structure was developed for the 1851
Censuses onwards, with improved instructions given
to both enumerators and householders. The number
and range of questions asked of householder changed
over the course of the nineteenth century, with
new questions introduced regarding marital status,
relationship to head of family, whether the individual
was blind, deaf and dumb, an ‘imbecile or idiot’, or‘lunatic’ and whether the individual was an employer
or employee. The aggregation work will concentratein the first instance on results from the 1891 Census,
as these are expected to be of higher quality than theearlier returns. A second strand will then examine
data from the 1841 Census, precisely because thequality of the enumerator’s returns was poorer, andthus systemic problems are likely to be exposed.
How do transcribers cope with poorly recorded or
ambiguous original data? How widely do transcribers
vary in their notation style?
As noted above, the data are far from complete, andso comprehensive national analysis is not currently
possible. However, there are some counties such as
Cornwall for which enumeration is complete or close
to completion for all censuses in the period, andcounty or region based analyses should be possible.
The overriding aim of the work reported in this paper
is to explore the potential for use of these data, and toascertain the ease with which aggregate observations
can be extracted from the FreeCEN database as it
grows in the future.
More significantly, there are more subtle issues withthe records contained within the FreeCEN data,
and there are a variety of issues to be explored.
Primarily, it is necessary to examine the accuracyof transcriptions. Over the course of the 19th
century the administrative prowess of census taking
increased, and improved instructions to enumerators(probably in combination with improved literacy
rates in the general population) caused an overall
improvement in the quality of the original data;
however the accuracy of current transcriptions
must also be assessed. It must also be noted thatboth the quality and comprehensiveness of records
transcribed will vary by area and transcriber: theinitial impetus for many will be transcription of theirown ancestors, and the sample may not therefore
be complete or representative. The degree to which
the sample and representative can be gauged by

Digital Humanities 2012

comparison to published totals, although regionaland small area totals are less readily available thannational totals, constraining the ability to make local
level assessments of quality. Mapping of the data will
demonstrate the extent to which there are spatial
biases (at both local and national levels) in therecords selected for transcription.
The lifetime net migration tables to be produced
from this project will permit new analysis of mobility
in Victorian Britain. Working with the results of
the 1871 and 1881 Censuses, Ravenstein (1885)
derived a number of frequently cited and debated‘laws of migration’, including that migrants tend tomove in a series of small steps towards a ‘centre
of absorption’, that counter-flows exist, and that
migration propensities reduce with distance. The
actual ‘laws’ are not enumerated as a clear list, but
described at separate locations within more than
one paper; for a fuller discussion see Grigg (1977).
In a discussion of Ravenstein’s work, Tobler (1995)
states that the most interesting of a set of maps
included in the 1885 paper is not referenced or
described in the text, noting that such an omission
would cause most modern editors to remove the map.
Such a map could perhaps be re-created if migration
matrices from the period were made available.
Many subsequent studies have been made using theoriginally published results of these censuses (seefor example, Lawton (1968) and Friedlander andRoshier (1966)). However, source data are hard tofind, and it is now difficult for the general researcher
to re-examine such work: thus, an aim of the work
reported in this paper is to facilitate future researchin this area.
A second approach to the study of these datais to develop a life course analysis, and findindividuals linked across censuses, and examine
the ways in which their lives have developed atdecennial intervals. Whilst appealing, this approach
is significantly harder due to difficulties in linking
individuals between censuses. Anderson (1972)
studying a sample of 475 people in consecutive
censuses (1851, 1861) for example, found that
14% of the sample had inconsistent birthplace
recording. Some inconsistencies are down to minor
misspellings, but this underlines the difficulty ofmatching individuals.

Friedlander, D., and R. Roshier (1966). A Studyof Internal Migration in England and Wales: Part I.
Population Studies 19(3): 239-279.
Grigg, D. (1977). E. G. Ravenstein and the “laws of
migration”. Journal of Historical Geography 3(1):41-54.
Hart,
M.
(1992).
Gutenberg:
thehistoryandphilosophy
ofProject
Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gut

enberg:The_History_and_Philosophy_of_Proje
ct_Gutenberg_by_Michael_Hart , retrieved 31

October 2011

Higgs, E. (1989). Making Sense of the Census,
Public Record Office Handbooks No 23. London:
HMSO.
Lawton, R. (1968). Population Changes in Englandand Wales in the Later Nineteenth Century:an Analysis of Trends by Registration Districts.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
44: 55-74.
Howe, J. (2007). The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired
14(6), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html , retrieved 31 October 2011
Ravenstein, E. (1885). The Laws of Migration.
Journal of the Statistical Society 46: 167-235.
Stillwell,
J.,
and
O.
Duke-Williams(2003). A new web-based interface to British
census of population origin-destination statistics.
Environment and Planning A, 35(1): 113-132.
Terras, M. (2010). Crowdsourcing cultural
heritage: UCL’s Transcribe Bentham project.
Presented at: Seeing Is Believing: New Technologies
For Cultural Heritage. International Society forKnowledge Organization, UCL (University College
London).
Tobler, W. (1995) Ravenstein, Thornthwaite, andbeyond. Urban Geography 16(4): 327-343.
Notes
1. http://www.freecen.org.uk
2. http://cider.census.ac.uk http://cider.census.ac.uk

This project is currently at its outset, and the paper
will report on progress and demonstrate how the data
can be accessed and used.

References
Anderson, M. (1972). The study of family structure.
In E. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth-century society.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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Digital Humanities 2012

Sharing Ancient Wisdoms:
developing structures for
tracking cultural dynamics
by linking moral andphilosophical anthologies
with their source andrecipient texts
Dunn, Stuart

stuart.dunn@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Hedges, Mark

mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Jordanous, Anna

2. Historical background
Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages,
anthologies of extracts from larger texts containing
wise or useful sayings were created and circulated
widely, as a practical response to the cost andinaccessibility of full texts in an age when these
existed only in manuscript form (Rodríguez Adrados
2009: 91-97 on Greek models; Gutas 1981). SAWS
focuses on gnomologia (also known as florilegia),
which are manuscripts that collected moral orsocial advice, and philosophical ideas, although themethods and tools developed are applicable to othermanuscripts of an analogous form (e.g. medieval
scientific or medical texts; Richard 1962).
The key characteristics of these manuscripts arethat they are collections of smaller extracts ofearlier works, and that, when new collections werecreated, they were rarely straightforward copies.
Rather, sayings were reselected from various othermanuscripts, reorganised or reordered, and subtly(or not so subtly) modified or reattributed. The
genre also crossed linguistic barriers, in particularbeing translated into Arabic, and again these wererarely a matter of straightforward translations; theytend to be variations. In later centuries, thesecollections were translated into western European
languages, and their significance is underlined by
the fact that Caxton’s first imprint (the first bookever published in England) was one such collection(Craxton [1477] 1877]. Thus the corpus of material
can be regarded as a very complex directed networkor graph of manuscripts and individual sayings thatare interrelated in a great variety of ways, an analysisof which can reveal a great deal about the dynamics
of the cultures that created and used these texts.

anna.jordanous@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Lawrence, Faith

faith.lawrence@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Roueche, Charlottecharlotte.roueche@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Tupman, Charlottecharlotte.tupman@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Wakelnig, Elvira

wakelnig@yahoo.de
University of Vienna, Austria

1. Introduction(SAWS)1

The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms
project
explores and analyses the tradition of wisdom
literatures in ancient Greek, Arabic and otherlanguages, by presenting the texts digitally in amanner that enables linking and comparisons within
and between anthologies, their source texts, and thetexts that draw upon them. We are also creating aframework through which other projects can link
their own materials to these texts via the Semantic
Web, thus providing a ‘hub’ for future scholarship on
these texts and in related areas. The project is funded
by HERA (Humanities in the European ResearchArea) as part of a programme to investigate culturaldynamics in Europe, and is composed of teams at the
Department of Digital Humanities and the Centre for

176

e-Research at King’s College London, The Newman
Institute Uppsala in Sweden, and the University of
Vienna.

3. Methods: publishing, linking,and creating tools for otherrelated projects
The SAWS project therefore has three main aspects:
1. The encoding and publication of a digital archive ofeditions of a selected number of these texts;
2. The identification, publication and display of thelinks between the anthologies, their source texts,
and their recipient texts;
3. The building of a framework for scholars outside
the SAWS projects to link their texts to ours and toother relevant resources in the Semantic Web.

Digital Humanities 2012

3.1. TEI XML markup of editions
Each of the texts is being marked up in TEIconformant XML and validated to a customised
schema designed at King’s College London for theencoding of gnomologia. Our structural markup
reflects as closely as possible the way in which thescribe laid out the manuscript. The TEI schema
uses the <seg> element to mark up base units
of intellectual interest (not necessarily identified
as single units by the scribe), such as a saying(statement) together with its surrounding story(narrative). For example:
Alexander, asked whom he loved more, Philip or
Aristotle, said: ‘Both equally, for one gave me the giftof life, the other taught me to live the virtuous life.’ 2This contains both a statement and a narrative:<seg type="contentItem"><seg type="narrative">
Alexander, asked whom he loved more, Philip or
Aristotle, said:</seg><seg type="statement">
Both equally, for one gave me the gift of life, the othertaught me to live the virtuous life.
</seg></seg>
Each of these <seg> elements can be given an@xml:id to provide a unique identifier (which
can be automatically generated) that differentiates
them from all other examples of <seg>, forinstance <seg type="statement" xml:id="K.alHaraka_ci_s1">. In other words, it allows each
intellectually interesting unit (as identified by our
team’s scholars) to be distinguished from each otherunit, thus providing the means of referring to a
specific, often very brief, section of the text.

3.2. RDF linking within and between
manuscripts
Several types of relationships have been identified
within and between the manuscripts. These
manuscript relationships exist at many different
levels of granularity, from links between individual
sayings to interconnections in families ofmanuscripts. These relationships are represented
using an ontology that extends the FRBR-oo model(Doerr & LeBoeuf 2007) (the harmonisation of
the FRBR model of bibliographic records (Tillett
2004) and the CIDOC (Doerr 2003) Conceptual
Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM)). The SAWS3

ontology, developed through collaboration between
domain experts and technical observers, models theclasses and links in the SAWS manuscripts. Basing
the SAWS ontology around FRBR-oo provides most
vocabulary for both the bibliographic (FRBR) andcultural heritage (CIDOC) aspects being modelled.
Using this underlying ontology as a basis, links
between (or within) manuscripts can be added to
the TEI documents using RDF markup. RDF4 is a
specification to represent one-way links (known as
triples) from an object entity to a subject entity. The
use of RDF to represent relationships in markup has
to date primarily been seen in XHTML documents
containing RDFa5 (RDF in attributes); however it isdesirable to extend the scope of RDF in markup, sothat RDF links can be added directly into documents
such as the TEI XML documents used in SAWS
(Jewell 2010).
To include RDF triples in TEI documents, three
entities have to be represented for each triple: thesubject being linked from, the object being linked
to, and a description of the link between them. The
subject and object entities in the RDF triple arerepresented by the @xml:id that has been given
to each of the TEI sections of interest. We use the
TEI element <relation/> (recently added to TEI)
to place RDF markup in the SAWS documents, withfour attributes as follows:- The value of @active is the @xml:id of thesubject being linked from;- The value of @passive is the @xml:id or URI(Uniform Resource Identifier) of the object being
linked to;- The value of @ref is the description of therelationship, which is drawn from the list of
relationships in the ontology;- The value of @resp is the name or identifierof a particular individual or resource (such as abibliographic reference). Many of the links being
highlighted are subjectively identified and are amatter of expert opinion, so it is important torecord the identity of the person(s) responsible.

Example:177

Digital Humanities 2012

Thus we will create an interactive environment thatenables researchers not only to search or browse
this material in a variety of ways, but also toprocess, analyse and build upon the material. This
environment will provide tools to browse, searchand query the information in the manuscripts, aswell as making available SAWS-specific TEI schemaand ontology files and XSLTs used to extract
semantic information from the structural markup
and metadata within theThis is equivalent to stating that the Arabic
segment identified as ‘K._al-Haraka_ci_s5’ isa close rendering of the Greek segment
identified as ‘Proclus_ET_Prop.17_ci1’, and that
this relationship has been asserted by Elvira
Wakelnig, 2012.
The <relation/> element can be placed anywhere
within the XML document, or indeed in a separate
XML document if required: for our own purposes
we have found it useful to place it immediately
after the closing tag of the <seg> identified as the‘active’ entity.

3.3. The SAWS ‘hub’ for enabling
related projects to annotate and link
their own texts
The project is thus producing a framework forrepresenting these relationships, using an RDFbased semantic web approach, as well as tools forcreating these complex resources, and for visualising,analysing, exploring and publishing them (Heath& Bizer 2011). We are engaging with scholars
working on related projects in order to establish an
agreed set of predicates; the version currently being
evaluated and deployed by scholars is available as
an ontology at http://purl.org/saws/ontology .
The number of manuscripts of this type is large, andthe project is creating the kernel of an envisaged
much larger corpus of interrelated material. Many of
the subsequent contributions will be made by others;
therefore we are creating a framework of tools andmethods that will enable researchers to add texts andrelationships of their own, which will be managed in
distributed fashion. We are also linking to existing
Linked Data sources about the ancient world, mostnotably the Pleiades gazetteer6 of ancient places andthe Prosography of the Byzantine World7 which aims
to document all the individuals mentioned in textual
Byzantine sources from the seventh to thirteenth
centuries.

178

TEI markup. We also hope to make available tools
for adding and editing manuscripts within the SAWS
environment. The ultimate aim is to create a networkof information, comprising a collection of markedup texts and textual excerpts, which are linked
together to allow researchers to represent, identify
and analyse the flow of knowledge and transmissionof ideas through time and across cultures.

References
Caxton, W. ([1477] 1877). The Dictes and Wise
Sayings of the Philosophers (originally publishedLondon, 1477), reprinted 1877 (London: Elliot Stock).
Doerr, M. (2003). The CIDOC CRM – anOntological Approach to Semantic Interoperability ofMetadata. AI Magazine 24(3).
Doerr, M., and P. LeBoeuf (2007). ModellingIntellectual Processes: The FRBR – CRM
Harmonization. Digital Libraries: Research andDevelopment, Vol. 4877. Berlin: Springer, pp.
114-123.
Gutas, D. (1981). Classical Arabic Wisdom
Literature: Nature and Scope. Journal of theAmerican Oriental Society 101(1): 49-86.
Heath, T., and C. Bizer (2011). Linked Data:
Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. San
Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool, pp.1-136.
Jewell,M.
O.
(2010).
Semantic
Screenplays:
Preparing
TEI
for
LinkedData http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-p
rogramme/abstracts/papers/pdf/ab-878.pdf/

Digital Humanities 2010, Friday 9 July, London, UK.
Pleiades gazetteer: http://pleiades.stoa.org/ Last accessed 9th March 2012.
Prosopography of the Byzantine World:
http://www.pbw.kcl.ac.uk/ . Last accessed 9th
March 2012.
RDF/XML

SyntaxSpecification(Revised).

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/

Last accessed 31st October 2011.

Digital Humanities 2012

RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing.
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/.
Last
accessed 31st October 2011.
Richard, M. (1962). Florilèges grecs. Dictionnairede Spiritualité V, cols. 475-512.
Rodríguez Adrados, F. (2009). Greek wisdom
literature and the Middle Ages: the lost Greek
models and their Arabic and Castilian. Bern: Peter
Lang.
Tillett, B. (2004). What is FRBR? A Conceptual
Model for the Bibliographic Universe. Library ofCongress Cataloging Distribution Service, Libraryof Congress 25, pp. 1-8.
Notes
1. http://www.ancientwisdoms.ac.uk
2. Gnomologium Vaticanum3. SAWS
ontology:
http://purl.org/saws/ontology
ontology. Last accessed 16th March 2012
4. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/
accessed 31st October 2011.

Last

5. RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/ . Last accessed 31st October 2011.
6. Pleiades gazetteer: http://pleiades.stoa.org/ . Last
accessed 9th March 2012
7. Prosopography of the Byzantine World: http://www.pbw.kcl.ac.uk/ . Last accessed 9th March 2012

Recovering the Recovered
Text: Diversity, Canon
Building, and Digital
Studies
Earhart, Amy

aearhart@tamu.edu
Texas A&M University, USA

This paper examines the state of the current digital
humanities canon, provides a historical overview ofthe decline of early digitally recovered texts designed
to expand the literary canon, and offers suggestions
for ways that the field might work toward expansionof the digital canon. The early wave of small recovery
projects has slowed and, even more troubling, theextant projects have begun to disappear, as isapparent from looking through the vast number ofprojects that are if we are lucky, ghosts on thewayback machine. Alan Liu’s Voice of the Shuttle
provides a good measure of the huge number oflost early recovery projects. A quick perusal of‘The Minority Studies’ section reveals that of thesix sites listed in ‘General Resources in Minority
Literature,’ half cannot be located with a carefulsearch, suggesting that they have been removed. The
same trend is found with other projects listed on
the site. While the ‘General Resources in Chicano/
Latino Literature’ section, only 50% of projects arestill online, other areas, such as Asian American
literature, have a higher percentage of active projects.
Some projects, such as Judith Fetterley’s 19th
Century Women’s Bibliography, are the living deadand have not been updated for years. Similarities
exist among the extinct projects. Most were producedin the late 1990s by single scholars at institutions that
did not have an etext center or a digital humanities
center, never attracted external support, and neverupgraded to SGML or TEI. The canon problems are
driven by the dual issues of preservation and thestagnation of digitization recovery efforts.
We should find it troubling that the digital canon
is losing the very texts that mirrored the revised
literary canon of the 1980s. If we lose a large
volume of these texts, and traditional texts suchas Whitman, Rossetti, and Shakespeare are thehighlighted digital literary texts, we will be returning
to a new critical canon that is incompatible withcurrent understandings of literature. The early digital
recovery work I am discussing is not easily available.
Few of these texts are in print. A few more areavailable on for-profit databases or on microfilm, but
most are available only with a return to the one or179

Digital Humanities 2012

two libraries that own the original physical copy ofthe book, journal, or newspaper.
Some have posited that a structural problem inthe emergence of digital humanities contributes
to the selection of materials for digitization andpreservation. Martha Nell Smith contends that
digital humanities developed as a space to which
practitioners hoped to flee from the shifts in theprofession that arose out of the cultural studies
movement. Smith highlights the digital humanities’
retreat into modes of analytics, objective approaches
as ‘safe’ alternatives to the messy fluidities foundin literary studies. If Smith is correct, then there
should be no surprise that recovery of messy lost texts
has not been a priority for the field. Others, suchas Kenneth Price, view the funding mechanism as
a contributing factor to the increasingly traditional
canon of digitized texts. Price notes that the criteriaof impact, crucial to the granting decision, favor
the canonical text. The National Endowment of
Humanities (NEH) awarded 141 start-up grants from2007 through 2010. Of those grants, only twentynine were focused on diverse communities andsixteen on the preservation or recovery of diverse
community texts. It is striking to examine theauthors and historical figures individually cited in
the list of funding: Shakespeare, Petrach, Melville,
and Jefferson. While there are grants to support
work on indigenous populations, African and African
American materials, and Asian American materials,
in addition to other populations, the funding of
named great men of history deserve scrutiny.
In addition, the turn to increased standardization(TEI) and big data troubles our efforts at smallscale recovery project, as DIY scholars, outside theDH community, have difficulty gaining access torequired technical skills for small projects, leading
to a decline in small-scale digital recovery projects.
The poor literary data sets impact digital humanities
efforts to experiment with visualization and data
mining techniques. For example, the UC Berkley
WordSeer tool is remarkably useful, but the data
set used to test the tool and the conclusions drawn
about the texts are problematic. The team chose to
examine the slave narratives housed at Documenting
the American South. They ran an analysis on theset to see if the literary conventions of the text
corresponded with critic James Olney’s claim that
autobiographical slave narratives follow a list oftropes such as ‘I was born’ or ‘Cruel slavemaster.’
However, the chosen data set was not appropriate
for the research question. The 300 narratives labeledslave narratives at this site are actually a mixed bagof first person narratives that are fictional and nonfictional, black authored and white authored, preand post Civil War, some autobiographical, somebiographical and some anti and some pro slavery, or

180

at least apologetic. Given the narratives, it is hard
to believe that Olney’s criteria, which he says areto be applied to autobiography, would be able to be
proven by the test set of data. Literary datamining is
still in its infancy, but, to date, the most successful
literary results are those that utilize smaller, curated
data sets, such as Tanya Clement’s fascinating Steinproject.
Dan Cohen writes, ‘Instead of worrying about longterm preservation, most of us should focus on
acquiring the materials in jeopardy in the first placeand on shorter-term preservation horizons, 5 to 10
years, through well-known and effective techniquessuch as frequent backups stored in multiple locations
and transferring files regularly to new storage media,
such as from aging floppy discs to DVD-ROMs. If we
do not have the artifacts to begin with, we will never
be able to transfer them to one of the more permanent
digital archives being created by the technologists.’
I want to spin out the two crucial points that I takefrom Dan’s argument. 1) we must continue to focus
on acquiring artifacts and 2) we must work with shortterm preservation strategies to stop immediate loss.
If Matt Kirschenbaum is correct and preservation
is not a technical problem but a social problem,
then it follows that the digital humanities community
should be able to address the lack of diversity inthe digital canon by attention to acquisition andpreservation of particular types of texts. We needa renewed effort in digitizing texts that occurs
in tandem with experimental approaches in data
mining, visualization and geospatial representations.
Recent critiques have tended to separate the two,a mistake that will damage both efforts. We cancreate infrastructure to support scholars interested
in digital recovery. Leveraging existing structures
to support new, small scale scholarship, continued
outreach and training for scholars not interested in
become digital humanists but interested in digital
recovery is crucial.
Preservation of existing digital recovery projects
needs to begin immediately. We need a targeted
triage focused on digital recovery projects that allow
access to materials that are not accessible in print
or other digital form. Using existing structures of
support, like NEH’s Access and Preservation Grant
and Brown’s newly launched TAPAS, we might build
an infrastructure to ingest selected digital recovery
projects. While it is unlikely that we can preserve theentirety of the project we might, as Dan Cohen hasargued, preserve simply. We may not preserve theinterface, but if we can preserve the recovery core –the text – then we will not lose the valuable work thatthe early digital pioneers completed.
We need to examine the canon that we, as digital
humanists, are constructing, a canon that skews

Digital Humanities 2012

toward traditional texts and excludes crucial work by
women, people of color, and the GLBTQ community.
We need to reinvigorate the spirit of previous
scholars who believed that textual recovery was
crucial to their work, who saw the digital as a way toenact changes in the canon. If, as Jerome McGannsuggests, ‘the entirety of our cultural inheritance willbe transformed and reedited in digital forms,’ (72),then we must ensure that our representation ofculture does not exclude work by diverse peoples.

Mind your corpus:
systematic errors inauthorship attribution
Eder, Maciej

maciejeder@gmail.com
Pedagogical University, Krakow, Poland

References
Clement, T. E. (2008). ‘A Thing Not Beginningand Not Ending’: Using Digital Tools to Distant-read
Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Literaryand Linguistic Computing 23(3): 361-381.
Cohen, D. J. (2005). The Future of Preserving thePast. CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship2(2): viewpoint.
Cole, J. L. (2004). Newly Recovered Works by
Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton): A Prospectus
and Checklist. Legacy: A Journal of American
Women Writers 21(2): 229-234.
Cole, J. L. Winnifred Eaton Digital Archive.
Formerly http://etext.virginia.edu/eaton/
Liu, A. Voice of the Shuttle http://vos.ucsb.edu/.
McGann, J. (2005). Culture and Technology: The
Way we Live Now, What is to be Done? New Literary
History 36(1): 71-82.
Olney, R. (1984). I Was Born: Slave
Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as
Literature. Callaloo (20): 46-73.
Price, K. M. (2009). Digital Scholarship,
Economics, and the American Literary Canon.
Literature Compass 6(2): 274-290.
Smith, M. N. (2007) The Human Touch: Softwareof the Highest Order: Revisiting Editing as
Interpretation. Textual Cultures 2(1): 1-15.
University of Virginia Library. Electronic Text
Center http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/digital
curation/etext.html .
Wordseer. The University of Berkley, California
wordseer.berkeley.edu.

1. Introduction
Non-traditional authorship attribution relies on
advanced statistical procedures to distil significant
markers of authorial style from a large pool of stylisticfeatures that are not distinctive enough to provide
reliable information about authorial uniqueness. In
other words, the goal is to find as much order in‘randomness’ as possible. The better the method
applied, the more regularities can be extracted froma population that seems to contain nothing but noise.
However, it does not mean that one can overcome theimpact of randomness: noise is an inherent feature of
all natural languages. In particular, word frequencies
in a corpus are random variables; the same can besaid about any written authorial text, like a novel or
poem.
Although dealing with this unavoidable noise iscrème de la crème of computational stylistics, anyother influence of additional randomness – e.g.
caused by an untidily-prepared corpus – might leadto biased or false results. Relying on contaminateddata is quite similar to using dirty test tubes
in laboratory: it inescapably means falling into
systematic error. Certainly, quite an importantquestion is what degree of nonchalance is acceptable
to obtain sufficiently reliable results.
The problem of systematic errors in stylometry
has already been discussed. Rudman (1998a,
1998b, 2003) has formulated a number of caveats
concerning different issues in non-traditional
authorship attribution, including possible pitfalls
in corpus preparation. Noecker et al. (2008), in
their attempt to test the impact of OCR errors on
attribution accuracy, have observed that a moderate
damage of input texts does not affect the results
significantly. Similarly, Eder (2011) has noticed thata faultily prepared corpus of Greek epic poems
displayed an unexpectedly good performance. In
another study, a strong correlation between thelength of input samples and attribution performancehas been shown (Eder 2010). In these and manyother studies, however, the problem of systematic
errors has not been addressed systematically.

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The nature of noise affecting the results is quite
complex. On the one hand, a machine-readable text
might be contaminated by a poor OCR, mismatched
codepages, improperly removed XML tags; byincluding non-authorial textual additions, such asprefaces, footnotes, commentaries, disclaimers, etc.
On the other hand, there are some types of
unwanted noise that can by no means be referred
to as systematic errors; they include scribal textual
variants (variae lectiones), omissions (lacunae),
interpolations, hidden plagiarism, editorial decisions
for uniform spelling, modernizing the punctuation,and so on.
To verify the impact of unwanted noise, a series ofexperiments has been conducted on several corporaof English, German, Polish and Latin prose texts,
the corpora being roughly similar in length andnumber of authors tested. In 100 iterations, a given
corpus was gradually damaged and controlled tests
for authorship have been applied (the procedure
has been inspired by the study of Noecker et al.
2008). It can be obviously assumed that heavy
damage will spoil the results substantially. The
aim of this study, however, is to test whether thisdecrease of performance is linear. On theoreticalgrounds, one can expect either a linear regression(the more errors, the worse the results), or some
initial resistance to small errors, followed by a steep
drop of performance.
In all the experiments, the Delta method has beenused (Burrows 2002). It is a very intuitive procedurethat performs considerably well as compared withmuch more sophisticated techniques. Like othermachine-learning methods, Delta is very sensitive
to the choice of number of features to be analyzed(Jockers & Witten 2010). For that reason, eachexperiment has been approached in a series of
30 independent tests for attribution, increasing thenumber of MFWs analyzed: 100, 200, 300, and soon, all the way to 3,000. The obtained results shouldbe – by extension – valid for other methods that rely
on multidimensional comparison of frequencies of
MFWs.
It should be stressed that one can deal with twogeneral types of systematic errors. First, when all
the samples are damaged to a similar degree (e.g. if
the corpus was not cleaned of markup tags); second,
when, in a carefully collected corpus, some of thesamples (e.g. one sample) are of poor quality. The
latter case will not be discussed in the present study.

2. Misspelled characters
The first experiment addresses a very trivial, yetsevere, type of damage – the situation where
single characters are misspelled due to transmission
disturbance, imperfect typing, poor quality of182

scanned documents, using untrained OCR software,
etc. This type of error is distributed randomly in astring of characters; however, some letters are more
likely to be damaged than others. Especially, whitespaces are rarely misspelled.
The experiment, then, was designed as follows. In
each of 100 iterations, an increasing percentage ofletters (excluding spaces) were replaced with otherrandomly chosen letters. To give an example: inthe 15th iteration, every letter of the input text was
intended to be damaged with a 15% probability; inconsequence, the corpus contained roughly 15% of
independently damaged letters.

Figure 1: Simulation of poor OCR quality in the
corpus of English novels: in 100 iterations, increasing
percentage of intentionally misspelled charactershas been tested for 30 different MFW vectors

The results were quite similar for most of thelanguages tested. As shown in Fig. 1 and 2, shortvectors of MFWs (up to 500 words) usually provide
no significant decrease of performance despite aconsiderably large amount of noise added. Even
20% of damaged letters will not affect the results insome cases! However, longer MFW vectors are very
sensitive to misspelled characters: any additional
noise means a steep decrease of performance.
Intuitively, this could be expected, as the topof frequency lists is usually occupied by shortwords, which are less likely to contain randomly
misspelled characters. This phenomenon is quite
clearly evidenced in the German corpus (Fig. 2): i.e.
in a language with words usually longer than those inother languages.

Digital Humanities 2012

Figure 2: Simulation of poor OCR
quality in the corpus of German novels

Figure 3: Simulation of editorial
modifications in the corpus of German novels

This is very important to stress, however, that using
short MFW vectors – despite their considerable
resistance to damaged texts – still provides worse
performance than relying on a large number of
MFWs. This means that the ‘garbage in, gospel out’
optimism is in fact illusory.

The results seem to be quite similar to those obtainedin the previous experiment – but it is worth tonote that the pictures are in fact symmetrical(Fig. 1-2 vs. 3-4). Here, short MFW vectors are
significantly sensitive to randomness in frequency
tables, while the longest vectors can survive amoderate earthquake: even very strong noise – its
strength comparable with the variance of the words
it infects – has a rather weak influence on attribution
effectiveness. The results were roughly similar ineach corpus tested.

3. Noise in word frequencies
The aim of the second experiment is to explore
the impact of scribal and editorial modificationsof the literary texts. These include orthographic
variants, scribal interpolations, editorial textual
adjustments, punctuation introduced by modern
scholars, etc. A corpus that contains such texts is
not merely damaged, i.e. it is clean of misspelledcharacters. However, due to different spellings used,
the obtained word frequencies are likely to bebiased. This bias might be used to find uniquescribal idiolects (Kestemont & Dalen-Oskam 2009);
it can be also subjected to automatic disambiguationof spelling variants (Craig & Whipp 2010). In
most approaches, however, there is no sufficientawareness of potential systematic error (Rudman
1998a).
The potential bias in word counts can be simulated byadding pure random noise – gradually increasing its
standard deviation – to the computed tables of word
frequencies. Thus, in the first of 100 iterations, theadded noise would have as little variance as 0.05 σi and the last iteration would include a huge noiseof 5 σ i variance (which means that the noise is 5
times stronger than the variance of a given word
frequencies it is added to).

Figure 4: Simulation of editorial
modifications in the corpus of Polish novel

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4. Impact of literary tradition
The last type of noise can hardly be calledsystematic error. Namely, the aim of this experimentis to simulate the impact of literary inspirations(plagiarism, imitations, intertextuality, etc.) on
attribution effectiveness. In authorship studies, there
is always a tacit – and somewhat naïve – assumptionthat texts in a corpus are purely ‘individual’ interms of being written solely by one author andnot influenced by other writers – as if any text inthe world could be created without references tothe author’s predecessors and to the whole literary
tradition. The problem of collaborative nature ofearly modern texts has been discussed by traditional
literary criticism (Hirschfeld 2001; Love 2002), but
it is hardly reported in computational stylistics. In
authorship attribution, this feature of written texts
is certainly a pitfall; however, the same feature
makes it possible to use stylometric techniques totrace stylistic imitations or unconscious inspirations
between different authors.
The experiment is designed as follows. In each of
100 iterations, for each text, a consecutive percentage
of original words are replaced with words randomly
chosen from the entire corpus. Thus, a simulation ofincreasing intertextual dependence between the texts
in a corpus is obtained.

Figure 6: Simulation of extreme intertextuality,
in the corpus of Latin prose texts

The obtained results are quite interesting. The
corpora of modern literatures, i.e. English (Fig. 5),
German and Polish, displayed a gentle decreaseof performance (despite the number of MFWs
analyzed) in correlation with the amount of‘intertextuality’ added. The Latin corpus (Fig. 6)
behaved as if the authorial uniqueness could betraced through a mass of external quotations: aconsiderably good performance was achieved despite
40% of original words replaced. This deserves further
investigation.

References
Craig, H., and R. Whipp (2010). Old
spellings, new methods: automated proceduresfor indeterminate linguistic data. Literary and
Linguistic Computing 25(1): 37-52.
Burrows, J. F. (2002). ‘Delta’: A Measure of
Stylistic Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 17(3): 267-287.
Eder, M. (2010). Does size matter? Authorship
attribution, small samples, big problem. Digital
Humanities 2010: Conference Abstracts. King’s
College London, pp. 132-135.
Figure 5: Simulation of extreme
intertextuality in the corpus of English novels

Eder, M. (2011). Style-markers in authorship
attribution: a cross-language study of the authorial
fingerprint. Studies in Polish Linguistics 6 (in press).
Hirschfeld, H. (2001). Early modern collaborationand theories of authorship. PMLA 116(3): 609-622.
Jockers, M. L., and D. M. Witten (2010). A
comparative study of machine learning methods

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for authorship attribution. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 25(2): 215-223.
Kestemont, M., and K. van Dalen-Oskam(2009). Predicting the past: memory based copyist
and author discrimination in Medieval epics.
Proceedings of the 21st Benelux Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC) 2009. Eindhoven, pp.
121-128.
Love, H. (2002). Attributing Authorship: An
Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Noecker, J., M. Ryan, P. Juola, A. Sgroi, S.
Levine, and B. Wells (2009). Close only counts
in horseshoes and... authorship attribution? Digital
Humanities 2009: Conference Abstracts. Universityof Maryland, College Park, MD, pp. 380-381.
Rudman, J. (1998a). Non-traditional Authorship
Attribution Studies in the ‘Historia Augusta’: Some
Caveats. Literary and Linguistic Computing 13(3):151-157.
Rudman, J. (1998b). The state of authorship
attribution studies: some problems and solutions.
Computers and the Humanities 31: 351-365.
Rudman, J. (2003). Cherry picking in
nontraditional authorship attribution studies.
Chance 16(2): 26-32.

Underspecified, Ambiguousor Formal. Problems in
Creating Maps Based on
Texts
Eide, Øyvind

oyvind.eide@edd.uio.no
University of Oslo, Unit for Digital Documentation,
Norway1. Introduction
How can a reading of a textual description ofa landscape be expressed as a map? Maps forma medium different from verbal texts, and thedifferences have consequences not only for how
things are said, but also for what can be said at allusing maps. Where are these limitations to be found?
In this abstract, I will discuss the relationshipbetween verbal and map based geographicalcommunication. I have created a model of thegeographical information read from a source text,
then tried to express the contents of the model
as maps. I will show that types of geographicalinformation exist that can be stored in and read fromverbal texts, but which are impossible to express
as geographical maps without significant loss of
meaning.

2. Object of study
I used a set of Scandinavian border protocols fromthe eighteenth century (Schnitler 1962) as source
material for this research. The text is based oninterrogations about geography with more than 100
different persons, of whom many presumably did
not use maps very much if at all. It was created ina society, or a set of societies, on the brink of thetransformation from oral to written cultures, wheresome were firmly placed within the written culture,
while others had only been exposed to the activityof reading texts for a few decades. The voices in the
text represent persons coming from different ethnic
and professional backgrounds, e.g., Sami reindeer
herders, Norwegian farmers, and Danish military
officers, thus bringing a set of different perspectives
into the geographical conversation.

3. Method
Modelling is to create and manipulate models
in order to learn from the experiences we gain
through the process. Models are in this context
185Digital Humanities 2012

representations of something which is created for the
purpose of studying what is modelled more closely(McCarty 2005: 24). In the work reported on here, acomputer based model was constructed based on thesource text. Through experiments on this model, newknowledge about the text was gained. The creationof the model itself also led to problems giving new
insights, so it was part of the series of experiments.
The same can be said of the development andtailoring of the software used.
The whole experiment was performed in a qualitative
manner. Occurrences in the text were not counted
and compared, they were rather evaluated as
individual cases, in accordance with traditional
humanities research where seeking local knowledge
about specific cases is the main activity (Galey 2010:95-100).
The point of a modelling exercise lies in theprocess, not in the model as a product. Modelling
mediates epistemologically between modeller andthe modelled, that is, between the researcher and thedata. The model was built through a combination
between computer based tools and a thorough close
reading in which all geographic information I wasable to extract from the text was included. The model
was stored as a set of connected facts in a computer
application I developed in Java for this research.
In the application the results of the close readings are
stored as triplets in a fact database. Then the ‘raw’
triplets go through several steps of interpretation,
leading to more and more formal structures. These
steps eventually result in the standard format RDF1,
then further interpretation leads to geographicalvector data in a simplified version of the GML
format2 which can be imported to GIS software to beviewed as maps.
The modelling process thus involves several steps,
each formalising the data in a stricter sense. For
each step, what ‘falls off,’ what is difficult to avoid
loosing, is the interesting part. This ‘falling off’ will
include things that cannot survive a transfer fromone system to another, which misses the added levelof formality. Through this process I attempted totranslate geographical information from one medium
to the other. The ‘fall-offs’ show us what was lostin the process; this was not always because ofdifferences between the media, but candidates forfurther examination were found in the ‘fall-offs’.
Examples from this modelling work will be shown in
the paper, including some situations where ‘fall-off’occurs.
As the goal is to understand how texts express
geographical information, I made an effort to basethe maps on what I read from the text only. While
it is impossible to exclude all context information,

186

I tried hard to exclude any local context based on
geographical knowledge of the area. This makes
the process different from mapping place nameinformation in literary texts, as done by e.g. Smith
and Crane (2001). The latter process includes adding
a significant amount of contextual knowledge to theprocess through what is learned from the pre-existingmap.

4. Main results
The issues faced in the modelling experiments led tothe development of the following typology of textual
expressions:
1. Under-specified texts. Based on such a text,
more than one map can be drawn, and at least twoof these maps are significantly different.
This situation occurs when the geographicalinformation in a text can be expressed as more than
one significantly different map. This happens when
directions such as ‘east’ or measurements such as‘1-2 miles’ are used: given lack of other evidence
in the text, a number of different geometricalinterpretations of the statements are possible.
2. Fully specified textual descriptions. Only
one map can be drawn based on the description.
If the text mentions something, it is fully specified
geometrically.
Texts in formal languages, such as GML, are typicalcases. I have not found examples of this type innatural language texts.
3. Ambiguity and negation. The text includes
expressions in the forms ‘A or B is located atC’ (ambiguity) or ‘There are no A’s in B’ (negation).
The spatial information read from the text cannot
be represented as one single map; one will need two
or more maps, a dynamic map or a map with its
geometry corrected by a textual description.
The choice of the words ‘significantly different’ as
opposed to merely ‘different’ in the description oftype 1 is necessary and highlights how the borderto type 2 is fuzzy. Two maps can always be madewhich are slightly different, but which will occur assimilar to the reader. Small adjustments in location
are routinely made in cartographical work in orderto improve the readability of maps. The choiceof symbols can also change without its leading tosignificantly different maps. Any text, also of type 2,
could be represented by two slightly different maps.
In the case of Schnitler, type 1 situations areabundant, we see a handful of type 3, and none of type2. The groups are partly exclusive: 1 and 3 can exist in
the same textual description, but is hard to see how aDigital Humanities 2012textual description can be both 2 and 1 or both 2 and
3.

5. Discussion
The discussion of the relationship between
geographical maps and verbal texts fall into the long
tradition of inter-art and intermedia studies. Two
important oppositions established by Lessing (1893)
can be summarised this way:
1. Actions in time should be applied in poetry, andbodies in space in painting.
2. What is hidden is not seen in painting, while things
hidden can still be seen in poetry.
Whereas Lessing’s dichotomy between poetry andpainting has been questioned, e.g., by Frank(1963) and Mitchell (1980) in connection to their
discussions of spatial form in literature, it has neverbeen eliminated. A recent way of formalising such
distinctions is the model of Elleström (2010). Insteadof starting from a set of different media or art forms,
he takes a bottom-up approach, starting from a setof media modalities. His set includes four, namely,
the material, sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic
modalities. The differences between texts and maps
fall mainly in the latter two categories.
The two problem areas found in the modelling ofSchnitler, under-specified texts and ambiguity andnegation, are both connected to Lessing’s thinking.
When ‘east’ in a text can mean a number of different
things, potentially covering half of the possible
directions from a place, the direction between two
features on a map is measurable, with only a limited
inaccuracy. Space is expressed differently in the two
media. And when disjunction is hard to put on a map,
it is also connected to the fact that the sign systems
used to refer to the external reality are different. This
will be discussed in light of Lessing’s opposition andElleström’s system in the paper. Some comments will
also be made as to how this links to narratology.

Behaviours, Products and Institutions. Open Book
Publishers, pp. 93-117.
Lessing, G. E. (1893). Laokoon: oder über die
Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie. Erster Theil.
In K. Lachmann and F. Muncker (eds.), Gotthold
Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften. Neunter
Band (3., aufs neue durchges. und verm. Aufl.).
Stuttgart: Göschen. Photographic reprint. Berlin : de
Gruyter 1968, pp. 1-177. First published: 1766.
McCarty, W. (2005). Humanities computing.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1980). Spatial Form in
Literature: Toward a General Theory. Critical
Inquiry 6 (3): 539-567.
Schnitler, P. (1962). Major Peter Schnitlers
grenseeksaminasjonsprotokoller 1742 - 1745,
Volume 1. Oslo: Norsk historisk kjeldeskrift-institutt.
Smith, D. A., and G. Crane (2001).
Disambiguating Geographic Names in a Historical
Digital Library. In Research and Advanced
Technology for Digital Libraries: 5th European
conference, ECDL 2001. Darmstadt: Springer, pp.
127-136.
Notes
1. Resource Description Framework: http://www.w3.org/RD
F/ (checked 2011-10-31)
2. Geography Markup Language: http://www.opengeospat
ial.org/standards/gml/ (checked 2011-10-31)

References
Elleström, L. (2010). The Modalities of Media: A
Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations. In
L. Elleström (ed.), Media borders, multimodality
and intermediality. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan,
pp. 11-48.
Frank, J. (1963). Spatial Form in Modern
Literature. In The widening gyre: crisis and masteryin modern literature. (First published: 1945). New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, pp. 3-62
Galey, A. (2010). The Human Presence in Digital
Artefacts. In W. McCarty (ed.), Text and Genre in
Reconstruction: Effects of Digitalization on Ideas,
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A Frequency Dictionary ofModern Written and OralMedia Arabic
Elmaz, Orhan

orhan.elmaz@univie.ac.atUniversity of Vienna, Austria

1. Learning Arabic
Having about 500 million speakers, Arabic is notjust the only Semitic world language but also one of
the six UN-languages. The interest in Media Arabic
more specifically increased with the popularity of thesatellite station al-Jazeera and the modern necessity
for reflecting the Arab perspective of what is going onin the world. People interested in the Arab opinions
about what is going on in the Middle East as an
example should read Arabic newspapers since in‘Western’ media – as Mol (2006: 309f.) states: ‘often
only information on the Arab world gathered bypeople who have not mastered the Arabic language[…] often only interpretations of the Arab world froma Western view are found.’(semantic ambiguity) were deleted and the line resp.
lemma set frequencies were calculated. The latter
were broken up and analysed fully forming ourprimary knowledge base together with each lemma’s
estimated frequency in Google News. The material
was analysed manually in a top-down manner(average morphological ambiguity rate: 3 possible
analyses per token) and a frequency vocabulary ofjust above 3,500 lemmas (estimated to correspond to
CEFR B2) sorted by their roots resp. word families,
was extracted. It was demonstrated that these cover
95% of non-trivial, recent media texts which werelemmatised manually! Further, the number of lookups in dictionaries is reduced to 24 ± 10 times fortexts with an average length of about 550 ± 60 words.
In order to be on line with the language of media,
neologisms (extracted by word length, patterns
and concordances) and generally disregarded multi
word items (extracted by n-gram analyses, finding
collocations [after Dunning 1993]) which constituteintegral elements of it, were dealt with separately.
A discursive glossary including dialectal variants
which textbooks published up to now are lacking tops
the study off.

2. Methods & Results
On the base of newspaper texts (Written Media
Arabic) and – up to date disregarded – transcripts(Oral Media Arabic), a learner’s vocabulary wasdeveloped and evaluated in a computer-assisted way.
The corpora put together comprise 23.5 million
tokens (cp. Routledge Frequency Dictionaries) andwere edited in Perl (a.o. CP-1256 incompatible
ligatures were broken down and data read wrongly[about 2%] was deleted).

The present material can be useful for reading
courses in which students of different levels
and background come together in order to level
differences in vocabulary. Moreover, the corpora canbe used for learning collocations with the help ofconcordances in an explorative manner and makeidiomatic corrections in writing assignments.

3. Corpora
The largest corpus is made up of texts publishedbetween 1 June 2008 and 31 May 2009 in the
pan-Arab newspaper al-Quds al-ʿArabī (London)
consisting of about 20 million tokens. In order
to augment the sections of economy and sports a
corpus for each was built using texts from the Qatarinewspaper al-Šarq. Oral Media Arabic was regarded
by creating a corpus of about 1,5 million tokens outof al-Jazeera transcripts.

The corpora were analysed using Tim Buckwalter’sword-stem based Buckwalter Arabic Morphologic
Analyzer (BAMA 1.0) the output of which waschanged in such a way that only possible
lemmas per token could be saved (without
any further information). Then, line duplicates188

4. Text coverage
The following table informs about the contents andlength of ten texts (disregarding digits), for which
the dictionary’s coverage was tested. The first six are
from Lahlali 2008. One finds the number of unknown

Digital Humanities 2012

words (NF), the text coverage rate, the number ofwords which can be understood by morphologicaland generative knowledge (NWB) and the number oftherein subsumed proper nouns (PN) as well as thetherewith corrected coverage rate and the number oflook-ups (LU) in dictionaries.

Therefore, one can relativise the FSI classificationof Arabic – ex aequo with Chinese, Japanese andKorean – as super hard language and the opinionof some natives who – as Belnap puts it ironically(2008: 59) – ‘almost universally revere Arabic as themost difficult language in the world and therefore
essentially unlearnable by mortals.’

References
Belnap, R. K. (2008). If you build it, they will
come. In Z. Ibrahim and S. A. M. Makhlouf (eds.),
Linguistics in an Age of Globalization: Perspectives
on Arabic Language and Teaching. Cairo: AUC
Press, pp. 53-66.
Buckwalter, T. (2002). Buckwalter ArabicMorphological Analyzer Version 1.0. Linguistic Data
Consortium.
Dunning, T. (1993). Accurate methods for thestatistics of surprise and coincidence. Computational
Linguistics 19(1): 61-74.
Lahlali, El Mustapha (2008). Advanced Media
Arabic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Mol, M. van (2006). Arabic Receptive Language
Teaching: a new CALL approach. In K. M. Wahba etal. (eds.), Handbook for Arabic language teachingprofessionals. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp.
305-314.

189

Digital Humanities 2012

Texts in Motion –Rethinking Reader
Annotations in Online
Literary Texts
Fendt, Kurt E.

fendt@mit.edu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Kelley, Wyn

wkelley@mit.edu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Zhang, Jiazhangjia@mit.edu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Della Costa, Dave

dfd@mit.edu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Taking Reader’s Response Theory as the basis,
this short paper discusses approaches to enhancing
reader interaction with literary texts through social
annotation and visualization tools. The integrationof multimedia repositories, collaborative annotation
mechanisms, and advanced visualization techniques
creates a digital environment for students andscholars alike and provides readers with rich tools
for both interpreting literary texts and visualizing
reader interactions with these texts. Examples will
be drawn from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein andHerman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
Notes in margins of books fulfill several functions
for the individual reader: recording thoughts andassociations while reading, marking importantpassages or references to other parts within thesame text, noting possible links to other texts
and documents, or simply creating a reference
point to come back to in a subsequent reading.
From a cognitive point of view, marginalia offer
insights into the interaction of a reader with agiven text and offer hints towards understanding
the process of reading and sense making. Readinga book that already contains notes by anotherreader can be both enlightening or distracting, yet
it allows us to encounter another person’s reading
experience, forming another layer of meaning thatmight influence our own interpretation. It’s thisinteractive nature of the reading experience, theconstant interaction between the text itself and thereader’s response to it that, according to Wolfgang
Iser in the Implied Reader (1974)1, allows us tointerpret a literary text. The result is a ‘virtual text’
190

that is formed by a text and the reader‘s interaction
with it.
For centuries, marginalia have served as
instantiations of a rich reader engagement with atext, often providing hints to interpretations fromdifferent times, languages, and cultures thus forming
critical insights into texts that would otherwise be
lost. With more and more texts being digitized or
already born digital texts available online or onelectronic readers, the notion of marginalia in adigital space poses a number of interesting questions.
How can we preserve, enhance, and expand thiscritical interaction especially with literary texts,
particularly when we consider the social dimension
offered through digital media? How can we makeuse of large digital text, image, video, and audio
repositories to help us represent a text as a‘multi-dimensional space,’ as a ‘tissue of quotations
drawn from innumerable centers of culture’ (Roland
Barthes)2? What if we had digital tools that allowed
us to even visualize how readers experience atext by following their interactions, for example bygraphically representing their annotations across thewhole text? How do readers discover connections
within a text, across different texts, to source texts, toadaptations in other media, or derivative texts? What
if we could finally visualize the ‘act of reading’ (Iser)and analyze a literary text from the perspective ofboth the author and the readers?
A multidisciplinary research team at HyperStudio,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital
Humanities Lab within Comparative Media Studies,
has been exploring these questions, developing
digital tools that allow readers to create multimedia
annotations to literary texts, and testing them inthe literature classroom. HyperStudio has createdspecific visualization tools that allow for a visual
representation of the structural features of a text and,more importantly, offer graphs that show the reader
interactions with a given text both on page and wholebook levels. At the same time, these visualizations
also serve as navigational mechanisms through thetexts and annotations, both fine-grained and on awhole-text basis.
Pedagogically this work is informed by a wide rangeof theoretical and practical approaches: concepts ofmedia literacy, work on interactive and collaborative
text editing, a pedagogy of close reading and critical
writing devised to place literary texts in relation
to their multimedia sources and adaptations; andnew Digital Humanities tools for visualization, data
mining, and social networking.
At the heart of these different approaches lie
theories and technologies for understanding themix as a central feature of new media ‘literacies’or ‘competencies,’ in Henry Jenkins’ terminology3.

Digital Humanities 2012

The notion of remix borrowed from popular
musical forms has come to define new modes ofartistic production and consumption that inspire
active creators. Similarly in academic scholarshipand pedagogy, an appreciation for how artists
borrow and rework cultural materials has energized
the study of creative processes. In a literatureclassroom, traditional methods of close reading,source study, and literary analysis can merge withnewer interpretive models to view texts in creative
flux: as fluid vessels for recombining older forms ofinspiration and engendering new ones in different
media adaptations. Reading literary works as textual
remixes reinforces strong close reading and criticalskills while rejuvenating source study. We see text
annotation at the center of this notion of remix.
The visualization approaches have been informed
by a range of current online tools for visualizing
texts but also by artistic representations of text
corpora such as David Small’s work4, timeline
tools such as HyperStudio’s Chronos 5, and playful
approaches such as the ones by John Maeda6.
Existing visualization concepts such as word clouds,
word trees, phrase nets are only a few of the online
visual tools that help us graph occurrences of single
words or the relationship between words within texts.
Popular visualization tools such as the ones available
for experimentation at IBM‘s Many Eyes7 or scholarly
tools such as Voyeur8 help us quickly discover word
frequencies and usage patterns. Google’s Ngram
Viewer9 makes the leap beyond the single text andsearches across ‘millions’ of books and displays
occurrences of single or multiple words as line graphs
along a timeline that spans decades or even centuries.
While these tools help us greatly analyze a range of
linguistic aspects of the work of an author, they tell
us little about how readers interact with literary texts.
The tools that HyperStudio is developing allow us
to visualize how readers interact with a text, how
they discover connections within a text, across texts,
to source texts, to adaptations in other media, orderivative texts. In the end, they aim at visualizing the‘act of reading’ (Iser) and helping to analyze a literarytext from the perspective of both the author and thereaders.
From a software development point of view, we
are using principles of agile development and codesign, involving students, faculty, designers, andassessment specialists from the outset. Buildingon HyperStudio’s Ruby-on-Rails-based platform
Repertoire, the text annotation tools feature
shareable text repositories, easy role and groupmanagement, filtering of annotations via tags andsearch, and display of overlapping annotations fromdifferent users/groups. The visualization tools willallow a seamless transition from fine-grained displayof annotations to a global view of annotations within
a whole literary text.
We recognize that there are a number of text
annotation tools available, both open source andcommercial, that include some of the features
we are describing here. However, the approachto annotating texts with multimedia materials,
annotation across texts, a deep integration ofvisualization tools for both textual features andreader interaction, combined with a strong
educational focus, is unique in the field.
Early feedback from students using a prototype of
the annotation tools in two literature classes at
MIT has shown a deeper engagement by students
not only in processes of close reading and creatingreferences to external sources but also in students’requests for private workspaces where they could
upload their selection of literary texts and annotate
them in the same way for their own research, noteven related to any class assignments. In addition,
the HyperStudio team has also received a numberof feature requests from students. One feature inparticular was in great demand (on our schedule
for later implementation): the flexible comparisonand joint annotation of two texts side-by-side. Eachtext can be independently defined as source, version,
base, or adaptation, allowing for the display ofreferenced annotations even when the related text is
not present. Additional features such as annotationof non-contiguous portions of text and the creationof multimedia essays based on reader annotations
will be implemented in a next phase. By thetime of DH2012, HyperStudio will have tested theannotation tools and visualizations in half a dozen
courses and conducted extensive assessment.
Funding
This work was supported by the MIT Class Fund andthe MIT SHASS Teaching and Learning Fund.
Notes
1. Iser, W. (1974). The Implied Reader; Patterns ofCommunication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett.
Baltimore: John Hopkins UP.
2. Barthes, R. (1997). The Death of the Author. In Image – Music–
Text. New York: Hill & Wang, pp. 142-148.
3. Jenkins, J., et al. (2006). Confronting the Challenges ofParticipatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.
Chicago: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7
B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENK
INS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF accessed 25 March 2012.
4. Small, D. (1999). Talmud Project. http://www.davidsmal
l.com/portfolio/talmud-project/ accessed 25 March
2012

191

Digital Humanities 2012

5. MIT HyperStudio (2011). Chronos Timeline. http://hypers
tudio.mit.edu/software/chronos-timeline/
accessed 25 March 2012.
6. http://www.maedastudio.com/index.php
7. http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/m
anyeyes/ accessed 25 March 2012.
8. http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/
2012.

accessed 25 March

9. http://books.google.com/ngrams accessed 25 March
2012.

May Humanists Learn
from Artists a New Way
to Interact with Digital
Technology?
Franchi, Stefano

stefano@tamu.edu
Texas A&M University, USA

1. Takeovers
The two best-known interactions between
computational
technologies
andtraditional
Humanist pursuits are represented by the Artificial
Intelligence/Cognitive science movement and theroughly contemporary Digital Humanities approach(although the label became popular only recently).
Classic Artificial Intelligence saw itself as ‘antiphilosophy’ (Dupuy 2000; Agre 2005; Franchi2006): it was the discipline that could takeover philosophy’s traditional questions about
rationality, the mind/body problem, creative
thinking, perception, and so on, and solve themwith the help of a set of radically new synthetic,
experimentally based techniques. The true meaningof the ‘computational turn in philosophy’ lies in
its methodology, which allowed it to associateengineering techniques with age-old philosophicalquestions. This ‘imperialist’ tendency of cognitive
science (Dupuy 2000) was present from the very
beginning, even before the formalization of the
field into well – defined theoretical approaches(McCulloch 1989 [1948]; Simon 1994).
The Digital Humanities represent the reverse
modality of the encounter just described. The
most common approach (Kirschenbau 2010) uses
tools, techniques, and algorithms developed bycomputer scientists to address traditional questions
about the meaning of texts, their accessibility andinterpretation, and so on. Other approaches turntechnology into the scholar’s preferred object of study(Svensson 2010). The recent approach pioneered bythe ‘Philosophy of Information’ (Floridi 1999, 2011)
follows this pattern. Its focus on the much broader
category of ‘information’ substantially increases thescope of its inquiries, while firmly keeping it within
philosophy’s standard reflective mode.
The common feature of these two classic encounters
between the Humanities and computational theory
and technology is their one-sidedness. In either case,one of the two partners took over some relevant
aspects from the other participant and fit it within
192

Digital Humanities 2012its own field of inquiry (mostly questions, in AI’scase; mostly tools, for the Digital Humanities).
The appropriation, however, did not alter thetheoretical features of either camp. For instance,
AI and Cognitive Science researchers maintainedthat philosophy pre-scientific methodology had
only produced mere speculation that madethose problems unsolvable. Therefore, philosophy’s
accumulated wealth of reflection about the mind,
rationality, perception, memory, emotions, and soforth could not be used by the computational
approach. In McCulloch’s famous phrase, the ‘denof the metaphysician is strewn with the bones ofresearchers past.’ In the Digital Humanities’ case,the takeover happens at the level of tools. In mostcases, however, this appropriation does not become
an opportunity for a critical reflection on the role ofthe canon on liberal education, or for a reappraisal of
the role of the text and the social, political, and moral
roles it plays in society at large.

2. Artistic Digital Practices
Meetings between artists and computational
technology show the possibility of a different
paradigm. In many cases, making music, painting,producing installations, and writing with a computerchanges the concepts artists work with, and, atthe same time, forces computer sciences to change
theirs as well. There are many examples in the richhistory of ‘digital art,’ broadly understood (OuLiPo
1973; ALAMO (Atelier de Littérature Assistée par laMathématique et les Ordinateurs); Schaeffer 1952). I
will illustrate their general features with reference to
two more recent projects: the ‘microsound’ approach
to musical composition (Roads 2004) and the TGarden approach to agency (Sha 2002).
‘Microsounds’ are sonic objects whose timescale lies
between that of notes – the smallest traditionalmusic objects, whose duration is measured inseconds or fractions thereof – and samples – thesmallest bit, measured in microseconds (10-6). The
manipulation of microsounds broadens substantiallythe composer’s palette, but it is impossible without
the help of technological devices of various kinds,from granular synthesis software to high-level mixing
interfaces. Composers wishing to ‘sculpt’ sounds at
the microlevel face a double challenge that translates
into a mutual collaboration between compositional
and algorithmic techniques. On the one hand,
they need to broaden the syntax an grammar ofmusic’s language to allow the manipulation andaesthetic assessment of previously unheard of objects(Vaggione 2001). On the other hand, they needcomputer scientists and mathematicians to develop
alternative analytic and synthetic models of sound (inaddition to Fourier-transforms and similar methods)

capable of capturing the features of sonic events
lasting only a few milliseconds (Vaggione 1996).
The T-Garden environment produced at the
Topological Media Lab follows a structurally similarparadigm. It is a closed room within which people
wearing wireless sensors on their chest and limbs
can project images and sounds on the room’s walls
and ceiling. As the participants move around, their
gestures across the floor perturb the preexistingsonic and visual fields, thereby modifying it andintroducing new aural and visual patterns. As Sha
describes it:[The environment] was built to explore how people
can improvise gestures out of dense, evolving fieldsof media. In ordinary informal conversation, you
can spontaneously drag or pitch your speech toexpress irony, sympathy, and so forth. Similarly, ina T-Garden, by waving your arm you write video
or leave a trace in sound, and by moving about
the space, solo or in concert with other people, youconstruct a voice for yourself out of a sound fieldthat is summed from all the instrumental voices in
the room. […] as you play, your continuous motions
create an aural and visual ‘voice’ for yourself out of
the ambient perceptual field (Sha 2002: 441-442).
Whereas Roads explored a new sonic object lying
between samples and notes, Sha investigated asegment of human agency that is neither fully free
nor fully constrained. He took human gestures as aproxy for agency in general and conceived a projectthat demanded theoretical and technical work on
two fronts. On the artistic side, it mandated thetranslation of a theoretical reflection upon the statusof semiotic structures into a concrete installation.
It required the construction of an event that forced
the participants to reassess their conception ofcommunication and ‘freedom of speech.’ On thetechnical sides, it forced the computer scientists todevelop real-time systems capable of interpreting
human gestures and translating them into sonic andvisual equivalents the participants could reintegrate
into their communicative actions.
These two examples points to a pattern ofcooperation between work in computational andnon-computational disciplines that is deeply atodds with the AI/CogSci and DigHum patterns
discussed above. Instead of a takeover, the artistic
model produces a true encounter that changes bothpartners’ technical and theoretical apparatus.

3. Digital Theoretical Poiesis
Could the interaction pattern most favored by artists
be generalized to the Humanities? With the help ofAristotle’s classification of human activity as poiesis,
praxis, and theoria (Aristotle 1984, 1025b19-30, p.
193

Digital Humanities 20121619), it could be objected that artistic practices areexamples of poiesis. They produce objects on thebasis of materials and manipulating tools. Anything(including digital tools) that provides new materials(material substrate) or new ways of organizing themwill necessarily change artistic practices. And artists
have always been extremely keen on expanding theirmaterial and formal palettes, long before the adventof digital techniques. The daily work of Humanists,
it could be claimed, is essentially theoretical, since
their task is to critically reflect upon a previously
produced reality.

amo.mshparisnord.org/index.html (accessed 24

March 2012).

Aristotle (1984). The complete works of Aristotle.
Ed. by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
Cordeschi, R. (2002). Discovery of the Artificial:
Behavior, Mind, and Machines Before and Beyond
Cybernetics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Dupuy, J.-P. (2000). The Mechanization of
the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP.

Paradoxically, however, a serious critical engagementwith contemporary reality shows that the Aristotelian
tripartite distinction is untenable in the current
landscape. How can Humanities’ traditional
inquiries about human nature and human cultural
production still be relevant in a landscape in whichsome of the communicating agents may not behuman, partially or entirely? Can they go on in
the same way? And vice versa: are science andtechnology fully aware that the new digital artifacts
they are shepherding into the world may change
its landscape and transform worldly action at thepragmatic as well as at the theoretical level? Or are
they still relying upon a pre-digital universe in which
technological artifacts were always to be used as mere
tools deployed by humans, an assumption that seems
increasingly questionable? The genuine challenge
Humanists face when confronting the ‘computational
turn’ demands a truly poietic effort. Humanists will
have to engage in the constructions of new concepts
in a close peer-to-peer interaction with the ‘sciencesof the artificial’ (Cordeschi 2002) that may resultin a form of ‘digital theoretical poiesis’ much closer
to artistic practice than to their traditional forms ofinquiry.

Floridi, L. (1999). Philosophy and Computing: An
Introduction. London, New York: Routledge.

This suggestion does not pretend to exhaust thetheoretical options we have at our disposal whenreflecting upon the computational turn. There arecertainly other views that may legitimately claim to
be seeking the same goal. My contention, however,is that artistic practices in all forms of ‘digital art’can serve as an inspiration to all of the Humanities
disciplines. We can follow their path toward a newmode of digital encounter that does not fall into thewell-worn path of hostile takeovers by either partner.

Sha, X. (2002). Resistance Is Fertile: Gesture
and Agency in the Field of Responsive Media.
Configurations 10(3): 439-472.

References
Agre, P. E. (2005). The Soul Gained and Lost:
Artificial Intelligence as Philosophical Project. In
S. Franchi and G. Güzeldere (eds.), Mechanical
Bodies, Computational Minds. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
ALAMO (Atelier de Littérature Assistée par laMathématique et les Ordinateurs). http://al194

Floridi, L. (2011). The Philosophy of Information.
Oxford: Oxford UP.
Franchi, S. (2006). Herbert Simon, AntiPhilosopher. In L. Magnani (ed.), Computing
and Philosophy, Pavia: Associated International
Academic Publishers, pp. 27-40.
Kirschenbau, M. G. (2010). What Is Digital
humanities and What’s It Doing in English
Departments? ADE Bullettin 150: 1-7.
McCulloch, W. S. (1989[1948]). Through theDen of the Metaphysician. In W. S. McCulloch,
Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, pp. 142-156.
OuLiPo (1973). La littérature potentielle. Paris:
Gallimard.
Roads, C. (2004). Microsound. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
Schaeffer, P. (1952). À la recherche d’une musiqueconcrète. Paris: Seuil.

Simon, H. (1994). Literary Criticism: a Cognitive
Approach. In S. Franchi and G. Güzeldere (eds.),
Bridging the Gap, Vol. 4. 1. Stanford Humanities
Review, Special Supplement, pp. 1-26.
Svensson, P. (Summer 2010). The Landscape ofDigital Humanities. Digital Humanities Quarterly
4(1).
Vaggione, H. (1996). Articulating Microtime
Computer Music Journal 20(2): 33-38.
Vaggione, H. (2001). Some Ontological Remarks
about Music Composition Processes. Computer
Music Journal 25(1): 54-61.

Digital Humanities 2012

A flexible model for thecollaborative annotation ofdigitized literary works
Gayoso-Cabada, Joaquingayoxo@gmail.com
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Ruiz, Cesar

cruiz85@gmail.com
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Pablo-Nuñez, Luis

lpnunez@filol.ucm.es
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Sarasa-Cabezuelo, Antonio

asarasa@fdi.ucm.es
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Goicoechea-de-Jorge, Maria

mgoico@filol.ucm.es
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Sanz-Cabrerizo, Amelia

amsanz@filol.ucm.es
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Sierra-Rodriguez, Jose-Luisjlsierra@fdi.ucm.es
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spainfrom similar approaches (Azouaou & Desmoulins
2006; Bechhofer at al. 2002; Koivunen 2005; Riosda Rocha et al. 2009; Schroeter et al. 2006; Tazi etal. 2003), is to promote the collaborative creation ofannotation schemas by communities of researchers,
teachers and students, and the use of these schemas
in the definition of annotation activities on literaryworks. It results in a very flexible and adaptive model,
able to be used by many different communities
of experts in literature defending different critical
literary theories and for different annotation tasks. In
this paper we present this annotation model.

2. The @Note Annotation Model
2.1. Structure of the model
The structure of the @Note annotation model issummarized in the UML class diagram (Booch et al.
2005) of Fig. 1. In this model:- Annotation management communities aregroups of annotation managers, experts inliterature (teachers, researchers, etc) who act asadministrators to create activities, to select works
and to organize activity groups.
- Annotation communities, in their turn, aregroups of annotators, students / pupils interested
in literature who perform proposed annotation
activities.
- Each annotation activity comprises (i) a digitized
work, (ii) a metalevel-oriented annotation
schema, (iii) a work-oriented annotation schema.

1. Introduction
The Complutense University has been one of thefirst European universities that has collaborated with
Google’s project1 by putting on the Web 100,000
volumes from its ancient fund. However scholars
notice that these digitized texts are often of no muchuse to professors-researchers-students in literatureunless additional tools are provided, to enhance theeducational and research value of this material. In
particular, the ability of making annotations on thesetexts has been largely recognized as a basic meanof adding value to this kind of digitized resources(Rios da Rocha et al. 2009). In this paper we present
the annotation model used in @Note 1.0, a systemdeveloped at UCM funded by the Google’s 2010
Digital Humanities Award program.
@Note 1.0 allows us to retrieve digitized works
from Google Books collection and add annotations
to enrich the texts with research and learning
purposes: critical editions, reading activities, elearning tasks, etc. One of the main features of@Note annotation model, which distinguishes it- In this context, the works are the literary texts thatcan be annotated during the annotation activities.
Annotations, in their turn, are characterizedby: (i) an annotation anchor (the region of
the work to which the annotation refers), (ii)an annotation content (a free rich-text piecethat actually configure the annotation), (iii) a
set of annotation types (semantic qualifiers forannotations) chosen from the annotation schemas
attached to the annotation activity (at least one
from the metalevel-oriented annotation schema).

Figure 1: @Note information model

195

Digital Humanities 2012

- The annotation schemas are explicit formalizationof the types of annotations that can be carriedout on works. In @Note, annotation schemas
are hierarchies formed by annotation types
and annotation categories (sets of annotation
types and/or others, more specifically, annotation
categories). In their turn, they can be metaleveloriented annotation schemas (schemas whichusually comprise concepts concerning particularliterary theories around which the annotation
activities are articulated), or work-oriented
annotation schemas (schemas that capture aspects
relative to the relationships between annotations
and their anchors). While schemas of the first typeare created by annotation managers, schemas ofthe second type are usually created by annotators.

course, while Fig 3b despites the description
logic’s counterpart. This simple interpretation isstill powerful-enough to enable powerful annotation
browsing and annotation recovering behavior.
Indeed:Figure 3: (a) A fragment of annotation
schema (b) description logic counterpart- Annotations can be browsed using annotation
schemas, in a similar way to a folder explorer in afilesystem. In each step, there is a category or a typeselected, and the user will see all the annotations
entailed by such a selected element.
- Queries consist of arbitrary Boolean formulae
involving annotation types and categories, being
the outcomes the annotations entailed by suchformulae.
In both cases, since entailment will be performed
according to the description logic principles, theprocess will take into account the is-a relationshipmade explicit by the annotation schema.
Figure 2: Example of rules governing the annotation
process (informally described using natural language)

2.2. The annotation process
The @Note annotation process governs how tocreate the different types of information elements
envisioned in the annotation model. For this purpose,@Note introduces a set of rules governing aspects
like information visibility, creation and modification
privileges of annotations and annotation schemas,
etc. Although, by lack of space, these rules will
not be detailed here, in Fig. 2 we include an
example concerning an informal description of someof the rules governing the management of annotation
schemas.

2.3. Annotation browsing andrecovering
Annotation schemas in @Note are seen as T-boxesof description logic theories (Brachman & Levesque2004). For instance, Fig 3a shows, edited in@Note, a fragment of the annotation schema used
at UCM in an English Literature introductory
196

2.4. Some technical details
The system has been entirely developed using Google
technologies for the development of Rich-Internet
Applications (RIAs) (Fraternali et al. 2010): GWTin the client side and the Google App Engine’s
facilities in the server side (Unruh 2010). Fig. 4 showssome snapshots of the system. The current version
runs on the fully free-access books integrated in
Google Books, and, in particular, on the UCM-Google
collection. The works retrieval is achieved by the useof the Google Books API through REST (Richardson& Ruby 2007), and then presented to clients in an
asynchronous way to keep them responsive to theirevents.

Digital Humanities 2012

This work has been funded by Google with agrant of the Google’s 2010 Digital Humanities
award program entitled Collaborative annotationof digitalized literary texts. Additionally, thiswork has been performed in the context of the
project grants of the Spanish Ministry for Researchand Innovation (FF12008-06924-C02-01 and
TIN2010-21288-C02-01), UCM (PIMCDs 2010/177
and 2011/313) and Santander-UCM (GR 42/10 962022).

References

Figure 4: Some snapshots of @Note

3. Conclusions and Future Works@Note promotes a fully collaborative annotation
process, in which not only literary works arecollaboratively annotated, but also annotation
schemas are collaboratively created. The @Note
system has been evaluated at UCM by several
researchers and students in literature. They
highlighted the flexibility of the annotation model,
and, in particular, the ability to create and shareannotation schemas tailored according to different
critical perspectives and annotation activities.
Additionally, they appreciate a sufficient expressive
power from a browsing and recovering point of view.
They also remarked the educational potential of thetool, although some advanced features could add
some conceptual difficulties for students.
Currently we are working to adapt the annotation
tool in order to facilitate its connection to arepository of learning objects, so as to allow thestorage of literary texts’ annotations as learning
objects (Polsani 2003), and to make possible therecovery of those annotations and move about
them according to the associated metadata. Thus,
we are developing a communal working space forthe creation of written compositions in different
traditions and languages. We are also experimenting
with the students’ capability for developing their own
catalogues, annotating the literary texts according tothem and reusing their annotations in the productionof critical essays. Additionally, we are working onconnecting our system with other digital libraries(in particular, with Hathi Trust2). Finally, we areplanning to address interoperability issues, in orderto enable the interchange of annotations according
to some of the emerging standards proposed by thedigital humanities community (e.g., OAC3).
Acknowledgements

Azouaou, F., and C. Desmoulins (2006).
MemoNote, a context-aware annotation tool forteachers. Proceedings of the 7th International
Conference on Information Technology Based
Higher Education and Training ITHET’06, Sidney,
Australia, July 2006.
Bechhofer, S., L. Carr, C. Goble, S. Kampa,
and T. Miles-Board (2002). The Semantics ofSemantic Annotation. Proceedings of the FirstInternational Conference on Ontologies, DataBases,
and Applications of Semantics for Large Scale
Information Systems ODBASE’02, Irvine, CA, USA,
October 2002.
Booch, G., J. Rumbaugh, and I. Jacobson(2005). The Unified Modeling Language User Guide(2nd Edition). Boston: Adisson-Wesley.
Brachman, R., and H. Levesque (2004).
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.
Amsterdam: Morgan-Kauffmann.
Fraternali, P., R. Gustavo, and F. SánchezFigueroa (2010). Rich Internet Applications. IEEE
Internet Computing 14(3): 9-12.
Koivunen, M.-R. (2005). Annotea and Semantic
Web Supported Collaboration. Proceedings of the
UserSWeb Workshop – 2nd European Semantic
Web Conference, Heraklion, Grece, June 2005.
Polsani, P. (2003). Use and abuse of reusable
learning objects. Journal of Digital Information
3(4).
Richardson, L., and S. Ruby (2007). Restful web
services. Beijing: O’Reilly.
Rios da Rocha, T., R. Willrich, R. Fileto,and S. Tazi (2009). Supporting Collaborative
Learning Activities with a Digital Library andAnnotations. Proceedings of the 9th IFIP World
Conference on Computers in Education WCCE’09,
Bento Gonçalves, Brazil, July 2009.
Schroeter, R., J. Hunter, J. Guerin, I.
Khan, I., and M. A. Henderson (2006).
Synchronous Multimedia Annotation System for

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Secure Collaboratories. Proceedings of the Second
IEEE International Conference on e-Scienceand Grid Computing e-Science ’06, Amsterdam,
Netherlands, December 2006.
Tazi, S., Y. Al-Tawki, and K. Drira K.
(2003). Editing pedagogical intentions for document
reuse. Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Technology
Based Higher Education and Training ITHET’03,
Marrakesh, Morocco, July 7-9, 2003.
Unruh, A. (2010 ). Google App Engine Java andGWT Application Development. Birmingham: Packt
Publishing.
Notes
1. http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/atencion/25403.php
2. http://www.hathitrust.org/
3. http://www.openannotation.org/

HyperMachiavel: atranslation comparison tool
Gedzelman, Séverine

severine.gedzelman@ens-lyon.fr
ENS de Lyon, France

Zancarini, Jean-Claude
jean-claude.zancarini@ens-lyon.fr
ENS de Lyon, France

1. Introduction
The HyperMachiavel project started with the ideaof a tool that would aid research communities
comparing several editions of one text and inparticular comparing translations.
The Italian studies department (Triangle laboratory)
at ENS de Lyon has been working for many years
on fundamental texts, from Machiavelli, Guicciardiniand other contemporary followers, that put forward
new political concepts throughout Europe in the 16th
century. The question addressed in the project was
mainly about the transfer of these concepts from one
language to another, and especially their reception in
France. The first aligned corpora tested in our tool
gathers different editions of Machiavelli’s Il Principe,
the princeps edito from Blado in 1532 and the first
four French translations of the 16th century.
Inspired by machine translation and lexicographic
domains, the system presented in this paper proposes
an annotation environment dedicated to the editionof lexical correspondences and offers different
views to assist humanities researchers in theirinterpretations of the quality and the specificities oftranslator’s work.

2. Viewing and Searching in
Aligned Corpora
2.1. Synoptic View
To be able to identify lexical correspondences,machine translation tools usually propose a frameof two panels, one for the source text and the otherfor the target text. The visualized interface is meant
for annotators to easily revise the results obtained
from automatic word alignment. In general it only
considers a pair of texts at a time.
In the world of digital editions, text comparison has
always been of great interest and the request to view
diplomatic vs normalized transcriptions, or simply
198

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different editions of one text increases all the morethat digital data become truly available. Systems suchas the Versioning Machine (Schreibman et al. 2007)
already offers parallel views for TEI aligned corpora
with no constraint on the number of displayedtexts. Being able to take into consideration several
target versions was an important starting point when
designing HyperMachiavel. Therefore the main
panel offers a ‘Parallel view’ (see Fig. 1) to interact
with processes that need global context visualization(e.g. concordancer results).

2.2. Alignment
To deal with text alignment, many tools working
with pair of texts (bitext2tmx, alinea or mkAlign1,
Fleury et al. 2008) uses statistical measuresof co-occurrence or combines word distribution
algorithm with cognates detection. Although original
investigation on automatic alignment has beenproceeded for non modern texts like in the Holinshed
Project (Cummings & Mittelbach 2010), our focus
was to fulfill the need for editing and controlling
lexical correspondences. Exploring these techniques
will be done in a second development phase but
for the moment, HyperMachiavel imports aligned
corpora encoded in XML-TMX or XML-TEI andproposes a manual alignment feature for additional
text files.
Because old edition texts usually present great
variability in the lexical forms, we favored acomputer-aided system for bilingual search and put
efforts in the lexicography work environment.

2.3. Lexicography and Lexical
Tagging
Linguistic annotation tools make use of external
dictionaries to tag texts but cannot be applied on
old texts per se. Combining this process with theuser’s analysis of the text to build its own lexical
resource, either by bringing corrections to the modelor proposing partial tagging, is a necessary condition
for our study. Recent work conducted by Lay et al.
2010 have also emphasized the user’s interactionin the lexical exploration and offers customizationof lexical resources. HyperMachiavel follows thatpath by presenting tokenizer’s choice (among which
TreeTagger java implementation by Helmud Schmid)
and a general framework to consolidate endogenous
or external lexical resources that would work inharmony with the defined corpora.
Information obtained from tokenization likecategory, lemma, word onset and offset localisationin the texts are registered in XML files. A full-text
search engine, specially designed for the tool, uses
this information, so does the ‘Vocabulary view’ listing

all the forms for each language in the corpora. Thisview displays frequency information by text (see Fig.
2) and brings a first impression on lexical distribution
among versions, or authors in our case.
The use of concordancer (Key Word In Context)that classically links dictionary entries to corpora
occurrences is central in the system (results ofmonolingual search or after a selection from the‘Vocabulary view’, e.g. Fig. 3). As for equivalences
detection are concerned, some authors have shownthat bilingual concordancers (ParaConc; Barlow etal. 2004; ConcQuest; Kraif 2008) are very helpful.
However viewing results of bilingual search withconcordancers in our case is not sufficient. As wewant to compare numerous source and target texts,a ‘Parallel Indexes view’ has been designed and is
described hereafter.

3. Exploring Equivalences
3.1. Equivalences Detection andValidation
Annotating equivalences is a long process and asemi-automatic scenario has been introduced withthe bilingual search. Results from that search aredisplayed in the ‘Parallel indexes view’ (see Fig. 4).
Some results will show co-presence in an aligned
segment of at least one source and target searched
items, but source or target occurrences could befound alone.
When the user is faced with empty results (sourceor target), the ‘Parallel view’ helps detect otherpotential equivalence expression. In some cases, it
could mean that no translation has been given orthat the occurrence belong to another semantic group(e.g. homonyms, polysemes).
Validation of real equivalences versus suggested
equivalences from the bilingual search, is done bychecking the lines. However manual completion isoften required, especially when source or target referto specific expressions or to other lexical terms thatwere not used in the search.

3.2. Graph Visualizations
Exploring edited equivalences can be pursued inother environments like excel or any data analysis
programs but HyperMachiavel has developed somefeature to highlight thematic groups of equivalences
and show stylistic differences between translations.
For each dictionary entry, one can ask to see
validated target equivalences. Information about
their frequency and distribution between versions oftext help the user evaluate translator’s appropriation
199

Digital Humanities 2012of the source text (see Fig. 5). Graph visualizations
illustrate the same information but the user can go
further and ask to see equivalents of equivalents
until no new information is provided. Groups ofequivalences usually appear and interrogate the user
on the conceptual themes exposed in the corpora.
In the current aligned corpora, we have noticed
that most French translators of Il Principe depict
the polysemic and complex reality of new politicalconcepts at that time by giving various lexicalequivalences. Yet one of the translators prefers
to steadily deliver concepts with almost uniquetranslation (e.g. ‘stato’ with only ‘estat(s)’) perhaps
believing that the rest of the text would do the rest.

4. Conclusion
This paper presents the state of developmentof HyperMachiavel2, a tool distributed under afrench open-source licence (Cecill-B). Although thedemonstration was done with only french-italian
texts the tool was defined to support manual editionof equivalences for aligned multilingual corpora andlexicography work.

Figure 1: ‘Parallel view’ of the aligned texts (rightpanel) and ‘Corpus view’ are showing the text
structure common to all versions (left panel)

Providing import and export formats recommended
by the digital humanity community ensure reuse of
corpora in other environment such as text mining
platform using the full complexity of TEI encoded
corpora (e.g. TXM3 , Heiden 2010). Use of automaticalignment algorithms will be tested with anotheraligned corpora based on Machiavelli’s The Art ofWar-translations. The idea is to extend our toolfeatures for comparable corpora (different texts ofauthors highly influenced by Machiavelli’s work).

Figure 2: The ‘Vocabulary view’ presents lexical forms and theirfrequency (number of occurrences) in the different aligned texts

Funding
The work presented here is carried out within the
research project (2008-2011) ‘Naissance, formes etdéveloppements d’une pensée de la guerre, desguerres d’Italie à la paix de Westphalie (1494-1648)’,
funded by the French Agence Nationale Recherche.

Figure 3: The ‘KWIC view’ shows occurrencesof the french old form ‘toutesfois’200

Digital Humanities 2012

Asia Conference on Language, Information andComputation, Sendai, Japan 2010.
Kraif, O. (2008). Comment allier la puissancedu TAL et la simplicité d’utilisation ? L’exemple
du concordancier bilingue ConcQuest. In Actes
JADT 2008, Journées Internationales d’Analyse
Statistiques des Données Textuelles, Lyon, 2008.
Lay, M.-H., and B. Pincemin (2010). Pour une
exploration humaniste des textes : AnaLog. In Actes
JADT 2010, Journées Internationales d’Analyse
Statistiques des Données Textuelles, Roma, 2010.

Figure 4: The ‘Parallel Indexes view’ shows searched source
and target expressions that appear in the same localization.
The bilingual search example was performed with ‘spetie’
as source expression and ‘espece(s)’ as target expressions

Schreibman, S., A. Hanlon, S. Daugherty, andT. Ross (2007). The Versioning Machine v3.1: A Toolfor Displaying and Comparing Different Versions of
Literary Texts. In Digital Humanities 2007. Urbana,
Illinois. Jun. 2007.
TEI Consortium. (2008). TEI P5: Guidelines forElectronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Version
1.1.0.,
4th July. L. Burnard and S. Bauman, eds., TEI
Consortium. http://www.teic.org/Guidelines/
P5

Notes

Figure 5: Views of French equivalents
for the Italian concept ‘ordine’

References
Bowker, L., and M. Barlow (2004). Bilingual
concordancers and translation memories: A
comparative evaluation. In E. Y. Rodrigo (ed.),Proceedings of the Second International Workshop
on Language Resources for Translation Work,
Research and Training. Geneva, Switzerland, August28, 2004, pp. 70-83

1. Software‘alinea’isdeveloped
by
O.
Kraif
( http://w3.u-grenoble3.fr/kraif/index.php?It
emid=43&id=27&option=com_content&task=view),‘bitext2tmx’ ( http://bitext2tmx.sourceforge.net )by S. Santos, S. Ortiz-Rojas, M. L. Forcada and now R. Martin,and ‘mkAlign’ by S. Fleury ( http://www.tal.univ-paris
3.fr/mkAlign )2. The software can be downloaded at http://hypermachiav
el.ens-lyon.fr
3. TXM is a collaborative, open-souce software initiated by
S.Heiden and the textometrie project members ( http://tex
tometrie.ens-lyon.fr/ )Cummings, J., and A. Mittelbach (2010).
The Holinshed Project: Comparing and linking
two editions of Holinshed’s Chronicle. In Citation
Information. International Journal of Humanities
and Arts Computing 4: 39-53 DOI 10.3366/
ijhac.2011.0006, ISSN 1753-8548, October 2010.
Fleury, S., and M. Zimina (2008). Utilisations
de mkAlign pour la traduction philologique. Actes
JADT 2008, Journées Internationales d’Analyse
Statistiques des Données Textuelles, Lyon, 2008.
Heiden, S. (2010). The TXM Platform: Building
Open-Source Textual Analysis Software Compatible
with the TEI Encoding Scheme. In 24th Pacific201

Digital Humanities 2012

Discrimination sémantiquepar la traduction
automatique, expériences
sur le dictionnaire françaisde Littré
Glorieux, Frédéricfrederic.glorieux@enc.sorbonne.fr
École nationale des chartes, France

Jolivet, Vincent

vincent.jolivet@enc.sorbonne.fr
École nationale des chartes, France

L’exploration d’un corpus sur un champ sémantique,avec plusieurs mots clés, produit de longues
concordances fastidieuses à dépouiller. Les outils
proposent de trier les résultats par les mots ducontexte, ce qui permet rarement de dégager desclasses sémantiques éclairantes quand le vocabulaire
est varié, sans mots spécialement fréquents. Des
regroupements peuvent être opérés par référenceà un système de traits sémantiques, ou ‘sèmes’,
attribués aux mots du contexte. Maurice Gross1
a ainsi montré comment quelques traits peuéquivoques tels que humain–non humain pouvaientdistinguer des acceptions: par exemple, le verbe
permettre signifie généralement ‘autoriser’ lorsqueson sujet est une personne, ou bien, il signifie‘rendre possible’ lorsque le sujet est une chose.
La sémantique syntaxique n’est cependant pas
suffisante pour dégager toutes les significations.
François Rastier2 a montré que l’interprétation dusens dans un texte, et non seulement dans une
phrase, s’appuyait sur l’isotopie de bien d’autressèmes, par exemple /noirceur/, /rapidité/, et tout
le spectre des valeurs et des sentiments. Il a
par ailleurs insisté sur les limites des ontologies
classificatoires de concepts, comme WordNet3. Si
un lexique sémique informatisé serait souhaitable, iln’est malheureusement pas encore constitué4. Notre
communication explore les potentialités et les limites
de la traduction automatique comme instrument dediscrimination sémantique, en observant d’abord son
application à un dictionnaire.
L’informatisationdeladésambiguïsation
sémantique a très tôt (1949) été liée à la traduction
automatique, notamment par Warren Weaver5.
Lorsqu’un traducteur humain rencontre en contexte
le mot français ‘société’, il a l’expertise pour choisir
en anglais entre ‘society’ et ‘company’. Comment
résoudre informatiquement cette ambiguïté? Weaver

202

appelait à la constitution d’un lexique inventoriant
les différents sens de chaque mot, avec des critères
repérables dans le contexte permettant d’opérer ladistinction. Une telle ressource suppose l’existenced’universaux linguistiques partagés entre les langues,(language invarients selon les termes de Weaver). À
cette époque, c’était visionnaire, la désambiguïsation
sémantique se présentait comme un préalable à la
traduction automatique.
Actuellement, les traducteurs automatiques enligne sont de plus en plus performants, pourtant,la désambiguïsation sémantique ne présente pasde résultats aussi convaincants. Par exemple lesmoteurs de recherche ne distinguent pas encore
strictement plusieurs sens d’un même mot, commesociété: ‘communauté organisée’ ou ‘entreprise’. Des
résultats ont été obtenus, mais les progrès butent sur
un obstacle humain. Jean Véronis6 a ainsi montré
qu’avec un même dictionnaire et les même textes,
des personnes n’affectaient pas le même sens à unmot équivoque (barrage). Les nuances proposées
par les lexicographes diffèrent selon les dictionnaires
et sont comprises différemment par les lecteurs. Si
la traduction automatique a progressé, ce n’est pas
par la désambiguïsation sémantique, mais par laloi de Moore qui a augmenté exponentiellement lacapacité des ordinateurs, qui désormais mémorisentet traitent une grande quantité de traductionsalignées.
Même si elle n’est pas explicitement formalisée,la traduction automatisée effectue pourtant biendes distinctions sémantiques. Dans votre traducteur
préféré, proposez par exemple ces deux phrases: ‘La
société doit protéger les faibles. La société protège
ses biens.’; vous pouvez obtenir les traductions:‘Society must protect the weak. The company
protects its assets.’, ‘Die Gesellschaft muss den
Schutz der Schwachen. Das Unternehmen schützt
sein Vermögen.’, ‘La sociedad debe proteger a losdébiles. La empresa protege sus activos.’ Pourraiton mobiliser cette information sémantique pouropérer des distinctions dans une même langue?
Pour observer le phénomène plus précisément,nous avons établi une édition électronique duDictionnaire de la langue française d’Émile
Littré (1863-1872)7. Comme tout dictionnaire, leLittré distingue les différentes significations d’unmême mot vedette, mais il a aussi l’avantage decomporter de nombreuses citations et exemples
d’emplois. L’auteur revendique un ordre historiquedes significations, ou du moins, fidèle à unereconstruction génétique selon ses convictions
positivistes. Si la finesse des définitions etdes distinctions de Littré impressionne encore,leur ordre convient beaucoup moins au lecteurd’aujourd’hui. Nous avons fait l’expérience d’utiliser
la traduction automatique pour réordonner l’article

Digital Humanities 2012

selon l’équivalent traductionnel proposé dans une
langue cible. Soit par exemple l’article SOCIÉTÉ,
toutes les occurrences de société dans les exemples
et les citations sont en gras. La traduction
automatique en anglais renvoie l’article traduit, avec
en gras des occurrences de society, company, voire
corporation, venture, ou partnership. Ces mots
servent ensuite de clés pour regrouper différemment
les paragraphes de Littré, et proposer un nouvel
ordre de lecture, selon le réseau sémantique dela langue cible. Avec une langue qu’il connait,
le lecteur constate évidemment des erreurs detraduction, notamment dans les textes anciens ou
les phrases tronquées, mais il est aussi surpris
par la reconnaissance de locutions rares (PetitesMaisons: ‘madhouse’). Sur des articles longs, avec
assez d’exemples par significations, le classementpar équivalent traductionnel dégage généralement
des distinctions éclairantes, en pondérant mieux
les acceptions fréquentes, en regroupant des usages
que la doctrine historique de Littré avait séparé.
Au fond, le procédé retrouve la pratique ancienne
dans les langues européennes de se référer à une
autre langue (en général le latin) pour distinguer lessignifications dans une langue vivante. La traduction
automatique n’a évidemment pas l’exactitude d’un
jugement humain, mais elle permet de projeter les
textes sur des dizaines de langues, qui sont autant
d’espaces sémantiques originaux. La comparaison etla combinaison de plusieurs langues produisent desordres de lecture parfois difficiles à interpréter, mais
rarement dénués de sens.

3. http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
4. Mathieu Valette et al. (2006). Éléments pour la génération declasses sémantiques à partir de définitions lexicographiques.
Pour une approche sémique du sens. In TALN’06, 2006.
5. Le Translation memorandum, 1949.
6. Sense tagging: does it make sense? In A. Wilson, P. Rayson etT. McEnery (dir.), Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: a festschrift
for Geoffrey Leech. Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2003.
7. http://corpus.enc.sorbonne.fr/littre/

La traduction automatique articule des distinctions
sémantiques, certes biaisées par les limites del’informatique, les intérêts pratiques des utilisateurs,
ou le lexique de l’anglais qui sert généralement
de langue pivot, mais pourtant révélatrices del’expérience singulière de nombreuses langues. Cetteapproche convient aux digital humanities parcequ’elle ne suppose pas a priori des universauxde signification et tente plutôt d’instrumentaliser
l’interculturalité afin de mieux comprendre sa propre
culture. La procédure peut être imitée par desdizaines d’autres langues, sans constitution coûteusede lexiques sémantiques ou de corpus annotés. Le
lexicographe, d’abord, sera invité à revoir le plan deses articles, à se dégager de ses présupposés logiques,par comparaison au découpage lexical d’autres
langues. Nous utilisons ce type de procédures dansdes interfaces interactives de recherche, afin d’élargir
le bouquet de mots d’une requête, puis pour trier lesconcordances.
Notes
1. Les bases empiriques de la notion de prédicat sémantique.
Langages 63, Paris 1981, pp. 7-52.
2. Arts et sciences du texte. Paris: PUF 2001.

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Digital Humanities 2012

The Myth of the New:
Mass Digitization, DistantReading and the Future of
the Book
Gooding, Paul Matthew
paul.gooding.10@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Warwick, Clairec.warwick@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Terras, Melissa

m.terras@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

1. Introduction
This paper proposes the importance of developinga realistic theoretical framework for the rise ofmass digitization: the importance of the diffusionof innovations in shaping public opinion ontechnology; hyperbole and the myth of the ‘digitalsublime’ (Mosco 2004); and the role of different
media in shaping human understanding. It proposesthat mass digitization can only be viewed as asignificant deviation from the print medium when
it emerges from the shadow of the Gutenberg Pressand exerts a similarly powerful paradigm of its own,
and that as a result there is a disconnect between thereality of the medium and the discourse with which
it is surrounded.

2. Research context
In recent years companies such as Google havegenerated huge interest in their attempts to digitize
the world’s books. Described by Crane as ‘vast
libraries of digital books’ (2006), they provide a
powerful future vision where books exist within adigital version of the mythical universal library. Yet
we know very little about what to do with thesebooks once they are digitized, or even how they arebeing used by researchers and the wider public. The
contemporary debate is defined by hyperbole andthe belief that digital texts will inevitably destroy
the print paradigm, a discourse that reflects therhetorical direction of many historical reactions totechnological change.
At the same time, a new research method which
Moretti labels ‘distant reading’ (2007) allows
researchers to undertake quantitative analysis of

204

these massive literary corpora using tools such as
the Google Ngrams Viewer1. Important work onthese corpora has been carried out within the Digital
Humanities community, such as projects by Jockers(2011) and Cohen (2006), and further research is
being made possible by Digging into Data2 funding
from NSF3, NEH4, SSHRC5 and JISC6. However, as
we shall argue below, it is vital that we understandthe theoretical background of such research, and its
potential effects on scholarly methodology in both
DH and traditional literary analysis.

3. Quantitative methods andtheories of technology
Rogers (2003) tells us that far from being adeterministic inevitability, the success of a newtechnology relies in no small part upon external
human factors. The role of opinion leaders isessential to this, and in the case of mass digitization
the literature is filled with examples of the
fetishization of both print and digital technologies.
Gurus and promoters tell us that digitization will
improve the world, and render obsolete what hasgone before; others express concern about thecataclysmic effects that new technologies may haveon humanity (Mosco 2004: 24). The result is a
powerful narrative of ruptures and dramatic change,a myth that is historically common yet rarelyreflected in reality.
This narrative has been shaped by a debate that has
spanned decades (Benjamin 1936; McLuhan 1962;
Barthes 1977; Baudrillard 1994; Lanier 2011), and so
it is essential to consider the influence that theorists
have exerted on the contemporary debate, and the
misconceptions that have arisen as a result. For
example, McLuhan’s conception of a global village,a ‘single constricted space resonant with tribal
drums’ (1962), is at odds with our experience of thecontemporary World Wide Web. The village operates
in a semi-closed system with clear boundaries,
whereas the Web is unprecedented in its scale andopenness. It more accurately resembles the loose
structure of a modern city, and therefore mirrors
the behavioural changes that have been noted inresidents of large cities. With increased access to
information comes an increased opportunity cost, thesense that whatever a person does will necessarily
involve missing out on something else potentially
useful (Deutsch 1961: 102). Accordingly, we cansee that both city dwellers and web users exhibit
similar behaviour in filtering and sorting the mass of
information to which they are exposed. As a resultof this promiscuous, diverse reading style (Nicholas
et al. 2004) the authorial voice has been side-lined,
and the growth of a specific cultural movement that

Digital Humanities 2012

hyperbolises quantitative analysis of literary corpora
threatens to hasten this process.
Many of the quantitative methods we have alreadyseen hold great potential as research methods (Cohen
2006; Jockers 2011; Michel & Shen 2010; Moretti2007), but there is a wider social discourse thatappears to have taken quantitative analysis as asign that traditional methods have, as with print,
become an unnecessary distraction. This culture
has redefined the content of texts as information,in an overly literal interpretation of the death of
the author that undermines both authority andcontext. Information, viewed in this manner, is an
abstract entity analogous to computerized data andtherefore open to the same methods of interrogation(Nunberg 2010). There is no doubt that quantitative
analysis holds great potential when combined withclose reading, but we have witnessed a rhetoricthat argues that close reading becomes unnecessary
when large data becomes available (Anderson 2008).
What appears to be a revolutionary faith in massdigitization, though, disguises a deeply conservativetechnological determinism that is reflected in themanner that digitization still so closely remediates
the print medium.

from institutions such as the British Library. It willargue that we must look beyond the noise thatcharacterises the theoretical framework proposed
above, and learn more about how the true impact ofmass digitization.

References
Anderson,C.
(2008).
The
endoftheory: the data deluge that makes thescientific method obsolete. Wired. Available
at: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory [Accessed May 31,
2011].
Barthes, R. (1977). The death of the author. In
Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation.
Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P.
Benjamin, W. (1936). The work of art in the ageof mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations. New
York: Schocken Books.
Bolter, J. D., and R. A. Grusin (1996).
Remediation. Configurations 4(3): 311-358.

Instead of acting as a disruptive force, massdigitization borrows greatly from the print mediumthat it remediates, a feature common to technologies
in the early stages of their development (Bolter &Grusin 1996: 356-357). Even quantitative analysis
can operate as a confirmatory method; rather thancreating new knowledge it often acts only to confirm
what humanities scholars already knew. The digitalform, then, still operates ‘not as a radical break but
as a process of reformulating, recycling, returningand even remembering other media’ (Garde-Hansen
et al. 2009: 14). The reality is that quantitative
methods are most effective when used alongside theclose textual reading that allows us to contextualize
the current glut of information. Yet the high speed
processing of huge numbers of texts brings with ita potential negative impact upon qualitative formsof research, with digitisation projects optimised
for speed rather than quality, and many existing
resources neglected in the race to digitise everincreasing numbers of texts.

Cohen, D. (2006). From Babel to knowledge: data
mining large digital collections. D-Lib Magazine
12(3). Available at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/ma
rch06/cohen/03cohen.html [Accessed February 7,
2011].

4. Conclusion

McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: themaking of the typographic. Toronto: U of Toronto P.

We must therefore learn more about the potential,
and limitations, of large-scale digitization in order toensure that a focus on quantity rather than quality
does not override the research needs of the wider
community. If accepted, therefore, this paper will
present some of the results of Gooding’s on-going
doctoral research into the use and impact of massdigitization projects, which will include case studies

Crane, G. (2006). What do you do with amillion books? D-Lib Magazine 12(3). Available
at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/crane/0
3crane.html [Accessed January 7, 2011].
Deutsch, K. W. (1961). On social communicationand the metropolis. Da 90(1): 99-110.
Garde-Hansen, J., A. Hoskins, and A.
Reading, eds. (2009). Save as... Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan.
Jockers, M. (2011). Detecting and characterizing
national style in the 19th Century novel. In Digital
Humanities 2011. Stanford University, Palo Alto.
Lanier, J. (2011). You are not a gadget. London:
Penguin.

Michel, J.-B., and Y. K. Shen (2010).
Quantitative analysis of culture using millions ofdigitized books. Science Magazine.
Moretti, F. (2007). Graphs, maps, trees: abstract
models for literary history. London and New York:
Verso.

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Mosco, V. (2004). The digital sublime: myth,
power, and cyberspace. Cambridge Mass.: MIT
Press.
Nicholas, D., et al. (2004). Re-appraisinginformation seeking behaviour in a digital
environment: bouncers, checkers, returnees and thelike. Journal of Documentation 60(1): 24-39.
Nunberg, G. (2010). Counting on Google Books.
The Chronicle of Higher Education. Available
at: http://chronicle.com/article/Counting-on-Google-Books/125735 [Accessed September 15,
2011].
Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations.
Fifth Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Notes

Designing Navigation Tools
for an Environmental
Humanities Portal:
Considerations and Critical
Assessments
Graf von Hardenberg, Wilko

wilko.hardenberg@carsoncenter.lmu.de
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society- LMU, Germany

Coulter, Kimberly

kimberly.coulter@carsoncenter.lmu.de
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society- LMU, Germany

1. http://books.google.com/ngrams
2. http://www.diggingintodata.org
3. http://www.nsf.gov/
4. http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/diggingi
ntodata.html
5. http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/home-accueil-eng.
aspx
6. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/dig
itisation/diggingintodata.aspx

As digital humanities projects bring together moredata than ever before, ways of presenting andaccessing this data are transforming rapidly: text
mining becomes more powerful and ‘searching’ and‘browsing’ become more complex and interrelated.
These tools not only help us find what we are looking
for; they also shape our paths of inquiry. For thisreason, it is important to carefully consider both the
ontologies behind the tools (what exists and how
can it be ordered?) as well as their epistemologicaleffects (how do classification and representation
affect our understanding?). How can we preserve, ina digital environment, the spirit of serendipity anddiscovery that characterizes humanities research?
By asking such critical questions, we hope to forge
tools that may generate unexpected results and new
perspectives.
This paper addresses such considerations in theselection and design of navigation tools forhumanities subject portals, as well as some current
options and concerns related to these choices.
As a concrete case study, we reflect on our
experiences creating the Environment & Society
Portal ( http://www.environmentandsociety.org), a not-for-profit education, research, and outreachproject at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment
and Society in Munich, funded by the German
Federal Ministry for Education and Research.
The Environment & Society Portal, which
launched in early 2012, makes digital multimedia
and interpretive materials in environmental
humanities freely and openly accessible toacademic communities and the interested public
internationally. To enhance user engagement, inthe coming year we will be building on features

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Digital Humanities 2012that facilitate and encourage feedback, interaction,
contribution and dissemination of information.
The Portal’s multimedia content mixes retrodigitizedenvironmental humanities materials with borndigital content, such as interpretive exhibitions,short descriptions of places and events, or the
localized environmental histories related to broader
issues found in the sub-project ‘Arcadia: European
Environmental Histories’ (this collaboration with
the European Society for Environmental History
eventually plans to include all world regions).
Content may be linked or clustered according todiverse research paths. It will be possible to add new
entries on the same topics to provide a fuller pictureor alternative perspectives.
The Portal employs three custom-designed
interactive navigation tools (map viewer, timeline,
and keyword explorer) that invite users to explore
content of interest and to visualize chronological,
spatial, and conceptual connections. While thePortal offers full-text indexing and searching as
well, these three interconnected navigation tools
represent its unique functionality. Similar tools exist
elsewhere, of course. But rather than simply apply
existing tools, we have reviewed our assumptions
about categorization and representation and have
either modified existing taxonomies or created
our own controlled vocabulary; we have reviewed
multiple benchmarks, considered the purpose of
our representations, and have created our tools’
designs from scratch. While we have done user
testing and can discuss our Google Analytics data,
our main objective is to reflect on how data
selection, categorization, and representation create
constraints and opportunities for inquiry. We offer an
examination of our decisions regarding the creationof these three navigation tools, and reflect critically,
six months after our launch, on their performance.

1. Map viewer
Navigation via the Portal’s map viewer is possible byzooming and browsing on a map and/or searching forplacenames. After considering several alternatives,
we chose to use GeoNames’ highly hierarchical,
but open-source, gazetteer (adopted also by othermajor European digital humanities portals such as
Europeana). We took this decision to reflect asaccurately as possible the complexities and vagaries
of geographical and administrative dependencies,
to potentially ease the retrieval of nested data
(e.g., showing results related to a certain village
among the results for its parent country), and toallow for a greater degree of interoperability withother websites. The most difficult and important
representational consideration was our decision torepresent only point data, not lines or areas. This was

not only a pragmatic technical decision, but serves
the purpose of our map viewer as a content index, not
as a thematic mapping of a coherent data set.

2. Interactive timeline
The Portal’s timeline feature allows users to scroll
forward and backward in time, to zoom in and out,
and to plot the results of up to three searches on aninteractive timeline canvas. One of the most difficult
decisions was limiting the temporal metadata toyears as points in time, to the exclusion of periods,
eras, and specific or ‘fuzzy’ dates. Representational
considerations included how to distinguish between
search results for the same year and the use of agraphic scale for time. Furthermore it was important
to us to present the Timeline as a content index,
not as a ‘comprehensive’ collection of events. The
decision to represent the quantity of relevant Portal
results in the timeline slider/scale bar as connected‘peaks’ may be one of the Portal’s most problematic
representations.

3. Keyword explorer
While the map and timeline allow users to compare
results geographically and temporally, the keyword
search tool offers thematic navigation functionallyresembling the former Google ‘wonder wheel.’Specifically, our keyword explorer lets users refine
a search by choosing among the tags that occur
most frequently in relation to a given keyword,
using a narrowing search and, in future, also a more
exploratory, expansive approach in which keywords
are linked without limiting the results to previously
identified keywords. To facilitate this, we chose to
adopt – and constantly develop – a flat controlled
vocabulary instead of imposing a predeterminedhierarchy of themes and keywords. This means thatsearch experiences may change substantially as new
materials are added to the Portal.
As new content is added, users’ search possibilities
will grow exponentially. That is, it will be possible
to use any tool to refine searches made with anyof the other tools. The aim is to allow the users
to create completely personalized paths throughenvironmental scholarship and materials gatheredon the Portal.
As the ways we organize and represent information
have important consequences for the communication
and use of knowledge, an enhanced navigational
platform provides opportunities to rethink our usualapproaches. We hope these tools will offer multiple
ways to find and compare information, inspire
alternative historical frames, and encourage theformation of new connections across disciplinary andpolitical boundaries.

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Digital Humanities 2012

By examining the complex ontologies behindnavigation
tools
and
the
epistemologicalconsiderations concerning their application and use,
we hope our experiences and critical reflections may
offer new perspectives for our colleagues working
with digital humanities data and databases.

Processing Email Archives
in Special Collections
Hangal, Sudheendra
hangal@cs.stanford.edu
Stanford, USA

Chan, Peterpchan3@stanford.edu
Stanford, USA

Lam, Monica S.
lam@cs.stanford.edu
Stanford, USA

Heer, Jeffrey

jheer@cs.stanford.edu
Stanford, USA

1. Introduction
Libraries and scholarly institutions often acquire
the archives of well-known individuals whose workand life has significant historical or research value.
Email collections are now an important part ofthese archives – the Academic Advisory Board
Members in the Paradigm project ranked them themost valuable from among images, speeches, press
releases, personal websites and weblogs, campaign
materials, engagement diaries, presentations, etc.
[3]. The detailed record embedded in email provides
access to the donor’s thoughts and actions at a levelthat has rarely been available in the past and enables
researchers to probe questions like: What was theprocess the donor used to come up with a particular
breakthrough? What were they reading at the timeand how may it have influenced them? [4] Further,
these archives are being accumulated not just by
famous people; with about 2 billion users, email
reaches just about every section of wired societies.
Indeed, the British Library has collected sample
email messages from ordinary Britons as a way of
capturing a sense of life in the 21st century [5].
In this paper, we describe a new technique forprocessing email archives in special collections
using MUSE (Memories USing Email), an emailbrowsing and visualization system developed at
Stanford University. The technical details of Museare covered in a separate paper [1]. While Muse
was initially designed for individuals to browse
their own long-term email archives, we have added
features that help archivists in processing email
archives of others as well. To illustrate witha concrete example, we report our experienceswith using Muse to process the email archives
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Digital Humanities 2012of noted American poet Robert Creeley, whosearchives are hosted at Stanford University Libraries.
The video at http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/creeley.mp4 demonstrates MUSE running on the
Creeley archives and supplements the descriptions
below. MUSE is publicly available at the URL: http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse.

2. Challenges in Processing Email
Today, email archives are being collected andpreserved, but are rarely processed, let alonedelivered to researchers and end-users. This is due toconcerns about privacy and copyright as well as therelative difficulty of processing large-scale archives
with conventional email tools. While paper records
are scanned and processed manually by archivists,such a process is cumbersome for archives with tensof thousands of email messages. Hence the potentialof email archives for research remains under-tapped
and they are often listed as a single series or subseries in a ‘Finding Aid’ in special collections, making
it hard for researchers to make practical use of them.
We elaborate on these challenges below.
Stakeholders
There are several stakeholders in the processof acquisition and use of email archives: thedonor, the curator, the archivist who processes thecollection, and the researcher who uses it. Each ofthese stakeholders has different requirements andexpertise.
Donors are sometimes hesitant to turn over theiremail archives to curators as they may contain deeply
personal information such as family or financial
records, confidential letters of recommendation,
health matters, etc. Donors are often busy people
and may not have the time to perform a detailed
assessment of their archives. Further, a donor may
sometimes not be the creator, but say, a family
member. Curators develop library collections andmaintain relationships with donors.
Archivists are generally well versed in tools andarchival processes, but may not be subject matter
experts. While archivists want to provide broad
access to the archives and encourage exploratory
use, they also have to be cautious due to embargoes
established by the donor, privacy considerations andcopyrights restrictions.
Researchers may be familiar with the subject, but
may not be experts with tools. Typically, they would
like to gain a sense of the content in the email
correspondence through the process of exploratorybrowsing. They may want to know if certain peopleor subjects are mentioned in the archives even before
making a visit to the collection or raising funding fora project.

Data gathering and cleaning
It is common for digital archives to be acquired at
different times, over several rounds of accession,and to be scattered across a variety of digital media
including floppy disks, Zip drives, CDs, DVDs andhard drives. Email archives are no exception andwe find that, over time, donors change computers,
accounts, email clients etc, and store email in
different formats (such as Eudora, Outlook andmbox). We have found tools like Emailchemy (http://
www.emailchemy.com) useful to convert email indisparate formats to the mbox format that Muse canread. Individuals’ email foldering practices tend to beinconsistent over time, and messages are frequently
duplicated in various folders. Muse takes care ofthis problem by detecting and eliminating duplicates.
Muse also organizes messages by automaticallyinferred (but manually editable) groupings of people
in the archives, making the folder structure lesscritical. Further, email addresses and name spellings
for the same person tend to change over time;
therefore, Muse performs entity resolution to try andmerge records for the same individual.
In the Creeley archives, there are about 80,000
emails; after removing duplicates, Muse is left with
40,038 messages. Of these, 14,770 are outgoingmessages and 25,268 are incoming messages. Creeley
corresponded with about 4,000 people in thesearchives.
Muse displays graphs of email communication
activity, which show that most messages in thesearchives are from 1996 to 1998, and from 2001 to
2005 (when Creeley passed away), with a sudden
dip at the beginning of 2002. This tells us that thearchives are missing material from the years 1999
and 2000, and possibly for some period in early
2002. Such signals are useful to the archivist to knowthat some information may have been missed at somestep in the archival process.
Capture and Authenticity
A major benefit of digital records is that they are easy
to capture and store compared to paper records. Thus
it is possible for a donor to retain access to his or her
records for many years or decades, and for archivists
to capture the archives of many more individuals
and store them in a reasonable amount of space atreasonable cost.
Another benefit of email messages is that, while
it is difficult to get access to letters sent by adonor, email copies frequently exist with both thesender and the receiver, leading to a more detailed
record. Physical correspondence also has problems
with completeness of information. For example, in
the Republic of Letters project, many letters were
not dated (http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/).
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Digital Humanities 2012

In contrast, email messages have an automatictimestamp. While both paper and digital formats candecay physically over time, it is easier to preserve alarge volume of digital data.
The techniques to determine the authenticity of apaper document are well established. Paper or vellum
can be appraised against a familiar set of physicalcharacteristics, such as ink, handwriting, letterhead,
paper quality and signs of tampering. However,there are new problems with electronic records. The
Paradigm workbook cited above points out that thecapture process itself can alter the perceived creation
date, and that author metadata is often inaccurate
or misleading. Further it notes that establishingintellectual property rights is a key concern for thedigital curator who will need to determine who
authored a photograph or article, whether they arestill alive, whether they still hold copyright and how
long that copyright will last.

3. Cues Provided by MUSE
We ran Muse on the Creeley archives, and found thefollowing cues useful in gaining a quick overview of
the archives.
1. Calendar view of terms. Muse displays a calendar
view of the 30 most important terms per month basedon statistical ranking, with a novel time-based TFIDF metric. The terms scored are named entities
extracted from the messages using the Stanford
NLP toolkit (http://nlp.stanford.edu). We foundthis feature useful to give ourselves and potential
researchers a high-level sense of the contents of thearchives; at the same time, the small number of terms
makes it easy for the archivist to manually ensure thatthey are appropriate for public distribution.
2. Sentiment Analysis. Muse uses sentiment analysis
techniques to identify messages that may reflect
certain categories of sentiments including emotions(such as love, grief, anger, etc), family events,
vacations, congratulatory messages, etc. We havedeveloped these categories and word lists for
personal archives instead of relying on more generallexicons like LIWC [2]. See Fig. 1 for a graphof these sentiments over time in the Creeley
archives. The Muse lexicon can be tuned by theuser by adding or deleting words to a category,or entire categories themselves. One use we foundof this feature was to add a category to identify
potentially sensitive messages involving health,finances, recommendation letters, etc.

Figure 1: Sentiments over time in
the Robert Creeley email archives

3. Attachment wall. To facilitate rapid scanning of
picture attachments in email, Muse displays themon a 2.5D zoomable and draggable photo wall(Fig. 2). In the Creeley archives, there are 6,282
picture attachments, of which 4,769 are unique.
The archives include many interesting pictures,for example, those of Creeley and his family, his
home, trips he took, various forms of artwork,and scanned announcements of events. In general,
pictures and documents have associated copyrights,
so the archivist cannot publish these images andattachments publicly.
Browsing features
When the user is interested in following a cue, Muselaunches a message view with all the messages related
to that cue. These views can be fairly large andconsist of hundreds of messages. To make it easy torapidly skim a collection of messages, Muse provides
a faceted browsing interface, where the facets are
sentiments, groups, people, original folders, email
direction (incoming vs. outgoing), and month or year.
It also provides a jog dial interface that lets users
rapidly flip through messages without the need for
keypresses and mouse clicks. The jog dial is very
popular with users of Muse.

Figure 2: Image attachments in the Robert Creeley email archives

Multiple views
While we initially thought that Muse would be
used primarily by archivists, we realized that it
can be useful to donors and researchers as well.
To support these stakeholders, two distinct viewsof the archives are needed. The first is a full-210

Digital Humanities 2012

access view for donors and archivists to use whenprocessing the archives. The same interface can also
be made available to researchers in a reading room
environment. The second, more limited interface canbe made public and can provide enough detail for
potential researchers to get an overall sense of thearchives’ contents. It can include a calendar view ofimportant terms, and perhaps the overall patterns ofcommunication with different groups and sentiment.
However, the actual message contents are omitted.
Since Muse stores message headers, bodies, andattachments separately for each folder in its own
cache, we found it easy to support both views for the
Creeley corpus; in the public view, we simply hide themessage bodies and attachments.
Message selection and export
We envision that Muse can be used by donors
themselves to screen their archives before turningthem over to the library, with the help of features like
automatic grouping of email and sentiment analysis.
We have added a feature in Muse to allow users to tag
messages and export all messages with a particulartag (thereby including only the selected messages), or
without a particular tag (to redact certain messages).
These features can also be used by an archivist to
screen the archive for sensitive material.

4. Connecting the Archives to Web
Browsing
While scanning the Creeley archives through Muse,
we realized that it would be useful to look in it forterms for which Robert Creeley is most famous. Thisis a difference from the original purpose of Muse;
the archivist or researcher is not expected to be
intimately familiar with the life of the donor. For
example, according to his Wikipedia page, Creeley
is known as a Black Mountain poet; searching forthis term in his archives returns 259 messages.
We therefore implemented a browser plug-in thatsearches for named entities on the page beingbrowsed and highlights those that are also present in
the archives. Clicking on the highlighted text lets theuser explore email messages that include the term.
This lets a researcher bring the archives’ lens into his
normal browsing.

archivists by letting them spot missing or uncleandata, performing quick scans of the contents formaterial that needs to be restricted, and make partsof the archives publicly available for researchers’ use.
Researchers benefit by gaining an overall sense of thematerial in the archives; when they need to drill down
into the actual contents, an interactive browsing andnavigation interface aids them explore the archives
efficiently, and a browser plug-in lets them bring alens from the archives into their normal browsing.
Using Muse, archivists can hope to process email
archives quickly and make valuable information
available for researchers. Further, we believe thatmaking Muse even simpler to use will enableordinary individuals to browse their own long-term
email archives, or those of people close to themsuch as family members. This will allow the studyof personal archives on a scale that has not beenpossible until now.
Acknowledgements
We thank Glynn Edwards, the Andew W. Mellon
Foundation, NSF POMI 2020 Expedition Grant
0832820 and the Stanford Mobisocial lab forsupporting this work.

References
1. Hangal, S., M. S. Lam, and J. Heer (2011).
Muse: Reviving memories using email archives.
Proceedings of UIST 2011. ACM, 2011.
2. LIWC Inc. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count.
http://www.liwc.net.
3. Thomas, S. (2005). Paradigm Academic
Advisory Board Report. John Rylands University
Library, Manchester, Dec. 12, 2005.
4. Wright, M. (2007). Why the British Libraryarchived 40,000 emails from poet Wendy Cope.
Wired, May 10, 2011.
5. Zjawinski, S. (2007). British Library Puts
Public’s Emails on The Shelves. Wired, May 29, 2007.

We hypothesize that researchers can find this feature
useful to browse their own research. The browsing
lens will automatically find terms in the archives thatare relevant to the researcher’s interest and highlightthem.

5. Conclusion
Our overall experience of processing email archives
using Muse was quite positive. Muse can help

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The Stylometry ofCollaborative Translation
Heydel, Magda

magdalena.heydel@tww.pl
Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

Rybicki, Janjkrybicki@gmail.com
Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

1. The Problem
A translated work of literature is a collaborative
effort even if performed by a single translator,
always haunted by the ghost of the author of
the original. The relationship between the two
has been at the centre of mainstream translation
studies and in the discipline’s corpus-based andstylometric varieties, as evidenced by a growing
body of scholarship (Olohan 2005; Oakes & Ji
2012). Stylometric problems multiply when the term‘collaborative translation’ is taken to signify a joint
rendering of a single author into a different language
by two (or more) translators, or by translator
and editor (Rybicki 2011). In general, stylometry
based on multivariate analyses of word frequencies
successfully detects the author of the original –rather than the translator – in translations (Rybicki2010); sometimes, this success varies from translator
to translator (Burrows 2002a). It is only whentranslations of the same author are compared is there
any hope for stylometric machine-learning methods
to tell translator from translator (Rybicki 2012).
This is exactly why this study focuses on a problem
situated somewhat in the middle of the above,
as collaborations between translators on a single
literary work are a fact in the publishing industry.
In the Polish market, this is perhaps most famously
evidenced by Maria and Cezary Frąc, responsible
for the third Polish translation of Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings. It is notoriously difficult toobtain information on the reasons and details ofsuch translatorial collaborations from either thetranslators or their publishers; usually, looming
deadlines for lengthy popular novels are blamed(Kozieł 2011).
But a collaborative translation can also be made forother reasons. When one of Poland’s most eminenttranslators, Anna Kołyszko died of cancer during her
work on Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, leaving afinished draft of much of the book and some noteson additional sections, the translation was takenover by Magda Heydel, a particular specialist in
212

Woolf (Jacob’s Room, Between the Acts, A Moment’s
Liberty, On Being Ill), who also performed someediting on the entire text. As Heydel stated in a TV
interview, it was for the readers to see whether there
was or there was not a rift in the middle of the bookwhere one translator took over from the other; shehoped her editing made the narration coherent as far
as the style was concerned. She also emphasized theuniqueness of the translator’s experience to confront
her own intuition of her voice in the text with that ofanother (Heydel 2011). Thanks to her previous workand research on Woolf, she had had quite a definite
idea of what stylistic shape Night and Day should
obtain in its Polish translation. Her linguistic imageof Woolf’s style, being, as it to an extent must, rooted
in her own idiosyncratic ‘feeling’ of the language,
was also informed by tangible evidence in Woolfscholarship. The technique of the changing pointof view, to be elaborated in Woolf’s mature work
into the stream of consciousness, a very importantachievement of the writer, is clearly visible alreadyin this early novel. Recreating this aspect of her
writing has always been one of Heydel’s central
concerns. Also, her particular translation technique
is to a large extent based on the idea of the voiceof the speaker, with the actual reading aloud forthe effect of naturalness as the ultimate test fora successful rendition. In Woolf the recognizable‘voice’ of the focalizer is central as it produces thepoint of view in narration (Rait 2010). Thus thechanges Heydel introduced into Anna Kołyszko’s
text were not (or very rarely) lexical but mainly
syntactical. She worked with the famously long andintricate Woolfian sentences, the more so that thePolish language, with its extremely flexible sentence
structure, locates most of its rhetorical and pragmatic
devices here. Also for this reason, most-frequentword analysis was a well-suited approach to thisexperiment in translatorial attribution.
Indeed, this seems a translatorial counterpart ofDavid Hoover’s study on The Tutor’s Story, a novel
begun by Charles Kingsley and completed by his
daughter Mary under her pen name Louis Malet,with some information available on who wrote what
(Hoover 2011). In the Polish Night and Day case,this information is exact; in both cases, the early
chapters have been written by the first, the final onesby the second translator. It is also reminiscent ofan earlier study on the Middle Dutch epic Walewein(van Dalen-Oskam & van Zundert 2007). The maindifference consists in the fact that Heydel is available
to confirm or deny the findings of the quantitative
analysis.

2. The Method and the Corpus
This study applies Cluster Analysis to Deltanormalized word frequencies in texts; as shown by

Digital Humanities 2012

(to name but a few) Burrows (2002) and Hoover(2004, 2004a), and despite limitations discussed
by Smith & Aldridge (2011), this is one of themost precise methods of ‘stylistic dactyloscopy.’ Ascript by Maciej Eder, written for the R statisticalenvironment, converts the electronic texts to produce
complete most-frequent-word (MFW) frequency
lists, calculates their z-scores in each text according
to the Burrows Delta procedure (Burrows 2002);
selects words for analysis from various frequency
ranges; performs additional procedures for better
accuracy (Hoover’s culling and pronoun deletion);compares the results for individual texts; produces
Cluster Analysis tree diagrams that show the
distances between the texts; and, finally, combines
the tree diagrams made for various parameters(number of words, degree of culling) in a bootstrap
consensus tree (Dunn et al. 2005, quoted in Baayen
2008: 143-47). The script was demonstrated at
Digital Humanities 2011 (Eder & Rybicki 2011) andits ever-evolving versions are available online (Eder &Rybicki 2011a). The consensus tree approach, based
as it is on numerous iterations of attribution tests
at varying parameters, has already shown itself as a
viable alternative to single-iteration analyses (Eder &Rybicki 2011b; Rybicki 2011).
The Woolf translation was analysed by comparing
equal-sized fragments (at various iterations offragment size) of the translation of Night and Day
to determine the chapter where Heydel had takenover from Kołyszko; Heydel was consulted only after
the initial determination had been made. At thispoint, the Kołyszko and the Heydel portions of
the book were compared to other translations by
Heydel (Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, A Moment’s Liberty
and Between the Acts, Graham Swift’s The Lightof Day and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) and by
Kołyszko (McCarthy’s Child of God, Miller’s Tropicof Capricorn, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children), and then to an even more
extended corpus of author-related translations.

3. Results
All iterations of different fragment sizes of
the Kołyszko/Heydel translation pointed to thebeginning of Chapter 27 as the place where Heydel
took over the translation from Kołyszko. Figure 1
shows the attribution of medium-sized fragments(approximating, in this case, mean chapter length) of
the translation. In fact, Kołyszko has completed 25
full chapters and left scattered notes on Chapter 26;
these have been collected, organized and edited byHeydel. If we are to believe stylometric evidence, thelatter made a very good job of preserving the styleof the former, so that her own style is only visible inearnest in Chapter 27.

Figure 1: Consensus tree for equal-sized fragments ofKołyszko and Heydel’s translation of Woolf’s Nightand Day, performed for 0-1000 MFWs with culling at
0-100%. The beginning of fragment 27 of the translation
roughly coincided with the beginning of Chapter 27

Once the authorship of the translation of Night andDay became confirmed, it was possible to place thisshared work in the context of other translations
by Heydel and Kołyszko; unfortunately, they nevertranslated different books by the same author. The
consensus tree in Figure 2 is divided neatly between
Kołyszko and Heydel. In this context, the overall
editing by Heydel might be visible in that both partsof Night and Day remain in her section of thetree; this might equally be a result of the original
authorship, as the Woolf novels are close neighbours
here.
When more translations by the same authors but byother translators are added to the corpus, the balance
between translatorial and authorial attribution isclearly shifted towards the latter. In Figure 3, fivetranslations of Woolf (including Night and Day) by
four different translators occupy the lower branchesof the consensus tree, with Bieroń’s Orlando being
the only (relative) outsider. Kołyszko’s and Heydel’stranslations in the upper half of the graph clusterwith translations of respective authors by othertranslators.

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References
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing Linguistic Data.
A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Burrows, J. F. (2002). Delta: A Measure of
Stylistic Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 17: 267-87.
Burrows, J. F. (2002a). The Englishing of Juvenal:
Computational Stylistics and Translated Texts. Style
36: 677-99.
Dalen-Oskam, K. van, Zundert, J. van (2007).
Delta for Middle Dutch – Author and Copyist
Distinction in Walewein. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 22: 345-62.

Figure 2: Consensus tree for translations by Kołyszko andHeydel, performed for 0-1000 MFWs with culling at 0-100%

4. Conclusions
So far, attempts at finding stylistic tracesof the translator or the editor have been
only partially successful. Word-frequency-based
stylometric methods have shown that they are betterat attributing the author of the original than thetranslator (Rybicki 2009, 2010; Eder 2010) – as has
already been stated, unless translations of a single
author are compared. In the latter case, Burrowsian
stylometry is quite capable of telling translator fromtranslator.
The translatorial attribution is greatly helped by
the adoption of the bootstrap consensus tree
approach, which minimizes attributive errors due
to unlucky combinations of parameters as, simply
speaking, Delta and similar distance measures are
more often right than wrong, but the proportion
between right and wrong might vary for a varietyof reasons – especially language (Eder & Rybicki
2011b). This is particularly significant in a raretranslatorial attribution case such as the Kołyszko/
Heydel translation of Night and Day, where theresults of stylometric analysis can be confirmed ordenied by the translator herself. Equally importantly,
this study demonstrates that although stylometry
seems to find traces of the author as well as of
the translator, these traces can be disambiguatedby placing the disputed translations in contexts ofvarious corpora.

Dunn, M., A. Terrill, G. Reesink, R. A.
Foley, and S. C. Levinson (2005). Structural
Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient
Language History. Science 309: 2072-075.
Eder, M., and J. Rybicki (2011). Stylometry with
R. Poster. Stanford: Digital Humanities 2011.
Eder, M., and J. Rybicki (2011a). Computational
Stylistics http://https://sites.google.com/si
te/computationalstylistics/ .
Eder, M., and J. Rybicki (2011b). Do Birds of a
Feather Really Flock Together, or How to Choose
Test Samples for Authorship Attribution. Stanford:
Digital Humanities 2011.
Heydel, M. (2011). Interview in ‘Czytelnia.’ TVP
Kultura, 12 Feb.
Hoover, D. L. (2004). Testing Burrows’s Delta.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 19: 453-75.
Hoover, D. L. (2004a). Delta Prime? Literary and
Linguistic Computing 19: 477-95.
Kozieł, M. (2011). The Translator’s Stylistic Traces.
A Quantitative Analysis of Polish Translations of
The Lord of the Rings. MA thesis, Uniwersytet
Pedagogiczny, Kraków.
Oakes, M., and M. Ji (2012). Quantitative
Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies,
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Olohan, M. (2004). Introducing corpora intranslation studies. London: Routledge.
Rait, S. (2010). Virginia Woolf’s early novels:
Finding a voice. In Seller, S. (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Rybicki, J. (2010). Translation and Delta Revisited:
When We Read Translations, Is It the Author or214

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the Translator that We Really Read? London: Digital
Humanities 2010.
Rybicki, J. (2011). Alma Cardell Curtin andJeremiah Curtin: The Translator’s Wife’s Stylistic
Fingerprint. Stanford: Digital Humanities 2011.
Rybicki, J. (2012). The Great Mystery ofthe (Almost) Invisible Translator: Stylometry inTranslation. In M. Oakes and M. Ji (eds),
Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation
Studies, Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Smith, P., and W. Aldridge (2011). Improving
Authorship Attribution: Optimizing Burrows’s Delta
Method. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 18(1):63-88.

Focus on Users in theOpen Development of the
National Digital Library of
Finland
Hirvonen, Ville

ville.z.hirvonen@helsinki.fi
The National Library of Finland, Finland

Kautonen, Heli Johanna

heli.kautonen@helsinki.fi
The National Library of Finland, Finland

1. The Public Interface of the
National Digital Library of
Finland
The tools for discovering cultural heritage material
are changing. For more than a decade there has
been a demand for better services for acquiring andworking with the ever increasing amount of digitizedcollections of archives, libraries, and museums.
Almost quarterly we hear about new electronic
search and research services, which promise better
assistance to academic workers. These tools arebrought out by software vendors, academic researchand development projects, or publishers. Looking
at these news we can estimate that the research
infrastructure for scholars in the humanities,
currently concentrating on resource databases, will
be replaced by integrated, modular services, which
utilize the potential of social metadata.
As a response to the increasing demand for novel
research infrastructure services, we in Finland
have started building our National Digital Library(NDL). The NDL project covers the digitization of
Finnish archives, libraries, and museums; the longterm preservation system; and a next generation
search application called the Public Interface, which
harvests the metadata from various data repositories
and provides it for the end users. The NDL will also
serve as the national aggregator to the European
Digital Library, Europeana. The development projectis funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education andCulture until 2014, after which there should bepermanent funding for maintenance and support.
The project started in 2008 and will reach the
publication of the first end-user interfaces displaying
the first set of material by the end of the year
2012. (Further information: www.kdk.fi/en/publicinterface.)

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The Public Interface facilitates access to the diverse
digital repositories of Finnish libraries, archives andmuseums. The users can use it to find physical items,
digital objects, and licensed electronic materials.
The metadata for these are harvested from theorganizations’ back-end systems via an OAI-PMH
interface. Access to restricted and licensed materials
will be provided by integrating user authenticationfrom the corresponding back-end system.
Within the service there will be one common userinterface for all free contents within the system,
called the National View. It will serve as the basis for
those organizations who will not need specific system
integrations and modifications. Organizations whowish to integrate external services, such as an online
payment system or an ontology, to the core service
can set their own interface instances and thus create
so called Local Views to the NDL. All will still havethe entire set of data available for their customers, via
whichever user interface, if desired.

2. A Technically Challenging
Project
From the technical point of view, the scope of the
project is very ambitious. So far there has been a lotof hard work choosing and testing the satisfactory
software for the Public Interface and defining various
system interfaces. Potentially all Finnish archives,
libraries, and museums are entitled to join the projectand get their services within the NDL. While someof them will follow given standards and some have
similar back-end systems, there will be those who will
require completely individual solutions for systems’
integration.
Scalability and additional service integrations also
require thorough planning and good management.
The amount of material in a country like Finland is
not enormous and the number of possible service
integrations can be controlled. However, the numberof organizations and user interfaces is easily in thehundreds. If not compensated, these can have someeffect on server loads and delays, which in turn will
have impact on the end-user experience.
The greatest technical challenge so far has been
the choice of the core software for constructing
the Public Interface. When the available software
solutions were initially compared, the information
discovery and delivery system Primo by the Ex Libris
Group was considered as the most suitable for theneeds of the NDL. During the pilot testing, which
took almost sixteen months, it became apparent thatthe customizations needed in Primo would require
much more time and resources than was reserved
for the project. Although the software procurement
contract between the National Library of Finland

216

and Ex Libris was cancelled in January 2012, thepartnership between these organizations continues.
The National Library still examines possibilities toprovide access from the NDL Public Interface to the
Primo Central Index.
In order to stay in the schedule of the project, a
new solution was needed quickly. After a speedy
market analysis, the National Library decided to turnto use an open source software solution. Havingsome experience of open source development, andavoiding a tedious start from the scratch, theNational Library studied some alternatives to be usedas the basis for the software development. The library
resource portal VuFind was selected to serve as thestarting point.

3. Focus on Usability
From the very beginning of the NDL project theimportance of end-users and their expectations has
been seriously regarded. As a means to realize theaim of good usability, a Usability Working Group anda reasonable budget has been assigned to meeting
the goals and coordinating the needed tasks. The
group has established the usability requirements
and defined target users for the Public Interface
service, and gradually completed a Usability Planfor the project and its outcome. Applicable design
approaches (e.g. Meroni & Sangiori 2011) and bestpractices (e.g. Clark et al. 2010) have been consulted
all along the process. The plan covers all project
phases from planning to maintenance, but is still
flexible enough to adjust to changes in technicalsolutions or the scope of the project.
Years 2010 and 2011 were mostly spent on testing
the Primo software, but also on testing the service
concept among prospect users. Eight organizations
among Finnish archives, libraries, and museums
volunteered, and started integrating their back-end
systems to Primo. The concept testing was conductedby the University of Tampere in summer 2010
(Lavikainen 2010). Some months later a user study
was conducted by an usability consultant company
Adage on the first end-user interface layouts of
the National View (Hirvonen 2011). The resultsof both studies indicated that some features ofthe future service might be difficult for end-users
to comprehend, and therefore the final design ofthe end-user interfaces will be crucially important.
However, the results gave no reason to change thescope of the service or the system requirements.
These studies, on their part, supported the demand
to chance the software solution.

Digital Humanities 2012

4. Several Local Views, One
National View
Although the core software had to be changed aftera reasonably long period of work, the efforts put on
testing one solution could be immediately utilizedwith the other option. Especially the concept ofdifferent views was considered applicable on VuFind,
too.
During the year 2011 some Local Views were
implemented with Primo and exposed to technicaland functional tests. The first in line was the Turku
City Library, which integrated Primo to their web
content management and publication system. In
their solution the main objective was to merge
the Digital Library into a dynamic and locallyoriented customer service. On the second track
there was the National Board of Antiquities ofFinland, which has invested considerable resourceson establishing common technological solutions for
Finnish museums. They implemented some varying
user interface instances that displayed the museum
repositories and utilized the features offered byPrimo. Their focus was on experimentation of datavisualization and service integration, since they
intend to offer one Local View for all museums. The
third track of the Local View testing concentrated
on a portal-like application that leaves the external
services to be run on the back-end system. The
National Archives of Finland worked on mapping andnormalizing aggregation levels of archival data. They
also aim at producing solutions and standards for all
archives in Finland. Such applications of Local Views
will later provide excellent field for usage studies,
since they reveal three entirely different viewpoints
to the same service.
The National View, which will serve as the userinterface for compiling all free material within the
NDL, could not be thoroughly implemented andtested with Primo. Therefore there are now great
expectations to the implementation of those featuresthat support effective discovery and display ofdifferent types of content, i.e. content from archives,
libraries, and museums at the same time. (SeeFig. 1.) According to the recently updated Usability
Plan the National View will be exposed to several
usage tests. Before the summer 2013 there will be acomprehensive log analysis, some customer surveys,
and other usability studies, which aim at further
analyzing the service concept and giving input to theuser interface design.
Along with the new software solution, the softwaredevelopment methods, the collaboration practices,and the user testing processes have been renewed.
The usability tests planned for the implementationand production phases will still be valid and executedin time. In addition, a constant row of end-users
will be involved in the agile development process totest freshly developed features immediately after they
have been published.

Figure 1: The layout of the National View
exposed to end-user tests in March 2012

5. More Challenges Ahead
With the exception of certain back-end a pplication
programming interfaces (APIs), the NDL Public
Interface service will be mainly developed by thestaff of the National Library. It will be crucially
important to share knowledge and results withthe open source community involved in VuFind.
The national open source development community
will also be communicated with. This sets extra
demands on project management and collaboration
management.
In future years the Public Interface of the NDL will
replace several research services currently used byhumanities’ scholars. Within the National Libraryof Finland alone the user interface of the national
bibliographic database, the portal of electronic
publications in Finnish libraries, and the interfaceof digital material repository will be ‘powered by’
the Public Interface of NDL. It is difficult yet toforesee how the actual research activities will change
due to the new tools. At least scholars themselves
should be more involved in systems’ and services’development than today (see e.g. Jeffreys 2010).
Nevertheless, the Usability Working Group has
already made preliminary plans for examining thescholarly use of the NDL service.
As soon as a sufficient number of organizations havegone live, and there is a critical mass of coherent data
within the service, we can start proper tracking andevaluation of the system as a research infrastructure.
It is to be noticed, that the service is not just alibrary in a digital environment, since it can offer

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and recommend content from archives and museums
on single search request. It will be particularlyinteresting to study how students and scholars will
be able to utilize such diverse and multifaceted
information, and how that information can best be
represented and laid out to the user. Therefore, it is
yet to be seen, how well the National Digital Libraryof Finland will meet the great expectations.

References
Clark, D. J., D. Nicholas, and I. Rowlands(2011). Europeana Log Analysis Report 1.
Europeana Connect. http://ciber-research.eu/
download/20110821-M3.1.2_eConnect_LogAnaly
sis.pdf (accessed 14 March 2012).

Hirvonen, V. (2011). Kansallisen näkymän
käytettävyystesti. Project report, The National
Library of Finland.. http://kdk.fi/wiki/images/
4/45/KDK-k%C3%A4ytett%C3%A4vyystesti_2011_
01.pdf (accessed 14 March 2012).

Jeffreys, P. (2010). The Developing Conception ofe-Research. In W. H. Dutton and P. W. Jeffreys (eds.),
World Wide Research. Reshaping the Sciences andHumanities. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp.
51-66.
Lavikainen, V. (2012). Kansallisen digitaalisen
kirjaston palvelukonseptin testaaminen. Project
report, University of Tampere. http://kdk.fi/wik
i/images/9/96/KDKn_palvelukonseptin_testaa
minen.pdf (accessed 14 March 2012).

Meroni, A., and D. Sangiori (2011). Design for
Services. Surrey, UK: Gower.

The Rarer They Are, theMore There Are, the Less
They Matter
Hoover, David

david.hoover@nyu.edu
New York University, USA

In computational stylistics and authorship
attribution recent work has usually concentrated onvery frequent words, with a seemingly compelling
logic: consistent and characteristic authorial habits
seem most likely to exist among frequent function
words not closely tied to plot, setting, andcharacterization, and not likely to be consciously
manipulated. Analyses using frequent words havebeen very successful, and continue to be used
(Craig & Kinney 2009). Some researchers haverecently begun using many more words in analyses,
often achieving excellent results by analyzing the500-4,000 most frequent words (Hoover 2007). Yet
even these words are not truly rare in a 200,000
word novel, where the 4,000th most frequent word
typically has a frequency of 3-4.
Brian Vickers has recently attacked work basedon common words, claiming that distinctive andunusual word Ngrams are better authorship markers
than words for 16th century plays (Vickers 2008,2009, 2011). He argues that rare Ngrams that are
not found in a large reference corpus, but arefound in one author’s corpus and in an anonymous
text, strongly suggest common authorship. Vickers
tests whether Thomas Kyd might have written the
anonymous Arden of Faversham by searching for
3- to 6-grams shared by Arden and the threeplays known to be by Kyd, but not found in a
64-play reference corpus of texts of similar genre
and date. He finds more than 70. This method, an
improved method of parallel hunting, is essentiallyan extreme version of Iota (Burrows 2007), but basedon Ngrams rather than words. As he puts it, ‘Oneor two such close parallels might be dismissed as
imitation, or plagiarism, but with over 70 identicalword sequences, often quite banal phrases . . . that
explanation falls away’ (Vickers 2008: 14). In a later
article he reports 95 such matches between Arden
and Kyd’s corpus (2009: 43). Does the existenceof such rare matches constitute reliable evidence
that Kyd wrote Arden? We can begin to answer thisquestion by testing the method on texts of known
authorship.
The texts Vickers works on are not ideal for
testing: 16th century texts have substantial spelling

218

Digital Humanities 2012variation, making automated methods problematic,
the authorship and dates of individual plays in
the period are often uncertain, and many of them
involve collaboration. I instead test the method on
American fiction ca 1900 and modern American
poetry. Because Ngrams have been used increasingly
in authorship study (Clement & Sharp 2003; Grieve
2007; Juola 2008), it seems useful to test frequent
word Ngrams before looking at rare ones. My
American fiction corpus consists of a bit morethan 2 million words of third person narration(10,000-39,000 words each) extracted from 83 texts
by 41 authors, 20 of the authors represented by
one or more additional texts, 36 test texts in all. A
cluster analysis of all 83 texts correctly groups all
texts by 16 of the 20 authors; in three cases, one of
an author’s texts fails to cluster with the others, andin the other case, the six texts by an author form
two separate clusters. Delta correctly attributes 35 of
the 36 possible texts in some analyses (on Delta, see
Burrows 2002). Bigrams are less effective: a cluster
analysis correctly groups only 14 of the 20 authors,and Delta correctly attributes a maximum of 32 of
the 36 test texts. Trigrams are even less effective:
cluster analysis is fairly chaotic, and Delta correctly
attributes a maximum of 31 of the possible 36, withmuch weaker results overall. The same is true for
American poetry, 2.7 million words of poetry by 29
authors, arranged in 23 primary composite samples(19,000-138,000 words), tested against 39 individual
long poems (900-1,500 words). Word bigrams aremuch less effective than words and trigrams do apoor job. While word Ngrams have sometimes given
better results than words alone, the results here do
not support Vickers’s basic premise that Ngrams
are inherently superior to words in characterizing
an author’s style, even though they add syntactic
information.
Rare Ngrams are a different matter, of course. In
order to duplicate the scenario of Vickers’s tests
on Kyd, I used 64 of the sections of third person
narration above (by 23 authors) as a reference
corpus. I collected a three-text corpus for James andeight other James texts as test texts. I also held out
six other texts for further testing. There are about 6.5
million 3- to 6-grams in the entire corpus; because
the method requires at least one match between texts,
I first removed all hapax Ngrams and those found in
only one text, leaving about 100,000. I then removed
all those found in the reference corpus, leaving about
9,600. I took each of the eight James test texts inturn, and compared it with the James corpus, withthe seven other James texts, and with the six texts
by other authors, with respect to the proportion of
Ngrams in each text that match those in the James
corpus or the other texts. The results are shown in
Figure 1.

Figure 1: Rare Ngrams in James’s Fiction

It is clear that the Ngrams in the James test texts
have a higher proportion of matches in the James
corpus than do the texts by others, ranging fromabout 33% to 42%, while the other texts range fromabout 21% to 28%. But the difference between theJames texts and the others is disturbingly small.
Also disturbing is that two of the six other authors
have more matches to other James texts than one ofJames’s own texts, and that all of the texts have about
the same percentage of matches with texts by otherauthors. These facts are disturbing because Vickers
bases authorship claims on the existence of ngrams
found in an authorial corpus and an anonymous
text that are not found elsewhere without doing thefurther tests above. Thus, if one were seriously testing
The House of the Seven Gables for the possibility that
Henry James wrote it, the fact that 28% (291) of the1045 Ngrams found in Seven Gables have matches in
the James Corpus but are found nowhere else in thereference corpus might seem like a strong argument.
Remember that Vickers based an argument for Kyd’s
authorship on only about 70 matches between the
Kyd corpus and his three anonymous plays thatwere not found in the reference corpus (or 95 in
his later article). (Why there are so many morehere needs further investigation, but the somewhat
greater average length of my samples is almost
certainly a factor.) For the poetry corpus, things
are even worse: Kees shows a higher proportion ofmatches to Rukeyser’s corpus than two sections ofher own poetry, and Stafford is not far behind, as Fig.
2 shows.

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Digital Humanities 2012

Figure 2: Rare Ngrams in Rukeyser’s Poetry

Finally, I tested a bogus composite author corpus
consisting of the samples by Stafford, Kilmer, andKees. As Fig. 3 shows, even with an unreal author,
there are many Ngram matches between the bogus
authorial corpus and each other text that are notfound in the reference corpus. For many of thesamples, 15% or more of their Ngrams match thebogus corpus but are not found anywhere else. If
these texts were anonymous, it would be easy torepeat Vickers’s argument and claim that all of themmust be by this illusory ‘author.’
Finally, preliminary tests in which additional texts
are added to the analysis show that many of thematches between an authorial corpus and any given
test text that are not found in the original reference
corpus also have matches in one or more of the
new texts. The results presented above suggest thatrare Ngrams are unlikely to be good indicators ofauthorship, in spite of their initial plausibility. There
are about 1.3 million trigrams in the 83 narrative
texts discussed above, but only about 150,000of them occur more than once, and the highest
frequency is 853. In contrast, there are about 49,000
different words, about 30,000 of which occur morethan once, and the highest frequency is 136,000. One
might say simply, and somewhat paradoxically, that,
although Vickers’s matching Ngrams are rare, there
are so many of them that matches can be expected
between almost any pair of texts, and some ofthese matches will also be absent from the reference
corpus.

220

Figure 3: Rare Ngrams in a ‘Composite’ Author

References
Burrows, J. (2007). All the Way Through: Testingfor Authorship in Different Frequency Strata. LLC
22: 27-47.
Burrows, J. (2002). ‘Delta’: A Measure of Stylistic
Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship. LLC 17:
267-87.
Clement, R., and D. Sharp (2003). Ngram
and Bayesian Classification of Documents. LLC 18:
423-47.
Craig, H., and A. Kinney, eds. (2009).
Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of
Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.
Grieve, J. (2007). Quantitative Authorship
Attribution: An Evaluation of Techniques. LLC 22:
251-70.
Juola, P. (2008). Authorship Attribution.
Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 1:
233-334.
Hoover, D. L. (2007). Corpus Stylistics, Stylometry,
and the Styles of Henry James. Style 41: 174-203.
Vickers, B. (2011). Shakespeare and Authorship
Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Shakespeare
Quarterly 62: 106-42.
Vickers, B. (2009). The Marriage of Philology andInformatics. British Academy Review 14: 41-4.

Digital Humanities 2012

Vickers, B. (2008). Thomas Kyd, Secret Sharer.
Times Literary Supplement, 18 April 2008: 13–5.

Experiments in Digital
Philosophy – Putting newparadigms to the test in theAgora project
Hrachovec, Herbert

herbert.hrachovec@univie.ac.at
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria

Carusi, Annamariaannamaria.carusi@oerc.ox.ac.uk
Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, UK

Huentelmann, Raphael

info@ontosverlag.com
Ontos verlag, Heusenstamm nr. Frankfurt,
Germany

Pichler, Alois

Alois.Pichler@fof.uib.no
Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen,
NorwayAntonio, Lamarraantonio.lamarra@iliesi.cnr.it
Istituto per il Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e laStoria delle Idee (ILIESI), Consiglio Nazionale delle
Ricerche, Italy

Cristina, Marras

cmarras@gmail.com
Istituto per il Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e laStoria delle Idee (ILIESI), Italy

Alessio, Piccioli

piccioli@netseven.it
Net7 srl, Internet Open Solutions, Pisa, Italy

Lou, Burnard

Lou.burnard@retired.ox.ac.uk
Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, UK

Agora extends an existing federation of semanticallystructured digital libraries named Philosource, acollection of high quality OA content from classical tocontemporary European philosophy. Agora intends
to transform this federation into a specialised
and highly innovative OA archive and publishingvenue for new scholarship, by carrying out fiveexperiments: (1) Semantic linking; (2) Linked Open
Data (LOD); (3) Advanced Scholarly Linking; (4)Open Peer review; and (5) OA business models in
the field of European philosophy. The LOD portal
created within experiment (2) will serve as uniqueaccess point to the philosophical content of thefederation and will expose its metadata to the LOD
221Digital Humanities 2012

cloud. Agora’s ultimate goal is to arrive at a model forestablishing and accessing a growing open researcharchive for scholarly publications in the humanities.
The presentation will focus on the rationale for theAgora project’s vision of innovative enhancementof Open Access resources in European Philosophy,
and on the TEI framework. The experiments andevaluation strategies will not be presented in detail,and are briefly summarised below. More information
can be found on the project website: http://www.project-agora.eu .

1. TEI Framework
The general vision that underlies the Agora project,
as well as the mark-up challenges that arose during
Agora’s initial phase focused on content preparation
for the experiments. It was decided to define a
simple TEI-based interchange format which could
be used both for existing and for newly publishedscientific journal articles, enabling different partners
to combine these secondary resources seamlessly
with other resources within the evolving AGORA
framework. To define this format we surveyed about
half a dozen different TEI-based publishing systems,
as used by different journal publishers in Europe andNorth America, and identified a common subset of
useful markup constructs. We documented this using
the TEI’s ‘ODD’ system, which is also used to generate
the schemas used to validate the content producedby all partners. For output to readable PDF andHTML formats we rely on a customization of the TEI
Stylesheet library. In a parallel experiment, we haveused the same library to define an input mappingfrom ‘docx’ format into TEI, enabling partners todraft new documents in the familiar Microsoft Word
environment using a specially customized Word
stylesheet.

2. Experiments
Each of the Agora experiments is a trial of amode of enhancing an aspect of philosophicalscholarship through the possibilities offered bydigital publications and repositories in philosophy.
The Semantic Linking Experiment has as the goalof enabling a novel way of building, querying,
and browsing a knowledge network and to assess
its suitability as a collaborative research tool
as well as a learning device. A subset of the
new content (secondary sources in the form ofscholarly articles, monographs) will be interlinked
via semantic annotations among each other and its
underlying datasets (primary sources in the formof editions of texts, manuscripts) most of which
are already available in the Philosource Federation.
A subset of secondary sources will be connected

222

with keywords that at the same time will make updomain concepts of the secondary sources ontology.
The resulting ontology, in the form of RDF files,
will be published on the web and the users will beoffered the possibility to browse it, use the ontology
to tag additional material, and add to the ontology
generating their own notebooks. The semanticallylinked content will enhance browsing, querying,collaboration and learning.
The Linked Open Data (LOD) Experiment aims
to offer users and machines a unique accesspoint to the federation content and to augment
the user search and browsing experience. The
Philosource Federation is already a federation in
the political sense by sharing common values andtechnological standards. The Federation Portal will
mainly serve as a centralised aggregator of all
the metadata (semantically structured and nonsemantically structured) produced by the federation
nodes. It will thereby interlink the federation nodes,
and link the federation content with relevant externalsources. It is hoped that the linking will makethe content more interoperable, easier to discoverand retrieve, and provide a richer context for thefederation content. The metadata made available
through the portal API will make the federation
content usable to build other third party applications
and aims to stimulate innovative and creative reuses of our data. The portal will offer a unique
SPARQL endpoint to access RDF metadata of all thefederation content to third party data consumers;
semiautomatically enrich the data to link certain typeof resources (most notably books, people, places andevents) via rdfs:sameAs properties, to other LOD
providers such as DBPedia, Freebase, The Library ofCongress, The Open Library, Geonames, Europeana;
offering an augmented search facility by expanding
queries with data extracted from third party LOD
providers. Enhanced search will be offered in an
appealing and easy to use interface, for example, byallowing visually browsing search results on a map
and on a timeline.
The Open Collaborative Peer Review Experimenthas as its goal to experiment in the field of open
peer review in order to enhance and determine
standards for peer review in the humanities andsocial sciences in the digital age. In this experimentauthors submit their papers to two new online
journals (Nordic Wittgenstein Review and Lexicon
Philosophicum) via Open Journal System (OJS).
Papers will undergo a general eligibility and quality
check by the editors and editors-in-chief. Papers
will undergo double blind review during whichauthors and reviewers will remain anonymous.
Papers that are accepted for publication will go
through one month of additional open review orcommentary, during which registered users will beDigital Humanities 2012asked to comment on and to discuss the accepted
papers. Editors and editors-in-chief will moderate
discussions. Editors will proceed with suggesting
revisions on the basis of the open review. Authors
will be able to use the suggestions, comments anddiscussions from the open review / comment stage
in finalizing their paper for publication. The online
publication of the articles will include functionality
for readers to evaluate, rate and recommend articles
in a comment stage. The user will then be able toselect from different criteria of evaluation, such as
highest rated, most read, and most cited.
The goal of the PPP OA Business Models Experimentcarried out by the philosophy publishing house
Ontos is to experiment with different OA Business
Models in order to gain insight into their effects oncommercial business. A commercial publisher willrepublish a selection of monographs in digital format
and make them available in Open Access, undera Creative Commons Attribution-Non CommercialNo Derivative license. It will study the effects onsales figures over time of re-publishing online in OA
existing inprint closed access monographs. It willfurther study the effects of publishing the Nordic
Wittgenstein Review under hybrid and delayedbusiness models.

3. Evaluation Strategy
The overarching evaluation strategy that is used has
been adapted from Value Sensitive Design (VSD),a design methodology geared towards the values
that are involved in technology customization anddesign, which consists of ongoing evaluation on
three levels: conceptual, empirical and technical.
VSD has been informed by philosophy from theoutset of its development, and is therefore closer
to a philosophical ethos, and also makes room fora philosophical as well as user-based evaluation of
the technologies as they develop. Even though thismethodology has been primarily used for ethicalvalues of technology design and implementation,
we will be extending it to epistemic values as well.
This is particularly appropriate for technologies forscholarship where the two forms of values are very
closely connected, and will also contribute to thefurther development of VSD as a methodology.

Journal on Semantic Web and Information System
5(3).
D’Iorio, P. (2008). L’île des savoirs choisis.
De HyperNietzsche à Scholarsource: pour une
infrastructure de recherche sur le Web. Recherches &Travaux 72.
D’Iorio, P., and M. Barbera (2011).
Scholarsource: A Digital Infrastructure for the
Humanities. In T. Bartscherer and R. Coover(eds.), Switching Codes. Thinking through New
Technology in the Humanities and the Arts. Chicago:
U of Chicago P.
Galey, A. (2011). Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web
Browsers and the Materiality of Digital Texts. In R.
Crone and S.Towheed, The History of Reading, Vol.
3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Luke, T. W., and J. Hunsinger, eds.
(2009). Putting Knowledge to Work and Letting
Information Play. Blacksburg: Center for Digital
Discourse and Culture.
Mika, P., C. Bizer, M. C. Schaefel, and L.
Rutledge (2010). Semantic Web Challenge 2009:
User Interaction in Semantic Web Research. Special
Issues of Journal of Web Semantics 8(4).
Pichler, A. 2010. Towards the new Bergen
Electronic Edition. In N. Venturinha (ed.),Wittgenstein After His Nachlass. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Pichler, A., and S. Säätelä, eds. (2008).
Philosophy of the Information Society: Proceedingsof the 30th International Ludwig Wittgenstein
Symposium, Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria 2007.
Frankfurt: Ontos.

References
Bartscherer, T., and R. Coover, eds.
(2011). Switching Codes. Thinking through New
Technology in the Humanities and the Arts. Chicago:
U of Chicago P.
Bizer, C., T. Heath, and M. Hepp, eds.
(2009). Special Issue on Linked Data. International

223

Digital Humanities 2012

Information Discovery in
the Chinese Recorder Index
Hsiang, Jieh

jhsiang@ntu.edu.tw
National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Kong, Jung-Wei

dino.kong@gmail.com
National Taiwan University, TaiwanSung, Allan

allan.sung@gmail.com
National Taiwan University, Taiwan

1. The Chinese Recorder
Chinese Recorder (CR) is a (first bi-monthly,
then monthly) journal published by the Protestantmissionaries in China between 1867, a few years after
the 1860 treaty that allowed missionaries to enter
China, and 1941, when the U.S. became engaged in
the Pacific theater of the Second World War. Except
for the nineteen-month interruption from June 1872
to the end of 1873, CR was the longest running
English missionary journal in China. The periodthat CR covered was a tumultuous time in Chinese
history, when the country went through the Taiping
Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the various wars
with the foreign powers, the Republic Revolution of
1911, the civil wars among the war lords, the rise ofcommunism, the invasion of Japan, and the great
cultural and social transformation during the late
19th and early 20th century. Being based within
China, CR provided a close look at all spectrum of
the Chinese society, not only missionary affairs, butalso issues such as Chinese civilization, healthcare,education, political situation, opium, and other social
issues of the day. CR is unique in that the articles
were written by missionaries in China for the benefitof their fellow missionaries. Being supported by
missions and not sponsored by any government,
Chinese or foreign, the views presented in CR weremore candid and not blurred by political agenda. It,
thus, provides an angle unlike any others. Although
one cannot say that CR is not biased, at least it isbiased in its own special way.

2. The Chinese Recorder Index
With its 73 volumes, one for each year, and over
50,000 pages in total, CR is difficult to use on its
own. In 1986 Kathleen Lodwick published the 2volume The Chinese Recorder Index: a Guide toChristian Missions in Asia, 1867–1941 (CRI), which
224

made it much easier for scholars to utilize CR in theirresearch (Lodwick 1986).
CRI is more than an index. It consists of 3 indicesand 6 special lists (of Persons by Affiliation, Persons
by Location, List of Women, etc). The Person
Index (PI) includes 8,391 names with 192,149 pagerecords; the Mission/Organization Index (MI) 712
mission entries with 34,851 page records; and the
Subject Index 4,691 entries with 83,636 page records.
Altogether, there are 13,794 entries and 310,626 pagerecords, averaging 22.5 page records per entry.
Unlike a conventional book index that only provides
the pages in which an entry appears, CRI assigns tags
to PI and MI, thus provides additional information
about the nature of the occurrence of the entry onthat page. Tables 1 and 2 give the names, nature, andnumbers about the tags that we have tabulated.
There is a great wealth of information hidden in thetags. For example, if a certain page appears in aperson name entry A, and if that page also appears inanother person name entry B under an ART (article)
tag, then we know that A appears in an article written
by B. Using the same page number to check all
entries, and we can find all person names, locations,
missions, subjects, etc that appear in the same article.
If the same page appears in a Subject Index entry
indicating a certain event, then we may even ‘guess’
what the article is about without reading the article
itself.
As another example, the ATT (attacks) tag tells how
many attacks of missions and missionaries had beenreported in CR, who were attacked, in what years
did they occur and where. This information should
be valuable to someone studying the attitude of theChinese society towards Christianity when it was
re-introduced to China in the late 19th century.
However, since ‘attack’ is not an entry by itself, thisinformation is scattered all over CRI. One has to porethrough the 13,000 entries to collect every relevant
bit of information.

Digital Humanities 2012

Tag nameof Person
Index

Tag value

number/no
value

explanation

AFF(Affiliation)

Name ofmission27,678 / 14

Affiliation

ARR (Arrival)

Year8,705 / 6,283

Arrival year (ifno value, thenit’s indicatedby volume
number)ART (Articles)

11,125

Article written
by person

ATT (Attacks)

1,164

Attack on the
personCHI (Children)

7,765Children of thepersonCON(Conferences)

Location, year 3,449 / 1,793

Conference
attended

COR(Correspondence)

2,276

Correspondence
to the editor

DAT (Dates in Year
China)

139 / 2

Dates in China

DEA (Death)2,459 / 2,035

Death (if novalue, thenit’s indicatedby volume
number)

DEP(Departures)

Precise year

Year ofdeparture

5,496 / 5,000

Departure in
the year(if novalue, thenit’s indicatedby volume
number)ITI(Itinerancy)

Location

445 / 413

Itinerancy

LOC(Location)

Location

39,744 / 8

Location

10,095

Other
publications

6658 / 2

Position of thepersonSPO (Spouse)

13,212

Spouse of thepersonUNS(Unspecified)

51,739Unspecified

OTH (Other
Publications)
POS(Positions)

Title andmissionTable 1: Person Index

Tag nameTag value

Number/no
value

explanation

ATT (Attacks)

275

Attacks on the
M/OCON (Convert)

996

Converts

FIN (Finances)

1,585

Finances of the
M/OHIS (History)

650

History of the
M/O

HOS(Hospitals)639

Hospital

MEE(Meetings)

2,340

Meeting

9,533 / 32

Location

OPR (Opium
Refuges)0

Opium refuge

ORD(Ordained
Asians)349

Asiansordained by
missionORP(Orphanages)

32

Orphanages

PER(Personnel)

1,520

Personnel

PRE (Press)

1,554

Press

REP (Reports)

772

Reports by the
M/OSCH (Schools)

1,309

School run by
the M/O

STA(Statistics)

2,510

Statistics about
the M/OUNS(Unspecified)

10,763

Unspecified

LOC(Location)

Location

Table 2: Mission/Organization Index

3. Reindexing the CRI
To fully utilize the wealth of information embedded
in CRI, we developed a system that incorporates
the 3 indices of CRI into one uniform framework,
under which the indices are fully integrated andcross referenced. This integration enables the user toexplore the rich information hidden within CRI.
Our approach starts with a data structure that
decomposes an index entry into a number of pagerecords, each consists of the entry name ( n ), a
volume number ( vol ) and page numbers (the start
page and the end page, s and e ), a tag ( t ) anda tag value ( v ). (The tag part may not be present
if it is not indicated.) Thus, a page record is a tuple( n ; vol : s - e ; t : v ). If there is only one page
indicated, then the start page and the end page willbe the same. For instance, the first page record in
the George Leslie Mackay entry (Figure 1) is (Mackay,
George Leslie; 13:74-74; AFF: CPM) and the second
page record is (Mackay, George Leslie; 13:312-312;
AFF: CPM). (The George Leslie Mackay entry as
shown in this example becomes 46 page records.)
This process will decompose the 13,794 entries in

225

Digital Humanities 2012

the three indices into 310,626 page records. We thendesigned algorithms to mine the relationships among
the page records, mainly using the page numbers
and the tags as reference points (Kung 2011). Whilethe detail of the algorithms cannot be covered inthis abstract, we will use two simple examples todemonstrate the outcome.

Figure 2: Some entries containing Vol. 16, p. 214

Figure 1: The ‘George Mackay’ entry in Person Index

One of the page records in the Person Index
entry of George Mackay is (Mackay, George Leslie;
16:214-214; LOC: Fukien, Amoy). Since in the entryof Thomas Barclay, there is a page record (Barclay,
Thomas; 16:214-215; ART), we know that Mackay
was mentioned in an article written by Barclay. Other
page records show that the same page appeared in the
Subject Index of Sino-French War (1884–1885), thePerson Index of James Maxwell, William Thow, etc.
(Figure 2), plus others. Thus, when issuing George
Mackay as a query, instead of simply returning Vol.
16, p. 214 as one of the pages in which Mackay
appears, all information in CRI about that page will
be organized and returned (Figure 3). (Indeed, it
was an article written by Barclay about the returningof the missionaries from Amoy to Taiwan after thelifting of the blockade of Taiwan at the end of
the Sino-French War.) Figure 4 shows the webpage
resulting from the query ‘George Mackay’. Notethat a chronological distribution is presented and afoldable/expandable classification of the return is on
the left.

226

Figure 3: Information returned about Vol
16, p214 when given query ‘George Mackay’Digital Humanities 2012

Figure 4: Query result of ‘George Mackay’Figure 5: summary of query ‘attack’

Figure 5 shows the return of the query ‘attack’, forwhich a total of 574 different pages in the entire
CR are retrieved. (There are all together 1,439 pagerecords with the ATT tag. But some referred to thesame pages.) The peak occurred in 1900, during
the Boxer Rebellion, which may not be surprising.
However, the post-classification of the query result(Figure 6), an important feature of our system,shows the lists of authors, persons, missions, whichmight provide interesting information for scholars to
pursue further.
The method and system that we have developed
provide a more global view of both CR and CRI. It
integrates the three indices of CRI and thus reveals
relations among them and information implicitly
embedded. Our work should make CR and CRI moreaccessible to the research community. The approachthat we have taken is also a general one that can beapplied to any index with a similar structure.

Figure 6: Classifications of the query result of ‘attack’
according to Author, Person, Mission, and Subject

References
Kong, J.-W. (2011). Design and Implementation of
a Retrieval System for the Chinese Recorder Index.
MS Thesis, National Taiwan University.
Lodwick, K. (1986). The Chinese Recorder Index:
A Guide to Christian Missions in Asia, 1867-1941.
Scholarly Resources Inc. Washington D.C.

227

Digital Humanities 2012

Complex Network
Perspective on Graphic
Form System of Hanzi
Hu, Jiajia

hjj81@126.com
Beihang University, China

Wang, Ningniwangning@263.net
Beijign Normal University, China

According to Saussure, there are two systemsof writing: (1) The system commonly known as‘phonetic’ tries to respond to the succession ofsounds that make up a word. Phonetic systems are
sometimes syllabic, sometimes alphabetic i.e. basedon the irreducible elements used in speaking. (2) Inan ideographic system, each word is represented by asingle sign that is unrelated to the sounds of the word
itself. Each written sign stands for a whole word and,
consequently for the idea expressed by the word. The
classic example of an ideographic system of writing is
Chinese. Thus there is a common misunderstandingthat treated each Chinese character as a separate
sign, especially in Chinese information processing
field, and caused a major problem namely the mass
encoding set. Hanzi, however, as a kind of common
information carrier created and shared by the whole
Chinese society, is impossible to be disorderly andunsystematic. There must be some intrinsic laws
which make Hanzi the most mature ideograhic
system in the world. This paper aims to use someanalysis methods for complex network to identify
these intrinsic laws of Hanzi system.
Being the representative of ideographic systemsof writing, the most noticeable feature of Hanzi
is that each character’s graphic form was coined
according to its original meaning. The elements ofHanzi graphic forms are called components whichhave certain functions when they were used toform characters. 梅, for example, is formed by 2components 木 and 每, with 木 indicating 梅 is aname of tree and 每 indicating the pronunciationof 梅. A Chinese character may be formed only by
one component, namely the character itself, andcalled single-element character; or may be formed
by no less then 2 components and called compoundelement character. The classical six principles foranalyzing Hanzi graphic forms are know as ‘Liushu’.
Modern study on the Hanzi graphic forms, on thebasis of ‘Liushu’, puts forward a new theory that uses‘component and component functions’ to analyze
Hanzi graphic forms. A component could play a228

quadruple role in forming a Chinese character: (1)as a pictographic symbol; (2) as a semantic symbol;(3) as a phonetic symbol; (4) as a deictic symbol.
They are called component functions. All Chinesecharacters formed by different components withdifferent functions could be divided into eleven
categories, called the formation modes, as listed inTable 1.
MODE

DEFINITION

ie

0Single-element
character

止Deictic-pictographic composed ofa pictographic
component and a
deictic component

正Deictic-semantic

composed of a本semantic component
and a deictic
component

Deictic-phonetic

composed of adeictic component
and a phonetic
component

Pictographicphonetic

composed of琴
a pictographic
component and aphonetic component

Semantic-phonetic

composed of a堤
semantic component
and a phonetic
component

百Comprehensive
composed ofcomposite witha phonetic
phonetic component components andother components

寶

Pictographic
composite

composed of
2 pictographic
components步

Semanticpictographic

composed of
電
a pictographic
component and asemantic component

Semantic composite composed of
2 semantic
components

是Comprehensive
composed羅
composite without of different
phonetic component components except
phonetic component
Table 1: Eleven Kinds of Hanzi Formation Modes

As a same component could be used to form different
Chinese characters with other components, thosecharacters having a common component (with thesame function) could be linked to each other, andmake the whole set of Hanzi a huge complex network,
as Fig.1 shows. Modern Chinese graphology, basedon comprehensive and detailed descriptions ofChineses characters’ components and components’
functions, has made some statistical analysis about
the systematic features of Hanzi graphic forms, likethe number of primitive components on Hanzi if
different periods varied from 250 to 400; more

Digital Humanities 2012

than 87% Chinese characters (since seal script) arecomposed of a semantic component and a phonentic
component, or in other words, are of semanticphonetic mode. These conclusions, however, can notgive further explanations on the structure profile ofHanzi System, like how are hundreds of thousands ofChinese characters composed of no more than 400
primitive components; what is the average distance
between 2 characters, are there any clusters, what are
their densities, do they show a strict hierachy, arethere some centers and so on.

would bring some new insights in the study on
Chinese graphology and provide some useful help
in the teaching of Hanzi and Chinese information
processing.

Figure 1: The Network of Hanzi
Graphic Forms (Local and Global)

This paper views the system of Hanzi graphic forms
as a complex network with each Chinese character
linked to its components by an edge indicating thecomponent’s function in the character (see Fig.1);
and uses a series of network metics, such as thedegree, the path length, the clustereing coefficient,
the centrality, the coreness, the betweeness andso on, to analyze its topology features. This
could introduce some more in-depth discussions
on the structure and formation mechanism ofHanzi graphic form system and help us get morethorough understanding of the nature of Chinese.
The innovation of this paper lies in the integrationof the techniques of complex network theory andthe scientific analysis of Hanzi graphic forms, which229

Digital Humanities 2012

A Computer-BasedApproach for Predicting theTranslation Time Period of
Early Chinese Buddhism
Translation
Hung, Jen-Jou

jenjou.hung@gmail.com
Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Taiwan

Bingenheimer, Marcus
m.bingenheimer@gmail.com
Temple University, USA

Kwok, Jieli

guo.jieli@ddbc.edu.tw
Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Taiwan

Buddhism is a world-religion which has managed
to take roots in cultures vastly different fromthat of its origin. Its transmission from India to
China between the 2nd and the 10th centuries
happened against all odds. The ‘Buddhist conquestof China’ can be partly attributed to the successfultranslation of a great number of texts translated into
Chinese from Indian languages. The current standard
edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon (Taishō
shinshū daizōkyō (Abbr.: T.) 大正新修大蔵經, edited
1924-1934) contains 3053 works in 85 volumes,
including about 1000 texts of Indian (or alleged
Indian) provenance. However, ca. 150 of these texts
are marked as shiyi 失譯, indicating that the name(s)of the translator(s) are unknown. Furthermore, forthe texts that were translated between the 2nd
and the late 6th century, many attributions are
uncertain, problematic or simply incorrect. The issueof doubtful and wrong attributions has been debatedin the field of Buddhist studies over the last few
decades, e.g., Zürcher (1991), Harrison (1993), (and)Nattier (2008).
Over the years Buddhist scholars have leveraged
traditional text-critical methods to corroborate or
dispute traditional attributions yet like every method
philology has its limits. Faced with a large numberof texts in ‘Buddhist Hybrid Chinese’ of unknown
provenance/origin, the long-established note-taking
on the usage of characters and words quickly
runs into problems. As with European languages,
computational linguistics might offer new avenuesof data collection and verification. The corpus of
Buddhist Hybrid Chinese is available in a reliable
digital format (XML/TEI) since the first 55 volumesof the Taishō edition were published freely by230

the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Texts Association(CBETA).
We are now able to apply statistical methods andartificial intelligence algorithms to the analysis of
this corpus. This enables us to obtain new evidence
bearing on translatorship attribution problems.
The major advantage of quantitative methods fortranslatorship attribution is being able to analyze
large amounts of data and to discover patterns which
are not evident to the human reader.
Quantitative translatorship attribution is often
considered to be a classification problem, that is,a text with uncertain or problematic authorshipwill be analyzed and compared with a corpus oftexts by possible authors and then attributed to theauthor which whose works the texts shares most‘characteristics.’ Recent years have seen renewedinterest in many issues involved in optimizing
quantitative authorship attribution. One of them isthe effect of the size of possible candidate authors.
As Luyckx and Daelemans (2010) have shown theaccuracy of authorship analysis will decrease as thenumber of possible authors increases. It is therefore
advisable to limit the number of possible authors
in order to get a high accuracy analysis result.
In our case, however, many of the early Chinese
Buddhist translations are only rarely mentioned inhistorical records and canonical catalogues, and few
have attracted the attention of philologists. For thesetranslations, it is difficult to reduce the range ofpossible translators.
Therefore, as part of our attempt to establish
a foundation for quantitative translatorship
attribution for early Chinese Buddhist translations,
we propose a classification mechanism based on
predicting the translation time or period of a text. The
advantage of this mechanism is twofold. First, withina given time bracket for the translation, the numberof possible authors is limited, thereby improving
the performance of the translatorship attribution.
Second, by examining the result classification
mechanism, we are able to identify possible andprobable stylistic features of translations for different
periods.
The time periods we focus on in the present
study include three early Chinese dynasties: theEastern Han (C.E. 25-220), the Three Kingdoms(C.E. 220-280) and the Western Jin (C.E. 266-316).
These three dynasties constitute the earliest phaseof Buddhist translation history and most of thetranslations from these periods present attribution
problems. In this research, we build up classification
mechanisms for each of the three dynasties. Thesecan be used to test whether the translation styleof a text is similar to the one prevalent during acertain period. We are aware of the fact that within

Digital Humanities 2012

Buddhist Hybrid Chinese translation styles within agiven period can vary greatly.

Notes on the Works of Lokaksema. Buddhist Studies
Review 10(2): 135-177.

For the Eastern Han (C.E. 25-220) and the Three
Kingdoms periods we build on recent philologicalscholarship (Nattier 2008), which has ascertained
a number of attributions for this period. For theWestern Jin textual corpus, we rely on contemporary
research on traditional Buddhist sūtra catalogs,
from which we exclude those texts for whichcurrent scholarship has not reached a consensus(Lancaster 2008; Lü 1981; Ren 1985; Yu 1993;
Xu 1987). We then adopt the Variant Length Ngram algorithm (Hung et. al. 2009) to extract
the stylometric features from the three corporaof ascertained texts. Variant Length N-gram is anextended form of the traditional n-gram algorithm.
In the traditional n-gram algorithm, the length ofgrams n is fixed. Although the exploitation of ngram algorithm has great impact on the performanceof following analysis, deciding the best value of n
is not straightforward. The Variant Length N-gramalgorithm generates grams of all possible lengths,
then removes those which are not significant. Thus,
the importance of stylometric features is measured
across grams of different length. This is crucial as
there are no word boundaries in Buddhist Hybrid
Chinese: gram-based analysis must therefore include
grams of any length.

Hung, J., M. Bingenheimer, and S. Wiles(2009). Quantitative evidence for a hypothesis
regarding the attribution of early Buddhist
translations. Literary and Linguistic Computing
25(1): 119-134.

In the final stage, we use Fisher Linear Discriminant
Analysis (FLDA) to analyze the stylometric featuresthat have been extracted from the translations andto build up the classification mechanisms. The
FLDA is a well-known dimension reducing andclassification algorithm. It returns a linear functionthat transfers the high dimension source data ofdifferent groups into one-dimension points such thatthe ratio of total variances of projected points tothe variances between groups of projected points
is maximized. Since the FLDA’s transformation isbased on assigning weight to n-grams, the analysis
is capable of yielding distinctive features, i.e. stringsof Chinese characters, that are characteristic of thedynasties in question.
According to our experiments, the classification
mechanisms for the three dynasties have all reached
an accuracy rate higher than 90%. Moreover, when
the three classification mechanisms are combined
and usedto predict the translation time of an
unknown translation, we can achieve an accuracy
rate and a recall rate both above 80%. Besides, weare able to identify characteristic translation terms
for different time periods.

Lancaster, L. (2008). Catalogues in the Electronic
Era: CBETA and The Korean Buddhist Canon:
A Descriptive Catalogue. CBETA, Taipei, 2008
(electronic publication). Retrieved from http://jinglu.cbeta.org/lancaster.htm .
Lu, Cheng呂澂 (1981). Xinbian hanwen
dazangjing mulu 新編漢文大藏經目錄. Jinan: Jilu
shushe 齊魯書社.
Luyckx, K., and W. Daelemans (2010). The
effect of author set size and data size in authorship
attribution. Literary and Linguistic Computing.
26(1): 35-55.
Nattier, J. (2008). A Guide to the Earliest Chinese
Buddhist Translations: Texts from the Eastern Han
東漢 and Three Kingdoms 三國 Periods. Tokyo:
The International Research Institute for Advanced
Buddhology, Soka University.
Ren Jiyu 任繼愈 (1985). Zhongguo fojiao shi 中國
佛教史. Vol 1. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue 中国
社会科学出版社.
Xu Lihe 許理和 (1987). Zui zao de fojing yiwen
zhong de donghan kouyu chengfen 最早的佛經譯文
中的東漢口語成分, Yu yan xue lun cong 語言學論叢,
Vol. 14. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan 商務印書館,
pp. 197-225.
Yu Liming 俞理明 (1993). Fojing wenxian
yuyan 佛経文献語言 [The Language of the Buddhist
Scriptures]. Chengdu: Bashu shushe巴蜀書社, p.
206.
Zürcher, E. (1991). A New Look at the Earliest
Chinese Buddhist Texts. In K. Shinohara et al. (eds.),
From Benares to Beijing: Essays on Buddhism
and Chinese Religion in Honour of Prof. Jan Yünhua.Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, pp. 277-304.

References
Harrison, P. (1993). The Earliest Chinese
Translations of Mahāyāna Buddhist Sūtras: Some
231

Digital Humanities 2012

Bridging Multicultural
Communities: Developing a
Framework for a European
Network of Museum,
Libraries and Public
Cultural Institutions
Innocenti, Perla

perla.innocenti@glasgow.ac.uk
University of Glasgow, UK

Richards, John

John.Richards@glasgow.ac.uk
University of Glasgow, UK

Wieber, Sabine

Sabine.Wieber@glasgow.ac.uk
University of Glasgow, UK

One of the goals of the recently funded EU
FP7 SSH MeLa Project5 is to fill this gap byinvestigating, identifying and proposing innovative
coordination strategies between public European
museums, libraries and public cultural institutions,for the benefit of multicultural audiences andtowards European integration and European culturalcommons 6. The idea of laying the foundations for aEuropean network of museums, libraries and public
cultural institutions that address globalisation,
migration and new media is particularly fitting forthe configuration of migrant communities, which‘in the receiving countries can best be describedfrom a structural perspective as a network oforganizations.’7

2. Collaborations between
Museums and Libraries:
Potentialities and Challenges

Knut Kjeldstadli1

In the first phase of our MeLa research, we have been
focusing in particular on collaborations between
museums and libraries. Some studies in this area8
have highlighted the benefits of joining forces andresources in a variety of areas, including but notlimited to:

1. Introduction- library activities and programmes related tomuseum exhibits

Traditionally, museums and libraries developed
as historically separate institutional contexts anddistinct cultures. Trant2 noted how philosophiesand policies of museums and libraries reflect
their different approach to interpreting, collecting,preserving and providing access to objects in theircare. Bishoff remarked that ‘libraries believe inresource sharing, are committed to freely available
information, value the preservation of collections,and focus on access to information. Museums believe
in preservation of collections, often create theiridentity based on these collections, are committed
to community education, and frequently operate
in a strongly competitive environment’3. In thelast century policy makers have attempted togroup and bridge these communities of practices
through ‘their similar role as part of the informal
educational structures supported by the public, andtheir common governance’4. Such commonalities
are increasingly important to the sustainability ofmuseums, libraries (and archives) in a globalised
world. However a theoretical framework to scope andaddress such collaborative models still needs to be
developed. This is particularly urgent in the specificcontext of our transnational and multiculturalsocieties.

- travelling museums exhibitions hosted in libraries

Global migration is here to stay232

- links established between web-based resources inlibrary and museum websites- library programs including passes to museums- collaborative digitisation and digital library
projects enhancing access to resources in bothmuseums and libraries- collaborative initiatives to bring in authors as
speakers- museums and libraries partnerships with
cultural and education organisational for public
programmes.
The overall opportunities for improving collections,increasing the number of users, leveraging
experiences and funding also represent some of themain benefit of such partnerships. These studies
also often included archives as a third player inmuseums and archives collaborations. The aims
and objectives of collaboration projects between
museums and libraries that have been investigatedin previous studies, include: educational focus(e.g. learning about past civilisations, encourage
families learning together etc.), cross-over visits
between institutions, promoting resources to various
target groups, improving coordination between

Digital Humanities 2012

institutions, demonstrating joint working or training
activities, providing models for working practices.
The International Federation of Libraries
Association (IFLA) remarked that museums andlibraries would indeed be natural partners forcollaboration and cooperation9. In this context,
a study in the United States observed that‘collaboration may enable […] museums and libraries
to strengthen their public standing, improve theirservices and programs, and better meet the needsof a larger and more diverse cross-sections oflearners.’10 The nature of this collaboration can be
multifaceted and varied, and the terminology lends
itself to diverse meanings, in particular regarding
the degree of intensity of the collaboration andits transformational capacity. Gibson, Morris andCleeve noted that ‘“Library-museum collaboration”
can be defined as the cooperation between a library
and a museum, possibly involving other partners.
[…].’11 Here, the authors use the term ‘collaboration’with the meaning indicated by Diamant-Cohen and
Sherman, as a ‘more involved cooperation where
there is a more in-depth sharing and pooling ofresources.’12
Museums and libraries seem well positioned
to synergically support and enable multicultural
identities of migration societies. 13 As a result,museums are ideally placed to interpret andpreserve culturally diverse heritage.14 As centres for
culture, information hubs, learning and gathering,libraries seemingly represent service providers for
culturally diverse communities, enabling intercultural dialogue and education while supporting andpromoting diversity.15
Nevertheless, the fruitful convergence between
museums and libraries faces a number of challenges.
Some authors16 have highlighted the risks andobstacles encountered on the road to establish
a successful collaboration between museums andlibraries with respect to their different missions,cultures, organisational and funding structures.
In terms of change management, Zorich, Waibel,
Erway suggested that it is important to differentiate
between coordination and cooperation, and pointing
to the organisational changes required for a
deep collaboration between libraries, museums
and archives17. In particular for collaboration
on digital libraries, Bishoff18 and Innocenti etalii 19 remarked that interoperability is criticalto the digital library community. Innocenti etalii further stressed the diverse organisational,
semantic and technical interoperability levels thatneed to be addressed in a digital library, using
the classification of the European Interoperability
Framework for eGovernment services.20 Achieving

effective organisational interoperability between
digital libraries can imply a radical change in theway that organisations work, manage and share theirdigital assets.

3. Towards a European Networkof Museum, Libraries and Public
Cultural Institutions
In the MeLA project, the ongoing research
programme on a Network of Museums, Libraries andPublic Cultural Institutions is articulated through aseries of enquiries that intend to:- Investigate the relations between transnational
museums, library and public cultural institutions
collaborations and the society of migration.
- Identify and describe how transnational
museums, library and public cultural institutions
collaborating together present themselves tovarious public communities.
- Understand and evaluate the effects (benefits anddisadvantages) of transnational museums, libraryand public cultural institutions collaborations.
The results of this research will be made available
in three books (a source book, proceedings of aninternational conference21 and a reference book),including a coordination framework and policy briefs
for the museum Community, policy makers andfor European Commission. It is our wish that
this coordination framework will contribute to newcollaborative models of museums and libraries,
testing the possibility of a European ‘imaginedcommunity’22 and the idea of European culturalcommons, encompassing both cultural and scientificexpressions and artefacts.
At the DH 2012 Conference we are presenting an
overview of the desk and field investigation on
selected case studies, organised in four thematicclusters: Collaboration models, European culturaland scientific heritage, Migration and mobility,
Narratives for Europe. Each cluster includes casestudies articulated in primary, secondary andtertiary level, with additional information froman online survey on museum collaborations withlibraries and public cultural institutions.23 Areas ofcollaboration explored in our research include thecore activities of archiving, preserving and framing
memory and the associated categories of hierarchiesof cultural value and historical identity. The
geographic coverage comprises trans-national andtrans-local connections of museums and libraries,
to allow more flexible and heterogenic connections
to be considered, both within Europe – where forexample public libraries are at the forefront ofleading initiatives addressing multicultural diversity
233

Digital Humanities 2012

– and outside its assumed confines (for example
the Mediterranean), also in terms of European
Union legitimacy and identity.24 We will provide
an overview of differences and current tension
points between museums, libraries and public
cultural institutions investigated in our research,
and will discusssome initial suggestions on how
they may overcome the challenges built into theirinfrastructure25 and manage the change conveyed bycollaborations and use of ICTs.

4. Conclusions and Outlook
Within the MeLa project, we are investigating
innovative coordination strategies of transnational
European museums, libraries and public cultural
institutions, for the benefit of multiculturalaudiences and towards European integration andEuropean cultural commons. Our research aims toprovide evidence of collaborations and networks thatcan positively impact on the visibility of institutions
involved, the improvement of the diffusion andaccessibility of the collections, the effectiveness ofan integrated organisational structure at European
level and the coherence with European policies
towards a common cultural and scientific heritage
definition. We expect that the results of ourinvestigation, which will continue through 2013,
will contribute to the advancement of knowledge
in this area, to provide museums, libraries andpublic cultural institutions with collaboration model
framework, and to shaping European policies on
multiculturalism and migration.
Funding
This work was supported by the European
Commission within the MeLA - European Museums
and Libraries in/of the Age of Migration, EU cofunded FP7 Collaborative Project, SSH-2010-5.2-2,
2011-2014 [Grant Agreement No. 266757].
Notes
1. Kjeldstadli, Knut (2010). Concepts of nation – and tasksof libraries, Keynote speech at IFLA Section LibraryServices to Multicultural Populations, IFLA Satellite Meeting,
Copenhagen, 17-18 August 2010.
2. Trant, Jennife (2004). Emerging convergence? Thoughts
on museums, archives, libraries, and professional training.
Museum Management and Curatorship 24(4): 369-387.
3. Bishoff, Liz (2004). The Collaboration Imperative. Library
Journal, 2004. Accessed August 16, 2011. http://www.lib
raryjournal.com/article/CA371048.html .
4. Trant, Jennifer (2004). Emerging convergence? Thoughts
on museums, archives, libraries, and professional training.
Museum Management and Curatorship 24(4): 369.
5. MeLa – European Museums in an Age of Migrations,
http://www.mela-project.eu/ . The work presented
in this paper is being conducted within ‘MeLa Research

234

Field 03 - Network of Museums, Libraries and Public
Cultural Institutions.’ http://wp3.mela-project.eu/ .
Last accessed September 23, 2011. MeLa Research Field 03
is led by History of Art at the University of Glasgow (GU);the research team include staff members from Politecnico
di Milano, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design,
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Muséum Nationald’Histoire Naturelle/Musée de l’Homme, The Royal College ofArt, L’Orientale University of Naples.
6. The definition ‘European Cultural Commons’ hasbeen recently used in relation to digital content
within the European Cultural Commons conference(europeanculturalcommons.eventbrite.com (europeancult
uralcommons.eventbrite.com) , videos at http://www.
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE244178708CBB62C )organised by Europeana on October 12, 2011. Europeana,an initiative endorsed by the European Commission, is asingle access point to millions of books, paintings, films,
museum objects and archival records that have been digitised
throughout Europe. In this paper we are using the definition ina wider and more general meaning.
7. Faist, Thomas (1998). Transnational social spaces out of theinternational migration: evolution, significance and future
prospects. Archives Européennes de Sociologie 39: 213-247.
8. See for example: Hannah Gibson, Anne Morris andMarigold Cleeve (2007). Links between Libraries andMuseums: Investigating Museum-Library Collaboration in
England and the USA. Libri (57): 53-64. Accessed August
16, 2011 www.librijournal.org/pdf/2007-2pp53-64.pdf (www.librijournal.org/pdf/2007-2pp53-64.pdf) ; Diane
M. Zorich, Gunter Waibel, and Ricky Erway. Beyond
the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries,
Archives and Museums. Report produced for OCLC Research,
2008. Accessed August 16, 2011 www.oclc.org/research/
publications/library/2008/2008-05.pdf (www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2008/2008-05.pdf) ;Alexandra Yarrow, Barbara Clubb, and Jennifer-Lynn
Draper. Public Libraries, Archives and Museums: Trends
in Collaboration and Cooperation. The Hague: IFLA
Headquarters, 2008. Accessed August 16, 2011 www.ifla.org/
VII/s8/pub/Profrep108.pdf (www.ifla.org/VII/s8/pub/Profrep108.pdf) . The WP3 team is preparing a selectedbibliography for the purpose of the workpackage activities.
9. Yarrow, Alexandra, Barbara Clubb and Jennifer-Lynn
Draper. Public Libraries, Archives and Museums: Trends in
Collaboration and Cooperation. IFLA Professional Reports N.
108. The Hague: IFLA Headquarters, 2008. Accessed August
16, 2011 www.ifla.org/VII/s8/pub/Profrep108.pdf (www.ifla.org/VII/s8/pub/Profrep108.pdf) .
10. Charting the Landscape, Mapping New Paths: Museums,
Libraries, and K-12 Learning. Institute of Museumand Library Services. Aug. 2004. Accessed August 16,
2011 http://www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/Charting_the_Landscape.pdf
11. Gibson, Hannah, Anne Morris and Marigold Cleeve. Links
between Libraries and Museums: Investigating MuseumLibrary Collaboration in England and the USA. Libri (57) 2007:
53-64. Accessed August 16, 2011, p.53 www.librijournal.org/
pdf/2007-2pp53-64.pdf (www.librijournal.org/pdf/20
07-2pp53-64.pdf) .
12. Diamant-Cohen, Betsy, and Dina Sherman. Hand in Hand:
Museums and Libraries Working Together. Public Libraries
42.2 (Mar./Apr. 2003): 102-105.
13. The definition of culture I am looking at can be found in
the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity:

Digital Humanities 2012‘culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual,material, intellectual and emotional features of society or asocial group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art andliterature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems,
traditions and beliefs’ (UNESCO Universal Declaration on
Cultural Diversity. UNESCO: 2002. Last accessed 18 August
2011, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001
271/127160m.pdf ). In this paper the terms “multicultural”,“multiculturalism” and “cultural diversity” are consideredsynonymous.
14. See for example Barker, Emma, ed. Contemporary Culturesof Display. London: Yale UP 1999; Bennett, Tony, The Birthof the Museum. History, Theory, Politics. London & New
York NY: Routledge, 2009. Gonzalez, Jennifer A. Subject
to Display. Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation
Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2008. Graham, Beryl, andSarah Cook Rethinking Curating. Art after New Media.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2010. Karp, Ivan, et al., eds.
Museum Frictions. Public Cultures/ Global Transformations.
Durham, NC, London: Duke UP 2006. Knell, Simon J., et al.,eds. Museum Revolutions. How Museums Change and Are
Changed. London, New York NY: Routledge 2007.

Reflections on the Origina and Spread of Nationalism, Verso,
London and New York, new edition 2006.
23. Research Field 03: Online Survey, http://wp3.mela-proj
ect.eu/wp/pages/research-field-03-online-surv
ey . Accessed March 12, 2012.
24. See for example Fuchs, Dieter and Andrea Schlenker.
“European Identity and the Legitimacy of the EU“.
EU FP6 Consent Network of Excellence, 2006.
Last accessed September 23, 2011. www.eu-consent.net/
click_download.asp?contentid=1258 (www.eu-consent.ne
t/click_download.asp?contentid=1258) .
25. Karp, Ivan, et al., eds. Museum Frictions. Public Cultures/
Global Transformations. Durham NC & London: Duke
University Press, 2006.

15. IFLA - Library Services to Multicultural Populations
Section (ed.) The IFLA Multicultural Library Manifesto:
The Multicultural Library. 2006. Accessed 18 August
2011: http://www.ifla.org/VII/s32/pub/Multicult
uralLibraryManifesto.pdf .
16. Gibson, Hannah, Anne Morris and Marigold Cleeve.
Links between Libraries and Museums: Investigating
Museum-Library Collaboration in England and theUSA. Libri (57) 2007: 53-64. Accessed August 16,
2011 www.librijournal.org/pdf/2007-2pp53-64.pdf (www.li
brijournal.org/pdf/2007-2pp53-64.pdf) ; Walker,
Christopher, and Carlos A. Manjarrez. Partnerships
for Free Choice Learning: Public Libraries, Museums
and Public Broadcasters Working Together. The Urban
Institute and Urban Libraries Council. 2004. 22 May
2008 http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/410661_p
artnerships_for_free_choice_learning.pdf .
17. Zorich, Diane M., Waibel Gunter and Ricky Erway. “Beyond
the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries,
Archives and Museums”. Report produced for OCLC Research,
2008. Accessed August 16, 2011, p. 5, www.oclc.org/research/
publications/library/2008/2008-05.pdf (www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2008/2008-05.pdf) .
18. Bishoff, Liz. “The Collaboration Imperative”. Library Journal,
2004. Accessed August 16, 2011 http://www.libraryjou
rnal.com/article/CA371048.html
19. Innocenti, Perla, MacKenzie Smith, Kevin Ashley, Seamus
Ross, Antonella De Robbio, Hans Pfeiffenberger, John
Faundeen. Towards a Holistic Approach to Policy
Interoperabilityin Digital Libraries and Digital Repositories.
The International Journal of Digital Curation 6 (2011): 1,
accessed August 16, 2011, http://ijdc.net/index.php/
ijdc/article/view/167/235
20.IDABC. “ European interoperability framework for panEuropean eGovernment services”. Luxembourg: European
Commission 2004.
21. More information on the forthcoming International
Conference for MeLa Research Field 03 are available
at http://wp3.mela-project.eu/wp/pages/researc
h-field-03-international-conference .
22. For the concept of ‘imagined communities’ see theseminal book by Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.

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Digital Humanities 2012

Ptolemy’s Geography andthe Birth of GIS
Isaksen, Leifleifuss@googlemail.com
University of Southampton, UK

The Geographike hyphegesis of Claudius Ptolemy(c. 90-c. 168 CE) – more commonly known as the‘Geography’ but hereafter referred to as GH – isperhaps the most important text in the history ofdigital cartography. While its fame derives fromthe enormous catalogue of ancient places that havemade it indispensable for those studying ancient
geography, its central innovations of presenting
locations as tables of coordinates and offering
multiple projections by which to represent themmake it the foundational work for all modern
Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Yet despite
this historic legacy it remains a deeply problematic
text (Dilke 1987). The sheer quantity, breadth andapparent precision of the catalogue greatly surpass
that of every other known work of ancient geography.
How did a lone scholar, working with only publishedmaterials, compile such a comprehensive overview of
the inhabited world (oikumene)? And what provoked
his revolutionary shift in methodology?
Several research projects have used digital methods
to examine aspects of Ptolemy’s Geography inrecent years. Most significant is Stückelberger
and Graßhoff’s database of coordinates (2006)
which forms the baseline data for the researchpresented. Despite creating this excellent resource,
their analysis (Stückelberger & Mittenhuber 2009)
remains a fairly traditional close reading of thetext, makes scant explicit use of the digital
data. Tsorlini (2009) used digital methods toshow coordinate discrepancies between different
manuscripts, although these largely focus on the
medieval maps, the provenance of which remains
unclear (Mittenhuber 2010). Kleineberg et al. useddigital transformations in order to ‘georectify’ thecoordinates in the region of Germania Magna andthus propose the identification of many hitherto
unidentified locations with modern sites (2010).
Conventional wisdom is that GH is the culminationof a long tradition of Greek geographical andastronomical science, augmented and improvedat each stage by contemporary sources such as
merchant’s reports, itineraries and astronomical
observations (Berggren & Jones 2000: 25-30). This
paper will present several arguments based on digital
methods to demonstrate that this view is almost
certainly wrong and that Ptolemy’s treatise is a highly
236

original work that fuses two distinct traditions for a
specific purpose: the calculation of local celestial andsolar phenomena for astrological prognostication.
This goal required the combined data of Greek
geographic maps – which represented the inhabitedworld schematically but in relation to cosmologicalconstants such as the poles and equator – and Roman
chorographic maps, which represented the world
in a series of densely populated but geospatiallyunanchored regional images. It was the challengeof bringing together these very different traditions
which led Ptolemy to apply the data management
techniques he had used for astronomical data in the
Almagest and thus the lay the groundwork for latemedieval geography and ultimately the GIS systemsof today.
While Digital Humanities is not the forum to lay
out a full argument for Ptolemy’s motives and thenature of his sources – which will be expressed in aforthcoming paper – the following preliminary points
should be made. First, his astrological ambitions
are no surprise. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos became theprinciple work on the topic for almost a millennium
and he explicitly refers to the practice of calculatingcelestial phenomena for terrestrial locations in the
Almagest (2.3; 8.6), GH itself (1.1; 8.2) and theManual to the Handy Tables. No other practicalmotive is given for GH’s construction and thus there
is no reason to believe that it was ever intended
for an alternative purpose. The second point is thatwhile we have virtually no extant examples of prePtolemaic geographic or chorographic maps, thewritten sources – including Ptolemy’s distinction
between the two practices in GH (1.1) – offersome important clues. The mathematical precisionof geographia is explicitly stated by Ptolemy, butevidence as to the paucity of its content canbe adduced from fragments of the three authors
most likely to have been sources to Ptolemy –Eratosthenes, Hipparchus and Marinos of Tyre.
Ignoring those on the Persian Royal Road, theplaces they mention are overwhelmingly (~90%)
located on coastlines and boundaries. This is stark
contrast to GH in which interior locations outnumber
liminal ones by about 3:2. In contrast, both Ptolemy
and Strabo (Geog. 2.5.17) refer to the richness ofchorographic content but a strong indication of theirunsuitability for astrology is given by the absenceof any geodetic information for the Agrippan ‘World
Map’ and other chorographic sources.

1. Statistical distributions ofprecision
Ptolemy’s coordinates are expressed as fractions ofa degree of latitude (measured from the equator)and longitude (measured from an arbitrarily definedprime meridian in the Atlantic ocean). Superficial

Digital Humanities 2012

examination makes clear that the smallest latitudinaland longitudinal increment is 1/12 of a degree(or 5 minutes) of arc. As real world locations arethemselves distributed randomly, we would expect
a relatively even distribution of Ptolemaic locations
with respect to the fraction of degree upon which theyfall. In fact their distribution is highly uneven (Figure1), a phenomenon also observed by Marx (2011). We
know that some locations (which we shall refer to as‘high precision’ locations) must have been assigned
to the nearest twelfth of a degree, as they fall on
divisions that are indivisible by lower denominators.1
However, the uneven distribution makes it clear thatsignificantly more of the coordinates are assigned
at lower levels of precision: sometimes just to thenearest degree. The challenge is to establish whichof them have been plotted more or less precisely.
While it is not possible to do this by considering
each location individually the fact that Ptolemy’s
principles are so closely aligned with GIS make it
an ideal tool for investigating the data’s underlying
structure.

that these values have not been determined fromempirical measurements.

Figure 2: Coordinates know to be assigned at a precisionof 1/12 of a degree of latitude or longitude. The effect isobserved in both Ξ (black) and Ω (red) recensionsFigure
2: Coordinates know to be assigned at a precision of
1/12 of a degree of latitude or longitude. The effectis observed in both Ξ (black) and Ω (red) recensions

3. Linear interpolation

Figure 1: Quantity of coordinates falling on latitudinal(white) and longitudinal (black) degree divisions (in minutes)

2. Spatial distribution of precision
The first clues as to the spatial distribution of‘high precision’ locations emerge from plotting all
locations which are definitely assigned to the nearest
twelfth of a degree in a GIS2 (Figure 2). This
demonstrates beyond all doubt that a core body ofdata – comprising Hispania, Italia and its majorisland neighbours, Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant
and Egypt – contains virtually all known coordinatesassigned to this high level of precision. The
phenomenon appears in both manuscript traditions.
In contrast, the peripheral regions, which include
such well-established roman regions as Gaul andAfrica Proconsularis, are almost entirely devoid of‘high precision’ locations. Furthermore, althoughlatitude is generally more likely to be of highprecision than longitude, this is not caused by thewell-known ‘Problem of longitude’ (Sobel 1995).
Latitude can be hopelessly incorrect in some ‘highprecision’ regions (such as Sardinia) so it is evident

The order in which Ptolemy’s coordinates are listed
is not random. The description of each region follows
a strict sequence commencing with boundaries,
followed by physical geography, continuing withinland cities and concluding with offshore islands.
The boundaries and physical features are typicallylinear in form and so topographically adjacentlocations are listed consecutively to facilitate thedrawing of lines or iconography between them.
Islands are also listed in the sequence in which they
follow a coastline wherever possible. Much moreinteresting for this analysis are the cities of theinterior, for there is no natural order for Ptolemy tofollow and so they may betray information as to themanner in which they were obtained.
We can visualize this order very easily by simply‘joining the dots’ in sequence and colour coding theindividual regions. Once again, the results display
a striking disparity between the core regions andthe periphery. In the core data, coordinates group
together in tightly bunched clusters. At the periphery
they are generally ‘sketched out’ in linear zig-zagging
rows, usually horizontally (Europe, much of Asia)or vertically (Africa), but occasionally in a NE-SW
sweep (India). A comparison with the ‘high precision’coordinates over these features clearly demonstrates
a correlation between this stylistic variation and the‘core’ data we identified previously (Figure 3).

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Figure 3: Detail showing lines interpolated between
settlements overlaid with ’high precision’ coordinates

4. Two Coordinate Systems
We can push this further. Despite the apparent
regularity of Ptolemy’s 180 x 360 coordinate grid(first developed by Hipparchus (Dicks 1960: 32-33)),
he also makes reference to a traditional series ofirregular Greek parallels (based on the length ofthe longest day) and tripartite divisions of the ‘hourintervals’ - the ‘time-zones’ of antiquity. So which
coordinate system is Ptolemy using? The answer
is most clearly illustrated by examining Ptolemy’s
regional map of Arabia Felix and Karmania. Ptolemy
lists a series of tribal and geographic divisions along
the coast of the Arabian peninsula and it is apparent
that their locations are defined with reference tothe traditional coordinate system (Figure 4). Yet
the interior, which contains no differentiation andis simply a list of towns conforms, to the entirely
separate Hipparchan framework (Figure 5).
We must be careful to jump to conclusions too
readily for, as we have seen, there is much regionalvariation in Ptolemy’s sources, but a consistentpattern emerges in both core and periphery.
Boundaries make reference to the coarse-grained
and irregular, traditional Greek framework whereasinternal cities generally conform to the finegrained and regular coordinate system. Returning
to our earlier argument, there is an obvious
explanation. Ptolemy’s goals required him to use
Greek geographic maps as a framework if he wasto compare terrestrial and celestial locations. Yet
we know that the data they provide is scanty. His
solution was to peg chorographic maps to this global
framework, thereby eliminating systemic error at thecost of local accuracy.

Figure 4: Ptolemy’s map of Arabia Felix and Karmania
showing how tribal divisions and structure are associated withtraditional Greek parallels and divisions of ‘hour intervals’

Figure 5: Ptolemy’s map of Arabia Felix and Karmania
showing how the order of undifferentiated cities of theinterior is influenced by the Hipparchan coordinate system

References
Berggren, J. L., and A. Jones (2000). Ptolemy’s
Geography. An Anntoated Translation of the
Theoretical Chapters. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Dicks, D. R. (1960). The Geographical Fragmentsof Hipparchus. London: Athlone Press.
Dilke, O. A. W. (1987). The Culmination of Greek
Cartography in Ptolemy. In J. B. Harly and D.
Woodward (eds.), The History of Cartography.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, vol. 1, pp. 177-200.
Kleineberg, A., et al. (2010). Germania und
die Insel Thule. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft.
Marx, C. (2011). On the precision of Ptolemy’sgeographic coordinates in his Geographike
Hyphegesis. History of Geo- and Space Sciences 2(1):29-37.

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Mercier, R. (2011). Ptolemaiou Procheiroi
Kanones. Ptolemy’s Handy Tables. Leuven: Peeters.
Sobel, D. (1995). Longitude. The True Story ofa Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific
Problem of His Time. London: Fourth Estate.
Jones, H. L. (1917). The Georgraphy of Strabo.
London: Heinemann, vol. 1.
Stückelberger, A., and G. Graßhoff (2006).
Ptolemaios. Handbuch der Geographie. Basel:
Schwabe.

Tracing the history of Nohtexts by mathematicalmethods. Validitating theapplication of phylogenetic
methods to Noh texts
Iwata, Yoshimi

sakunoshippo@gmail.com
Doshisha University, Japan

Stückelberger, A., and F. Mittenhuber(2009). Ptolemaios. Handbuch der Geographie.
Ergänzungsband. Basel: Schwabe.
Toomer, G. J. (1984). Ptolemy’s Almagest,
London: Duckworth.
Tsorlini, A. (2009). Higher Order Systematic Effectin Ptolemy’s Geographia Coordinate Description of
Iberia. e-Perimetron 4(2): 117-130.
Notes
1. At 5 minutes (1/12), 25 minutes (5/12), 35 minutes (7/12) and55 minutes (11/12)
2. Those that fall on the traditional 2nd, 4th, 11th, 12th, 13th,anti-2nd and anti-4th Greek parallels (which also happen to be‘high precision’ for arbitrary reasons) have also been removed
here for reasons which will become clear.

1. Introduction
Noh is a classical Japanese stage art consisting of
singing and dancing with musical accompaniment.
The song lyrics have been documented and are
known as Noh texts. It is generally accepted that
there are 240 songs, which are still performed today.
However, some academic scholars claim that there
are more than 500 Noh texts in existence. The texts
take on different forms depending on the Noh school
and the era in which they were edited.
Very little analyses have been carried out on
Noh texts by applying mathematical methods.
Therefore, in previous studies, Noh text was analyzed
by identifying the authors of each Noh playusing mathematical methods. This study employedmathematical and statistical methods to analyze
21 songs including worrier play category fromNoh plays. Specific usage within lexical categories(auxiliary verb, adjective) was identified. As in Nohplay, there are manuscripts which differ by the Nohschool and the era being edited, the manuscripts
under study need to be chosen adequately. Therefore,
it is necessary to trace the history of each Nohtext using phylogenetic analysis. At the same time,
one has to be aware of the differences between
engineering and literary approaches.

2. Purpose of research
The purpose of this research is to establish a
new methodology in Noh field by employing
mathemathecal and stylometric techniques. First,
data is collected from various research materials
and a database is constructed that facilitates
preliminary analyses to verify items in thecollected data or to draw a complete map
for further studies. Practical analyses directly
connected to interpretations are based on the
preliminary analyses. Although, in Japan, theseprocesses are common in both engineering andliterary approaches, attitudes to analyses are239

Digital Humanities 2012

completely different. In engineering approaches,
final conclusions are derived from practical analyses.
In contrast, in literary approaches, analyses andinterpretations are essentially synonymous andinterpretive understanding is given more importancethan scientifically based analyses. Therefore thediscussions with other fields, such as information
science, are required in each research process.
Additionally, linguistic and cultural barriers makeforeign researchers to spend a lot of time and careon understanding the research materials. Standingon this point, versatile methodology not to dependon researchers’ skills of language is required.
Normalized Compression Distance (NCD) method,
the author focused on in this paper, calculates
similarity of texts objects by using compression
algorithm without any knowledge about the researchmaterials.

4. Analysis
This study examined Tadanori (忠度), one of the
240 existing songs. Tadanori is one of the oldest
accessible manuscripts, and anyone can browse
the full version of the photocopied manuscript. In
addition, this masterpiece is popular even now, andthus, there is a considerable relevant material thatmakes it possible to trace the history of the Noh texts(Table 1). Eleven different Tadanori manuscripts
were transcribed as data files. The size column inTable 1 shows the byte size of the manuscripts.

3. Previous ResearchesTwoprevious
research
appliedmethodologies to cultural phenomena.

biological

A. Split decomposition, Spectronet
Tamaki Yano (2005)
Tamaki Yano applied Phylogenetic methods tocollections of traditional Japanese ‘waka’ poems
edited in 1215 [1]. The term ‘waka’ is a form ofpoem handed down from ancient times in Japan.
The research materials had some versions thatdeparted from the original, and the research aimed
to identify an archetype for the differing collections.
In this study, the genealogy of each collection isvisualized by neighbor-net, a distance-based method
for constructing phylogenetic networks that is basedon the neighbor-joining algorithm of Saitou and Nei[2].
B. Database and Semantic Analysis for Fine Arts
Based on Researchers’ Experience –The Case of ‘A
Hundred Beauties’ Drawn by YAMAGUCHI SOKEN
Yuka Iemura, Yu Fujimoto (2010)
In Iemura and Fujimoto’s research, NCD was used
to calculate the similarity distance because of its
simplicity. Suppose, for instance, there are two files
named ‘x’ and ‘y,’ C(xy) is the compressed size forthe concatenation of files ‘x’ and ‘y.’ C(x) denotes thecompressed size of ‘x’ and C(y) denotes that of ‘y.’Fujimoto and Iemura attempted to apply this method
to XML documents and the results were visualizedusing neighbor-net. They concluded that the results
properly reflected differences between each XML
document [3].

240Table 1: Node names and manuscripts

A. NCDTo create text files for NCD, all kanjis wereconverted to Japanese hiragana using Visual Basic
for Applications (VBA).
NCD was calculated by Hyakka-One, which is a
NCD calculating software developed by Fujimoto.
The software currently supports zip, gzip, andbzip algorithms. General zip compression was usedin this study. Although the original advocates of
NCD recommend the quartet method for clustering,neighbor-net was used to visualize the genealogy ofNoh-hon. The distance matrix calculated by HyakkaOne was exported to phylogenetic tree software,
Splits Tree4, and visualized as a phylogenetic
network called a neighbor-net. The neighbor-net
derived from the NCD matrix is presented in Figure1.
B. Phylogenetic approach
The phylogenetic approach involves two methods.
The first is a method for detecting differences
between each group of phrases and calculating
distances for a phylogenetic tree. The second, which
is used to verify the results of the NCDs, is basedon the maximum parsimony method. PAUP*4.0

Digital Humanities 2012software was used for this verification in thisstudy. PAUP* is commonly used in cladistics or
phylogenetics. To apply the second method, data
cleaning is required to conflate each Noh text andextract the different phrases, make groups of phrases,
and replace the groups with single letters. The
process of separating Noh texts into phrases is not
required by the NCD method. The methods provide
different results based on differences between
phrases. PAUP* returned 841 results. Although
the lengths of edges are shorter than the NCD
results, they are similar. These result were integratedusing super-network and the integrated results weredisplayed using Splits Tree4.

preliminary analysis. It is acknowledged that it will
be necessary to develop database schemas that canpotentially generate text plans for calculating NCD.

Figure 1: Neighbor-net for texts of
Tadanori derived from NCD distance

5. Results
Three results were obtained by the distance methodby SplitsTree4 (Figure 2), the Super-Network by
the maximum parsimony trees (Figure 3), andthe distance method by NCD (Figure 1). In all
three results, the kp and kz groups are apparently
separated. This means the texts can be categorizedaccording to schools. With regard to hs_1979, allthree networks show that hs_1979 is closer to thekz group. Related to the forms of performance, itis generally accepted in the Noh community thatthe hs group and the kz group are part of thesame group, while kp belongs to other groups thatwere not included in this study. Therefore, thesethree results support the generally accepted ideas.
Although NCD tends to be criticized because of the
difficulty involved in verifying the results, in thisstudy, the NCD approach gives enough results ongrouping and can be applied to preliminary analysis.
The advantage of NCD is the simplicity of its data
cleaning process. Because of this simplicity, foreign
researchers who are not fully familiar with theJapanese language or researchers of literature andhave a limited knowledge of engineering can handle
the data. The other two methods require familiarity
with both Japanese and engineering. NCD has a
disadvantage for the practical analysis stage. Because
NCD depends on a complex compression algorithm,
it is difficult to perform verification using the original
texts.

6. Conclusion
The NCD approach has been successfully applied
to Noh research. In this initial study, the resultsfrom the NCD method were not significantly different
from the other two common methods, and it isreasonable to conclude that the NCD method cansupport traditional Noh studies equally as well as
the other two methods. In future research, theauthor will attempt to apply NCD to other Noh plays
and determine if it is valid to use the method for

Figure 2: Neighbor-net for texts of Tadanori
derived from standard distance method

Figure 3: Super-network for texts of Tadanori derived
from the maximum parsimony method (PAUP*)

References
Yano, T. (2005). Split decomposition, Spectronet.
Japan. The Special Interest Group Notes of IPSJ SIG
Computers and the Humanities, pp. 33-40.
Saitou, N., and M. Nei (1987). The neighborjoining method: a new method for reconstructing
phylogenetic trees. Molecular Biology and Evolution
4: 406-425.
Iemura, Y., and Y. Fujimoto (2010). Databaseand Semantic Analysis for Fine Arts Basedon Researchers’ Experience – The Case of ‘A
Hundred Beauties’ Drawn by YAMAGUCHI SOKEN.
Proceedings of Third Japan Art Documentation
Society, pp. 12-15.
Omote, A. (1965). The Study of Kozanbunkobon –the part of Utaibon –. Tokyo: Wanya Bookstore.
Yokomichi, M., and A. Omote (1960).
Youkyokusyu 1 & 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Bookstore).

241

Digital Humanities 2012

Computing and Visualizing
the 19th-Century Literary
GenomeJockers, Matthew
mjockers@stanford.edu
Stanford University, USA

1. Overview
In literary studies, we have no shortage of anecdotal
wisdom regarding the role of influence on creativity.
Consider just a few of the most prominent voices:
1. ‘Talents imitate, geniuses steal’ – Oscar Wilde(1854-1900?).1
2. ‘All ideas are second hand, consciously andunconsciously drawn from a million outside
sources’ – Mark Twain (1903).
3. ‘The historical sense compels a man to write notmerely with his own generation in his bones, butwith a feeling that the whole of the literature … hasa simultaneous existence’ – T. S. Eliot (1920).
4. ‘The elements of which the artwork is created areexternal to the author and independent of him …’– Osip Brik (1929).
5. Anxiety of Influence – Harold Bloom (1973).
Whether consciously influenced by a predecessor
or not, it might be argued that every book is insome sense a necessary descendant of, or necessarily‘connected to, ’ those before it. Influence may bedirect, as when a writer models his or her writing on
another writer,2 or influence may be indirect in theform of unconscious borrowing. Influence may evenbe ‘oppositional’ as in the case of a writer who wishes
to make his or her writing intentionally different fromthat of a predecessor. The aforementioned thinkers
offer informed but anecdotal evidence in supportof their claims of influence. My research brings
a complementary quantitative and macroanalytic
dimension to the discussion of influence. For this,I employ the tools and techniques of stylometry,
corpus linguistics, machine learning, and network
analysis to measure influence in a corpus of late 18thand 19th-century novels.

2. Method
The 3,592 books in my corpus span from 1780 to1900 and were written by authors from Britain,
Ireland, and America; the corpus is almost evenin terms of gender representation. From each of
242

these books, I extracted stylistic information using
techniques similar to those employed in authorship
attribution analysis: the relative frequencies of every
word and mark of punctuation are calculated and theresulting data winnowed so as to exclude features notmeeting a preset relative frequency threshold.3 Fromeach book I also extracted thematic (or ‘topical’)information using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei,
Ng et al. 2003; Blei, Griffiths et al. 2004; Chang,Boyd-Graber et al. 2009). The thematic data includes
information about the percentages of each theme/
topic found in each text.4 I combine these twocategories of data – stylistic and thematic – tocreate ‘book signals’ composed of 592 unique feature
measurements. The ‘Euclidian” metric is then used
to calculate every book’s distance from every otherbook in the corpus. The result is a distance matrix ofdimension 3,592 x 3,592.5
While measuring and tracking ‘actual’ or ‘true’
influence – conscious or unconscious – is impossible,
it is possible to use the stylistic-thematic distance/
similarity measurements as a proxy for influence.6
Network visualization software can then be used asa way to organize, visualize, and study the presenceof influence among of books in my corpus.7 To
prepare the data for use in a network environment,
I converted the distance matrix into a long-formtable with 12,902,464 rows and three columns inwhich each row captures a distance relationshipbetween two books. The first cell contains a ‘source’
book, the second cell a ‘target’ book, and a thirdcell the measured distance between the two. Afterremoving all of the records in which the target book
was published before, or in the same year as, thesource book,8 the data was reduced from 12,902,464
records to 6,447,640. This data and a separate tableof metadata were then imported into the open source
network analysis software package Gephi (2009) foranalysis and visualization.

3. Analysis
Networks are constructed out of nodes (books) andedges (distances). When plotted, nodes with lesssimilarity (i.e. larger distances between them) will
spread out further in the network. Figure 1 offers a
simplified example of three imaginary books.

Digital Humanities 2012

Figure 1: a sample network with edge numbers
representing measured distances between nodes

While it is not possible to show the details of theentire network here, it is possible to display severalof the most obvious macro-structures. Figure 2,
for example, presents a zoomed out view of the
network with book nodes colored according to datesof publication.9

Figure 3: The 19th-century novel network
colored according to author-gender

Figure 2: The 19th-century novel network
colored according to publication date

The shading of nodes and edges according to
publication date reveals the inherently chronologicalnature of stylistic and thematic change. The
progressive darkening of the nodes from east to west
allows us to see, at the macro-scale, how style andtheme are changing and evolving over time. 10Also
seen in this image is a ‘satellite’ of books in thenorthwest. This satellite represents a ‘community’ ofnovels that are highly self-similar but at the sametime markedly different from the books in the main
network cluster. 11When the network is recoloredaccording to gender (figure 3), a new axis can be seen
splitting the network into northern and southern
sectors along gender lines.

This visualization (Figure 3) reveals that works byfemale authors (colored light gray) and male authors(black) are more stylistically and thematicallyhomogeneous within their respective gender classes.
As a result of this similarity in ‘signals,’ femaleauthored books cluster together on the south sideof the main network, while male-authored books
are drawn together in the north.12 These two ‘views’of the network allow us to begin imagining thelarger macro-history of thematic-stylistic change andinfluence in the 19th-century novel. What is not
obvious in this macro-view, however, is that a great
many of the individual books we have traditionallystudied are in fact ‘mutations’ or outliers from thegeneral trends. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, for example, clusters closer to the works ofmale authors, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda has asignal that does not become dominant for forty years
after the date of Belinda’s publication. Also absent
from the macro-view are the individual thematicstylistic ‘legacies’. Using three measures of network
significance (weighted in-degree, weighted outdegree and Page-Rank), 13I will end my presentation
with the argument that Jane Austen and Walter Scott
are at once the least influenced (i.e. most original)of the early writers in the network and, at the sametime, the most influential in terms of the longevity,or ‘fitness,’ of their thematic-stylistic signals. The
signals introduced by Austen and Scott position themat the beginning of a stylistic-thematic genealogy;
they are, in this sense, the literary equivalent of
Homo erectus or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve.

243

Digital Humanities 2012

References
Bastian, M., S. Heymann, et al. (2009). Gephi:
An Open Source Software for Exploring andManipulating Networks.

Yang, Y., and J. Pedersen (1997). A comparative
study on feature selection in text categorization.
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML ’97), Nashville, Tennessee.

Blei, D. M., T. L. Griffiths, et al. (2004).
Hierarchical topic models and the nested Chinese
restaurant process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Zhao, Y., and J. Zobel (2005). Effective andscalable authorship attribution using function words.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer,
pp. 174-189.

Blei, D. M., A. Y. Ng, et al. (2003). Latent Dirichlet
Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research
3: 993-1022.

Notes

Bloom, H. (1973). The anxiety of influence; a theoryof poetry. New York: Oxford UP.
Bloom, H. (2011). The anatomy of influence:
literature as a way of life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
UP.
Brik, O. M. (1929). Teaching Writers.
Chang, J., J. Boyd-Graber, et al. (2009).
Reading Tea Leaves: How Humans Interpret Topic
ModelsAdvances in Neural Information Processing
Systems 22.
Eliot, T. S. (1920). The sacred wood; essays on
poetry and criticism. London: Methuen.
Garcia, M., and C. Martin (2007). Function
Words in Authorship Attribution Studies. Literaryand Linguistic Computing: Journal of the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing
22(1): 49-66.
Grieve, J. (2007). Quantitative Authorship
Attribution: An Evaluation of Techniques. Literaryand Linguistic Computing: Journal of the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing
22(3): 251-270.
Hoover, D. L. (2001). Statistical Stylistics andAuthorship Attribution: An Empirical Investigation.
Literary and Linguistic Computing: Journal of the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing
16(4): 421-444.
Hoover, D. L. (2008). Quantitative Analysis andLiterary Studies. A Companion to Digital Literary
Studies. Oxford: Blackwell.
Martindale, C., and D. McKenzie (1995). On the
Utility of Content Analysis in Author Attribution: The
Federalist. Computers and the Humanities 29(4):259-270.
Team, R. D. C. (2011). R: A Language andEnvironment for Statistical Computing. Vienna:
Austria, R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Twain, M., and A. B. Paine (1975). Mark Twain’s
letters. New York: AMS Press.

244

1. Routinely attributed to Wilde, but of uncertain origin, Wilde
probably ‘borrowed’ this quip.
2. An extreme case may be Fielding’s Shamela, which attempts tosatirize Richardson’s Pamela.
3. Features with a corpus mean less than 0.10 were excluded. This
resulted in 92 features being retained. For more on feature
selection practices see: Martindale and McKenzie (1995), Yangand Pedersen (1997), Hoover (2001), Zhao and Zobel (2005),
Garcia and Martin (2007), Grieve (2007), Hoover (2008)
4. For this research, the topic model was set to extract 500 latent
topics.
5. ‘Distance’ here is a measure of stylistic and thematic similarity.
Distances were calculated using the default settings of the‘dist()’ function in the R statistics package. See: Team (2011)
6. This is not simply a ‘proxy’ of convenience. It is, in fact, an ideal
proxy, especially so when we consider that even plagiarism (themost obvious form of influence) can be accidental.
7. I’m grateful to my colleague Elijah Meeks who sees theworld through network analysis goggles and who aided me invisualizing and analyzing this data.
8. Influence only works in one direction!
9. All network layouts employ Gephi’s built-in Force Atlas 2algorithm.
10. Remember that time is not a feature in the similarity
calculations. The arrangement of the nodes in a chronologicalfashion is a byproduct of the way in which the books signals
change in a regular, chronological, manner.
11. In the larger presentation of this work, I will offer an
explanation for why the 499 books in this isolated cluster
are split off from the main network. One unifying element istime; most are books from a similar time period, but the full
explanation is more nuanced.
12. Even in the satellite community, sub clustering by gender isapparent.
13. Weighted in-degree is a measure of influence coming into a
node whereas weighted out-degree provides a measure of theinfluence a given node exerts on subsequent nodes. The PageRank algorithm can be used to gauge the significance/power/
importance of a book in the overall network.

Digital Humanities 2012

Using the Google Ngram
Corpus to Measure Cultural
Complexity
Juola, Patrick

juola@mathcs.duq.edu
Duquesne University, USA

It is common to hear assertions that culture iscomplex, that language is complex, and that while
the complexity of language is a universal constant,the complexity of culture is increasing as technology
and the increased pace of modern life creates newcomplexities. These statements are usually basedon subjective assessments, often tinged by nostalgia
for the ‘good old days.’ Can questions of culturalcomplexity be addressed quantitatively?
Previous work (e.g. Juola 1997, 2008) has beenable to use information theory to address thisquestion. The basic idea is that a sample of languageis ‘complex’ if it contains a lot of information,
defined formally as the size of the computer programthat would be necessary to (re)create the sample
from scratch, a measure more formally known as
Kolmogorov complexity. This can be approximatedby compressing the text sample and looking at thesize of the resulting file – the larger the resulting file,the more complex the original. Alternatively, one cancompute complexity directly using Shannon’s (1948)
famous formula for information entropy based ona concept of the underlying linguistic ‘events.’ In
any case, linguistic complexity can be measured
observing discourse-controlled samples of language,
essentially by comparing several (linguistic) versionsof the same text, such as translations of the Bible
or of a specific novel, and observing whether one
language yields systematically larger measurements
than another. Previous work suggests that no such
systematic pattern exists, and that all languages areindeed roughly equal in complexity.
Key to this approach is the idea of discourse control;
we are measuring how difficult it is to express
a specific fixed concept in a given language andcomparing it to the same concept expressed in an
another language. Culture, however, can be treatedas the set of concepts that people choose to express.
By eliminating the restriction of discourse control
and instead investigating language chosen freely by
the cultural participants, we may be able to teaseapart the interaction between cultural and linguistic
complexity. In particular, we can distinguish between
linguistic and cultural complexity as follows: alanguage is complex if there is a lot of information

contained in a topic-controlled discourse. A culture
is complex if there is a large range of topics
for discourse, or alternatively a lot of information
contained in topical choice. Therefore, if we compare
the complexity (however measured) of two language
samples that are not topic-controlled, but instead
are in some sense representative of the breadth of
discourse present in a culture, we can calculate thedifferences attributable to discourse variation, andhence to cultural complexity.
As an illustrative example, we follow the approachof Spenser (1900; cited by Denton 2004), inthat ‘complex’ means ‘containing many different
interdependent parts.’ A complex political system has
many parties and power groups, many different roles
and offices, and many relationships among them. In
a political discourse, many if not most of these parties
and power groups would need to be explicitly named
and distinguished from each other. By contrast, an
autocratic monarchy is relatively simple: there is themonarch and then everyone else. A game is complex if
it has many rules and strategies. A culture is complex
if it contains many heterogeneous aspects suchas technological specifications, social stratification,
multilevel administrative hierarchies, or a large
amount of object or object-types. Continuing thisline of reasoning, a complex culture is one withlots of ‘stuff’ and where people do lots of things toor with ‘stuff,’ where ‘stuff’ here refers not only tophysical objects but also to people, groups, activities,
abstractions, and so forth – anything that can be
discussed among the group.
We therefore apply the previous methodology toa different sort of corpus; an uncontrolled corpusthat represents the breadth of cultural experience.
If the information contained in such a corpus ishigh, then we can say the culture is complex. Several
corpora may be suitable for this purpose; we havechosen to study the Google Books Ngram Corpus(Michel et al. 2010). This contains all of the ngrams from the millions of books in the Google
Books database, something like 20 million books, orapproximately 4% of all books ever printed. While
not strictly speaking representative (for example,‘publishing was a relatively rare event in the 16th and17th centuries,’ and ‘many more books are publishedin modern years’), and of course typically only theliterate can write or publish books, this neverthelessgives us a time-stamped window into the scope ofculture. Furthermore, by focusing on n-grams (andspecifically on 2-grams, word pairs), we can observe
not only the distribution of ‘stuff,’ but also someof the relationships between ‘stuff’ – for example,
the number and range of word pairs beginning with
‘expensive’ will inform us about changing opinions
regarding money and the types of goods consideredluxurious and pricey.

245

Digital Humanities 2012

We therefore used the Google Books American 2Gram Corpus to measure changes in the complexityof American culture at ten-year intervals between
1900 and 2000. This corpus simply contains afrequency list of all two word phrases used in
American-published books in any given year. For
example, the phrase ‘hamburgers with’ appeared only
8 times in print in 1940, compared to 45 in theyear 2000. Focusing strictly on the US during the20th century avoids many of the problems withmass culture, as publishing was a well-establishedindustry and literacy was widespread. However, thenumber of books published in this time of course
tended to increase. Our first observation, then, is that
culture may be increasing simply from the number ofdifferent things to talk about. The number of different
word pair types per year increased dramatically,
nearly doubling from 1900 to 2000, as given in table1.
Year# types

1900

17,769,755

1910

22,834,741

1920

22,409,426

1930

19,745,549

1940

20,369,679

1950

23,632,749

1960

27,379,411

1970

34,218,686

1980

34,458,083

1990

37,796,626

2000

41,654,264
Table 1This alone indicates an increase in the complexityof written culture, although this process is notcontinuous and some years during the Depression
show a loss. To confirm the overall upward trend, we
have also calculated the Shannon-entropy of the 2gram distributions, attached as table 2.
Year

Entropy (bits)

1900

17.942357

1910

18.072880

1920

18.072325

1930

18.133058

1940

18.241048

1950

18.336162

1960

18.3918721970

18.473447

1980

18.692278

1990

18.729807

2000

18.742085
Table 2This further analysis illustrates that a moresophisticated measure of complexity shows a

246

continuous process of increasing complexity, even intimes when (for example due to economic downturn)the actual volume of words published decreases.
Even when people are writing less, they still havemore ‘stuff’ about which to write, showing the
cumulative nature of culture (today’s current events
are tomorrow’s history, but still suitable material for
discussion and analysis – part of culture).
We acknowledge that this is a preliminary study
only. Google Books offers cultural snapshots atmuch greater frequency than ten-year intervals.
Google Books also offers corpora in other languages(including German, French, Spanish, Russian, andHebrew) as well as another English-speaking culture.
Use of a more balanced corpus (such as the Google
Books English Million corpus, a corpus balanced
at about 1 million words/year to offset increased
publication), or the BYU Corpus of Historical
American English might help clarify the effectsof publication volume. Analysis of n-grams at
sizes other than 2 would illustrate other types ofcomplexity -- in particular, 1-grams (words) would
show changes in lexical but not syntactic complexityand hence an analysis of ‘stuff’ but not what people
do with ‘stuff.’ Despite these weaknesses, we still
feel this paper illustrates that culture-wide analysis
of abstractions like ‘increasing complexity’ is bothpractical and fruitful.

References
Denton, T. (2004). Cultural Complexity Revisited.
Cross-Cultural Research 38(1): 3-26.
Juola, P. (1998). Measuring Linguistic Complexity :The Morphological Tier. Journal of Quantitative
Linguistics 5(3): 206-213.
Juola, P.. (2008). Assessing Linguistic Complexity.
In M. Miestamo, K. Sinnemaki, and F. Karlsson(eds.), Language Complexity: Typology, Contact,
Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Y. Kui Shen, A. Presser
Aiden, A. Veres, M. K. Gray, W. Brockman,
The Google Books Team, J. P. Pickett, D.
Hoiberg, D. Clancy, P. Norvig, J. Orwant,
St. Pinker, M. A. Nowak, and E. Lieberman
Aiden (2010). Quantitative Analysis of Culture
Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science (Published
online ahead of print: 12/16/2010).
Spencer, H. (1900). First principles (6th ed.).
Akron, OH: Werner.

Digital Humanities 2012‘All Rights WorthRecombination’: PostHacker Culture and ASCII
Literature (1983-1993)
Katelnikoff, Joel

katelnikoff@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

1. ASCII LiteratureThis presentation will focus on a literary and cultural
movement of the computer underground thatfeatured texts written in ASCII code and distributedby means of the Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) thatflourished from the early-1980s until the mid-1990s.
Independently-produced ASCII publications (alsoknown as textfiles, t-files, g-files, philes, etc.)
offered computer users a means by which toshare information and opinions with one another.
This movement, at its height, also gave rise to
an innovative literature that was shaped by thetechnological environment in which it was produced
and by the digital culture that it was connected to.
This presentation will focus primarily on two of
the earliest serial ASCII publications: PHRACK and
Cult of the Dead Cow. These publications were
founded in 1985 (shortly after the film WarGamesand the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer
Revolution). These publications share several thingsin common: they are collaborative projects, written
and edited by pseudonymous computer users intheir late teens / early twenties, they contain illicit
information about hacking, phreaking, and mischief,
and they are uncensored and boundary-pushing.
They both refuse to copyright their material, withthe hope and expectation that their publications will
be freely uploaded and downloaded throughout thecomputer underground. And most importantly, bothof these publications feature literary writings that
innovate new forms and styles that are strongly
influenced by the techniques and tenets of hacker
culture, particularly in its connection to copyright.

2. Rhizomatic transfer
When the earliest ASCII zines emerged, thecomputer underground consisted of innumerable
hubs of digital culture, primarily in the form of
independently-operated, predominantly non-profit
bulletin board systems. BBSes functioned much likeanswering services, routing incoming calls into aninterface that would allow callers to send messages,

upload and download files, and play door games.
Most BBSes were very small and had one telephoneline, meaning that only one user could access thesystem at any given time. These small BBSes were
not directly linked to one another (unlike hypertext
models), but instead were connected through theirusers, most of whom would frequent several other
BBSes, downloading and uploading files from board
to board.
Because BBS culture had no hierarchy oforganization and because most BBSes were
non-profit, there was no major presence ofcorporate media organization (e.g. newspapers, bookpublishers) within BBS culture. The literati of the
BBS world would instead emerge from a new
chorus of voices: namely, those who were willingto publish their works without any remuneration
and were willing to allow their works to be copiedand distributed freely throughout the computerunderground. In exchange for this, the writers
would have the potential to proliferate from BBS
to BBS, city to city, allowing for the distant (butactual) possibility of becoming major contributors
to the shape of computer underground culture. Asan acknowledgement of their willingness to allow
users to do what they will with the text, most ofthese files either exclude any statement of copyright(Phrack), or compose puns such as ‘all rights
worth shit’ (Cult of the Dead Cow). The publishers
implicitly acknowledge that, in order for their work
to proliferate, they must allow the work to be freely
downloaded from BBSes and freely uploaded to other
BBSes.

3. Open source
If information wants to be free, what does thisfreedom entail? ASCII publishers allow their works
to be shared, transferred, and read without cost to
the reader or creator. The files can be limitlessly
replicated with minimal concern for material costs.
But beyond the ability to distribute and use thesefiles freely, Cult of the Dead Cow and Phrack
themselves take liberties that extend beyond use
and distribution. These publications demonstrate awillingness to modify the work of others in order toproduce new works of their own, in the way that wemight envision software programmers using opensource code. What follows are three successive stagesof open source literature: reprinting, modification,and recombination.

4. Reprinting‘The Conscience of a Hacker’ (also known as ‘The
Hacker Manifesto’) is probably the most wellknown essay of the ASCII era. It was originallyprinted in Phrack 1:3, Phile 7 (1986). It was later247

Digital Humanities 2012

republished in Cult of the Dead Cow 12, without any
acknowledgement that the essay had previously been
published in Phrack, and without the knowledge ofthe author. Moreover, cDc used ‘The Conscience ofa Hacker’ to overwrite the original content of issue
12 (the transcribed lyrics of Metallica’s Master ofPuppets album). For Cult of the Dead Cow, it was
not only their own copyright that was ‘worth shit,’
but also the copyright claims of other publishers
and writers, both digital and mainstream. In 1988,
they republished a rant entitled ‘Fuck the World,’
which strongly influenced the next ten years of
ASCII literature. The article, ironically, was a reprint
from a print publication entitled Forced Exposure.
Although the editor of cDc (Swamp Rat) does give
credit to the author and original publisher in theissue, the header of the issue clearly reads ‘FUCK
THE WORLD / by Swamp Rat,’ leaving generationsof readers confused as to who truly authored thearticle, and to what extent the text is ‘by’ Swamp
Rat. Here, unauthorized reprinting seems to take its
place alongside hacking and explosives manuals as
yet another form of illicit information.

5. Modification
In Cult of the Dead Cow and Phrack, freedom of
information also extends to the modification of text.
In academia, scholars frequently build upon thework of their colleagues, citing the findings of other
scholars as part of the process of developing theirown work. In ASCII publications this is also common,but without the same insistence of formality. The
most parasitic example of this was the practice oftagging, where BBS sysops would obtain publishedtext files, modify them by adding advertisements fortheir BBSes to the header or footer of the file, andcontinue to distribute the file by means of their BBS.
The modified versions would proliferate, often under
the same file name, which would limit the circulationof (and possibly overwrite) copies of the original
version.
Phrack and Cult of the Dead Cow also modified
texts, but for different reasons and in different ways.
Instead of inserting their own text into other peoples’
publications, they would bring other people’s writing
into their publications. This was often done without
the knowledge or consent of the writer. In someinstances, they would replicate a substantial portionof another text (or an entire text), and then add to or
subtract from that text at will. One of Phrack’s regularfeatures, ‘Phrack World News,’ would republish
articles from corporate media outlets, occasionallyinterjecting their own undercutting commentary insquare brackets. The inversion is clear: this is what
the mainstream is saying about us, and this is what
we are saying about what them.

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Phrack’s most documented exploit in modificationis their publication of a scaled-back version ofa document that had been illegally downloaded
from a ‘secure’ BellSouth computer, describing
some of the workings of their Enhanced 9-11
system. Even though the contents of the file
were lightweight and contained no indication of
being proprietary or sensitive information, its
republication demonstrated that the systems at
BellSouth could be hacked, by affiliates of Phrack.
The editor was indicted on charges of wire fraud,interstate transportation of stolen property, andcomputer fraud and abuse.

6. Recombination
The central concept of hacking is to generate a
flexible and adaptable mastery of codes, and todevelop a mastery that transcends a system. This iscentral to the hack and to the hacker ethos. Like
any other codes, legal codes are equally susceptible
to disruption and modification, as demonstrated
in these four publications, which demonstrate alibertarian attitude in their handling of illicit
information (in terms both content and copyright).
Like any other codes, literary and linguistic codes are
likewise susceptible. Even in these early publications,
there is a tendency toward the recombinant (that is,writing that borrows liberally from multiple sources).
From the inception of ASCII literature, writers tend
to transform, and recontextualize language, style,and form from other ASCII publications and fromBBS culture. Writers blur the boundaries between
information and narrative, purpose and play, text
and intertext.
The most prominent example of recombinationthat took place in this era is probably ‘The cDc#200 Higgledy-Piggeledy-Big-Fat-Henacious-MegaMackadocious-You-Can’t-Even-Come-Close-SoJump-Back-K-BOOMIDY-BOOMIDY-BOOM File.’
This file, designed to simulate the scrolling displayof an early-1990s BBS, follows the narrative arc ofa BBS experience, with every message board andfile area transforming into narrative, each narrative
venturing into the most iconic tropes and mythemesof the computer underground, corporate culture, andASCII literature: Internet Relay Chat, Teen Beat,
Encyclopedia Brown, K-Rad slang, Phrack magazine,‘The Real Pirate’s Guide,’ George Bush, Malcolm
X, and old school 40-column all-caps ASCII. Thisissue begins to demonstrate what can be donewith the structures and contents made familiarby other publications. It demonstrates a writingthat takes freely and gives freely, which is neverproprietary, and for whom all rights remain shit.
Most importantly, it leads into the next generationof ASCII literature, where writers continue to borrowfrom one another, to build cultural mythologies

Digital Humanities 2012

collectively, and to follow the hacking tenets set
out by Steven Levy: ‘All information should be free.
Mistrust authority – promote decentralization. You
can create art and beauty on a computer.’

Evaluating Unmasking for
Cross-Genre Authorship
Verification
Kestemont, Mike

mike.kestemont@ua.ac.be
CLiPS Computational Linguistics Group, Universityof Antwerp, Belgium

Luyckx, Kim

kim.luyckx@ua.ac.be
CLiPS Computational Linguistics Group, Universityof Antwerp, Belgium

Daelemans, Walter

walter.daelemans@ua.ac.be
CLiPS Computational Linguistics Group, Universityof Antwerp, Belgium

Crombez, Thomas

thomas.crombez@ua.ac.be
CLiPS Computational Linguistics Group, Universityof Antwerp, Belgium

In this paper we will stress-test a recently proposed
technique for computational authorship verification,‘unmasking’ (Koppel et al. 2004, 2007), which has
been well received in the literature (Stein et al.
2010). The technique envisages an experimental setup commonly referred to as ‘authorship verification’,a task generally deemed more difficult than so-called‘authorship attribution’ (Koppel et al. 2007). We will
apply the technique to authorship verification acrossgenres, an extremely complex text categorization
problem that so far has remained unexplored(Stamatatos 2009). We focus on five representative
contemporary English-language authors. For eachof them, the corpus under scrutiny contains several
texts in two genres (literary prose and theatre plays).

1. Background: cross-genre
authorship verification
In authorship verification, the given text may havebeen written by one of the candidate authors, but
could also be written by none of them. Note that thisopen case scenario is typical of forensic applications:the author of e.g. a bomb letter is not necessarily
among the suspect candidate authors. In the caseof a suicide letter (potentially faked by a murderer),
it is highly likely that this is the only suicide letterthe victim ever wrote. In absence of similar material,
it is difficult to extract reliable style markers frompre-existing writings to determine authorship of theletter.
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Digital Humanities 2012

Authorship across genres is an issue that isbeing paid all too little attention in present-day
research. The few remarks that have been madeon this issue agree that authorship attribution isdifficult within a single textual genre, even moredifficult with several topics involved, and likely to
be extremely difficult with several genres involved(Luyckx & Daelemans 2011). Although it is generally
assumed that an author will display stable stylecharacteristics throughout his oeuvre, irrespectiveof genre, this remains speculative in the absenceof systematic empirical investigation. Consequently,
cross-genre authorship verification deserves much
more attention than it has attracted so far.

2. Unmasking
Unmasking is a fairly complex meta-learning
approach to authorship verification. Koppel et al.
(2007) observed in earlier experiments that a small
number of features had a lot of discriminatory
power. It is indeed common for authors to use ‘asmall number of features in a consistently different
way between works’. Such features often relate to
topic-related, narrative, or thematic differences. As aresult, a limited number of features can wrongfully
maximize the differences in writing style between two
works of identical authorship.
The unmasking approach tests the robustness ofa stylistic model by deliberately impairing it overa number of iterations, each time removing thosefeatures that are most discriminative between the
two texts. The resulting ‘degradation curves’ display
many sudden drops in accuracy: when the mosttelling features are removed during each iteration,
it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate
between two texts. In the case of two texts of nonidentical authorship, however, a far larger numberof features is discriminative, causing less dramatic
drops in accuracy during degradation. Using training
material in the form of a series of same-authorand different-author degradation curves, Koppel etal. (2007) try to verify whether previously unseen
degradation curves are of (non-)identical authorship.
The unmasking technique is especially attractive forauthorship verification across genres, because of theinterference between genre markers and authorialstyle markers. It might help remedy genre-related
artifacts in that superficial genre-related differences
between same-author texts in different genres will
be filtered out easily and removed from the model
early in the degradation process. After the removalof these non-essential stylistic features, one could
hypothesize that only features more relevant for
authorial identity will be preserved.

250

3. Methodology and evaluation
Our unmasking implementation closely adheresto the original description of the procedure. In
the experiments, we have used the same genericparameter settings as tentatively adopted by Koppel
et al. (2007): a chunk size of 500 tokens, n=250,
m=10 and k=3. The main difference is, that a‘leave-one-text- out validation’ is carried out onthese curves for evaluation purposes, whereas k-foldcross-validation was applied in the original paper.
We train an SVM classifier on the training curves
and have it classify each of the test curves as asame-author or different-author curve. When all
predictions have been collected, one can report on theoverall classification accuracy and macro-averaged
F1-score.

4. Corpus and selection of texts
The corpus we collected for the experiments in crossgenre authorship verification consists of publishedtexts by five contemporary authors: Edward Bond,David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, andArnold Wesker. The main criterion for selecting an
author was the availability of texts in more than one
literary genre. Theatre and prose were the genres
these five authors were most productive in, so thesewere chosen for the experiments. In our corpus,
applying a text length threshold of 10,000 words(cf. Sanderson & Guenter 2006) resulted in 11 prose
works and 23 theatre plays. We experimented witha complete matrix of authors and genres, allowing
both intra-genre and cross-genre experiments for
all authors. Digitization of the material involved
three steps: scanning, OCR’ing, and manual postcorrection.

5. Intra-genre experiments
Figure 1 shows degradation curves for an experimenton the eleven prose works in the corpus. Solid lines
represent same-author curves, whereas dotted lines
represent different-author curves. All curves display
downward slopes, with decreasing cross-validation
accuracies, as more predictive features get eliminatedin each iteration. For same-author curves, however,
it is clearly visible that the effect of degradation
generally sets off sooner and more dramatically.
Different-author curves are more robust and yieldhigher cross-validation accuracies, even when a large
number of strongly discriminative features is deleted.
Intersections between both curve types are minimal.
A leave-one-text-out validation test on this set of
curves confirms the success of the approach: theoverall accuracy amounts to 96%, which is only justover the F1 score of 95%. This result confirms theDigital Humanities 2012potential of unmasking for authorship verification inprose work collections.

out validation, however, shows poor performanceof unmasking in this experiment, with an overall
accuracy of 77% and a macro-averaged F1 of 56%.

7. Interpretation

Figure 1: Unmasking on prose texts by five authors

A second experiment has been carried out on
the 23 theatrical works in the corpus. Figure
2 displays a much less clear-cut differentiationof the same-author curves and their differentauthor counterparts, suggesting that the unmasking
approach (with its default settings) is less effective forthe theatrical section of the corpus. The leave-onetext out validation confirms this, yielding an overall
accuracy of 84% and an F1 score of 62%.

After unmasking has been applied, the individualdegradation curves allow for interpretation of results.
Figure 3 visualizes the elimination process for
Pinter’s play The Caretaker and Mamet’s prosetext The Old Religion, who were personal friends.
Mamet even acknowledged Pinter as a key influenceon his work. The limited degradation in accuracy
demonstrates that these Mamet and Pinter texts
appear to adopt well-distinguishable styles. Figure
3 shows early elimination of names of principal
characters (davies, mick and aston vs. markand pete), personal pronouns that relate to atext’s narrative perspective (i, you), and colloquial
language (aint). Moreover, typical genre-features(e.g. the director’s indication pause) are deleted as
anticipated.

Figure 2: Unmasking on theatre plays by five authors

6. Cross-genre experiments
So far, the unmasking procedure has been mainly
investigated for text pairs within the same text
variety, although Koppel et al. (2007) reporton a successful application of the technique to
Hebrew-Aramaic texts across different topics. It is
an interesting question whether the degradationdifferences between same- author and differentauthor curves would also hold for pairs of texts that
do not belong to the same genre. A leave-one-text-

Figure 3: Visualization of the feature elimination
process for Pinter’s play The Caretaker
and Mamet’s prose text The Old Religion

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Digital Humanities 2012

8. Conclusion
The experiments reported on in this paper confirm
that unmasking is an interesting technique forcomputational authorship verification, especiallyyielding reliable results within the genre of (larger)
prose works in our corpus. Authorship verification,
however, proves much more difficult in the theatricalpart of our corpus. The original settings for thevarious parameters often appear to be genre-specificor even author-specific, so that further research on
optimization is desirable. Finally, we have shownthat interpretability is an important asset of theunmasking technique.
Funding and Acknowledgements
Kestemont is a Ph.D. fellow of the Research
Foundation – Flanders (FWO). The research of
Luyckx and Daelemans is partially funded by
the FWO project ‘Computational Techniques for
Stylometry for Dutch’. The research by Crombez ispartially funded by the FWO project ‘Mass Spectaclein Flanders’. The authors would like to acknowledge
Sarah Bekaert’s work on the digitization of the
corpus.

References
Koppel, M., J. Schler, and E. Bonchek-Dokow(2007). Measuring Differentiability: Unmasking
Pseudonymous Authors. Journal of Machine
Learning Research 8: 1261-1276.
Luyckx, K., and W. Daelemans (2011). The Effectof Author Set Size and Data Size in Authorship
Attribution. Literary and Linguistic Computing
26(1): 35-55.
Sanderson, C., and S. Guenter (2006).
Short Text Authorship Attribution via Sequence
Kernels, Markov Chains and Author Unmasking:
An Investigation. Proceedings of the 2006
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing (EMNLP), Sydney, Australia,
pp. 482-491.
Stamatatos, E. (2009). A Survey of Modern
Authorship Attribution Methods. Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science andTechnology 60(3): 538-556.
Stein, B., N. Lipka, and P. Prettenhofer (2011).
Intrinsic Plagiarism Analysis. Language Resources
and Evaluation 45(1): 63-82.
Koppel, M., and J. Schler (2004). Authorship
Verification as a One-Class Classification Problem.
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on
Machine Learning, Banff, Canada,

252

Literary Wikis: Crowdsourcing the Analysis andAnnotation of Pynchon, Eco
and Others
Ketzan, Erikeketzan@lavabit.com
Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany

1. Introduction
Annotation of complicated texts – the Bible, theworks of Shakespeare, experimental fiction – is afamiliar concept. In 2005 I had an idea: what if I
used a wiki to create such a guide? Would anyone
contribute to it? Would anyone read it? Would theresults be any good? Since then, hundreds of users
have annotations thousands of pages of experimental
fiction by the authors Thomas Pynchon and Umberto
Eco, and the projects PynchonWiki and Umberto Eco
Wiki.
What have we learned from these projects? What canother digital humanities and crowd-sourcing projects
learn from their successes and failures? The Eco wiki
project is still ongoing, but I plan to present myfindings and insights at DH 2012.

2. The Queen Loana Wiki
When Umberto Eco’s novel, The Mysterious Flameof Queen Loana, was published a few months later, I
launched what I called the Queen Loana Annotation
Project, a wiki organized by chapter and page.1 Eco’s
novel was a perfect test case for the experiment
I envisioned, a literary annotation wiki. First, Ecofrequently quotes texts without attribution, which led
to wiki entries like:P. 15, ‘you always said you could resist
anything but temptation’quotation from Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar
Wilde.
Second, many references in the novel were confusing
to readers, making my wiki a useful resource.
According to a Village Voice review at the time,‘Early reviews have dismissed Mysterious Flame
as nostalgic and at times so personal as to be
impenetrable. Eco concedes he wrote it with his own
generation in mind. “It’s a book for Italian people of
my age”.’ Thanks to the wiki, though, readers could
easily read up on all those references, with entries likethis:

Digital Humanities 2012

P. 382, ‘Rina Fort’
On November 30, 1946, a woman and her threechildren were found beaten to death in theirapartment in Milan. In January, 1950, Caterina Fort,
the lover of the woman’s husband, was condemned tolife imprisonment for the murders.
Third, Eco has written dozens of books and hefrequently references the same incidents, themes andideas across them. For example:
P. 297, A rose by another other namefrom Romeo & Juliet.
Eco remarked in Postscript to The Name of the Rosethat everyone assumed that the title, Name of theRose, was a reference to this same line of Juliet. Ecoemphasizes, however, that he meant his title to mean
the exact opposite: names are important.
This kind of entry requires more than just Googling.
Only someone truly familiar with Eco’s previous
works could have written it, thus adding anotheruseful element to the wiki on par with traditional
published literary analysis and commentary.
In short, the Queen Loana Annotation Project wasa modest success. A couple dozen contributors fromaround the globe added hundreds of high-quality
entries. This group of contributors, which briefly
felt like a ‘community’, annotated seemingly every
last historical, literary, and artistic reference in
Eco’s novel. The quality of the annotations was also
surprisingly good, on par with a publishable guidebook.

3. Pynchonwiki.com
The next year, 2006, a musician and writer named
Tim Ware converted his extensive online notes on thenovels of Thomas Pynchon into a wiki, which he aptly
named Pynchonwiki.com. The works of Pynchon
were also perfect for a literary wiki, as Pynchon’s
novels teem with countless obscure references which,when analyzed, often illuminate his bigger themes
and messages. I joined Pynchonwiki as one theearliest contributors (under the handle ‘Bleakhaus’)and created a section for page-by-page annotation in
the manner of the Queen Loana Annotation Project.
This one took off beyond the wildest expectations ofa literary annotation wiki geek.
According to Ralph Schroeder and Matthijs den
Besten, scholars at Oxford’s Internet ResearchInstitute and e-Research Centre who publisheda paper2 on Pynchonwiki, some successes of
Pynchonwiki include:- Over 235 contributors- Over 455,000 words (over twice as long as Moby
Dick)
- 1350+ alphabetical entries- 4000+ page-by-page entries- >10,000+ edits
Schroeder and den Besten also concluded that:- ‘the Wiki had covered all pages within threemonths of publication’- ‘the Pynchon Wiki can be put into the context
of growing interest in computer supported
collaboration and e-Research’- ‘A common theme emerging from the facts andfigures presented is the tremendous attractionof the page-by-page style of annotation in the“Against the Day” wiki’- ‘Wikis thus seem to be a good tool [for tasks]
where endless detective work is called for, and thismay apply to other areas of e-Research or online
collaboration’- ‘the Wiki is bound to encourage learning among
contributors’
Section for Pynchon’s other novels followed shortly
at Pynchonwiki.com, and in short order there existed
annotations for almost all of the thousands of pages
in Pynchon’s oeuvre.

4. What next? Umberto Eco Wikiand linguistic exploration
Over the next few years, I thought vaguely about
how the lessons and successes of the Queen Loana
Annotation Project and Pynchonwiki could be
repeated. I created a site, Literarywiki.com, for myown experiments in annotating different kinds oftexts. But I quickly discovered that most novels do notbenefit from extensive commentary or annotation.
Only certain kinds of novels, those that teem withinformation, references, and/or enigmas, benefited
from such supplementary information. The novels ofPynchon and Umberto Eco, I came to believe, were
exceptions rather than the rule.
To explore these issues in greater depth, I will launch,this coming week, the first of November, 2011, a
new website named Umberto Eco Wiki, which I am
creating through the support of my current employer,
the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim,
Germany).3To coincide with the German- andEnglish-language editions of Umberto Eco’s new
novel, The Prague Cemetery, I will launch this wikiin the spirit of the above-named projects.
Umberto Eco Wiki has secions for German andEnglish annotations, and I plan to explore how

253Digital Humanities 2012

successful and useful such a resource in multiple
languages can be.
My proposed short paper for Digital Humanities
2012 will document the history of the literary wiki
as summarized above, relate the progress on the new
Umberto Eco Wiki, explore issues relating to theliterary wiki concept, including how its lessons can beapplied to other digital humanities areas.
Notes
1. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana Annotation Project was
initially online at http://queenloana.wikispaces.com/ . Later it was moved to my own Literarywiki.org, and its
contents will soon be migrated to the Umberto Eco Wiki (aproject of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache), at http://eco.ids-mannheim.de
2. Schroeder, R., and M. L. den Besten (2008). Literary Sleuths
Online: e-Research Collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki.
Information, Communication & Society 11(2): 25-45. Available
at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1086671
3. Umberto Eco Wiki, available at http://eco.ids-mannheim.deSocial Network Analysis
and Visualization in‘The Papers of Thomas
Jefferson’
Klein, Lauren Frederica

lauren.klein@lcc.gatech.edu
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

The silences endemic to the archive of slavery havelong presented a range of challenges to the literaryscholar: How does one account for absences in thearchival record, both those inscribed in the archive’scontents, and those introduced at the time of thearchive’s construction? How does one account for the
power dynamics at work in the relationships between
the enslaved men and women who committed theirnarratives to paper, and the group of (mostly white)reformers who edited and published their works?
How does one identify and extract meaning from theunique set of documents that do remain – letters,
inventories, ledger books, and personal narratives –documents that, in the words of Susan Scott Parrish,
the literary critic, we must struggle to make ‘mean
something more?’ (2010). And how does one do so
without reinforcing the damaging notion that African
American voices from before emancipation – not justin the archival record, but the voices themselves, aresilent, and irretrievably lost?
This final, critical challenge is what has prompted
scholars from across the humanities, such as theliterary critics Stephen Best (2009, 2011) and Saidiya
Hartman (2008), the sociologist Avery Gordon(2008), the archivist Jeanette Bastian (2003), andthe historian Jill Lepore (1998), to call for a shift awayfrom what Best has identified as ‘a logic and ethic ofrecovery,’ to a new focus, instead, on animating themysteries of the past (2011). However, each of thesescholars proposes traditional methods of analysis
and criticism for animating such mysteries.
This short paper will instead draw upon a setof tools and techniques associated with social
network analysis and visualization in order topropose a new method for animating the mysteriesof the past. While social network analysis andvisualization tools have been applied to literarytexts (Drouin 2006-), historical datasets (Wilder
2010-), and correspondence networks (Findlen etal. 2008-), these tools have not yet been applied
to historical archives with the aim of illuminating
the relationships among people mentioned in thearchive’s content.

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Digital Humanities 2012

For this task, I employed a named entity recognizer(NER) developed at Stanford, and included in its
suite of CoreNLP (Natural Language Processing)tools, in order to identify the names of the people
mentioned in the archive’s content (Manning etal. 2010). I then developed my own co-appearance
script, in Python, in order to determine which people
were mentioned in the same document as each other,and how many times those people appeared together.
I then formatted the data to be displayed using
Protovis, a javascript-based visualization toolkit also
developed at Stanford (Bostock & Heer 2010).

Figure 1

My paper will focus on a subset of documents
included in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, thosethat make reference to members of the enslaved
Hemings family (Figure 1). The descendants of
Elizabeth Hemings, including Sally Hemings, thewoman with whom, whether consensually or not,Jefferson maintained a lifelong relationship and bore
six of his children; and James Hemings, who trained
as a chef de cuisine in the high French style, and thenworked as the head cook at Jefferson’s Monticelloplantation until his emancipation, in 1796, function
as an ideal test case both for assessing the limitsof the computing methodologies employed, and for
determining how the analysis and visualization ofsocial networks can, in fact, animate the mysteriesof the past – those that Best, Hartman, and others,
have sought to identify and amplify through more
traditional scholarly techniques.
A significant limit of employing NER software on
this particular dataset is that enslaved men andwomen were most often referred to by first namealone. For instance, not only are there many Jameses
mentioned in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, but
James Hemings was also called Jamie, Jimmy, andeven Gimmé while in France. After running my coappearance script, I was required to go throughthe results by hand in order to determine whichnames referred to the same individual, and in thatevent, combine the associated data. Because of theeighteenth-century style of the Jefferson Papers, I
was also required to remain attentive to any NERerrors, as well as to individuals clearly alluded to in
the Papers, but not referred to by name at all.
The test case of the Hemings family also points
to the limits of the ‘arc diagram’ model for
visualizing complex relationships. While preferable
to a force-directed layout, which obscures the distinct
relationships among individuals, its layout implies
a linearity that is not consistent with the webof relationships contained within the dataset. My
paper will thus also propose how hive plots andchord diagrams might function as better models
for visualizing such network data (Krzywinski 2009,2011). In this way, I will suggest how contemporary
data visualization research can have a direct impact
on a range of literary and cultural investigations.
Furthermore, by demonstrating how a visualizationof this particular social network allows us to see thehistorical traces of the Hemings family as presences,
not absences, as scholars such as Best, Hartman,
Gordon, Bastian, and Lepore, have each argued for,I begin to address an issue of mounting concern
within the community of digital humanities scholars,as voiced by Johanna Drucker (2009) and Alan Liu(2011), among others, about the need to reinscribe
humanistic inquiry as the central focus of digital
humanities work. The presence of the Hemings
family in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, as
unearthed by the methods described above, suggests
not only how digital tools might be applied to adiverse set of cultural and literary questions, but also
how these methods might expose – and animate –the diversity of experience embedded in significant
records of early American cultural life.

References
Bastian, J. (2010). Owning Memory, How A
Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and FoundIts History. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.
Best, St. (2011). Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery
and the Visual Archive. Representations 113(1):150-163.
Best, St., and M. Sharon (2009). Surface
Reading: An Introduction. Representations 108(1):1-21.
Bostock, M., and J. Heer (2010). Protovis.
http://mbostock.github.com/ protovis/

Drouin, J. (2006-). Ecclesiastical Proust Archive.
http://www.proustarchive.org/
Drucker, J. (2009). SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics
and Projects in Speculative Computing. Chicago: Uof Chicago P.

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Digital Humanities 2012

Findlen, P., et al. (2008-). Mapping the Republicof Letters. https:// republicofletters.stanford.edu/
Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting
and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P.

VariaLog: how to locate
words in a French
Renaissance Virtual
Library
Lay, Marie Hélène

marie-helene.lay@univ-poitiers.fr
University of Poitiers, France

1. Introduction
The efficiency of search engines is based on
the principle that the information sought can be
retrieved by ‘looking for words’ conveying theinformation and that these words can be identified
thanks to the string of characters they are comprisedof. This view takes for granted that the words arealways spelt in the same way and that they comply
with orthographic rules.
Such is not the situation which prevails for the texts
produced during the French Renaissance period.
Therefore the availability of older texts for purposesof archiving and disseminating the cultural heritage
tradition raises a particular problem. In texts edited
in French before the 18th century, spellings are notconsistent, as proper spelling has not been ‘invented’
yet. One and the same word may therefore be spelt
in a variety of forms. This is not only a time-related
variation, as would be expected from the evolution of
the language between the 15th and the 17th century.
In one and the same book many different spellings
may be identified for the one and the same word: forthe word côté, either coté, cotté, cote, costé, or couste
could be used, the verb savoir may be spelt either
scavoir or sçavoir, ‘je sais ’ may be spelt ‘ie sçay ’, andits past participle ‘su ’ may appear as ‘sceu ’.
It is therefore necessary to adapt search engines
based on word form identification if they are to
render the service expected. Several strategies canbe envisaged and the purpose of this paper is tofocus on those which resort to linguistic expertise,either included in the documents themselves (byannotation) or into the search engine (by query
extension). The solutions considered are produced in
the context of the Virtual Humanistic Library Projectand its evolution ( http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/ ). This part of the project called VARIALOG,
is financed by a Google Digital Humanities ResearchAward.

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Digital Humanities 2012

2. Methodological alternatives
The BVH/VHL context, considered here, is that of ahighly expert environment of a relatively moderate
size aiming at a complete editorial treatment
and the dissemination of annotated and validated
resources. Within this context, two solutions havebeen designed:
1. Texts annotation with linguistic information
gained from lemmatization. The forms retrieved,
whatever their spelling, are lemmatized undera canonic form which then becomes the pivotof further requests: for example the lemma fornuit groups together forms like nuits (which is‘regular french’) or nuyctz (old written form).
A first solution, HUMANISTICA (Lay 2000)
was based on the adaptation of a probabilistic
tagger/lemmatizer. The results achieved weresatisfactory but the adaptation of the analyzer had
to be started all over again to take into accountspecific features of this high heterogeneous corpus.
Another solution, ANALOG (Lay 2010a, 2010b)
was therefore developed. It provides an annotation
computer assisted environment, and is currently
being used in the BVH project. But the enrichmentof text through linguistic annotation is a slow
and costly process. Though this solution is very
useful to go on producing a reference environment,
it is nonetheless desirable to provide efficientquery tools on texts already available but not yet
annotated.
2. Query extension, without requiring thelemmatization process. The aim is not to produce
exactly the right forms (like in EEBO -VosPos-,
Impact, ToTrTaLe, LGeRM, or for old czech, or old
German projects). We will do so, in order to help
in an editorial process (DISSIMILOG), but here,
we just want to spot all the written forms which
could correspond to a query, being insensitive tovariation.

3. VariaLog : Principles
To solve the problem of spelling variation, one has
to go back to observational evidence. Two directions
may be taken in this respect: either observe the texts
or observe the variants attested for a given form.
1. Concerning text observation, the aim is to evaluate
the number of forms for a given text which do notcorrespond to the norm. Moreover, one must take
into consideration the extent to which the texts canbe compared. We intend to illustrate this with two
short extracts from Montaigne and Rabelais, two
authors of paramount significance.
2. Concerning the observation of variants attested
for one word, the idea is to formulate the rules

which govern the production of abnormal forms.
We will then build rules to extend queries, turning
the search of a word into the search of all the forms
assumed by this word, and match the results withforms in texts.
Comparing the searched forms and their spellingin text, a typology of the situations occurring
may be offered. The form being searched isthe same one (raisons/raisons) or the link
can be very weak (impératrice/empériere).
Between these two types, a whole gradationof situations can be organised on a linguistic
basis: relations between sounds and different
ways of spelling in modern french (c=ss; n=nn;
r=rr; s=z; t=th; ai=ei,ai,ey,ay,oi,oy; [uv]=u,v;
u=eu), flexionnal history (serais/seray/serois)and morphological history (hôpital/hospitalier;forêt/forestier; advis/avis). Due to the structural
instability of this linguistic data, equivalences
between character strings are difficult to track
statistically and no model-based approach canbe developed. But linguistic knowledge helps
recognize regular replacement patterns, which canbe turned into rules.
3. The next point which needs to be taken into
account is the relevance of the rules: they have tohelp find all the forms concerned (low silence, goodrecall), and to avoid generating too much noise(good precision).
To test the first results, a small corpus of 7 words(vices/une/face/fesse/lu/vu/souverain) has beentransformed by the substitution rules mentionned
above. The results do contain all the relevant forms,
but the 7 words have been extended to 118445 forms.
There is obviously some correlation between thelength of the word and the number of generated
words due to the combinatory process.
The solution chosen to fix that problem is to describe,for each rule, the context in which the substitutionis allowed. This aims at constraining theirapplication strongly, and limits their productivity.
This contextualisation is based on a good knowledgeof the linguistic process involved. In the example
given below, 8 simple rules are transformed into 9
more complex rules. Most of the time, one simple rule
will be derived into 5 to 15 contextualised rules.
(?<\=[bdflmnprstv])u=eu

ain=ein,ain,eyn,ayn(?<\=[aeiouy])c(?\=[eiy])=ss^s(?\=[eiy]) = c(?<\=[aeiouy])ss(?\=[eiy])=c(?!^.+)v = u(?!^.+)n(?<!.+$)=nn^u = v(?!^.+)r(?<!.+$)=rr

s$ = zThe results achieved are satisfactory: the rules
produce all the linguistically permissible variants,
and the number of variants is much lower. The 7
words generate 37 forms.
257

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4. VariaLog : Tool description
The tool itself is thought to be really user-friendly
especially for the tuning of rules and the evaluationof their consequences (efficiency and non regression
tests). It is a free available java program which firsttransforms a list of words into an extended list offorms, using that for a rules set. Having done this,the need is to localise the different forms attested in
the old spelling in a text, according to the requested
form. The output file of this last part of the process
is an html file with a graphical highlighting (or boldcharacter) of the identified variant. Moreover, eachform is connected to a bubble showing the rules used
to derive the variant. A table containing the summaryof the used rules for the text is also available: thehuman validation process is quite friendly. This tool
is being put forward to be integrated to an XTF
platform.

5. Conclusion
Using a rule-based approach, VariaLog is designed
to identify all the written forms that are likely tocorrespond to a query, since it is insensitive tovariations in spelling. The recall rate (tested on 5000
forms) provides evidence that all the linguisticallypermissible variants in French are produced by therules, so long as the problem is simply one ofspelling (nuit/nuyct)and not a morphological one(e.g. impératrice/empérière). As far as precision
is concerned, the rules may sometimes generate
more ambiguity than anticipated. If ‘o’ becomes‘ou’, then, école becomes écoule, which is not an
acceptable variation, but volant becomes voulant,
which is an acceptable variation; as a result, volant
will correspond to vouloir (‘want’), thus increasing
the ambiguity of this form which means already‘flying, robbing, wheel, flounce, shuttlecock’. The
generated ambiguity is no different from standard
ambiguities, even in an orthographic environment.

Burnard, L. (1995). http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/Customization/Lite/teiu5_en.xml

Proceedings of the Second Language Engineering
Conference, 1995.
Craig, H., and R. Whipp (2010). http://llc.ox
fordjournals.org/content/25/1/37.short

Literary and Linguistic Computing 25(1): 37-52.
Demonet, M.-L., and M. H. Lay (2011).
Digitizing European Renaissance prints: a 3year experiment on image-and-text retrieval.
International Workshop on Digital Preservation of
Heritage (IWDPH07). Kolkata, 2007.
Erjavec, T. (2011). http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W11/W11-1505.pdf Proceedings of the 5th
ACL-HLT Workshop on Language Technology for
Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities,
2011, Portland, pp. 33-38.
Hana, J., A. Feldman, and K. Aharodnik(2011). http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W11/W11-1502.pdf
Proceedings of the 5th
ACL-HLT Workshop on Language Technology for
Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities,
2011, Portland, pp. 10-18.
Lay-Antoni,

M.-H.

et

al.

(2000),

http://lexicometrica.univ-paris3.fr/jadt/j
adt2000/pdf/89/89.pdf jadt 2000, Lausanne.

Lay, M.-H., et al. (2010). http://lexicometrica.univ-paris3.fr/jadt/jadt2010/allegati/JAD
T-2010-1045-1056_106-Lay.pdf jadt 2010, Rome.

Sánchez Marco, C., G. Boleda, and L.
Padró (2011). http://ilk.uvt.nl/LaTeCH2011/slides/01_Sanchez-Marco_etal.pdf ACL-HLTWorkshop, 2011, Portland, pp. 1-9.
Scheible, S., R. J. Whitt,M. Durrell, and B.
Bennett (2011). Evaluating an ‘off-the-shelf’ POStagger on Early Modern German text. ACL-HLTWorkshop, 2011, Portland, pp. 10-18.

Already used to search several French dialects,
VariaLog can be used to process any form of spellingvariation, in any language. One just needs to adjust
one’s own specific spelling rules or dictionary. Our
aim is to help locate spelling variation efficiently.
User feedback is most welcome.

Souvay, G. and J.M. Pierrel (2009). http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=812845 TAL
50(2): 149-172.

References

Conference Abstracts, 2011, Stanford.

Baron,
A.,
and
Rayson,P.
(2009). http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/publications/cl2009/314_FullPaper.pdf In M. Mahlberg, V.
González-Díaz, and C. Smith (eds.), Proceedingsof the Corpus Linguistics Conference, CL2009.
University of Liverpool, UK, pp. 20-23.

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Thaisen, J. (2011). http://dh2011abstracts.sta

nford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-346.xml;query=;brand=default
DigitalHumanities

http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/
http://www.c-tei.org/
http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/XML-TEI/index.asp
http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/Epistemon/phi
lologic.asp

Digital Humanities 2012

http://xtf.cdlib.org/documentation/programming
http://www.monkproject.org/
http://eebo.chadwyck.com/help/whatis_wh.htm
http://impactocr.wordpress.com/
http://panini.northwestern.edu/mmueller/vo
spos.pdf

DeRiK: A German
Reference Corpus ofComputer-MediatedCommunication
Lemnitzer, Lothar

lemnitzer@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Germany

Beißwenger, Michaelmichael.beisswenger@uni-dortmund.deTechnische Universität Dortmund, Germany

Ermakova, Mariaermakovamd@googlemail.com
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Germany

Geyken, Alexander

geyken@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Germany

Storrer, Angelika

angelika.storrer@uni-dortmund.deTechnische Universität Dortmund, Germany

1. Project background and focus of
the paper
In view of the increasing amount of reading
and writing that people do on the Internet,
corpus designers who set out to provide balanced
corpora that include all relevant text types ofcontemporary language should also include samples
of genres of computer-mediated communication(CMC) such as e-mail, weblogs, microblogging on
Twitter, discussion boards and wiki discussions,chats and instant messaging conversations, andcommunication in social network sites. In our paper
we present selected aspects of an ongoing projectthat aims at building a reference corpus of German
CMC, called DeRiK (‘Deutsches Referenzkorpus zur
internetbasierten Kommunikation’).1 DeRiK is a
joint initiative of TU Dortmund University and the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the
Humanities (BBAW). The corpus will be integrated
into the lexical information system provided by the
BBAW project Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen
Sprache (DWDS, www.dwds.de (www.dwds.de) ).2
In our paper we will focus on the role of the DeRiK
component in the DWDS framework (section 2) and259

Digital Humanities 2012

on CMC-specific issues of corpus annotation (section
3).

2. Integrating CMC discourse
into a corpus of contemporary
German: motivation andapplication fields
DWDS (www.dwds.de (www.dwds.de) ) is a lexicalinformation system developed by and hosted at the
BBAW. The system offers one-click-access to threedifferent types of resources (Geyken 2007):a) lexical resources: a common language dictionary,3an etymological dictionary, and a thesaurus;b) corpus resources: a balanced reference corpus(called ‘DWDS core corpus’) of German ranging
from 1900 up to now, a set of additional newspaper
corpora, and specialized corpora;c) statistical resources for words and word
combinations.
These resources are displayed alongside one anotherin separate panels (cf. Fig. 1). The system offers
the choice among several views, i.e. between several
profiles with predefined panel combinations.

Figure 1: Web frontend of the DWDS
system ( http://www.dwds.de )The
CMC
component
DeRiK(‘Deutsches
Referenzkorpus zur internetbasierten Kommunikation’) will be integrated into this framework bothas an independent panel and as a subcorpus of
the DWDS core corpus. The sampling of the CMC
genres in DeRiK is guided by the findings of the‘ARD/ZDF-Onlinestudie’, a German online usage
survey conducted once per year (www.ard-zdfonlinestudie.de). The findings of this survey allow us
to derive a key for the composition of our corpus.
However, for practical reasons the project will set out
to acquire data of only those CMC applications on theInternet for which the users have explicitly granted
260

permission for (re-)distributing and (re-)using theirwritten utterances for non-commercial purposes/
academic research.4 The first partial corpus of
DeRiK will include discourse from Wikipedia talkpages, a selection of forum and weblog discussions,chat conversations, and postings of selected Twitterusers who have licensed their tweets under Creative
Commons. We hope that in the long term changes in
IPR restrictions within the domain of discourse on
the Internet will enable us to apply more principled
methods of data sampling.
The integration of the CMC reference corpus into the
DWDS system may be valuable for various research
and application fields, for example:a) Language variation, language change andstylistics: A general-language corpus that includes
a CMC component will provide a broad empiricalbasis (a) for further, corpus-based investigationsof the usage and dissemination of CMC-specificphenomena across linguistic varieties and digital
genres, and (b) for comparative analyses of thefeatures of CMC discourse and of “traditional”
written genres (e.g. newspaper, fiction, scientificwriting, nonliterary prose); it will thus facilitate to
track and describe how new linguistic patterns andcommunicative genres emerge.5b) Lexicology and lexicography: Besides genrespecific discourse markers and netspeak jargon (like‘lol’ laughing out loud or ‘imho’ in my humble
opinion), new vocabulary is characteristic for CMC
discourse, e.g. ‘funzen’ (an abbreviated variant of‘funktionieren’ to function) or ‘gruscheln’ (a functionof a German social network platform, most likely
a blending of ‘grüßen’ greet and ‘kuscheln’ cuddle).
There are also CMC-specific processes of lexicalsemantic changes, e.g. the broadening of the conceptof ‘Freund’ (friend). Up-to-date lexical resources
should document and describe these tendencies
by integrating CMC data into their data basis.
Once the first partial corpora of the DeRiK corpus
are made available in the DWDS system, it isintended to extend the DWDS dictionary component
with entries describing new lexemes that have
evolved from CMC discourse. In addition, the DWDS
corpus system will then allow one to track how
new vocabulary from CMC discourse (such as theexamples mentioned above) spreads into ‘traditional’
genres (e.g. newspaper, fiction, nonliterary prose).
c) Language teaching: CMC has become
an important part of everyday communication.
Language- and culture-specific properties of CMC
should thus also be regarded in communicative
approaches to Second Language Teaching. In thiscontext, the DeRiK corpus and the documentationof CMC vocabulary in the DWDS dictionary may be
useful resources. In school teaching, students with

Digital Humanities 2012

German as a native language may use the DWDS
system to compare written language with CMC and
to explore how style varies across different genres.

3. Annotation of CMC-specificphenomena
One advantage of integrating DeRiK into the DWDS
system is that users can profit from the DWDS
corpus annotation and querying facilities: The corpus
resources which are currently available in the DWDS
system are lemmatized with the TAGH morphology(cf. Geyken & Hanneforth 2006) and tagged withthe part-of-speech tagger moot (cf. Jurish 2003).
The corpus search engine DDC (Dialing DWDS
Concordancer) supports linguistic queries on several
annotation levels (word forms, lemmas, STTS partof-speech categories), filtering (e.g. by text type) andsorting options.
Since all corpus resources in the DWDS systemare encoded according the guidelines of the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI-P5), the project aims to use
and customize TEI for the appropriate base-levelannotation of the CMC sub-corpus. For this purpose,
we have developed a TEI-compliant annotation
schema that- provides a macro-structure of CMC discourse
which should cover as many genres as possible (seesection 3.1);- provides a suggestion for the description of CMCspecific phenomena which is oriented mainly on
surface features (for instance, the annotation will
cover interaction signs of various types; see section
3.2 for details).
The TEI-related details of this schema are describedin Beißwenger et al. (2012).6 The discussion inthis paper will focus on two annotation issues:
The representation of CMC-specific micro- andmacrostructures (section 3.1) and the annotation of
typical ‘netspeak’ elements (section 3.2).

3.1. Annotation of CMC-specificmicro- and macrostructures
We introduced the category posting as a basic
element to capture CMC micro- and macrostructures.
A posting is defined as a content unit that is being
sent to the server ‘en bloc’. Postings can usually berecognized by their formal structure, even if they
have different forms and structures across CMC
genres. This facilitates the automatic segmentation
and annotation of CMC micro- and macrostructures.
We use the term microstructure to refer to theinternal structure of postings. There are cases inwhich a posting consists of exactly one portion of

text. In other CMC genres, e.g. in discussion groups,
postings may contain divisions and markup used by
the author to structure their content.
We use the term macrostructure to describe how thepostings are sequenced. While microstructures are
generated by an individual author, macrostructures
do not emerge from the actions of just one user but
from all posting activities of all users involved in a
CMC conversation plus server routines for ordering
the incoming postings.
In our TEI schema, we represent structures on the
microstructure level (which result from the planningand composition decisions of one author) using the<p> element (‘paragraph’) from the TEI standard.
Structures on the macrostructure level, in contrast,
are described using the <div> element (‘division’). In
addition, we differentiate between two major types of
CMC macrostructures:- logfile structures, which arrange the postings ina linear chronological order based on when theyreached the server.
- thread structures, which arrange the postings
in a sequence and use two dimensions withspecific semantics: the above/below dimension
representing a temporal ‘before/after’ relation;
the left/right dimension (by indentation), whichusually symbolizes the topical affiliation of one
posting to a previous posting.

3.2. Annotation of interaction signs
The corpus-based investigation of ‘netspeak’ jargon isinteresting in many research contexts (style variationand language change, discourse management,
language teaching etc.). Our annotation schema
copes for a set of ‘netspeak’ phenomena which
we term ‘interaction signs’. The term builds onthe category ‘interaktive Einheiten’ which has
been introduced in the Grammatik der deutschen
Sprache, a three-volume scientific grammar of theGerman Language (cf. Zifonun et al. 1997), toclassify interjections (such as ‘hm’ or ‘oh my god’)and responsives (such as ‘yes’ and ‘no’) in spoken
discourse7. In contrast to part-of-speech-categories,
interaction signs are not syntactically integrated anddo not contribute to the compositional structureof sentences. In spoken discourse, they serve as
devices for conversation management, i.e. they
can be used to express reactions to the partners’
utterances or to display the speaker’s emotions. Our
category ‘interaction sign’ includes interjections andresponsives as well as four CMC-specific classes (cf.
Fig. 2):261

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development of this schema as a first step towards
the development of an annotation standard thatwill facilitate cross-language, cross-genre, and microdiachronic investigations of CMC phenomena on thebasis of corpora. The schema focuses on linguistic
aspects, but it is open for extensions motivatedthrough other fields of research, i.e. cultural studies
or sentiment analysis.
Figure 2: Typology of interaction signs (with examples)

References

1. Emoticons are iconic units that have been createdwith the keyboard and which typically serve as
emotion or irony markers or as responsives.
Being of iconic origin, the use of emoticons is
not restricted to a specific language. However,different styles of emoticons exist – e.g, Western
style emoticons such as :-), :-(, ;-) or the :), orJapanese style emoticons such as (^_^), \(^_^)/,(*_*).

Beißwenger, M. (2000). Kommunikation in
virtuellen Welten: Sprache, Text und Wirklichkeit.
Stuttgart: Ibidem.

2. Interaction words are symbolic linguistic units
whose morphologic construction is based on aword or a phrase. They may describe gestures or
facial expressions, e.g. *g* (< “grins” grin), *fg* (<fat grin), *s* (< smile), or they are used for thesimulation of actions and events.

Beißwenger, M., M. Ermakova, A. Geyken, L.
Lemnitzer, and A. Storrer (2012). A TEI schema
for the Representation of the Computer-mediatedCommunication. TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)
Journal. (submitted 2012).

3. Interaction templates are units that the user
does not generate with the keyboard but which
are generated automatically from a file with apreviously prepared text or graphical element after
the user has activated a template. Due to theirgeneration from predefined templates, we do notclassify them as emoticons, even though some ofthem may have similar functions. Amongst others,
this category includes *.gif files. Many of them
portray not just facial expressions but can depict
almost everything; in the case of animated graphics
they can even portray entire scenes as moving
pictures.
4. Addressing terms are units which are used toaddress an utterance to a particular interlocutor.
The most widely used form here is the one
made out of the <@>-character together with a
specification of the addressee’s name.

4. Conclusion and outlook
Up to now, many assumptions about the Internet’s
impact on language change have been based uponsmall datasets. As a new component within the
DWDS system, the DeRiK corpus is meant tobe a resource for the investigation of language
usage in CMC genres on a broader empiricalbasis. The annotation schema sketched in section
3 is used and evaluated in the ongoing workof the DeRiK project. The categories proposedin this schema will have to be further discussed
within the CMC community. We consider the
262

Beißwenger, M., and A. Storrer (2008).
Corpora of Computer-Mediated Communication. In
A. Lüdeling and M. Kytö (eds.), Corpus Linguistics.
An International Handbook, vol. 1. Berlin: de
Gruyter, pp. 292-308.

Biber, D., et al. (1999). Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English. Edinburgh: Pearson.
Biber, D., et al. (2002). Longman Student
Grammar of Spoken and Written English.
Edinburgh: Pearson.
Blake, B. J. (2008). All About Language. New York:
Oxford UP.
Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the Internet.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Crystal, D. (2011). Internet Linguistics. A Student
Guide. New York: Routledge.
[DUDEN-45] DUDEN (1995). Die Grammatik. 5th
ed. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut.
[DUDEN-47] DUDEN (2005). Die Grammatik. 7th
ed. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut.
Geyken, A. (2007). The DWDS corpus: A reference
corpus for the German language of the 20th century.
In Ch. Fellbaum (ed.), Collocations and Idioms.
London: Continuum, pp. 23-40.
Geyken, A., and Th. Hanneforth (2006). TAGH
– A Complete Morphology for German basedon Weighted Finite State Automata. In: A. YliJyrä, L. Karttunen, and J. Karhumäki (eds), Finite
State Methods and Natural Language Processing– Proceedings of FSMNLP, 5th international
workshop, Helsinki 2005, Heidelberg: Springer (=Lecture Notes in Artificial Ingelligence 4002), pp.
55-66.

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Greenbaum, S. (1996). The Oxford English
Grammar. New York: Oxford UP.

Gegenwartssprache (WDG). 6 Bände. Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag.

Herring, S. C. (1996). Introduction. In: S. C.
Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication.
Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 1-10.

Werry, C. C. (1996). Linguistic and interactionalfeatures of Internet Relay Chat. In S. C.
Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication.
Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp.
47-63.

Herring, S. C., ed. (1996). Computer-MediatedCommunication. Linguistic, Social and CrossCultural Perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Herring, S. C., ed. (2010). ComputerMediated Conversation, Part I. Special Issue ofLanguage@Internet 7. http://www.languageati
nternet.org/articles/2010 (accessed 11 March
2012)
Jurish, B. (2003). A Hybrid ApproachtoPart-of-Speech
Tagging,Finalreport.
Project ‘Kollokationen im Wörterbuch’. BerlinBrandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Berlin. http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~mooc
ow/pubs/dwdst-report.pdf (accessed 11 March
2012)
McArthur, T., ed. (1998). Concise Oxf ord
Companion to the English Language. Oxford:
Oxford UP.
Reynaert, N., O. Oostdijk, H. de Clercq, etal. (2010). Balancing SoNaR: IPR versus Processing
Issues in a 500-Million-Word Written Dutch
Reference Corpus. In Proceedings of the Seventh
conference on International Language Resources
and Evaluation (LREC’10). Paris, 2693-2698.
Online: http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/1800
1/01/LREC2010_549_Paper_SoNaR.pdf

Runkehl, K., T. Siever, and P. Schlobinski(1998). Sprache und Kommunikation im Internet.
Überblick und Analysen. Opladen: Westdeutscher
Verlag.
Schiffrin, D. (1986).
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Discourse

markers.

Storrer, A. (2012, in press). Sprachstil undSprachvariation in sozialen Netzwerken. In B. FrankJob, A. Mehler, and T. Sutter (eds.), Die Dynamik
sozialer und sprachlicher Netzwerke. Konzepte,
Methoden und empirische Untersuchungen an
Beispielen des WWW. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für
Sozialwissenschaften.

Zifonun, G., L. Hoffmann, B. Strecker, et al.,eds. (1997). Grammatik der deutschen Sprache. 3
Bände. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.
Notes
1. Cf. http://www.empirikom.net/bin/view/Themen/D
eRiK . The project is embedded in the scientific network‘Empirische Erforschung internetbasierter Kommunikation’ (http://www.empirikom.net/ ), funded by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
2. Another corpus of contemporary language which aims toinclude a CMC subcorpus is the Dutch SoNaR project (Reynaert
et al. 2010).
3. This dictionary is based on a six-volume paper dictionary,
the Wörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (WDG,
en.: ‘Dictionary of Contemporay German’) published between
1962 and 1977 and compiled at the Deutsche Akademie derWissenschaften (cf. [WDG]).
4. This is typically communicated by assigning certain subtypesof the ‘Creative Commons’ License to CMC documents or
to web applications which specify the terms of (re-)use and(re-)distribution of their content.
5. Overviews of the features of CMC discourse from a linguistic
perspective can be found, e.g., in Herring (ed., 1996, 2010),
Werry (1996), Runkehl et al. (1998), Beißwenger (2000),
Crystal (2001, 2011), Beißwenger & Storrer (2008), and Storrer(2012). The DeRiK corpus will include annotations of selectedphenomena which are often described as being typical for
language use on the Internet.
6. The RNG schema file, a TEI-compliant ODD documentation as
well as encoding examples are available at http://www.emp
irikom.net/bin/view/Themen/CmcTEI .
7. In other grammars these units are described as interjections(e.g., Greenbaum 1996; McArthur et al. 1998; Blake 2008) orInterjektionen (DUDEN-47), inserts (Biber et al. 1999, 2002),
discourse markers (Schiffrin 1986), discourse particles orGesprächspartikeln (DUDEN-45).

[TEI-P5] TEI Consortium (eds., 2007). TEI
P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding andInterchange. http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/ (accessed 11 March 2012).
[WDG]: Klappenbach, R., and W. Steinitz,
eds. (1964-1977). Wörterbuch der deutschen
263

Digital Humanities 2012

Estimating theDistinctiveness ofGraphemes and Allographs
in Palaeographic
Classification

palaeography, provided the results can be presented
in a meaningful form.

Levy, Noga

2. Methods

nogaor@gmail.com
Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Wolf, Lior

wolf@cs.tau.ac.il
Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Dershowitz, Nachum
nachumd@post.tau.ac.il
Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Stokes, Peter

peter.stokes@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

1. Introduction
Within the discipline of palaeography, the‘morphological’ approach tries to describe the lettershape as a whole, so a letter may be described asa ‘Caroline a’ or as an ‘insular r’. Aspects of thisapproach are visible in almost all palaeographicalhandbooks, particularly those that provide alphabetsor selections of letter-forms. An example is Albert
Derolez’s, Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript
Books, which also provides a useful discussion ofmorphology as a palaeographical method.
Commonly, a morphological system of descriptors
contains two main categories: One category is thegrapheme or perhaps, more correctly, character: theletter as an abstract entity but with physical form,
such as a, æ, or a single punctuation mark. The
second category is the allograph, namely, a particular
way of writing the letter; typical examples include‘Caroline’ or ‘insular’.
A key question, given any system of descriptors,
is to evaluate the relative importance of eachof the components of this system. For example,
it is well known among palaeographers that thegrapheme a is very distinctive for late Anglo-Saxon
minuscule (Ker 1957; Dumville 1988; Stokes 2005);
however, subjective evaluation of distinctivenesscould potentially be misleading. It is therefore quite
useful to conduct a statistical analysis of significance,and potentially contribute thereby to the practice of264

In this work, we employ methods that are commonlyused for mining insights from biological experiments
regarding underlying genetic mechanisms. We showthat in the context of palaeography such an approachalso provides insightful observations.

A dataset consisting of 456 scribal handwritings in
English Vernacular minuscule, ca. 990 – ca. 1035,
is used (Stokes 2005). ‘Scribal handwriting’ here
refers to a single stint or block of writing by one
person; these samples are spread across some 198
manuscripts and range from the main text of the bookto later additions and notes or glosses between thelines or in the margins.
The handwritings were described using 289
descriptors (Stokes 2007-2008), where each
descriptor indicates whether a certain grapheme(or group of similar graphemes) written as specificallograph(s) appear in the manuscript, as well
as forms of certain parts of letters such as
ascenders, descenders, and pen-angle. Every sampleof handwriting is described by its known or predicted
place of writing (where possible) and the estimatedrange of dates of writing. For classification purposes,
the dataset was divided into classes that arehomogeneous in time and place.
First, we measure for each descriptor how
informative it is. This is done using the information
gain method (Mitchell 1997), which is often used
for feature selection in text categorization tasks. The
information gain score measures the decrease inentropy when a descriptor is given vs. the baselinein which it is absent. That is, the information gain
measures the discriminative power added by eachsingle descriptor.
Measuring the power of each descriptor by itself isof limited power. That a certain descriptor is ranked
high tells us very little about how informative othersimilar descriptors are. Using an analogy to biology,
it is helpful to know which genes express differently
in a specific experiment testing different classes of
biological conditions. However, if we want to learn
about biological functions and processes, we must go
beyond the level of the specific gene by aggregating
the information from multiple genes of the samefamily. In palaeography, the importance of a specificcharacter, for example, cannot be reliably detectedjust by looking at the ranking of one of the associateddescriptors, no matter how highly it is ranked.
The Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) is astatistically valid tool to evaluate how prominent a
set (that is, a family) of descriptors is (Subramanian

Digital Humanities 20122005). This computational method determines
whether an a priori defined set of features presents
itself in a statistically significant and coherent
manner among a ranked list of descriptors.

Rank

Grapheme+

Normalized ES

1

æ

1.73

2

7 (Tironean nota)

1.31

3

a

1.31

The input of the GSEA method is a ranked listof features and a list of families of features.
Context is important, and so we conduct one
experiment using families derived from graphemes
and another experiment for families of allographs.
The GSEA method is based on elaborate order
statistic mechanisms that can compare, on a leveled
ground, between large and small families of features.

4

c

1.15

5

f

1.10

6

d

0.86

7

g

0.82

8

Aspect

0.79

9

e

0.76

10

y

0.64

11

Ascender

0.60

12

h

0.58

13

Þð

0.58

14

k

0.57

15

Descender

0.56

16

s

0.50

3. Results
The information gain method was used toautomatically rank all 289 descriptors. The first,
most significant, 30 features are listed in Table 1.

Table 2: The 16 graphemes (and stylistic issues) thatwere found to be discriminative in a statisticallysignificant way by the GSEA method. The enrichmentscore (ES) reflects the degree to which a feature-set isoverrepresented at the top. The normalized ES accounts fordifferences in set size and the correlations between the sets

Table 1: The 30 single descriptors that were found to be
the most informative using the information gain score

GSEA was then applied to these results, finding
16 families of graphemes (and stylistic issues, like
aspect) that are ‘enriched’ in a statistically significant
way, and 20 families of ‘enriched’ allographs. Tables
2 and 4 show the enriched families. The GSEA tool
also provides another output: a list of descriptor
families that are statistically speaking irrelevant.
These lists (Tables 3 and 5) contain 5 graphemes
and 9 allographs whose descriptors are ranked so
consistently low that it is unlikely to be by chance.
As can be seen, the GSEA results contain both
expected results and surprising ones; see (Ker 1957;
Dumville1988, 1993, 1994) for general backgroundfor script of this period.

It is unsurprising that the ash (æ) is most significant,since it is a combination of a and e, both of which arein themselves significant (Dumville 1988). It is quite
surprising that the Tironean nota for and (whichlooks like the numeral 7) is discriminating, as this is
not noted by any of the palaeographers cited. It alsocame as a surprise that c and y turned out to be highly
significant, because they are not generally recognised
as such, though some of their specific forms certainlyare (Dumville 1993). It was also surprising, from apalaeographer’s viewpoint, to see h in the list, as it
is not included in those published by palaeographers(Ker1957; Dumville 1993; 1994; Stokes 2005).
Rank

Graphemes+

Normalized ES

1

Minim

-1.20

2

Pen

-0.90

3

hmn

-0.76

4

r

-0.70

5

ð

-0.62

Table 3: The five graphemes and stylistic
issues that were found to be irrelevant to thediscrimination task to a statistically significant degree

Here, it is very interesting to see that ð isinsignificant, since its form varies very widely
between scribes. Perhaps some of its features are
better discriminants than others.

265Digital Humanities 2012

Table 5: The nine allographs that were found to beirrelevant in a statistically significant manner to thediscrimination task. Most of these results are expected
since these allographs are either very common in the corpus
or present the ‘default’ values for the script of the period

4. Discussion

Table 4: The 20 allographs that were found to be discriminativein a statistically significant way by the GSEA method

Table 4 is also quite insightful. While HORNED
is widely accepted as significant (Ker 1957),
ANGLED_SW (angled southwest quadrant) is not,although it has been suggested as discriminative(Stokes, 2005). LONG_TONGUE is not attested
in the literature as significant, as are the related
ANGLED_TONGUE and HORIZ._TONGUE: it will
be interesting to study if they are strongly correlated,
and if they are even more distinctive in combination.
Since TEARDROP, ROUND, and SEMI_CAROLINE
are all forms of the letter a, their significance is
expected and is supported by related literature on
the minuscule of the period (Ker, 1957; Dumville,
1994), and is strongly argued as relevant forthis period in the thesis from which this dataset
is taken (Stokes 2005).
ROTUND_MINIM is
unrecognized as being discriminative. LOW_LIG(low ligature) is less recognized in the literature than
TALL_LIG (Ker, 1957) which is correlated with it.
BULGING_LIG is well recognized (Ker 1957; Stokes
2005). SQUINTING is recognised as distinctive in
Latin (Dumville 1993) but not in the script normallyused for the vernacular.

266

Computerized systems that perform digital
palaeography have been criticized in the past for
reducing script entirely to statistical processes thatare themselves difficult or impossible to evaluate(Stokes 2009). In fact, the struggle to elicit meaningout of statistical inference tools is common to many
scientific domains. Here we begin to show that, byusing the appropriate statistical tools, computers canbe used to mine meaningful insights in palaeography.
The proposed method is not without its limitations.
First, it relies on a specific definition of ‘distinctive
descriptors’ that is derived from the choice of thefeature ranking algorithm used. The IG method usedfocuses on the ability to discriminate between theclasses; by choosing another ranking method one
could focus, for example, on scribal variation, whichis also a question of interest to palaeographers.
A second limitation is that the method cannot go
beyond the assumptions made in the initial coding
system. For example, there is a normalization quality
to GSEA, in the sense that, if the palaeographer
recorded more varieties of a, say, than of otherletters, precisely because he expects that letterto be more significant, the GSEA method willcounterbalance this by looking at the overall
distribution of all varieties. However, presumably
there could have been other letters and features thatare in fact more distinctive but that were not recordedin the database because they were mistakenly
deemed to be relatively insignificant. Future work
should therefore aim to augment the database with
automatically extracted features, with the potential
benefit of adding a new (robotic) perspective tomorphological analysis. Another limitation of themethod is its dependence on verbal descriptors
for features which are visual, or, indeed, which
are a function of the physical movements of thescribe’s arm, hand and pen, particularly given
the lack of standard palaeographical terminology
for such detailed features (Stokes 2011-2012).

Digital Humanities 2012

These difficulties could potentially be overcome byproviding greater rigour in nomenclature and byconnecting these labels to particular images. Bothapproaches are already being tested in the DigiPal
project ( http://digipal.eu/ ), and discussions are
already underway to combine the work done therewith that described here.
Despite these limitations, the method describedis still very promising. One of the difficulties inpalaeographical study is the vast quantity of detailthat must be processed, and so helping the humanexpert to identify distinctive features would beenormously beneficial in managing that data. For
instance, identifying patterns in variation such as
those by region, date or group of scribes would
be invaluable in identifying manuscripts by theirwriting. Applying the method to other corpora ofscribal handwriting could also lead to valuable
insights. For example, if particular features prove
to be discriminative across many different scriptsystems then this could be an important clue into
identifying scribes independently of the script thatthey wrote, something very necessary given thatmost scribes routinely wrote in a number of very
different scripts. Finally, with further testing andrefinement, this approach promises an importantand large step towards a method for distinguishinghandwriting that can be described explicitly, thatcan be communicated effectively in ways thatpalaeographers and other humanities scholars canunderstand, and that can also enjoy the support ofquantitative data. This goal is one that has beensought for a very long time (Stokes 2009).

Stokes, P. A. (2007-2008). Palaeography
and image-processing: some solutions andproblems. Digital Medievalist 3. http://digitalm
edievalist.org/journal/3/stokes/ (accessed 15
March 2012).
Stokes,P.
A.
(2009).
Computer-aided
palaeography: present and future. In Rehbein, M.,
et al. (eds), Kodikologie und Paläographie im
Digitalen Zeitalter. Norderstedt: Books on Demand.
309–338. http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/2978/(accessed 15 March 2012).
Stokes, P. A. (2011-2012). Describing script[Parts i–]. DigiPal Project Blog. King’s College
London. http://digipal.eu/blogs/blog/descr
ibing-handwriting-part-i/ (accessed 15 March2012).
Subramanian, A., et al. (2005). Gene set
enrichment analysis: a knowledge-based approach
for interpreting genome-wide expression profiles.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States of America 102(43): 15545-50.

References
Bishop, T. A. M. (1971). English Caroline
Minuscule. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dumville, D. N. (1988). Beowulf come lately: somenotes on the palaeography of the Nowell Codex.
Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und
Literaturen 225: 49–63.
Dumville, D. N. (1993). English Caroline Script
and Monastic History. Boydell: Woodbridge.
Dumville, D. N. (1994). English Square Minuscule
script: the mid-century phases. Anglo-Saxon
England 23: 133–64.
Ker, N. R. (1957). Catalogue of Manuscripts
Containing Anglo-Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Mitchell, T. M. (1997). Machine Learning. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
Stokes, P. A. (2005). English Vernacular Script
ca 990–ca 1035. Cambridge [unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation].

267

Digital Humanities 2012

Academic Research in the
Blogosphere: Adapting to
New Opportunities andRisks on the Internet
Littauer, Richardrichard.littauer@gmail.com
Universität des Saarlandes, Germany

Winters, Jameswintzis@gmail.com
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Roberts, Sean

S.G.Roberts@sms.ed.ac.uk
University of Edinburgh, UK

Little, Hannah

H.R.Little@sms.ed.ac.uk
University of Edinburgh, UK

Pleyer, Michael

Pleyer@stud.uni-heidelberg.de
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany

Benzon, Bill

BBenzon@mindspring.com
QuestionCopyright.org, USA

Interdisciplinary research with the intent ofpublication to a wide audience is increasingly
desired. Blogging offers new opportunities foracademics to collaborate with researchers from otherfields and integrate data. The power to publish
results and theories freely and get rapid feedback
has positive and negative potential implications.
On the positive side, new ideas can be presented
and discussed easily with progress potentially much
faster than a traditional journal peer-review. Theinternet also provides a forum to engage the public
about ongoing research, an increasing concern for
funding bodies. On the negative side, ideas canappear in public and affect research without being
properly assessed. This could dilute the impact of
relevant research. We review whether blogging canbecome part of research, by examining the case studyof our blog on language evolution.
ReplicatedTypo.org has received 120,000~ hits
in 3 years (counts gathered using Wordpress
Analytics) and been awarded 8 editor’s selections
from ResearchBlogging.com. As well as reportingon recent publications and conferences, we havewritten basic introductions to Linguistics, Evolution,mathematical modeling and animal signaling. Asa blog with multiple authors, our interests are268

varied, but our central research theme – evolutionary
approaches to language and culture – remains thesame. Our post topics include what makes humans
unique, top-down versus bottom-up approaches tolanguage evolution, the evolution of colour terms,
Specific Language Impairment and Autism, theeffect of second language learners on linguistic
structure, cultural evolution and the singularityand genetic correlates of social sensitivity. We’ve
written about the current trend for large-scalestatistical analyses of linguistic features and socialfeatures, and contributed some of our own including
phoneme inventory size and demography, alcohol
consumption and morphological complexity andwhether linguistic diversity is correlated with traffic
accidents. As shown by the examples provided,
Language Evolution is an inherently interdisciplinary
field with many new ideas and which relies upon newtechniques and analyses.
Blogs are a useful source for discovering current
research and a forum for open peer review, whether
open (from the public) or closed (from co-authors
on drafts). Linguistics blogs have been around formany years (e.g. Language Log), but blogs dedicatedto language evolution have emerged, too (e.g. Babel’s
dawn, Shared Symbolic Storage, Culture Evolves!,
Biolinguistics Blog, Replicated Typo). One of theseblog-authors has even published a book directed ata general audience about the theories he developedon his blog (E. B. Bolles 2011). However, there is nouniversal consensus on the method or acceptability ofciting ideas from blogs. We argue that the devaluingof research and criticism appearing in open forums
risks obstructing research. This is not merely adebate in Linguistics; much ink has been spilled
on a similar grounds in evolutionary biology, inthe so called #arsenicgate scandal (see Zimmer2011). Scholarship will not take advantage of thecollaborative potential of the Internet if academic
standards are not applied to Internet resources.
Concerns about standards and plagiarism, from workthat might considered to be in the public domain,
are particularly important for blogs that are used
to disseminating original work in progress such as
small-scale experiments and theoretical essays. A
particularly sensitive issue, in that it may stop one
blogging about personal research, is public access toexperiment data and model code.
On a note unrelated to research disseminationand publication models, writing for blogs canbenefit students. It encourages wider reading,engagement with cutting-edge topics and helps
integrate students from diverse backgrounds into thelanguage evolution community. In an increasinglycompetitive academic environment, blogs are a vital
tool for career development. We would like to see
universities teach new media skills such as blogging.

Digital Humanities 2012

Our aims as science bloggers on Replicated Typo
are: to highlight and discuss new research on
language evolution; to engage with the generalpublic by presenting language evolution researchin an accessible way; to be a platform for open
science research into language evolution. We hopethat presentation of research and discussion on theinternet can, in conjunction with journal peer-review,
lead to more productive, accurate and progressive
research. Discussions of posts on our own blog havelead to revisions of our research and new avenues ofresearch as well as collaborations and clarificationsof research by the authors of the studies reviewed.
Releasing code on our blog has lead to interactions
that benefited both the readers and the researcher.
We hope that model transparency and the sharing ofcode can help foster links between language evolution
and other fields who use similar techniques andtechnologies (biology, informatics, etc.).

Pleyer, M. (n.d.). Shared symbolic storage.
http://sharedsymbolicstorage.blogspot.com .
Winters, J., ed. (n.d.). Replicated typo. http://www.replicatedtypo.com

Zimmer,C.
(2011)
Happy
Birthday,#arseniclife.
The
Loom,
December2,
2011. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loo
m/2011/12/02/happy-birthday-arseniclife/(accessed March 14 2012).

The aim of this paper is to provide a forum at Digital
Humanities 2012 for discussing these issues, and thequestions that arise from them, namely:- Can blogged research be taken as seriously as peerreviewed research?
- What are the risks of publicly accessible research?
- Is research blogging adaptable to other fields,
in particular fields involving minorities or low
resource groups?
- Are there particular concerns with running
experiments or soliciting feedback online?
- Is the field of academia doing enough towards
public engagement on the internet?
We hope that providing a focus for these issues will
ensure a productive and balanced response.

References
Bolles, E., ed. (n.d.). Babel’s dawn. http://wwww.babelsdawn.com .
Bolles, E. B. (2011). Babel’s dawn: A natural
history of the origins of speech. Berkeley, CA:
Counterpoint.
Jordan, F. (n.d.). Culture evolves! http://evolu
tionaryanthropology.wordpress.com .
Liberman, M., and G. Pullum, eds. (n.d.).
Language Log. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.
edu .
Martín, T., ed. (n.d.). Biolinguistics blog. http://
biolingblog.blogspot.com .
Munger, D., ed. (n.d.). Research blogging.
http://www.researchblogging.com .

269

Digital Humanities 2012

Feeling the View: Reading
Affective Orientation of
Tagged Images

with known affect types. An affective magnitude
computation method is also proposed to retrieve
images with strong affective orientation.

Liu, Jyi-Shane

Among the major photo web sites, Flickr provides
several unique features that seem to be better
fit to the purposes of this research. First andforemost, Flickr emphasizes the use of tags for image
description and community activity. Flickr photos
tend to be associated with more tags than other website photos. Second, user activities on Flickr involve
more direct interaction of images and words withcomments and feedbacks. Third, Flickr provides APIs
that are conducive to data acquisition.

jyishane.liu@gmail.com
Natioanl Chengchi University, Taiwan

Peng, Sheng-Yang

young.orange@gmail.com
Natioanl Chengchi University, Taiwan

1. Problems
Images are visual representations of humanexperiences and the world (Molyneaux 1997). An
image captures a moment of life and provides a
glimpse of human history. With the overwhelming
popularity of social media and the convenienceof personal digital devices, digital images on web
platforms have exploded in astonishing numbers.
According to a recent article by an independent
online news site (Kessler 2011), the number ofphotos on Facebook was 60 billion, compared to
Photobucket’s 8 billion, Picasa’s 7 billion and Flickr’s
5 billion in early 2011. These digital images embody
certain aspects of human nature in a historicalscale. Challenges and opportunities abound for new
findings of humanities research on digital visualmedia.
Many images (or photos) on social media areassociated with tags that describe the content of
the images. As opposed to controlled vocabularies
in domain-specific taxonomy, tags are keywords
generated freely without hierarchical structure andare characterized as folksonomy (Trant 2009). An
image, with its visual representation of the world,
can be seen as an anchor that links a set oftags. Mitchell (1994) discussed the relations ofimages and words and suggested the views thatimages and words are interactive and constitutiveof representation and that all representations areheterogeneous. Therefore, images with tags areintegral representations that encode fuller andricher content. This observation seems to support
the assumption that, through an image anchor,
meaningful linkage among tags exists.
This research focuses on the affective aspect ofhuman life in digital images and attempts to identify
a subset of tags that may indicate strong affectiveorientation. This provides a possibility to read intoviewers’ affective response to images with certain
affect indicative tags that are strongly associated270

2. Methodology

This research adopts an affective framework based on
Russel’s circumplex model of affect (Posner 2005),
in which 28 emotion words are evenly distributed
around a circle centered on the origin of a twodimensional space of affective experiences. The
horizontal dimension of valence ranges from highly
negative (left) to highly positive (right), whereas thevertical dimension of arousal ranges from sleepy(bottom) to agitated (top). The set of emotion words
were reduced from 28 to 12 based on significant
occurrence in Flickr tags and equal representationof four affective quadrants. For each affective tag, atotal of 1,000 Flickr photos are retrieved based on
a popularity index called interesting. The retrieving
process also includes a check-and-replace step tomake sure that the final sample of 12,000 photos
were all unique and from unique users. This is toremove bias and achieve objective representation indata collection.
Point-wise mutual information (PMI), developed in
the fields of probability and information theory,is a measure of mutual dependenceof two randomvariables and has been successfully applied toprovide effective word association measurement intext mining research (Church & Hanks 1989; Recchia& Jones 2009). For any two words X and Y, their PMI
value is calculated by taking the base-2 logarithmof the ratio of the joint probability distribution p(X,Y) over the independent probability distributions
p(X) and p(Y). Maximal positive PMI values indicate
strong tendency of co-occurrence, whereas negativevalues suggest less chance of occurring together andzero means independence. In this research, two tags
co-occur if they appear in the tag set of a photo.
For the purpose of retrieving images withstrong affective orientation, an affective magnitude
computation method is developed. This method
combines association strength, affect distribution in
tag set, and community feedbacks. First, community
feedback parameters such as views, favorites, andcomments, are used to retrieve candidate photos with

Digital Humanities 2012

above average parameter values. Second, for eachcandidate photo, an affective weight is calculatedby the ratio of the number of affect indicative tagsin the photo’s tag set to the total number of tagsin the photo’s tag set. Third, for each candidate
photo, the affective magnitude of certain affective
type or certain affective quadrant is computed by theweighted sum of PMI values of the pairs of the affecttypes and the affect indicative tags of the photo.

3. Results
The total number of tags in the sample set of 12,000
photos is 258,293, in which 70,066 tags are unique.
The frequency distribution of these unique tags
shows a long tail. A stemming process is applied tothese unique tags to reduce the inflected words totheir root form, e.g., girls to girl, beautiful to beauti.
A frequency threshold of 1% is also set to filter out
less meaningful tags. The stemming and filtering
processes result in 386 word forms of tags. These
386 tags are called affect indicative tags because of
their high co-occurrence with the 12 affective tags. By
calculating PMI values of a pair of an affective tag
and an affect indicative tag, a matrix of association
strength among 12 affective tags and 386 affectindicative tags are obtained. Table 1 shows a partial
matrix of PMI values between affective tags and affectindicative tags.

Table 2

These affect indicative tags can be used to retrieve
images with predicted affective orientation. Given a
set of images that include an affect indicative tag intheir tag sets, the affective magnitude computation(AffMC) method is then used to determine an image’s
affective magnitude in the affect quadrant, and thus
provides a ranked list of images. The performanceof the affective magnitude computation method iscompared to that of Google and Flickr, which also
include a ranking mechanism on retrieved images.
Images retrieved by AffMC, Flickr, Google with top
affect indicative tags of each affect quadrant are
shown in Tables 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Q1: positive & more aroused affect indicative tag: joy
AffMC

FlickrTable 1The PMI values of an affect indicative tag are further
grouped by each affect quadrant to provide distinct
affective orientation. The association strength of
an affect indicative tag with an affect quadrant iscalculated by summing up positive PMI values of thethree affective tags in the affect quadrant. Negative
PMI values indicate unlikely co-occurrence and aretaken as zero during quadrant grouping to avoid
incorrect underestimation of co-occurrence union.
Table 2 shows the lists of the top ten affect indicative
tags that have the most association strength with oneof the four affect quadrants.

GoogleTable 3

*Copyrights of all images shown are reserved byoriginal contributors.

271

Digital Humanities 2012

Q2: negative & more aroused affect indicative tag: scary

Q4: positive & less aroused affect indicative tag: serene

AffMC

AffMC

FlickrFlickr

GoogleGoogleTable 6

Table 4
Q3: negative & less aroused affect indicative tag: lonely
AffMC

FlickrTo evaluate the affective magnitude computation(AffMC) method, top three affect indicative tags foreach affect quadrant are used to retrieve images.
The number of images retrieved by each ranking
method is twelve, with three for each affect quadrant.
A total of thirty-six images are given to a group of 136
subjects for testing their emotional response. Survey
results indicate that AffMC is better than Flickr
and comparable to Google in retrieving images ofstrong affective orientation. Note that image sourcesof Google and Flick (and AffMC) are different and
Google enjoys a much significant user feedback for
effective ranking.

4. Conclusions

GoogleTable 5This research shows that image tags can be
exploited to characterize affect indicative tags.
Accordingly, images with strong affective orientation
can be identified and retrieved, from which viewers’
emotional response can be mostly anticipated. Thismethod can be further developed into an engine
for sorting and grouping images into affective types
based on the given tags. Potential applications
include intelligent visual services for user emotion
enhancement or compensation. Another research
implication is that significant pairs can be revealed
by substantial repetition among loosely associateditems and the triangular cluster of a significant pairand the central item provides the basis for functional
exploitation.
Acknowledgement272

Digital Humanities 2012

This work was partially supported by the
National Science Council, Taiwan, [NSC 100-2221E-004-013]; and the National Chengchi University’s
Top University Project.

References
Church, K. W., and P. Hanks (1989).
Word Association Norms, Mutual Informationand Lexicography,Proceedings of the 27th Annual
Conference of the Association of Computational
Linguistics, June 1989, Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada, pp. 76-83.
Kessler, S. (2011). Facebook photos by the
numbers, Mashable. http://mashable.com/2011/02/14/facebook-photo-infographic/ (accessed
28 October 2011).
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture Theory: Essays
on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of
Chicago P.
Molyneaux, B. L., ed. (1997). The Cultural Lifeof Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology.
London: Routledge.
Posner, J., J. A. Russell, and B. S. Peterson(2005). The Circumplex Model of Affect: An
Integrative Approach to Affective Neuroscience,
Cognitive Development, and Psychopathology.
Development and Psychopathology 17(3): 715-734.
Recchia, G. L., and M. N. Jones (2009).
More Data Trumps Smarter Algorithms: Comparing
Pointwise Mutual Information to Latent Semantic
Analysis Behavior Research Methods 41: 657–663.
Trant, J. (2009). Studying Social Tagging andFolksonomy: A Review and Framework. Journal of
Digital Information 10(1): 1-42.

Characterizing Authorship
Style Using Linguistic
Features
Lucic, Ana

alucic2@illinois.edu
Graduate School of Library and Information
Science, USA

Blake, Catherine

clblake@illinois.edu
Graduate School of Library and Information
Science, USA

1. Introduction
For centuries, scholars have been searching for
reliable methods to establish the authorship of awork. The underlying premise of this scholarship isthat each author has a detectable individual styleof writing that can be explored with automatedmethods.
A range of features have been explored that
include function words and character n-grams either
individually or in combination with other features(Burrows 1987; Bayeen et al. 2002; Keselj et al. 2003;
Argamon & Levitan 2005; Houvardas & Stamatatos
2006), part-of-speech information (Stamatatos etal. 2001), probabilistic context-free grammars(Raghavan et al. 2010), and linguistic features of thetext (Koppel et al. 2006). Although many of thoseexperiments consider only lexical features, syntactic
features are considered more reliable (Stamatatos
2009: 542), but parsing technologies have only
recently achieved the accuracy necessary to consider
syntactic features in detail. Once the features are inplace, the problem of authorship attribution can becast as a classification problem and machine-learning
methods can be used, such as Naïve Bayes or Support
Vector Machine (SVM) that both work well when
there are a large number of weak features. For verylarge collections and for open authorship attribution
sets, similarity-based methods are more appropriate
than machine-learning methods (Koppel et al. 2011).
Our goal is to analyze the potential of syntactic
dependencies to characterize an author’s writing
style with respect to how an author refers to people.
The features that we use are drawn from bothsemantic and syntactic features. Specifically we first
identify personal names – a semantic feature –and then identify local dependencies that surroundthose personal names – a syntactic feature. Our
results demonstrate that these features vary between
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authors and that those variations can be exploited toaccurately determine authorship attribution.

2. Method
The proposed authorship attribution modelemphasizes how an author refers to people. Thisapproach leverages linguistically motivated markers
and takes advantage of recent automated methods
to identify syntactic dependencies. Consider thefollowing sentence shown in Figure 1: ‘Robert Ryan
is the prey he captures, along with the girl Janet
Leigh’ where author 819382 uses a noun appositive
to refer to the actress Janet Leigh. Note that there
are two structures in this case – one for Janet
Leigh and another for Robert Ryan where theauthor uses the actor as the subject of the sentence.
Our method considers one dependency before
and one dependency after the person reference.
Author 819382’s profile suggests a preference forappositives, such as in the sentence ‘The claims
manager, Lee J. Cobb here, unravels the plot’ where
the author again uses the appositive when referringto the character Lee J.Cobb.

Figure 2: Dependency Grammar showing Gloria DeHaven
as the subject and June Allyson in a conjunctive clause

Author 1609079, however, is more likely to use
a nominal subject passive grammatical relation
when introducing personal names than otherreviewers. Figure 3 shows this pattern when referring
to Evelyne in the context of the sentence ‘Arnold’s
wife Evelyne is also expected to sacrifice for Edward.’
As with the earlier authors, author 1609079 uses
other patterns in addition to nominal subject passive
before the name within the same sentence. The
generated author’s profile reflects all of these
preferences and is thus well suited to use indiscerning one author from another.

Figure 3: Dependency Grammar of a sentence by author 1609079
who prefers to refer to people as the subject of a passive clause

Figure 1: Dependency Grammar showing Robert Ryan
as the subjects and Janet Leigh as a noun appositive

In contrast to author 819382, author 463200 prefers
to describe several people together such as in thefollowing examples that occur in different reviews:‘Lois Lane and Clark Kent are sent to cover acircus (for some reason)’and ‘And there’s Gloria
DeHaven and June Allyson in bit parts!’ (see Figure
2 for the dependency grammar representation). The
coordination (cc) and preposition (prep) would also
be used as candidate markers for this sentence.

These examples provide the motivation for our
strategy to use local syntactic structures where
authors refer to people. The general approach tocreate an author profile has the following steps. The
information shown in parenthesis provides details
for the experiments reported in this paper.
1. Collect and identify sentences from the source
collection (Natural Language Toolkit recognizer,
nltk.org
2. Identify people within each sentence (Named
Entity Recognizer, nlp.stanford.edu/software/
CRF-NER.shtml)
3. Generate syntactic dependency trees from eachsentence (Stanford Lexical Parser version 1.6.9,
nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml)

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4. Align the person names with the dependencies andcount the local grammatical structures before andafter each person reference
5. Normalize the local grammatical structures bydividing by the number of people used by an author
Our method only considered those sentences andonly those reviews which included personal names
and that had 80 or fewer words. Of the 62,000
reviews, 92% or 57,286 included at least one sentencethat satisfied this criterion and of the 919,203total
sentences 354,389 referred to people.

3. Results
The evaluations presented in this paper are basedon a closed set of 62 candidate authors. The
publicly available IMDb62 dataset (Seroussi et al.
2011) was harvested from the IMDB (imdb.com)
in 2009 and satisfies Grieve’s (2007) requirementthat the texts should be written in the samegenre and should have originated around the same
period. The IMDb62 collection, however, does notsatisfy Grieve’s requirement that the texts should
preferably be on the same topic as the movie
review topics depend on the topic and genre of
the movie. Only those reviewers who made prolificcontributions to the imdb.com web site were selected
for inclusion in the dataset so that each of 62
reviewers has 1,000 reviews (the total of 62,000
reviews). Movie reviewers typically refer to actors,
directors and characters from a movie, so the
IMDb62 dataset provides a rich collection in which to
explore authorship style when referring to people.
Results show that authors differ both with respect
to the number of person references made and how
they refer to people. The majority of authors in
the collection (43/62) referred to between 5,000
and 20,000 personal names in all of the reviews,
but 15 authors use far fewer names (between 1,086
and 5,000), and 4 reviewers referred to more than
20,000 personal names (up to 33,115). Twentynine candidate syntactic features (13 before and 16
after personal names) were selected based on thefrequency of use within the entire set of reviews.
The two most frequent syntactic patterns before
a personal name were nominal subject and objectof a preposition while the most frequent syntactic
patterns after a personal name were a punctuation
mark and possessive modifier.
To evaluate how well the syntactic features could
predict the correct author for a review, a test set
was created by drawing 5% of reviews for eachauthor at random from the original collection. The
author profile described in the methods section
was then created using the remaining 95% of thereviews (the training set) and the cosine similarity

between the features in the test set and the profilein the training set was used to identify the correct
author, i.e. if syntactic features are well suited toauthorship disambiguation then the cosine similarly
would place the correct author first in the ranked
list of candidate authors. Note that all reviews in thetest set (approximately 50) were considered together
rather than as 50 different reviews and that thisprocess was repeated 10 times with 10 different
samples. On average the correct author appeared at
rank 1.84 (in the range from 1 to 6.8). Twenty-one of
the 62 authors are ranked first and author accuracy
increases from 33.8, 67.7, 83.9 and 95.2% as the rankincreases from 1 through 4.
With respect to related work, Seroussi et al.
(2011) used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) tomodel topics within the IMBDb62 dataset and thenauthorship attribution is calculated by finding thesmallest Hellinger distance between the test andtraining documents. Author attribution accuracy
varied between 19 to 68% for the multi-document
approach and 25 to 81% for a single-document
approach depending on how many topics were usedin the model. Seroussi et al.’s experiment (2011)
outperformed the KOP method (Koppel et al. 2011)
on the IMDb62 dataset by about 15% at 150 topics
and the results were statistically significant.

4. Closing Comments
We have presented a new method that leverages
local syntactic dependencies to reveal the ways inwhich an author refers to people. One limitation ofthis approach is that it is restricted to only those
texts and those reviews which contain named entities(in our case personal names); however, authors
frequently refer to people and places in history
books, historical novels, and fiction works in general.
Our preliminary results on the IMDb62 collection
are consistent with Stamatatos’s speculation (2009)and indicate that grammatical structures , in ourcase that surround personal names, are indeed
useful to differentiate between authorship styles.
We posit that further experimentation is required
to better understand how individual features, andcombinations of features can best be used todetermine authorship attribution accurately.

References
Argamon, S., and S. Levitan (2005). Measuring
the Usefulness of Function Words for Authorship
Attribution. Proceedings of the 2005 ACH/ALLC
conference. Victoria, BC, Canada, June 2005.
Burrows, J. F. (1987). Computation into Criticism:
A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experimentin Method. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Digital Humanities 2012

Grieve, J. (2007). Quantitative Authorship
Attribution: An Evaluation of Techniques. LLC 22(3):251-270.
Houvardas, J., and E. Stamatatos (2006).
N-Gram Feature Selection for Authorship
Identification. AIMSA 2006: 77-86.
Keselj, V., F. Peng, N. Cercone, and C.
Thomas (2003). N-gram-based Author Profiles
for Authorship Attribution. Proceedings of theConference Pacific Association for Computational
Linguistics. Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Canada, August 2003.
Koppel, M., N. Akiva, and I. Dagan (2006).
Feature instability as a criterion for selecting
potential style markers: Special Topic Section on
Computational Analysis of Style. Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science andTechnology 57(11): 1519-1525.
Koppel, M., J. Schler, and S. Argamon (2011).
Authorship Attribution in the Wild. Language
Resources & Evaluation 45(1): 83-94.
Raghavan, S., A. Kovashka, and R. Mooney(2010). Authorship Attribution Using Probabilistic
Context-Free Grammars. Proceedings of the ACL2010 Conference Short Papers. Uppsala, Sweden,
July 2010.
Seroussi , Y., I. Zukerman, and F. Bohnert(2011). Authorship Attribution with Latent Dirichlet
Allocation. CoNLL 2011: Proceedings of the
15th International Conference on Computational
Natural Language Learning. Portland, OR, USA,
June 2011.
Stamatatos, E. (2009). http://onlinelibrary.w
iley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21001/full A Surveyof Modern Authorship Attribution Methods. J
ournal of the American Society for Information
Science and Technology 60(3): 538-556.

Stamatatos, E., N. Fakotakis, and G.
Kokkinakis (2001). Computer-Based Authorship
Attribution without Lexical Measures. Computers
and the Humanities: 193-214.

Investigating thegenealogical relatednessof the endagered Dagon
languages
Moran, Stevensteve.moran@lmu.de
Research Unit: Quantitative Language Comparison,
LMU, Munich, Germany

Prokic, Jelenaj.prokic@lmu.de
Research Unit: Quantitative Language Comparison,
LMU, Munich, Germany

Dogon languages are spoken predominately ineastern Mali in West Africa. The Dogon were madefamous by Marcel Griaule, a French anthropologist
who pioneered Ethnography in France, and worked
with the Dogon between 1931-1956. He reported thatthe Dogon had advanced astronomical knowledge of
the Sirius binary star system, knowledge that is notpossible without telescope. Since then, the Dogon
have been shrouded in controversy and mystery.
As late as 1989, Dogon appeared in reference books
as if it were a single language, e.g. Bendor-Samuel1989 (as found in Blench 2005). The standard
encyclopedic reference on the world’s languages,
the Ethnologue,1 now lists 14 Dogon languages(Lewis 2009), but this figure is too low. In 2004,
an extensive sociolinguistic survey by Hochstetler
et al. (2004) estimated no less than 17 distinct
languages and described the language family as
highly internally divided. Since 2004, much initial
survey work on Dogon has been undertaken by Roger
Blench, Denis Douyon and Jeffrey Heath’s Dogon
languages project,2 which has lead to the ‘discovery’of a web of divergent dialects, some of which havebeen raised to the status of distinct languages basedon standard linguistic criteria. Thus, the current
Dogon linguistic situation is not at all transparent.
Dogon languages are very under-described, many arehighly endangered, and all are genealogically not wellestablished (Blench 2005; Heath 2008).
The Dogon languages project provides a tentative
detailed inventory of known Dogon languages.
There are currently 20 distinct languages grouped(crudely) into eight geographical regions, withno implications for genealogical subgrouping. Theinternal structure of the Dogon language family is
unknown, as is the number of mutually unintelligible
languages it contains. In fact, the Ethnologue givesa flat genealogical tree. The position of the Dogon

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languages relative to other African language families
is also unclear because of Dogon’s unique typologicalcharacteristics. Its lineage has long been disputed, assummarized in Table 1.3
YearClassification
Author(language family)

1924

Nigéro-Sénégalais

Delafosse

1941

Voltaic (Eng. Gur)

Homburger

1948

Voltaic; Gurunsi

Baumann &Westermann

1951

Mandé

Holas

1952

Mandé

Delafosse

1952

Gur (Fr. Voltaic)

Westermann &
Bryan

1953

Voltaic

Bertho1953

Non-classified

de Tressan

1950/60

Gur

Calame-Griaule

1963

Gur

Greenberg

1971

Gur

Bender-Samuel1981

Voltaic

Manessy

1981

Volta-Congo

Bendor-Samuel

1993

Unresolved; nonclassified

Galtier

1994

Unresolved; nonclassified

Plungian andTembiné2000

Ijo-Congo

Williamson andBlench2009

Volta-Congo

Lewis

Table 1: Historical classification of Dogon

In this paper, we use a marriage of digital methods
successfully applied in bioinformatics to decode DNA
and determine the genetic relatedness of humans,
and we apply these methods to language data in
an attempt to shed light on the prehistory of the
Dogon languages and determine their genealogicalsubgroupings. The comparative method employedin historical and comparative linguistics (the studyof language change to reconstruct the genealogicalrelatedness of languages) is a very laborious
and time-consuming task that involves identifying
cognates (words that share a common etymologicalorigin) through their shared meanings and common
sound change correspondences (e.g. English ‘is’,
German ‘ist’, Latin ‘est’, Indo-European ‘esti’).

subgrouping hypothesis for the Dogon language
family and we will discuss the limits of current
quantitative approaches, where the state-of-the-art
in computational historical linguistics is heading, andwhat we can hope to glean from their application to
linguistic diversity.

References
Bendor-Samuel, J., E. J. Olsen, and A. R.
White (1989). The Niger-congo languages – aclassification and description of Africa’s largest
language family, chapter Dogon. Langham: UP of
America, pp. 169-177.
Blench, R. (2005). A survey of Dogon languages in
Mali: overview. Ogmios 26: 14-15.
Heath, J. (2008). A grammar of Jamsay. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Hochstetler, J. L., J. Durieux, and E. DurieuxBoon (2004). Sociolinguistic survey of the Dogon
language area. SIL International.
Levenshtein, V. (1965). Binary codes capableof correcting deletions, insertions and reversals.
Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR 163: 845-848.
Lewis, M. P. (2009). Ethnologue: languages of theworld, Sixteenth edition. SIL International.
Page, R. D. M., and E. C. Holmes (2006).
Molecular evolution: a phylogenetic approach.
Malden: Blackwell.
Notes
1. http://www.ethnologue.com/
2. http://dogonlanguages.org/
3. See Hochstetler et al. (2004) and Hantgan’s Dogonbibliography for references at: http://dogonlanguages.o
rg/bibliography.cfm .

We show how recent advances in the use ofquantitative methods in the study of language
comparison can be applied to digital data of(endangered) languages to automate the discovery of
regular sound correspondences and cognate forms.
Next, powerful statistical techniques allow for new
insights into the origin and evolution of humanlanguages. We use distance-based methods like
Levenshtein (Levenshtein 1965) and character-based
methods like Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo
methods (Page & Holmes 2006) to induce language
family trees from lexical data. We present the first277

Digital Humanities 2012Landscapes, languages anddata structures: Issues inbuilding the Placenames
Database of IrelandMěchura, Michal Boleslav
mechrm@dcu.ie
Dublin City University, Ireland

1. Introduction
The Placenames Database of Ireland is a bilingual
database which records the official names in Irish
and English of geographical objects on the island of
Ireland. The database contains over 100,000 entries,
is accessible to the public for free (www.logainm.ie(www.logainm.ie) ) and serves around 150,000
searches per month.
The public-facing website was launched in 2008 in
the context of recently enacted legislation which gave
more prominence to Irish-language placenames in
the Republic of Ireland; for details on the legal andsociolinguistic situation of placenames in Ireland see
Mac Giolla Easpaig (2008, 2009). For more insights
into the history and role of placenames in Ireland, see
Mac Mathúna (1990).
We will not attempt to describe the structure of
the Placenames Database of Ireland holisticly here.
Instead, we will concentrate on three sub-areas
where interesting challenges have arisen. In manycases, the issues presented here are issues that havenot been solved satisfactorily in our database yet, or asolution has not been implemented yet. In this sense,
the paper is merely a discussion of issues rather thana catalogue of solutions.

2. Linguistic properties ofplacenames
Placenames databases differ in how much attention
they pay to the linguistic properties of the names
themselves, such as their gender, inflection and soon. Multilingual databases such as Geonames usuallyignore such aspects completely. Smaller databases,
however, often focus on only one or two languages
and are conceived mainly as a lexical database rather
than a geographic one. Linguistic properties relevant
to placenames can be broadly subdivided into thefollowing three areas.
Internal structure. Practically all placenamesthat consist of more than one word have an
278

implicit internal structure, just like other linguistic
expressions. Some aspects of this structure may need
to be made explicit in a database. These include
definite articles and other textual phenomena that
get in the way of alphabetical sorting including initial
mutations in Celtic languages; composite names suchas Ballaghgowla and Froghan; and names withdisambiguators such as Black Lough (South).
Combinatorial properties. These are linguistic
properties relevant to how the placename interacts
with the text in which it is being used andinclude language-specific features such as gender,
grammatical number and inflection paradigms. In
addition, the following combinatorial properties are
relevant to placenames in particular: how the namecan be combined with categorizers such as ‘town’or ‘county’ (Donegal Town but County Donegal);
which locative prepositions are combined with theplacename ( i nGaillimh ‘in Galway’ but ar an
gCeathrú Rua ‘in Carrarow’, literally ‘on Carrarow’).
Lexical relations to other words in the language
and to other placenames. The former include
demonyms (terms for ‘people from’) and derived
adjectives which are sometimes irregular. The latterinclude cases where one geographical object has
been named after another, such as Ballybeg Road or
Lismore Terrace.

3. Cross-linguistic issues
A separate cluster of issues stems from the fact that
the Placenames Database of Ireland is bilingual. This
does not seem to pose a challenge at first; the generalprinciple is that every place has two names, one ineach language, and this seems to call for a simple
data structure: all we need is two text fields. However,that approach would fail to account for the following
phenomena.
Borrowing and gaps. Sometimes, a place has thesame name in both languages. An example is an areaof Dublin called Dún Laoghaire. This is an Irish namewhich is also used in English with unchanged spelling(but with anglicised pronunciation). An obvious
solution would be to simply record Dún Laoghaire
twice, once as an Irish name and once as an English
name. However, this is unsatisfactory as it fails toaccount for the fact that this name is not really inEnglish, it is merely used in English.
On the other hand, in some strongly Irish-speaking
areas, minor features such as crossroads, fields
and wells only have Irish names and there are no
known English names. One can only assume that
if somebody needed to refer to such a place while
speaking English, one would briefly code-switch into
Irish to utter the name.

Digital Humanities 2012

A fairly granular data structure is called for here,
one that allows us to capture facts as to whether aname in a given language exists or not, whether thename used in a given language is also a name in that
language, and whether the name has been borrowed
from another language.
Anglicisation,translation
andreinterpretation. Many English placenames in
Ireland have been obtained from the original Irish
names by a process of writing down an approximatedpronunciation (Gaoth Dobhair -> Gweedore). In
other cases, when the English name was createdfirst, the method used to coin the Irish name hasoften been translation, such as Butler’s Bridge ->Droichead an Bhuitléaraigh. In other cases still, theIrish and English names are independent coinages(example: Loch Garman/Wexford).
Translation is sometimes accompanied by reinterpretation. An example of this is an area of
Dublin called Barra an Teampaill/Temple Bar.The
placename originated in English from the personalname Temple but was later re-interpreted as thecommon noun temple and hence the Irish name(literally ‘the bar of the temple’). Although based ona misunderstanding, it was decided to keep the Irish
name as official because it is commonly used.
An ideal data structure would allow us to record
these and other etymological relations between
names of the same place in different languages.
If such relations are explicated and annotated in
the database, then we can not only provide better
information to users but also extract interestingstatistical observations about the relative proportionof these phenomena in the country’s body ofplacenames.

4. Dealing with overlapping
hierarchies
Most countries are subdivided into administrative
units such as districts, provinces or counties. These
units form a hierarchy and such hierarchies aredeliberately designed as a nested hierarchy todisallow overlapping and facilitate reasoning.
In Ireland, the situation is far from thiscomputational ideal. The basic units (counties ->baronies -> civil parishes -> townlands) may haveoriginally been designed as a nested hierarchy but are
no longer so because of boundary changes that havenot been propagated up and down the hierarchy andbecause of the introduction of competing hierarchies
which overlap with the traditional system.
The consequence when building a placenames
database is that we must work with an overlapping
hierarchy where a child may have more than

one parent. This complicates things; for example,
reasoning is no longer always possible. If we knowthat A is in B and that B is in C1 and C2
simultaneously, we can no longer infer whether A
is in C1 or C2 or both. In fact, there is no way toknow this other than by deriving it from a dataset ofgeographical boundaries, or by recording it explicitly.

5. Place as an abstract concept
Consider the placename Dún na nGall/Donegal
which can be found in the north-west of Ireland.
The question to ask is: how many places called
Dún na nGall/Donegal are there in this corner of
Ireland? The answer will differ depending on one’s
perspective. An outsider will see only one, a county ofthat name. A local inhabitant will probably see two,the county and its capital town of the same name. A
local politician will probably see an electoral divisionof that name and also a town of that name with its
town council. In total, there are five units called Dún
na nGall/Donegal in that part of Ireland.
In our database, these are treated as separate objects
which, as far as the database knows, only happen tohave the same name. That, however, is unsatisfactory
as it fails to distinguish a case like this from casessuch as the 19 places called An Baile Mór (literally‘the large town’) which can be found all over Ireland
and which genuinely happen to have the same name.
Another reason why this is unsatisfactory is that it
introduces a potential for inconsistency because datasuch as the Irish name’s grammatical informationneed to be recorded five times instead of once.
An ideal data structure would provide a way toconnect several places to a single ‘abstract place’. The
abstract place would contain all information common
to the concrete places, such as names and historicalcitations, and these would then be inherited by theconcrete places.

6. Conclusion
Many of the issues illustrated here are inherently
linguistic and stem from the fact that weconceive of our database as primarily a lexical
database and only secondarily as a geographicaldatabase. A second cluster of issues is causedby the heritage of conflicting and overlapping
administrative hierarchies and from the differencesin perspective these hierarchies impose.

References
A. Placenames databases
Geonames: http://www.geonames.org

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Placenames Database of Ireland: http://www.loga
inm.ie/B. Literature
Mac Giolla Easpaig, D. (2008). Placenames Policy
and its Implementation. In Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín,
Seán Ó Cearnaigh (eds.), A New View of the Irish
Language. Dublin: Cois Life, pp. 164-177.

Interoperability of
Language Documentation
Tools and Materials for
Local Communities
Nakhimovsky, Alexander

Mac Giolla Easpaig, D. (2009). Ireland’s heritageof geographical names. Wiener Schriften zur
Geographie und Kartographie 18: 79-85.

adnakhimovsky@colgate.edu
Colgate University, USA

Mac Mathúna, L. (1990). Ár dTimpeallacht
Logainmneacha: Inniu agus Amárach [ourplacenames environment: today and tomorrow].
Dublin: Coiscéim.

jcgood@buffalo.edu
Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo,
USA

Good, Jeff

Myers, Tomtommyers@dreamscape.com
N-Topus Software, USA

1. Tools for language
documentation
The two main outputs of traditional language
documentation are lexicons and corpora of texts.
In the last two decades, it has been proposed toaugment these in a number of ways (Himmelmann
1998, 2006):- The primary data for language documentation
should be made available in the form of (digital)
audio or video recordings made in the field.
- Corpora should consist of time-aligned andannotated transcripts of those recordings. Timealignment makes explicit how a given set ofannotations relates to a media segment. Since
there is a one-to-one correspondence between text
and media segments, the latter can be searched bytheir text and annotations.
- Text annotations should generally take the formof Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) (see Palmer &Erk 2007). An example of IGT, from Haspelmath(1993), is shown below. The format has a treelike structure, which can be represented via
a ‘nested’ table. Its basic components include
a transcriptional representation of data fromthe language being described which is further
broken down into words and their component
morphemes. Each sentence is associated with afree translation, and each word is associated with(possibly specialized) glosses.

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FLEx without losing information produced by either
tool when exporting/importing data between them.

Existing tools supporting the production of lexicons
and time-aligned corpora are not, at present, wellintegrated. One testimony to this is the continuing
use of Toolbox (formerly known as Shoebox), a
database utility optimized for the creation of IGT
and lexicons initially developed in the 1980s by SIL
International (SIL). Toolbox lacks native support for
time-aligned annotation and, more strikingly, proper
data validation. However, one of its key features,the integration of a text database with a lexical
database to facilitate automated glossing, has yet tobe effectively replicated in any other widely used tool.
A recent major revision of Field Language Explorer(FLEx), also from SIL, positions this tool to fill thisgap, however (see Rogers 2010 for a recent review).
FLEx is now cross-platform and internally uses anative XML format, which can form the basis for its
integration into a set of interoperable tools.
In Europe, there is a major center for thedevelopment of language documention and languagearchiving technology (LAT) software at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. One of thetools they have produced, ELAN, has become widelyadopted for the creation of time-aligned annotations(see Berez 2007 for a review). Toolbox, ELAN andFLEx are the most commonly used specialized tools
for language documentation. While all three do somethings well, none covers the entire range of language
documentation tasks. For example, ELAN has nosupport for lexicon building, and Toolbox and FLEx
have no support for time alignment or audio playbackthat is of great help in transcribing a media file.
In addition, none provides direct support for thecreation of publishable outputs, a gap that is mostfrequently filled by Microsoft Word, even though it
offers no ready means of interoperating with custom
linguistic software.
While ELAN has import/export modules for Toolbox,
there was, until recently, no way to share data
between ELAN and FLEx. In 2009, one of theauthors (TJM) led the development of a FLEx-import
module that was integrated into a release ELAN. Thiseffort was severely handicapped by the limitationsof FLEx’s native data storage format at that time,
which has been partly addressed in its present XML
format. Since then, we have been working with both
ELAN and FLEx teams to establish a means forlossless two-way interchange of files between ELAN
and FLEx. This will make it possible for a linguist to,for example, exploit the time-alignment functionalityof ELAN and the lexicon and parsing functionalites of

The main obstacle to achieving this goal is thatthe two programs have very different internal
data models: ELAN has the capability to create
structures that are not replicable in FLEx (forinstance, to represent overlapping utterances from
more than one speaker), while FLEx allows words
to be associated with a wealth of grammaticalinformation that cannot be encoded using ELAN. At
the same time, both ELAN and FLEx contain someoverlapping information in their representationsof IGT. Our proposed solution to achieve fullinteroperation is to provide both ELAN and FLEx
with a unified underlying representation that will
represent data from both programs. Some parts ofthat representation will be ignored by ELAN, andother parts will be ignored by FLEx, but new tools
can be developed to ensure that a lossless roundtrip between the two programs will be possible(see Cochran et al. 2007 for an earlier discussion).
This approach can also broaden the interoperability
between ELAN and Toolbox, and indeed facilitate
interoperability between both Toolbox and FLEx aswell.
An obvious choice for a unifying representation are
Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs ofthe sort associated with the Semantic Web (Allemang& Hendler 2010). One of the main purposes of RDF is
specifically to merge heterogeneous representationsof overlapping data. It also has a standard querylanguage and a rapidly growing arsenal of tools fordevelopment.
We would like to emphasize the generality of thissolution: given two programs with overlapping but
partially incompatible data models, RDF, perhaps
augmented by Web Ontology Language (OWL), canbe used as an interlingua that can represent both.
(See Farrar & Langendoen 2009 for discussion of
the use of OWL in descriptive linguistics.) When thisrepresentation is accessed by one of the programs(e.g., by using SPARQL, the query language for
Semantic Web data – see DuCharme 2011), parts of
the representation will be ignored, but the editing
done on the overlapping part can be preserved foreventual access by the other program.
Since May 2011, we have maintained a discussion
group in which both ELAN and FLEx developers
participate, allowing the development of a concrete
implementation of this proposed solution. A key areaof progress has been devising an appropriate system
for assigning globally unique identifiers to be used inboth ELAN and FLEx to allow the overlapping data
available to both tools to be effectively tracked.

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Digital Humanities 2012

2. Serving diverse communities
through interoperation
An endangered language documentation project
typically results in two collections of materials,
one addressed to scholars, the other addressed to
the local community. The requirements for thescholarly collection are quite precisely defined interms of allowable data formats, required metadata,and specifications of access restrictions (see, e.g.,
Johnson 2004; Austin 2006; Nathan 2011). By
contrast, there has been little discussion of ageneral systematic approach to creating materials
for local communities, nor even an attempt tocreate principled specifications for them (though see
Nathan 2006; Nakhimovsky & Myers 2003). As aresult, materials for local communities are frequently
developed as a separate effort, unrelated to thescholarly archive.
The approach presented in the first section of
the paper creates an opportunity for a moregeneral solution. We suggest that a unified RDF
representation is well-suited for the creation ofmaterials for local communities due to rapidly
developing trends in data dissemination technology,
including the increasing adoption of Semantic Web
technologies as a means of data exchange, thewidespread of deployment of Cloud services, andthe increasing use of social media in even relatively
marginalized communities especially via mobile
devices like smartphones (see, e.g., the BOLD project
for an example as well as Nathan 2010).
The overall strategy for developing community
materials could be as follows. Using SPARQL
queries, extract suitable materials from the overall
RDF collection (e.g., streamable media, communityselected texts) and assemble them, possibly
dynamically, into a community website to beaccessed via the internet or a local server. Sucha model would allow community members toreassemble the data to suit their needs while
also ensuring they have access to the most upto-date analyses of the linguists. Moreover, inprinciple, the same basic techniques that permit
tool interoperation via a unified RDF representation
could also allow communities to enrich the
RDF themselves, thereby adding information (e.g.,
metadata or cultural annotations) to the dataset
and allowing them to take a more active role inthe construction of the documentary record of theirlanguage.
Funding
This work has been supported by the National
Science Foundation [0553546 A.N.; 1065619 A.N.,
T.M; 0715246, J.G.]
282

References
Allemang, D., and J. Hendler (2010). Semantic
Web for the working ontologist: Effective modelingin RDFS and OWL (second edition). Amsterdam:
Elsevier.
Austin, P. K. (2006). Data and language
documentation. In J. Gippert, N. P. Himmelmann& U. Mosel (eds.), Essentials of language
documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp.
87-112.
Berez,
A.
(2007).
Technology
review:
EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (ELAN). Language
Documentation and Conservation 1: 283-289.
http://hdl.handle.net/10125/1718 .
http://bold.xpdev-hosted.com/
BOLD.
(accessed March 4, 2012).

Cochran, M., J. Good, D. Loehr, S. A.
Miller, S. Stephens, B. Williams, andI. Udoh (2007). Report from TILR Working
Group 1 : Tools interoperability and input/output
formats. Toward the Interoperability of Language
Resources Workshop, Stanford, California, July
2007. http://linguistlist.org/tilr/workinggroup-reports/Working%20Group%201.pdf .
DuCharme, B. ( 2011). Learning SPARQL.
Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.
ELAN.
http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/(accessed March 4, 2012).
Farrar, S., and D. T. Langendoen (2009). An
OWL-DL implementation of GOLD: An ontology
for the Semantic Web. In Andreas Witt & Dieter
Metzing (eds.), Linguistic modeling of informationand markup languages: Contributions to language
technology. Berlin: Springer, pp- 45-66.
http://fieldworks.sil.org/flex/
FLEx.
(accessed March 4, 2012).

Haspelmath, M. (1993). A Grammar of Lezgian.
Berlin: Mouton.
Himmelmann, N. (1998). Documentary anddescriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36: 161-195.
Himmelmann, N. P. (2006). Language
documentation: What is it and what is it goodfor? In J. Gippert, N. P. Himmelmann & U.
Mosel (eds.), Essentials of language documentation.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1-30.
Johnson, H. (2004). Language documentation andarchiving, or how to build a better corpus. In
P. K. Austin (ed.), Language documentation anddescription, volume 2, 140-153. London: SOAS.

Digital Humanities 2012

LAT. http://www.lat-mpi.eu/ (accessed March
4, 2012).
Nakhimovsky, A. D., and T. Myers (2003).
Digital video annotations for education. Paper
presented at the International Conference on
Engineering Education, Valencia, Spain.
Nathan, D. (2006). Thick interfaces: Mobilizing
language documentation with multimedia. In J.
Gippert, N. P. Himmelmann & U. Mosel (eds.),
Essentials of language documentation. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 363-379.
Nathan, D. (2010). Archives 2.0 for endangered
languages: From disk space to MySpace.
International Journal of Humanities and Arts
Computing 4: 111-124.
Nathan, D. (2011). Digital Archiving. In P. K. Austin& J. Sallabank (eds.), The Cambridge handbook ofendangered languages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
pp. 255-274.
Palmer, A., and K. Erk (2007). IGT-XML:An XML format for interlinearized glossed
texts. Proceedings of the Linguistic Annotation
Workshop. Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania: Association
for Computational Linguistics. 176-183. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W07/W07-1528 .
Rogers, Ch. (2010). Technology review: Fieldworks
Language Explorer (FLEx) 3.0. Language
Documentation and Conservation 4: 74-84.
http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4471 .

Content Creation by
Domain Experts in a
Semantic GIS System
Nakhimovsky, Alexanderadnakhimovsky@colgate.edu
Colgate University, USA

Myers, Tomtommyers@dreamscape.com
N-Topus Software, USA

1. Introduction
The focus of this paper is on how an ontology-based
GIS system can be populated with class instancesand further maintained by domain experts withno support from ontological engineers. This is an
old goal of knowledge engineering. We present ourapproach in the context of a specific Semantic GIS
system called EventMap (Nakhimovsky 2010), but
the techniques we propose should be of generalinterest. At the core of our approach are two
simple observations. First, instances of a given classcan be described by a table in which each row
corresponds to an instance and each column to aproperty. Such tables can be created in a context thatallows data validation for data properties and, forobject properties, provides access to already createdinstances of the object class. If the tables are kept
in the cloud (e.g., Google spreadsheets) then we
have a ready-made environment for joint distributed
authoring, essential for creating community-based
resources. The second observation is that map layers
can be described by KML documents which can becreated using a variety of tools ranging from ArcGIS
to the free KML editor built into Google Maps / My
Places. This is a flexible arrangement that makes
simple things easy and difficult things possible.
Specifically, in this paper we present two
mechanisms for data entry: via a blog with links
to KML data, in which each blog entry corresponds
to an event; and via a Web application that reads
in the relevant subset of an ontology (expressed as
metadata tables) and provides a form that validates
new class instances against that ontology.

2. The EventMap Framework
An EventMap is a sequence of annotated maps
produced by a GIS system and controlled by aTimeline: each map corresponds to a time interval,
and together a map and a time interval represent an
Event. The Timeline makes it possible to navigate
283

Digital Humanities 2012

event sequences and observe changing event patterns
over time; the patterns depend on the query posedto the GIS system. Every event is linked to anannotation that can contain arbitrary web content,
including images, multimedia, and output from Web
applications. Internally, the content is represented
by RDF graphs; specific event sequences, their maps,
and their annotations are produced by a SPARQL
query (DuCharme 2011).
Instead of thinking of an EventMap as a sequenceof maps each corresponding to a time interval andannotated by a web page, one can think of it as asequence of pages each annotated by a map. A good
example of this kind of book is McEvedy (2003).
EventMap is a framework for creating such books
online.

Figure 2: EventMap Architecture

In more detail, the Primary Store contains a number
of Repositories, each a container of material on a
specific topic, such as the history of Afghanistan
borders, or the history of Arctic research during
the Second International Polar Year. A repository
contains the following kinds of materials:- data tables, each corresponding to a class of objects
or events- metadata tables, one for each data table; theydescribe the table’s schema.
- an OWL ontology that defines the classes of objects
and events in data tables, and provides axioms
about them.

Figure 1: An Event Representation

Figure 1 shows a Google map overlaid with a scannedand edited map of Afghanistan’s borders in 1879.
It corresponds to the historical event of the treatyof Gandamak, formalizing the British occupation of
the mountain passes into Afghanistan in response to
rapid Russian advance into Central Asia. Pink strips
on the Timeline correspond to events and link toevent descriptions. The controls help navigate theevents.

2.1. The Architecture of the
Framework
The overall structure of the EventMap frameworkis shown in Figure 2. EventMap data are kept in
a Primary Store, with links to other materials. The
Store can be in any data structure that can beserialized in the Comma-Separated Values (CSV)
format; this includes spreadsheet and relational
database. The Store can be located in the cloud, which
creates a framework for collaborative authoringthat does not require advanced computer skills orserver maintenance. We have been using Google
spreadsheets, partly because Google provides HTML
forms for editing them, and we can write code tovalidate user input and pre-populate the forms withdata that the author must verify but rarely needs to
type.

284

When a repository is loaded, all the data tables
are linearized as CSV (Comma-Separated Values)
and passed to a Java servlet, together with the
ontology. The servlet invokes the Jena library tobuild one big RDF graph out of the tables andthe ontology. Individual EventMaps (e.g., the storyof a particular Arctic expedition, or the changing
patterns of networks of international cooperation)
are produced by SPARQL queries from the repository
graph, and sent to the timemap library (Timemap
2012) that controls the display of the map and thetimeline.

3. Creating a Repository
To create a new repository one needs to- add to the ontology as needed;- populate data tables, using an HTML form withontology-based validation;- create map layers, as KML files;- create annotations, which are Web content.
Only the first of these tasks requires a practicing
ontologist; the rest is done by domain experts. The
ontology and the data tables are aligned, in the sensethat if a class has a certain property then the datatable has a column whose header is the name ofthat property. In addition, if the class name has a
Wikipedia entry with an infobox, we use the same
property names as the infobox, gaining additionalalignment with DBPedia.

Digital Humanities 2012

4. Eventmap Authoring
We can usefully distinguish two levels of authoring:working with events within an existing EventMap,
and creating a new EventMap. To add an event, one
first needs to create a KML file with a placemark
or several Placemarks for the event, and an HTMLfile with the event’s description. This is the creative
part; the rest is just filling out a form with time
data and links to resources. To edit an existing eventthe user works with the same tools, but requires adifferent level of access to the repository. Creatinga new EventMap involves creating a metadata tablefor it, which may be too complex for some domain
experts, although most of them will probably be able
to copy an existing metadata table and modify it for
their needs.
To recapitulate, we are trying to provide a range
of options for data entry by domain experts. At
one end are users who have access to ArcGIS,
Adobe Dreamweaver, and competent designers whotransform their knowledge and data into compelling
maps and Web pages. At the opposite end are users
who are content with simple vector-graphics layers,
and a simple arrangement of text and images, to tella story or to visualize a process. For this latter case,
we provide a Blogger-based interface that makes it
possible to create an EventMap as a sequence of blog
entries. The only constraint is that each entry needs
to specify the start and end times of the event, and alink to the KML file that describes the placemark(s).

References
DuCharme, B. (2011).
Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.

Learning

SPARQL.

Gregory, I., and P. S. Ell (2007). Historical
GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
McEvedy, C. (2003). The New Penguin Atlas ofAncient History: Revised Edition. London: Penguin.
Nakhimovsky, A. (2010). Timelines, Google Maps,
and Visualization of History. Paper presented at
the Biannual European Social Science History
Conference (ESSHC) Ghent, April 13-16.
Pleiades (2012). http://pleiades.stoa.org/ .
Accessed March 1, 2012.
Timemap(2012).
http://code.google.com/p/timemap/ Accessed February 28, 2012.
Visual Eyes (2012). http://www.viseyes.org/ .
Accessed March 1, 2012.

5. Comparison to similar efforts
As a story-telling and history-writing framework,
EventMap resembles two other efforts: (Visual Eyes
2012) (formerly History Browser) and (Pleiades
2012). Compared to Visual Eyes, EventMap requires
less of a learning curve, and is more cleanly basedon standard technologies. Compared to Pleiades,
EventMap is more flexible because based on dates
rather than a closed list of named ‘epochs.’
EventMaps should also be considered in the context
of the larger Historical GIS effort (Gregory & Ell2007). While EventMaps cannot match the scope oflarge national databases of geospacial data, Google
spreadsheets’ storage capacity and computational
power provide an adequate platform for many
projects in which GIS databases are used. EventMaps
can use a database as well, but databases are
expensive to create, maintain, and make globally
accessible, while Google servers offer an unparalleledglobal network for free.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Science
Foundation [7017695 to A.N.].
285

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From Preserving Language
Resources to Serving
Language Speakers: New
Prospects for Endangered
Languages Archives
Nathan, David John
djn@soas.ac.uk
SOAS, UK

This paper will describe seismic shifts that are
currently taking place in the field of endangered
languages archiving, drawing on research andimplementation at the Endangered Languages
Archive, together with developments among
other innovative archives reported at a recent
workshop Language Documentation and Archiving.
Endangered languages archives, a new type of facilityof which several have sprung up over the last 15 years,
have brought new considerations into account:- endangered
languages
materials
arepredominantly in the language documentation
genre, newly created through fieldwork conductedin areas where languages are threatened- such language documentation material consists
initially, fundamentally, and crucially of media
recordings (audio and video) of spontaneous,naturalistic language use such as conversation(Himmelmann 1998)- due to the nature and contexts of communities
whose languages are endangered, the identities of
speakers and the content of their recordings can besensitive, so that nuanced access protocols must be
designed and implemented.
These considerations have brought new types ofparticipants into engagement with each other,some for the first time. Linguists are now foundto be working at one moment with membersof remote communities and soon after withaudio-video specialists, archive technicians, andeven journalists and filmmakers. Over the last
decade, some researchers have advocated for more
direct community participation (e.g., Grinevald2003), and some archives have steadily built up
trust relationships with communities. However,the field has generally remained in a ‘steadystate’, emphasising language as data and building
infrastructure for research interoperability, in a‘language resources’ approach.
Now, the situation is suddenly changing, largely asa result of shifting expectations amongst language
286

community members. Following projects fundedby DoBeS1, ELDP,2 and DEL,3 more membersof communities have been exposed to language
documentation and become aware not only of its
potential but also of its methods. Digital technologies
central to language documentation – media devices(including mobile phones), computers, and theWorld Wide Web – are rapidly becoming available
to people in language endangerment ‘hotspots’, suchas in much of Africa, Asia and South America. The
shift has been precipitated by growing expectationsof participation, control, and personal and local
relevance, fostered by social networking platforms
such as Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and Twitter. In
fact, many communities are first experiencing theinternet through these platforms and see the web as
a more social, participatory and personally relevant
space than those who were ‘first generation’ netizens.
While many communities are keen to participate in
the new media landscape (deliberately or incidentallyas new providers of language documentation), thechallenge is to reconcile their contributions with thestructures and policies of archives. Mechanisms need
to be created and monitored to determine if increased
access to a variety of naturalistic language recordings
creates more value for their audiences than is lost
through perceived methodological limitations in datacollection (Trilsbeek & König 2011). Despite thepotential problems of crowdsourcing, it provides away for language speakers to establish real links
with resources, rather than being merely ‘participant
metadata’. Here is an example: the web is currently
trending towards mash-up pages, mobile ‘apps’, andaggregating portals. These gather resources basedon a particular user’s preferences, and display themaccording to topic, geographic location, or language.
But what happens when that user wants to view
information connected to a specific person, say
language speaker X? Unless speaker X is a true
participant in the digital platform as a member,owner, or even curator, rather than a mere metadata-point, then such a speaker-centred page will be
an incomplete and insipid representation, with weak
implementation of access control because nobody
except speaker X can properly decide who he/shewants to share with. We are fortunate, therefore, to
see the maturation and continual rise of online andmobile social networking and innovative ‘apps’ which
personalise individuals’ interactions, provide further
exemplars for implementing participatory models,and organically solve protocol problems throughindividually-managed access control.
Mary Linn (2011), for example, has proposeda framework called Community Based Language
Archiving, in which the language community is
involved in every step, from documentation planningto curating to dissemination. It turns traditional

Digital Humanities 2012archiving on its head, because the primary curatorialtask, namely contextualisation, becomes about thecontext of the users themselves, because it is they(especially as community members newly welcomed
into the archive ecology) who ultimately determine
the success of archives in meeting their goals.
Other proposals are for decentralised, web-based
functions that allow language speakers to interact
with archives’ existing resources. They can add
further materials, comments, or contextualisation.
They can identify themselves or their relatives inorder to claim their moral rights in recordings andother materials, and make corrections to erroneous
data, interpretations, and attributions (Garrett 2011).
Existing archivists also need to regain participatory
roles. The era of the engineer as the pace-setter isgiving way to usage-driven design and evolution,
catering for the shifting interests of users. Archivists,
whose job entails understanding their audiences, cancontribute not only to contextualisation of materials
and curation of exhibitions etc but also to software
design issues.
Participants at a workshop on language
documentation and archiving (Nathan ed. 2011)
came up with a number of emerging trends that canbe expected to be increasingly influential dynamics
for our archives:
Form of documentation: Despite extensive
theorisation of documentation in previous work,
there has been little discussion of the formof documentation: its granularity, structure,organisation, links, and how it is to be navigated.
Archives which attempt to provide attractive andusable interfaces that encourage user engagement
will find themselves frustrated with current
models for language documentation, which stillsee documentation as consisting of unstructured
collections of data. New genres of expression
will be needed, and these will result fromcollaborative efforts among documenters, archives,and contributors and users.
Community curation and contextualisation:‘Community curation’ represents a paradigmchanging challenge, changing roles within archives.
The original contributors and their languagelearning community members become the principal
curators, presenting a radical but rational inversion:
the archive concept of ‘context’ is no longer that of thematerials or their (supposed) provenance, but of theusers, where users are often the language speakers.
Contextualisation of materials is at the heart ofarchiving, but in many of our current archives,
the art of contextualisation has been replaced by
the science of software development. However,communities may wish to play a role in framing
the interpretation of their materials to others (cf.

Christen 2011: 197). Similarly, community access tomaterials is not reducible to file transfer, but entails
access to meaning (Christen 2011: 194). Issues ofquality control (Trilsbeek & König 2011) become justone of many elements to be renegotiated between
technical ‘best practices’ and community aspirations
and activities.
Promotion: Archives need to do more than acquire,curate, preserve and disseminate materials. To reachtarget audiences for language revitalisation, archives
also need to actively promote the materials they hold(Wilbur 2011; Woodbury 2011). Archives need todevelop relationships with their audiences that are
not based purely on access to language materials,
for the success of archive outreach may depend on
first developing contact, relationships and trust inorder to encourage usage or other participation withthe materials. Ultimately, social networking provides
promotion through social endorsement.
Publishing: Paradoxically, even as archives seem tobecome fragmented and fluid as they respond toaudience participation, they will come to be seen
less as archives and more as publishers, due to theirincreased attention to genre, exhibitions, promotion,and other outreach.
Endangered languages archives are an essential
component of ethical and effective responses tolanguage endangerment. However, the ‘language
resources’ approach is giving way to a participatory
one, because neither the quality of documentarymaterials, nor the effectiveness of technologies
are meaningfully measurable without considering
audiences and usages. Full engagement withlanguage speakers through social networking will
provide new sources of data for researchers as well as
new forms of cultural repatriation for communities,
and new ways of supporting threatened languages.

References
Christen, K. (2011). Opening archives: Respectful
Repatriation. American Archivist 74(1): 185-210.
Garrett, E. (2011). Web software for participantdriven language archiving. In D. Nathan, David(ed.), Proceedings of Workshop on Language
Documentation and Archiving. London: SOAS, pp.
71-72.
Grinevald, C. (2003). Speakers and documentationof endangered languages. In P. K. Austin (ed.),Language Documentation and Description 1: 52-71.
Himmelmann, N. (1998). Documentary and
Descriptive Linguistics. Linguistics 36: 161-195.
Linn, M. S. (2011). Living archives: A communitybased language archive model. In D. Nathan(ed.), Proceedings of Workshop on Language
287

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Documentation and Archiving. London: SOAS, pp.
59-70.
Nathan, D., ed. (2011). Proceedings of Workshop
on Language Documentation and Archiving.
London: SOAS.
Trilsbeek, P., and A. König (2011). Increasing
the usage of endangered languages archives in theyears to come. In D. Nathan (ed.), Proceedingsof Workshop on Language Documentation andArchiving. London: SOAS, pp. 45-49.
Wilbur, J. (2011). Think globally, archive
locally: Opportunities and challenges in working
with local archiving institutions. In D Nathan(ed.), Proceedings of Workshop on Language
Documentation and Archiving. London: SOAS, pp.
51-58.
Woodbury,A.
(2011).
Archivesandaudiences: toward making endangered language
documentations people can read, use, understand,and admire. In D. Nathan (ed.), Proceedingsof Workshop on Language Documentation andArchiving. London: SOAS, pp. 11-20.

Retrieving Writing
Patterns From Historical
Manuscripts Using Local
Descriptors
Neumann, Bernd

neumann@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Herzog, Rainer

herzog@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Solth, Arved

solth@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Bestmann, Oliver

7bestman@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Scheel, Julian

julian@jusst.de
University of Hamburg, Germany

Notes
1. Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen, funded by theVolkswagen Foundation. http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES .
2. Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, SOAS,
funded by the Arcadia Fund. http://www.hrelp.org/ .
3. Documenting Endangered Languages, National Endowment
for the Humanities. http://www.neh.gov/grants/guid
elines/del.html

1. Introduction
Computer-supported retrieval of manuscripts basedon the visual features of a query image is a highly
desirable, but rarely available service for manuscript
research. The service could be used, for example,
to check whether a manuscript, specified by a copy,
is contained in a museum collection. This kind of
retrieval is often approximated by making use of anindex based on textual annotations, and thus requires
extensive manual preparation. Retrieval based on aquery image without annotations, on the other hand,promises to be mainly automatic and also support
interesting applications beyond document retrieval.
Most importantly, this service can allow retrieval ofmanuscripts containing the query image as a detail.
For example, one could find manuscripts wherecharacters are written in a specific way, exemplified
in the query image. Moreover, one could search forthe occurrence of writing patterns consisting ofarbitrary graphical features, in short graphs. Similargraphs, retrieved from different manuscripts, may
contribute valuable information about a possible
scribe identity or a common origin of manuscripts.
In this contribution we describe a novel approach forgraph retrieval based on local descriptors at ‘interest
points’. Interest points (IPs) specify locations ofstrong ‘cornerness’ of the image intensities andthus provide reasonably stable reference points for288

Digital Humanities 2012

local descriptions. They have proved their worth inmany image analysis applications, in particular inimage retrieval solutions based on SIFT features(Lowe 2004). Different from SIFT features, ourdescriptors are not scale and rotation invariant,although tolerant to small variations, giving rise
to a distinctly superior performance and efficiency
while preserving its usefulness for many concernsof manuscript research. Basically, each descriptor
consists of the structure tensors (Koethe 2003) inthe neighborhood of an IP, thus giving a precise
account of the local gradient distribution. Dependingon the resolution of the manuscripts and the chosen
size of the neighborhood, the descriptor of a single
IP may comprise several hundred feature values,
called IP features in the sequel. For highly detailed
query images, for example depicting a Chinesecharacter, there may be a large number of IPs (in our
experiments up to 40 ), each of which is recorded with
its location and its feature values in a local descriptor.

2005). Most approaches so far use retrieval based onwords or characters (Lavrenko et al. 2004; Adamek
et al. 2007; Srihari et al. 2005; Zhang et al. 2004)
which limits the applicability to handwritings withclear word or character separation. A more generalapproach, as followed in this contribution, relies
on retrieving a spatial configuration of graphicalfeatures, extracted from the query (Su et al. 2009).
For all approaches, the key question is which features
to use for the comparison of query and data. It
has been shown that the spatial distribution ofgradients gives the best results (Zhang et al. 2004;
Ding et al. 2007). In most approaches, descriptors
based on simple gradient computations (Srihari
et al. 2005; Ding et al. 2007) are assigned toa fixed mesh covering a segment. In our work,
descriptors are based on structure tensors (Koethe
2003) at IPs determined for each query independentof a segmentation. Furthermore, we use a novel
probabilistic model applicable to IPs.

For retrieval, a target image is processed essentiallyin the same way as the query image, i.e. IPs and IP
features are determined. This is done only once andoff-line, comparable to establishing an annotation.
The main retrieval task is then to find a subset of
IPs in a target image whose relative locations andfeature vectors best match the query descriptors.
We will present an approach which profits fromprior segmentation of the target image into possible
matching candidates, but can also be applied to large
datasets without segmentations. It is controlled by asimple probabilistic model for the kind of differences
between query and data which should be tolerated fora retrieval, with parameters which can be adjusted bya manuscript researcher.

Since our focus is on the retrieval of arbitrary writing
patterns, we do not discuss work on OCR here,
although OCR could also be an application area worth
exploring with our approach.

First experimental results with Chinese characters inhistorical manuscripts indicate that our descriptor istolerant with respect to a certain amount of variationsof the same character, yet quite discriminativewith respect to structurally different characters,
promising high precision and recall.

3. Technical Implementation
Due to the restricted length of this abstract, wecannot provide many technical details here. The
IPs in our approach are computed using the Harris
Corner Detector (Harris and Stephens, 1988) with
the improvements introduced in (Koethe, 2003). Fig.
1 shows typical results achieved for manuscripts with
Chinese and Arabic handwritings.
Local descriptors are computed for each IP by
combining the structure tensors of all points in theneighbourhood (in our examples of size 11 x 11) intoa large feature vector characterizing strength anddirectionality of intensity gradients.

In the remainder of this abstract, we describe related
work in Section 2, give details about the technicalimplementation in Section 3, and finally report about
experimental results in Section 4.

2. Related Work
Retrieving graphs from manuscripts is a special
case of Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), a
well-established research field with a rich set of
methods (Datta et al. 2008). But CBIR applied
to manuscripts has found very little attention
in this community. Most relevant work builds
on handwriting recognition which is increasingly
applied to historical manuscripts (Fischer et al. 2009;
Yosef et al. 2007; Lavrenko et al. 2004; Shrihari et al.

Figure 1a: Interest points (IPs) determined (a)for a Chinese character in a 60 x 41 image and(b) for a 86 x 107 segment of Arabic handwriting289

Digital Humanities 2012

4. Experimental Results
We have carried out first retrieval experiments with
Chinese and Arabic manuscripts. Fig. 2 left showsa section of the Fo shuo Tiwei jing (British Library
Or.8210/S. 2051). The left-most white box marksa character used as a query, the other boxes show
matching characters found by the retrieval system.
There have been no false negatives, but the second hit
in Column 6 is a false positive, although quite similar
to the query. Similar results have been achieved forother queries, applied to a manuscript section with
364 characters.

Figure 1b: for a 86 x 107 segment of Arabic handwriting

To retrieve matching patterns from target data, IPsof the query are incrementally compared with IPsof the data using a probabilistic model comprising
the following boolean probabilities, both for the
hypothesis H1 that the target is a match, and the
hypothesis H0 that it is not a match:
PIP target descriptor missing in window at query
location
Ploc target descriptor dislocated from query location
Pfeat target descriptor features differing from query
descriptor features
Let A be pairs of descriptors of query and target,
P(H0) and P(H1) the prior probabilities of therespective hypotheses, then for a hypothesis test we
have to evaluate:

The comparison is formulated as two hypothesis
tests, the first whether the query pattern is containedin the target, and the second whether the target
pattern, constrained by a successful first test, is
contained in the query. The target is considered amatch of the query, if both tests succeed.

290

Figure 2a: Retrieval from a Chinese (left)
and an Arabic manuscript (right), see text

Digital Humanities 2012

International Conference on Virtual Systems andMultimedia, pp. 137-142.
Harris, C., and M. Stephens (1988). A Combined
Corner and Edge Detector. Proceedings 4th Alvey
Vision Conference, pp. 147–151.
Koethe, U. (2003). Edge and Junction Detection
with an Improved Structure Tensor. Proceedings
25th DAGM Symposium, pp. 25-32.
Lavrenko, V., T. Rath, and R. Manmatha(2004). Holistic Word Recognition for Handwritten
Historical Documents. Proceedings Document
Image Analysis for Libraries (DIAL), pp. 278-287.
Lowe, D. G. (2004). Distinctive Image Featuresfrom Scale-Invariant Keypoints, International
Journal of Computer Vision 60(2): 91-110.
Srihari, S. N., C. Huang, and H. Srinivasan(2005). A Search Engine for Handwritten
Documents. Proceedings SPIE-IS&T Electronic
Imaging, pp. 66-75.
Figure 2b right shows part of Vollers0015,S.2 from theRefaiya Library in Leipzig. The section marked witha box (shown also in Fig. 1b) was used as a query forthe same manuscript and retrieved as the only hit as
to be expected. Further experiments are on the way

Funding
This work was supported by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the ResearchGroup ‘Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa’ andthe Collaborative Research Center for the Study ofManuscript Cultures SFB 950.

References
Adamek, T., N. E. O’Connor, N. Murphy, andA. F. Smeaton (2007). Word Matching Using Single
Closed Contours for Indexing Handwritten Historical
Documents. International Journal on Document
Analysis and Recognition 9(2-4): 153-165.

Su, T.-S., T.-W. Zhang, D. J. Guan, and
H. J. Huang (2009). Off-line Recognition ofRealistic Chinese Handwriting Using Segmentationfree Strategy. Pattern Recognition 42(1): 167-182.
Yosef, I. B., I. Beckman, K. Kedem,
and I. Dinstein (2007). Binarization, Character
Extraction, and Writer Identification of HistoricalHebrew Calligraphy Documents. International
Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition(IJDAR) 9: 89-99.
Zhang, B., S. N. Srihari, and C. Huang (2004).
Word Image Retrieval Using Binary Features.
Proceedings Document Recognition and Retrieval
XI, pp. 45-53.

Datta, R., D. Joshi, J. Li, and J. Z. Wang(2008). Image Retrieval: Ideas, Influences, andTrends of the New Age. ACM Computing Surveys
40( 2): 1-60.
Ding, K., Z. Liu, L. Jin, and X. Zhu(2007). A Comparative Study of Gabor Feature andGradient Feature for Handwritten Chinese Character
Recognition. Proceedings International Conferenceon Wavelet Analysis and Pattern Recognition, pp.
1182-1186.
Fischer, A., M. Wüthrich, M. Liwicki, V.
Frinken, H. Bunke, G. Viehhauser, and
M. Stolz (2009). Automatic Transcription ofHandwritten Medieval Documents. Proceedings 15th
291

Digital Humanities 2012

Distractorless Authorship
Verification
Noecker Jr., Johnjnoecker@jgaap.com
Evaluating Variations in Language Laboratory,
Duquesne University, USA

Ryan, Michaelmryan@jgaap.com
Evaluating Variations in Language Laboratory,
Duquesne University, USA

1. Introduction

We will attempt to remedy the errors introducedby the distractor set by eliminating the set entirely.
Instead, we will consider only the document inquestion as well as a sample of writing known tobelong to the candidate author. Thus, the validityof the verification task hinges only on obtaining a
representative model of the candidate author’s work,a requirement shared by traditional verification
tasks, and does not involve any guesswork.

3. Materials and Methods
3.1. Distractorless Authorship
Verification
Goal: Given a document D, and a candidate author A,
determine the likelihood that D is written by A.

In traditional authorship attribution, our task is toassign an author label (or a similar categorical label
such as genre, publication date, etc.) to a work of
unlabeled authorship. In the closed-set problem, we
assign a label from a set of potential authors forwhom we have some labeled training data. In the
open-set problem, we also allow for the answer ‘noneof the above’. We build upon this here with theauthorship verification task, which is essentially an
open-class authorship attribution problem with only
one author in the candidate pool. Thus for a given
document D and candidate author A, we attempt toanswer the question ‘Was D written by A?’.

Method:2. Background

4. Choose a ‘distance like’ function, δ , such that ifδ(x, y) > δ(x, z), we can say that x is ‘closer to’ or‘more similar to’ y than to z (in some meaningfulway).

Previous approaches to this problem [1-2] have
involved the creation of a distractor set, which isnormally controlled for genre, tone, length, etc. andperforming an a traditional authorship attributionstyle analysis to see whether the unlabeled document
is more likely to be by the candidate author or oneof the authors in the distractor set. This approachis not ideal because it relies heavily on the creationof an appropriate distractor set. That is, enoughinformation was available about the candidate author
and the training documents to choose a set of
distractor authors that were appropriate for the task.
Thus, although these methods performed well at theverification task, they do not lend themselves well toautomation. Indeed, the entire result of this type of
authorship verification hinges upon the documents
chosen for the distractor set. This creates a sort ofchicken-and-egg problem wherein it is necessary toknow the answer in order to evaluate the suitability ofthe distractor set, yet it is necessary to know whether
the distractor set is appropriate in order to evaluate
the results.

292

1. Compile a set of training data, which is known tobe written by A.
2. Compile a model from the training data. This isnormally accomplished by extracting linguistic or
token-level features from the text and compilinga feature vector using any of various standard
techniques from the authorship attribution field.
We will label this feature vector M = <m1, m2, …,
mn>.
3. Extract a feature set, F, from D in the form of F =<f1, f2, …, fn>, where fi corresponds to mi for all i.

5. Choose a threshold, t, such that if δ(M, F) > t, we
accept the premise that M and F are written by thesame author, A. This threshold is found empiricallyby analyzing the average δ between documents ofthe same author.

3.2. The Corpora
To evaluate the performance of our authorshipverification algorithms, we used two publicallyavailable corpora. We made use of the Ad-hoc
Authorship Attribution Competition corpus (AAAC)[3] and the PAN 2011 Authorship Identification
Training Corpus [4].
Ad-hoc Authorship Attribution Competition
CorpusThe AAAC was an experiment in authorship
attribution held as part of the 2004 Joint
International Conference of the Association for
Literary and Linguistic Computing and the
Association for Computers and the Humanities.

Digital Humanities 2012

The AAAC provides texts from a wide variety ofdifferent genres, languages and document lengths,
assuring that the results will be useful for a wide
variety of applications. The AAAC corpus consistsof 264 training documents, 98 test documents and
63 authors, distributed across 13 different problems(labeled A-M). A description of each problem is foundin Table 1.

we have focused on these features, examining results
for character n-grams for n from 1 to 20. For
completeness, we also provide results for word ngrams for n from 1 to 10. Here, a word is defined
as any series of non-whitespace characters separated
by whitespace. The n-grams are generated using asliding window of size n and slide 1. We have limited
ourselves to these simple features as they can becalculated very rapidly and without risk of error(such as that introduced by imperfect part-of-speechtaggers), and thus lend themselves well to rapid,
confident analysis.

3.5. Author Model
In order to perform the distractorless authorshipverification, it is necessary to accurately model
the writing style of the candidate author. We
accomplished this using the centroid of the feature
vectors for each training document. The centroid was
calculated by using the average relative frequency ofeach event across the training documents, to adjustfor variations in training document length.
Table 1: AAAC Breakdown

PAN 2011 Authorship Identification Training
CorpusThe PAN 2011 Authorship Identification Training
Corpus consists of ‘real-world texts’ (described by
the originators as ‘often short and messy’ [4]). These
texts appear to come primarily from the Enron
Email Dataset [5]. Each text contained authorship
information within the text itself, which was removed
during the preprocessing stage. They are included toensure that the results obtained herein are applicablein real-world situations, and to avoid overtraining
on the AAAC data. The PAN corpus contained 5,064
training documents and 1,251 test documents across
10 authors.

3.6. Analysis Method
For this study, we have limited ourselves to theuse of a normalized dot-product (Cosine Distance)
analysis method. This method was shown in [7] tobe among the best performing and simplest methods
for authorship attribution. The advantage to using
the Cosine Distance, particularly in conjunction
with the simple features described above, is that
it is possible to perform this verification extremely
quickly, even on very large data sets. In order toanswer the verification task, we need only consider
the dot product of the unknown document with thecandidate author model. So, let:

3.3. Preprocessing
Preprocessing was performed on the text based on
current best practices from traditional authorship
attribution. Both corpora were preprocessed tostandardize whitespace and character case. Any
sequence of whitespace characters in the documents
converted to a single space, and all characters wereconverted to lower case. As previously mentioned,
for the PAN corpus, we also removed the author tags
from each document.

3.4. Features
We used a variety of features, also chosen for
their known performance in traditional authorship
attribution, in our approach. Current research [6]shows that character n-grams are strong performers
in traditional authorship attribution tasks. As such,

3.7. Evaluation Metrics
For each set of results below we report the ‘accuracy’of a particular experiment. For the purposes of thispaper, we define the accuracy as the number ofcorrectly classified texts divided by the total numberof attempts.

4. Results
4.1. AAAC Corpus Results
Characters

293

Digital Humanities 2012

For the AAAC Corpus with character n-grams, weachieved our best results using Character 12-grams.
Our highest accuracy was 87.44% with a threshold,t, of t=0.099387. For character n-grams of various
values of n, our best accuracies varied from about
86% to about 88% as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 3: PAN Character n-grams by Highest Accuracy

Words

Figure 1: AAAC Character n-grams by Highest Accuracy

Words

For the PAN Corpus with word n-grams, we achieved
our best results using Word 2-grams. Our highest
accuracy was 91.53%. These results were achieved by
setting a threshold, t, of t = 0.1518. For word n-gramsof various values of n, our best accuracies varied fromabout 90% to about 92% as shown in Figure 4.

For the AAAC Corpus with word n-grams, weachieved our best results using Word 4-grams. Our
highest accuracy was 88.04. These results wereachieved by setting a threshold t=0. For word ngrams of various values of n, our best accuracies
varied from about 86% to about 88% as shown in
Figure 2.

Figure 4: PAN Word n-grams by Highest Accuracy

5. Discussion and Conclusion

Figure 2: AAAC Word n-grams by Highest Accuracy

4.2. PAN Corpus Results
Characters
For the PAN Corpus with character n-grams, weachieved our best results using Character 7-grams.
Our highest accuracy was 92.23% with t = 0.1643
and t = 0.1707 respectively. For character n-grams ofvarious values of n, our best accuracies varied fromabout 90% to about 92% as shown in Figure 3.

294

These results are as expected, and show that
distractorless authorship verification is a viable
technique with high accuracy even on extremely
difficult problems. The lower accuracy rates on the
AAAC Corpus are expected, as this corpus contains
many times more authors than the PAN corpus withfewer training documents per author. Despite this,we were able to achieve accuracy rates of up to 88%
on this more difficult corpus, and 92% on the ‘easier’
PAN corpus.
It should be noted that the results of this techniqueare extremely tunable. For instance, we can tune forany combination of accuracy, precision and recall
as desired. That is, this distractorless authorshipverification technique allows us to tune the Type I(false positive) vs. Type II (false negative) error rates

Digital Humanities 2012

depending on the application of the technology. For
instance, in a forensic context we may want to err
on the side of saying ‘no’, and thus prefer to reduce
false positives, while in a less stringent application we
may wish to improve the overall accuracy at a cost of
possibly having more false positives.
Given the performance on both the PAN corpus,
which consisted mainly of real-life e-mail messages,
and the AAAC corpus, which contained a wide
variety of documents, the distractorless authorshipverification technique shows promise for a wide
range of genres and document lengths, and appears
to work across a variety of languages, all without
much tuning. Indeed, the only difficulty appears
to be in finding an appropriate threshold, t, for
given candidate author. This is possible by analyzing
the average δ between documents by the candidate
author. It can also be approximated from a large
corpus, as was done here, although these results
make it clear that there will be some of thesame problems in controlling the corpus for genre,
document length, etc. that were present in forming a
distractor set for traditional authorship verification.
Future work will focus on improving theseresults, mainly through the addition of confidence
ratings for the verification answers. That is, byallowing the system to decline to answer somepercentage of the verification questions asked (or,effectively, to answer ‘I don’t know’), we have seensome improvement in these experimental results.
Although full results for this study are not yet
available, we have seen that by dropping the 20%‘most difficult’ verification problems, we see anincrease in accuracy to approximately 96% (from92% on the strict binary problem). Whether or not
this is truly an increase in accuracy depends upon
the intended application of the technology, but webelieve this future work will provide interesting
results in application-specific tradeoffs, as describedabove.

Problem. ICML ’04 Proceedings of the Twenty-FirstInternational Conference on Machine Learning.
New York, NY[2] Koppel, M., and J. Schler (2004). Text
Categorization for Authorship Verification. 8th
Symposium on Artificial Intelligence.
[3] Juola, P. (2004). Ad-Hoc Authorship
Attribution
Competition.
ALLC/ACH
2004
Conference Abstracts. Gothenberg: University ofGothenberg.
[4] PAN 2011 Lab (2011). Uncovering Plagiarism,
Authorship, and Social Software Misuse. Authorship
Identification Training Corpus. Amsterdam.
[5] Enron Email Dataset. http://www.cs.cmu.
edu/~enron/ .
[6] Juola, P., and M. Ryan (2008). Authorship
Attribution, Similarity, and Noncommutative
Divergence Measures. In Selected Papers from the
Chicago DHCS Colloquium. 2008. Chicago, IL,:
Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities andComputer Science.
[7] Noecker Jr, J., and P. Juola (2009).
Cosine Distance Nearest-Neighbor Classification
for Authorship Attribution. In Proceedings from
Digital Humanities 2009. College Park, Md.: Digital
Humanities.

Overall, we believe we have shown this distractorlessauthorship verification to be a useful tool on thestylometrist’s workbench. Although no tool is itself
a panacea, we are also planning efforts to combine
this technique with a mixture-of-experts style voting
system, effectively using multiple distance functions
and feature sets on the same problem to increase
confidence in our answer. Finally, we hope toboth more fully explore the process of determining
the appropriate threshold without the need forextraneous texts, and to find an acceptable ‘default’threshold for cases where there is little training data.

References[1] Koppel, M., and J. Schler (2004).
Authorship Verification as a One-Class Classification
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Digital Humanities 2012

Cataloguing linguistic
diversity: Glottolog/
Langdoc
Nordhoff, Sebastiansebastian_nordhoff@eva.mpg.de
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Germany

Hammarström, Harald

harald_hammarstroem@eva.mpg.de
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Germany

1. Overview
Glottolog/Langdoc is a comprehensive databaselinking 180k bibliographical references to 21k
languoids (language families, languages, dialects).
It provides extensive query possibilities for humanusers and subscribes to the principles of Linked Open
Data (Heath & Bizer 2011) as far as machine users areconcerned.
The aim of Glottolog/Langdoc to provide near-total
bibliographical coverage of descriptive resources tothe world’s languages. Every reference is treated asa resource, as is every ‘languoid’ (Good & HendryxParker 2006). References are linked to the languoids
which they describe, and languoids are linked to thereferences described by them.
Computational treatment and modeling of language
resources has so far mainly concentrated on
major languages with a research tradition in NLP
and some commercial viability. When we leave
the industrialized countries, languages resources
become very scarce. Treebanks or annotated corpora
seem like fanciful ideas when the sum totalof resources treating a language amounts to a
description of its verbs and a treatise of its phonology
from a local university, which is for instance thecase of the Niger-Congo language Aduge. Before one
can start thinking about developing a WordNet or
similar larger resources for these languages, onemust take stock of the resources which exist, however
arcane they might be. This is one of the aims of the
Glottolog/Langdoc project. The resources are tagged
for resource type (grammar, word list, text collectionetc), macroarea (roughly, continents), and language.

2. Use cases
Four different user groups can be distinguished:language diversity researchers, statisticians,
Semantic Web engineers, and linguistic empiricists.

2.1. Linguistic diversity researchers
The first groups covers linguists interested in
the world-wide distribution of linguistic diversity(cf. Evans & Levinson 2009), for the largest
part typologist. These researchers are for instanceinterested in the distribution of subject, verb, andobject in the languages of the world (SVO, SOV, VSO,OVS, OSV, VOS), or in the size of the phonemic
inventory. The emerging patterns can be related tohuman cognition on the one hand hand (SOV andSVO have distinct processing advantages Hawkins
2004) and known migration patterns of humans
as they settled the global land mass (Atkinson2011). In order to acquire the necessary data points,
description of various languages have to be perused,
respecting genetic and geographical. This meansthat substantial bibliographical information has tobe collected. Glottolog/Langdoc aims at providing
near-total coverage of literature of the world’s lesser
known languages, including grey literature. Note that
Glottolog/Langdoc only provides the bibliographicalrecords, not the references themselves. Allbibliographical information can be downloaded
as txt, html or bibtex. Zotero integration is
also provided. The provision of references iscomplemented by links to sites where a copy could beobtained (WorldCat, GoogleBooks, Open Library).

2.2. Statistical analysis
The links established between 180k references and21k languoids allow for statistical analyses of thefollowing kinds:- What is the descriptive coverage of a particularlanguage?
- What is the descriptive coverage of a particularlanguage family or area (Hammarström &Nordhoff, in press)?
Austronesian

nonAustronesian

Totalgrammar93 (17.82)%

114 (13.82%)

207 (15.37%)

grammarsketch104 (19.92%)

148 (17.94%)

252 (18.71%)

phonology orsim.

55 (10.54%)

54 (6.55%)

109 (8.09%)509 (61.70%)

779 (57.83%)

wordlist or less 270 (51.72%)- How many languages have so far been described(Hammarström & Nordhoff 2011)?

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- Status of the least described language families in
the world (Hammarström 2010)?
- In which geographic area is the research focus onphonology, in which area is syntax deemed moreinteresting?

2.3. Semantic Web engineers
Next to XHTML, Glottolog/Langdoc data are alsoavailable as RDF, making use of a number of
established ontologies such as rdfs, skos,1 gold,2lexvo,3, wgs84,4 bibo,5 and Dublin core.6 This meansthat Glottolog/Langdoc data can be integrated into
other projects making use of the aforementioned
ontologies.

2.4. Empiricists
There are a number of researchers who are at uneasewith the current way how languages are defined andlanguage codes assigned by the current registrar,
SIL international. Some spurious languages do get
codes, while some existing languages do not get acode. Some language families see a multiplicationof their members (e.g. there are over 40 Quechuan
languages) while this ‘splitter’ approach is notobserved in other areas of the world (Nordhoff &Hammarström 2011). SIL draws on the Ethnologue7
for the set of living languages it provides codes for.
The Ethnologue lists about 7000 languages, but does
not always disclose the information the inclusion
is based on. As a result, there are a number of‘languages’ which do not seem to relate to anything
in the real world, dangling pointers so to speak.
They have an Ethnologue entry, a name, a code
assigned by SIL, but no referent. Glottolog has thestated goal to give a reference for every language
it includes. The project distinguishes ‘establishedlanguoids’, for which scientific documentation isavailable, for ‘provisional languoids’, for which we
do not have dedicated descriptions. The long term
goal is to get rid of ‘provisional languoids’ by either
finding a description, making them ‘established’, orby discarding them. This will allow linguists to always
be able to ascertain on what grounds a given language
is argued to exist.

4. Comparison
There are a number of related projects withslightly different foci. The WEBALL project for
instance8 lists genetic, bibliographic, and geographic
information about the languages of Africa, but notbeyond. We incorporate a recent version of the
WEBALL database in Glottolog/Langdoc. OLAC 9
aggregates references to linguistic resources, but
has a slightly different data model. Furthermore,
OLAC uses federated data aggregated via OAI-MHP
while Glottolog/Langdoc uses a static repository.
OLAC does include genetic information, but thisseems to be ad hoc. For instance, OLAC includes
Austronesian and Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, but
not the lower grouping Oceanic (still over 1000
languages). Furthermore, the coverage of OLAC
and Glottolog/Langdoc is different. OLAC has more
information on major languages, an area Glottolog/
Langdoc disregards. Many of the higher numbers
from OLAC come in fact from a single documentation
project hosted at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
in Nijmegen. These high numbers have technicalreasons (every recording of the MPI archives iscounted as one resource) and do not translate to an
equally high number of publications. The following
table gives the top languages as far as number ofreferences are concerned for OLAC and Glottolog/
Langdoc. A dagger † signals languages which profit
from overcounting of resources from corpus1.mpi.nl.
OLAC

Glottolog/Langdoc

English (9044)

Swahili (1826)

German (5770)

Hausa (1542)

Dutch (5239)

Nama (Namibia) (1270)

Japanese (4317)

Afrikaans (1155)

Spanish (3331)

Central Yupik (1129)

Turkish (3091)

Standard French (1059)

French (1964)

Zulu (1048)

Yuracare (1576) †South Levantine Arabic (990)Oxchuc Tzeltal (1390) †Tlingit (987)Central Yupik (1312)

Gwich’in (905)Turkish Sign Language (1157) † Yoruba (900)
Yele (1152) †Kabyle (879)

Aleut (1135)

Aleut (740)

Beaver (1080) †Thai (730)

3. Technologies

Dutch Sign Language (1063) †Koyukon (728)Tlingit (1028)

Xhosa (728)

Glottolog/Langdoc draws on over 20 input
bibliographies, which are enriched with information
about document type and languages covered using
machine-learning techniques (Hammarström, 2011).
The project uses the pylons web framework.
Glottolog/Langdoc supports content-negotiation(XHTML and RDF) and is part of the Linguistic
Linked Open Data Cloud (Chiarcos et al. 2012).

North Alaskan Inupiatun(1024)Akan (709)

Gwich’in (955)

Pulaar (703)

Czech (943)

Ewe (693)

Polish (892)

Tswana (690)

Multitree’s10 focus is on gathering all geneticclassifications of the world’s languages, not so muchon references. Glottolog uses Multitree information
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Digital Humanities 2012

for lower levels, but an own, more conservative,classification for higher levels. Multitree has 141
families while the Glottolog main tree has 429(including isolates).
The Ethnologue11 finally lists languages andreferences, but does not subscribe to the documentcentric approach Glottolog/Langdoc employs. These
projects cover similar ground, but with different
specializations. As an example, Ethnologue lists 45
references for Hausa, while Glottolog lists 1826;
The figures for Thai are 37 and 730, respectively.
Ethnologue has a similar number of languages
families as Multitree (132), which is less ‘splitting’
than Glottolog. The Ethnologue lists population
figures and language development; this information
is not found in Glottolog.
The current technical limitations mean that there isa substantial duplication of work. It is hoped thatthe use of RDF and related technologies will lead toa decrease of this duplication of work. There is for
instance no need that all these projects keep theirown database mapping geographical coordinates andcountries to languages, neither is there a need to haveseveral databases of language names. Publication ofthese resources according to the principles of Linked
Data (Chiarcos et al. 2012) will mean that the data
can easily be repurposed and integrated into otherapplications.

at http://butler.cc.tut.fi/fabre/BookIntern
etVersio/Alkusivu.html accessed May 2005.
Good, J., and C. Hendryx-Parker (2006).
Modeling Contested Categorization in Linguistic
Databases. Proceedings of the EMELD 2006
Workshop on Digital Language Documentation:
Tools
and
Standards:
The
State
of
the Art. Lansing, Michigan. June 20-22,
2006 http://www.linguistlist.org/emeld/wor
kshop/2006/papers/GoodHendryxParker-Modell
ing.pdf .

Hammarström, H. (2010). The Status of the
Least Documented Language Families in theWorld. Language Documentation & Conservation 4:
177-212.
Hammarström, H. (2011). Automatic Annotationof Bibliographical References for Descriptive
Language Materials. In P. Forner, J. Gonzalo,
J. Kekäläinen, M. Lalmas, and M. de Rijke (eds.),
Proceedings of the CLEF 2011 Conference on
Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access
Evaluation, LNCS, vol. 6941. Berlin: Springer, pp.
62-73.
Hammarström, H., and S. Nordhoff (2011).
How many languages have so far been described?
Paper presented at NWO Endangered Languages
Programme Conference, Leiden, April 2011.

Glottolog/Langdoc provides URIs for references andlanguoids so that other resources can easily link to or
retrieve from Glottolog/Langdoc. While Glottolog/
Langdoc takes a critical stance towards ISO 639-3,
all relevant information can nevertheless also beaccessed via the ISO 639-3 code.

Hammarström, H., and S. Nordhoff (in press).
Achievements and Challenges in the Descriptionof the Languages of Melanesia. In M. Klamer and
N. Evans (eds.), Melanesian languages on the Edgeof Asia, Special Issue of Language Documentation &Conservation.

References

Hawkins, J. A. (2004). Efficiency and Complexity
in Grammars. Oxford UP.

Atkinson, Q. D. (2011). Phonemic Diversity
Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language
Expansion from Africa. Science 332: 346.

Heath , T., and C. Bizer (2011). Linked Data Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. San
Rafael: Morgan & Claypool.

Chiarcos, C., S. Nordhoff, and S. Hellmann,eds. (2012). Linked Data in Linguistics.
Representing Language Data and Metadata.
Springer. Companion volume of the Workshop on
Linked Data in Linguistics 2012 (LDL-2012), heldin conjunction with the 34th Annual Meeting of
the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), March 2012,
Frankfurt/M., Germany.

Maho, J. (2001). African Languages Country byCountry: A Reference Guide, Göteborg Africana
Informal Series, vol. 1. Department of Oriental andAfrican Languages, Göteborg University, 5th ed.

Evans, N., and S. Levinson (2009). The mythof language universals: Language diversity and its
importance for cognitive science. Cognitive andBrain Sciences 32: 429-492.
Fabre, A. (2005). Diccionario Etnolingüísticoyguía
Bibliográfica
delosPueblos
Indigenas Sudamericanos. Book in Progress
298

Nordhoff, S., and H. Hammarström (2011).
Glottolog/Langdoc: Defining dialects, languages, andlanguage families as collections of resources. In
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on
Linked Science 2011, CEUR Workshop Proceedings,
vol. 783CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 783.
URL http://iswc2011.semanticweb.org/filead
min/iswc/Papers/Workshops/LISC/nordhoff.pd
f.

Digital Humanities 2012Notes
1. http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
2. http://linguistics-ontology.org
3. http://lexvo.org
4. http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos
5. http://bibliontology.com/
6. http://dublincore.org/
7. http://www.ethnologue.com
8. http://sumale.vjf.cnrs.fr/Biblio/
9. http://www.language-archives.org/
10. http://multitree.org/
11. http://www.ethnologue.com

Geo-Temporal
Interpretation of Archival
Collections Using Neatline
Nowviskie, Bethany
bethany@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Graham, Wayne

waynegraham@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

McClure, David

dm4fn@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Boggs, Jeremy

jkb2b@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Rochester, Eric

err8n@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

In late 2009, with funding from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars’ Lab at
the University of Virginia Library began developmentof Neatline, a tool with which students, scholars, andarchivists can express the geo-temporal dimensionsof literary or historical collections: http://nea
tline.org/ . These expressions take the formof customizable, highly interpretive, interlinked,
and interactive web-based timelines and maps.
They are built using open-source software andstandards-based approaches to geospatial data, andthey permit scholars to draw heavily on digitizedarchival content and standardized metadata createdby cultural heritage institutions. That said, eachuse of Neatline is imagined as a carefully-designed
narrative or exhibit – a subjective story told intime and space through small-scale interpretivedecision-making, rather than (as is more commonly
pursued in our era of ‘big data’) an algorithmicallyderived or data-driven geotemporal information
visualization. In the broadest terms, Neatline isconceived as a contribution – in the visual vernacular– to multidisciplinary, place-based scholarship using
primary sources.
This paper describes: 1) the theoretical goals of
Neatline, including a role for iterative sketching(or graphesis) and hand-craftedness in digitalinterpretive toolbuilding; 2) the decision-making
process which led us to architect Neatline not
as a stand-alone tool, but as a set of mixand-match plugins for Omeka, an open-source299

Digital Humanities 2012

platform for online collections and exhibits; and3) preliminary assessment of ongoing work on the
project, undertaken since 2010 as a partnership
between the Scholars’ Lab at UVa Library and the
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Mediaat George Mason University.
As an NEH-funded prototyping project, Neatline
made three claims to innovation or to a shiftingof the landscape of geo-temporal visualization in
the humanities. First, by building on primaryresources expressed in EAD (Encoded Archival
Description) metadata – among other standards,
such as VRA Core – Neatline creates a pragmatic
path for collaboration among metadata providers
and scholars. Although EAD has long been employedby academics working in concert with archivists,
as in the Walt Whitman Archive, its use has
typically been straightforwardly bibliographical, asa finding aid or for the production of catalogs
of manuscripts and letters. EAD has rarely beenused as a stepping-stone to rich, interpretive or
theory-based expression (much less visualization)of the content of those primary resources. The
Neatline project aims to demonstrate the value ofarchival metadata to interpretive scholarship, andthereby strengthen connections among scholars andcollections stewards.
Next, Neatline aims for ease of use by scholars new
to the digital humanities. This was a major argumentin our bid for NEH funding, and our rationale
for shifting from development of a stand-alone,
downloadable tool (installable as a single, serverside application), to a functionally atomized array ofinterchangeable plugins for Omeka ( http://omeka.org ) is arguably the most important contributionof the project to the current scene of humanities
computing software development. Neatline was
imagined as a self-contained, self-service, singlefunction tool that nonetheless allowed expert users
easy access ‘under the hood’ to customize andcontribute to its open source code. For a stand-alone
tool, this would have been the right approach; but wequickly realized that we had the opportunity to modela more productive and collaborative set of open
source software practices. The Scholars’ Lab has now
shared source code for 9 completed or in-progress
Neatline-related plugins with the Omeka developers’community, and Omeka forms the backbone for basic
content management functionality in our project.
We feel strongly that our shift to Omeka plugin
production retains or enhances all of the desired
qualities of our originally-proposed system, while
adding two great benefits. First, Neatline has become
mix-and match. In other words, no longer must
users assent to the entire, ideal Neatline workflow inorder to make use of our work – and in fact we areseeing great interest in and use of individual plugins

300

in Omeka user communities and scholarly andarchival contexts far removed from those interested
in geo-temporal interpretation. Secondly, our close
collaboration with the Omeka team and open source
developers’ community is leading to advancementsin the core code of Omeka itself, again benefitinga far wider audience than we anticipated. Not only
were we able to leverage Omeka as a technical andsocial framework for Neatline, but our work has madethe system a more attractive option for researchand special collections libraries – even those withsophisticated technical and repository infrastructureof their own.
Finally, Neatline makes a theoretical contribution
to the digital humanities by emphasizing handcrafted visualization as a mode of praxis andscholarly inquiry. (This is a practice we have,after the experimentation of the UVa’s former‘SpecLab’ thinktank and the scholarship of Johanna
Drucker, called graphesis.) Low-tech sketching andstoryboarding is regularly taught as part of theearliest design processes for digital projects in the
Scholars’ Lab. A side effect of our work is todemonstrate the value of iterative interpretationand knowledge-production manifested in visualform – particularly within fields like history andliterary studies, in which interpretation of visual
artifacts is rarely taught and drawing is infrequently
modeled as (in William J. Turkel’s formulation)‘a way of knowing.’ We have emphasized this bydesigning drawing and editing interfaces that are
relatively simple to use and nearly identical to afinished, end-user’s view. In Neatline, scholars arealways sketching, erasing, and sketching again theirarguments on the screen.
Subjectivity in space and time is a matter ofinterest in Neatline. Our map and timeline-related
plugins (in progress) are designed to offer users
the ability to model multiple backgrounds oralternatives independently from the foreground of
their critical attention, and express all of thesefields and their interrelation visually. The spatial
and temporal foreground stands as a place forscholarly commentary, including textual annotation
as well as intervention in the visual field bymeans of the freehand drawing of lines and shapes.
Meanwhile user-specified Neatline backgrounds canbe empirical or unabashedly subjective – precisely
geo-referenced or wholly speculative. For example,
one local test case, which we will demonstrate, uses
the maps and letters of U.S. Civil War cartographer
Jedediah Hotchkiss. GIS (Geographic Information
Systems) layers are brought into Neatline frommodern satellite imagery, from scans of Hotchkiss’s
own surveyed-and-drawn battlefield maps, andfrom the historical atlases that served as thesurveyor’s mental ‘base layer.’ Against these, we haveDigital Humanities 2012

georectified an informal, child’s-eye map Hotchkissdrew in a letter, to allay his young daughter’s
concerns about his welfare. Neatline allows all ofthese documents to be plotted and annotated in space
and time.
We will describe not only the theoretical basis of
the project, but its concrete products, including
improvements to the Omeka codebase and thecreation of a suite of open-source plugins. Most ofthese plugins are usable independently but gain value
in combination, comprising the Neatline system.
1. EAD Importer: allows for the easy and easilyadjusted import of Encoded Archival Description
metadata into an Omeka exhibit.
2. Neatline Maps: provides map display throughone or more GeoServer instances or through any
specification-compliant WMS service.

The project continues under the rubric of an ‘Omeka+ Neatline’ partnership with the Center for History
and New Media, funded through 2013 by the UnitedStates Library of Congress, with a next major code
release planned for January 2012. DH 2012 in
Hamburg will coincide with the release of Neatline
demonstration projects and end-user documentation
at http://neatline.org/ .
Neatline operates on archival metadata – itself
already an interpretation of a literary or historicalcollection – to allow scholars to illustrate connections
among documents and the spatial and temporaldimensions that arise through their reading. In this,it embodies a theme of much work in the Scholars’
Lab: that method is a path to argument, and thatinterpretive digital humanities scholarship may be
best enacted in iterative, visual modes.

3. Neatline Features: allows users to draw on
map layers, encoding and edit geospatial shapeinformation.
4. Neatline Time: incorporates the well-known
Simile Timeline Javascript framework into Omeka toprovide chronological visualization of Omeka items.
5. Neatline Theme: provides facilities for combining
Neatline and Omeka information into unified
interactive presentations.
In addition, our work on Neatline led us to develop
five further plugins which users may employ as partof their Omeka exhibits. These plugins greatly extend
the capacity of Omeka and make it a more attractive
option not only for end-users, but for betterresourced libraries, digital humanities centers, andcultural heritage institutions – the constituency best
positioned to contribute further development time tothe open source code of Neatline and Omeka alike.
1. FedoraConnector: makes it possible to display,comment on, annotate, and otherwise employ
objects inheriting behaviors from a Fedora Commons
repository.
2. GenericXmlImporter: permits users to import any
arbitrary, flat XML data into Omeka.
3. SolrSearch: allows use of the Solr searchengine with Omeka, facilitating improved search andimplementing faceted browsing.
4. TeiDisplay: allows users to render TEI files inHTML format and attach them to Omeka items. Thisplugin integrates with SolrSearch for indexing.
5. VRACoreElementSet: allows users to bring the
VRA Core Element Set (designed for description ofvisual resources) into Omeka.

301

Digital Humanities 2012

Collections. Available: http://www.archivesz.com/

Neatline: Plot Your Archive in Space andTime. University of Virginia Library Scholars’ Lab.
Available: http://neatline.scholarslab.org/
Papers of Jedediah Hotchkiss, Accession #2822
and #2907, Special Collections, University ofVirginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.
Scholars’ Lab Omeka Plugins. University ofVirginia Library Scholars’ Lab. Available: http://www.scholarslab.org/projects/omeka-plugins

Turkel, W., and D. Elliott (2010). Rapid
Prototyping to Support Experimental History.
Playing with Technology in History Symposium. 30
April 2010. Available: http://www.playingwithhi
story.com/

References
Catapano, T., K. M. Price, and K.
Walter (2005). The Walt Whitman Archive:
Archivist-Scholar Collaboration in Description and
Representation. Joint International Conferenceof the Association for Literary and Linguistic
Computing and the Association for Computers andthe Humanities, Victoria, British Columbia, 2005.
Drucker, J., and B. Nowviskie (2004).
Speculative Computing: Temporal Modelling. A
Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Drucker, J. (2009). SpecLab: digital aesthetics
and projects in speculative computing. U of Chicago
P.
Kramer-Smyth, J., M. Nishigaki, andT. Anglade. ArchiveZ: Visualizing Archival

302

Digital Humanities 2012

Enriching Digital Libraries
Contents with SemLib
Semantic Annotation
SystemNucci, Michele

mik.nucci@gmail.com
Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy

Grassi, Marco

The SemLib Annotation System (AS) can beeasily integrated into existing DL or usedthrough a bookmarklet to annotate generic Web
pages, addressing annotations at different level ofcomplexity and expressivity. In the prototype, users
can write simple comments, augment them with links
to Linked Data2 (LOD) and semantic tags. But if they
are scholars and need more expressivity they cancreate complex structured relations among digital
objects, connecting text within different documents
and relating to specific vocabulary terms.

Morbidoni, Christian

Annotations are structured as RDF data, which isstored to a remote annotation server and can be
consumed by third party applications as ‘slices’ of asingle collaborative RDF graph.

Piazza, Francesco

2. The Role of Semantic
Annotations

margra75@gmail.com
Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
christian.morbidoni@gmail.com
Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
f.piazza@univpm.it
Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy

1. Introduction
The advent of revolutionary communication tools,
like social media and image/video sharing, havetransformed the Web into a giant collection of
resources created by millions of people aroundthe planet, representative of their different culturesand ideas. In this context, the Digital Humanities
community have understood that Digital Libraries(DL) should no longer be simple ‘expositions’of digital objects but rather provide interaction
with users, enabling them to contribute with newknowledge, e.g. by annotating and tagging digitalartefacts (Arko et al. 2006). This provides a moreengaging user experience, enabling scholars tobenefit from the digital world in their everyday workand researchers to work collaboratively (David etal. 2008). The crowdsourcing paradigm has been
experimented, as in (Holley 2010), by leveraging
users annotations to enrich the DL, helping in
curating contents (correcting or signalling typos, etc.)
or upload new digital material1.
Existing annotations tools, however, are often limited
to context and tags, which provide poor semantics,
and, when they offer more expressive annotations,use proprietary or non-interoperable formats torepresent semantics. In other words, the knowledge
created by advanced users carefully annotating
contents with valuable information is often lost, since
it is not directly reusable by applications.

Data interoperability and reuse are the mainachievements that the DL research community
is trying to address by looking at Semantic
Web (SW) and LOD technologies. As argued inprevious researches (Kahan et al. 2001; Haslhofer
2010; Gerber et al. 2010) and witnessed by
the Europeana initiative, which is adopting a
RDF based data model (EDM), great expectations
come for the semantic technologies. Semanticallystructured data is expected to provide the ability tomash-up heterogeneous information and establish
connections among digital objects independently
provided by different institutions.
Data interoperability and flexibility of aggregation
foster reuse and enable serendipity: unexpectedreuse of data by different persons and in different
contexts from the one data was produced in. Users
annotations, when properly represented as semantic
data, can play an important role in this context, as
they link documents to data.
On the one hand, semantic annotations represent
precise relations and metadata and they are reusablewith relatively low effort to augment the DL’s data.
Here, it is very important to expose easily accessible
APIs to ‘slice’ the RDF data produced. On theother hand, LOD annotations contain links to open
datasets or ontologies that can be contextualized.
This allows applications to merge annotations andaugment their metadata with other semantic. As
an example, if documents are connected to aworld wide linked data graph, composed by big
datasets, vocabularies and user annotations, software
applications can let users explore such a graphand possibly discover unexpected and interesting
connections among them.

In this paper we present the prototypal annotation
system developed within the SemLib EU project.
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Digital Humanities 2012

3. Simple Use-Case
Let us shortly describe a simple use case that
illustrates the kind of scenario that AS should
address.
Alice is a researcher in politics and annotates atranscription of an election rally. She writes acomment to a passage and then clicks the ‘extract
tags’ button. AS uses DBPedia Spotlight3 (or possibly
other multi language entity extraction tools) topropose a set of entity tags, using remote metadata tobuild a preview with pictures, descriptions, etc. Alicechooses a number of tags including the politician‘X’ who is mentioned in the transcription and thenshe loads an ‘emotions vocabulary’ that allows her toexpress a precise relation (e.g. ‘is a manifestation of’)between the annotated sentence and the term ‘rage’
from the vocabulary. Alices annotations are collected,
among others by a virtual community of users, intoa Web site exposing a RDF based faceted browser,
where they are merged with further metadata
about the DBPedia entities cited in annotations andontologies.
A second user, Bob, made a similar annotation,
semantically linking to the politician ‘Y’ from
DBPedia. Since in DBpedia the two politicians areconnected by their metadata (e.g. they are from thesame party or they are born in the same city, etc.),
the two entities can have one or more paths thatconnect them in the graph. Bob can explore suchpaths and discover a relation among his annotationand the one from Alice. In addition, when Bob search
for the keyword ‘anger’, to find objects related tothat emotion, he will be able to find the transcription
annotated by Alice, since an emotion ontology isavailable and it defines ‘rage’ as a narrower term of‘anger’. At this point, Bob could also decide to create
a new semantic annotation expressing a similarity
between the two transcriptions, for example, using asimple ‘is similar to’ relation.
Using the AS, DL administrators or DL owners/
maintainers can make their own annotations but
they can also select relevant end-user contributions,aggregate them and then publish back as trusted/
official annotations, importing them to enrich theDL.

4. Annotations Data Model
Annotations represent a peculiar type of resources,
specifically conceived to add information to otherexisting resources. Annotations acquire therefore
full significance in relation with the target resource
and other contextual information, such as its
author, its creation date and the vocabulary terms
used. Properly structuring an annotation using SW
304

technologies is therefore necessary at twofold levelto clearly separate contextual metadata from its
content. The AS data model reuses and extends OAC
ontology (Sanderson et al. 2011) to encode contextual
metadata and to attach annotations to involved
Web resources. Since OAC specification makes noassumption on the kind of body an annotation canhave, one of the first issues that have been tackled
in SemLib project is how to represent annotations
that have an RDF graph as body. In AS data model,
annotation body is a named graph containing a
set of RDF statements. This allows to represent
semantically structured annotation content basing
on the standard support for named graphs provided
by RDF triplestores and SPARQL in addition to queryand access only little slices of the entire collaborativeknowledge base (KB).
The annotation storage is agnostic with respect tothe ontologies used to represent the informative
content of annotations. Pluggable ontologies
and SKOS taxonomies can be used to encode
annotations content according to standardized
domain vocabularies to foster data interoperability
between different communities and DL.

5. Annotations Sharing Model
In AS users collect their annotations in notebooks
to organize their work, aggregating annotations
by topic or task, and to easily make available
to others subsets of their annotations enabling
collaborative scenarios. Notebooks are identified
by dereferenciable URLs that applications can use
to retrieve RDF-encoded annotations and relative
metadata in different formats.
Sharing a notebook is as easy as sharing its URL on
the Web, similarly to what happens for popular filesharing platforms and common mechanisms like emails, wikis or social networks can be used. For eachnotebook, the owner can easily set fine-grained rights
access, also making it public or sharing it only withselected users.
Before creating and sharing annotations each user
must signing into the annotation system. To makeas easy as possible the integration of the annotation
system in existing DL, single sign-on systems like
OpenID and OAuth have been used. Different
authentication systems can be supported developing
dedicated plugins.

6. Prototype
At the time of writing, a fully working AS prototype4
has been developed and will be further enhanced in
the continuation of the project. The prototype can beused in any existing Websites through a dedicatedDigital Humanities 2012

bookmarklet, which will injects the needed Javascript
code into the Web pages.

user comments (based on DBPedia Spotlight) andsemantic tagging.

System architecture, shown in Fig. 1, is typicallyclient-server. The client-side component, which
comprises a set of modules implementing thegraphical user interface to create and browse
annotations, is developed in Javascript. The serverside component is a RESTful Web service which
implements the main application logic and thestorage for the annotations based on a native Sesame
triplestore with the support for semantic inference.

To demonstrate how annotation can be consumed
basing on simple REST API, the AS prototype
provides also an example faceted browsing facility,
implemented using Simile Exhibit7.

7. Conclusions
In this work, SemLib annotation system havebeen introduced, discussing its data and annotation
model and presenting a working annotation systemprototype, discussing how this is expected not only
to foster annotation sharing between DL and user
engagement but also to allow the application of
crowdsourcing paradigm in the creation of added
value for the DL.
Fundings

Figure 1: Simplified architecture of the Annotation System

The AS prototype allows users to compose RDF
statements using an on purpose GUI (Fig. 2),
connecting selected items with properties comingfrom pluggable ontologies.

The research leading to these results hasreceived funding from the European Union’s
Seventh Framework Programme managed by REAResearch Executive Agency [SEMLIB - 262301 FP7/2007-2013 - FP7/2007-2011 - SME-2010-1].

References
Arko, R. A., K. M. Ginger, K. A. Kastens,
and J. Weatherley (2006). Using annotations
to add value to a digital library for education
Online: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may06/arko/
05arko.html (accessed on 7th March 2012).
David, S., M. Nucci, and F. Piazza (2008).
Talia: a Research and Publishing Environment for
Philosophy Scholars. Proceedings of the Digital
Humanities 2008 Conference, Oulu, Finland,
25th-29th June, 2008.

Figure 2: An example of the annotations editor

Selected items can be DL resources, named entities
coming from custom SKOS vocabularies or Web
reconciliation services like Freebase5 Web pages orfragments of these. For example, users can create
structured annotations in Dante Alighieri’s DL page
to reference other pages of the DL about Italian
writers that have been influential for him, to provide
additional information about his place of birthreferring to Florence entity in Freebase or to linktext-excerpts of the Divine Comedy coming from the
Gutenberg Project6.
The AS prototype includes a module for comments
and tags. At the moment, it provides basic
functionalities including entity extraction fromGerber, A., and J. Hunter (2010). Authoring,
Editing and Visualizing Compound Objects for
Literary Scholarship. Journal of Digital Information
11.
Haslhofer, B., E. Momeni, M. Gay, and R.
Simon (2010). Augmenting Europeana Content
with Linked Data Resources. Proceedings of the 6thInternational Conference on Semantic Systems (ISemantics), September 2010.
Holley, R. (2010). Crowdsourcing: How and Why
Should Libraries Do It? D-Lib Magazine, The
Magazine of Digital Library Research, March/April
2010.
Kahan, J., and M. R. Koivunen (2001). Annotea:
An Open RDF Infrastructure for Shared Web
Annotations. Proceedings of the 10th international
conference on World Wide Web, pp. 623-632.

305

Digital Humanities 2012

Morbidoni, C., M. Grassi, and M. Nucci(2011). Introducing SemLib Project: Semantic
Web Tools for Digital Libraries. Proceedingsof the International Workshop on Semantic
Digital Archives – sustainable long-term curation
perspectives of Cultural Heritage held as part ofthe 15th International Conference on Theory andPractice of Digital Libraries (TPDL), Berlin, 29th
September 2011.
Sanderson, R., and H. van de Sompel(2011). Open Annotation: Beta Data Model Guide,
Online: http://www.openannotation.org/spec/b
eta/ (accessed on 7th March 2012).
Notes
1. BBC WW2 People’s War: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2pe
opleswar/
2. Linked Data: http://linkeddata.org/
3. DBPedia Spotlight: http://dbpedia.org/spotlight
4. For for a working demo see http://metasound.dibet.un
ivpm.it/release_bot/release/semlib-client_0.6
1-demo_page/examples/demo.html
5. Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/
6. Gutenberg Project: http://www.gutenberg.org/
7. Exhibit: http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/

The VL3: A Project at
the Crossroads between
Linguistics and Computer
ScienceNuñez, Camelia Gianina

cnunez3@uwo.ca
The CulturePlex Laboratory, The University ofWestern Ontario, Canada

Mavillard, Antonio Jiménez

ajimene6@uwo.ca
The CulturePlex Laboratory, The University ofWestern Ontario, Canada

The current study will introduce the VL3 (Virtual
Language Learning Lab) a multidisciplinary projectthat brings together a variety of disciplines:
from Theoretical Linguistics, Second Language
Acquisition and Second Language Pedagogy toComputer Science and Natural Language Processing(NLP). The VL3 stands as a great example of how
humanistic knowledge, when combined with thepower of the technology, can lead to the creation of
innovative tools, beneficial to society at large.
Specifically, the VL3 aims to provide a virtualenvironment where (Spanish) second language
learners can work towards improving theircommunicative skills in the target language, byparticipating in a set of predefined conversation
scenarios that closely mimic real life situations.
As mentioned earlier, the VL3 is heavily basedon research within the fields of Linguistics,
Second Language Acquisition and Second Language
Pedagogy; as such an important part of thispresentation will focus on introducing and explaining
the theoretical context for the development of thecurrent project. We will then proceed to show how
this research has been applied in order to further
develop and refine the existing spoken dialoguesystem technology used by our partner, Natural
Language Inc.
Although the importance of linguistic theory(phonology, morphology, syntax) to the advancesin the field of NLP has been pointed out bymany (Matthews1993; Schultze & Gupta 2010), it
continues to be a relationship that needs to be
explored in more detail. Without a doubt, greaterattention paid to linguistic research would leadto even more significant developments for natural
language processing technologies. Skeptics of suchtechnologies claim that computer programs will306

Digital Humanities 2012never be able to account for the complexity of thehuman language (Salaberry 1996) and although it
may well be the case that we will not be able
to fully describe something as unpredictable as
human language, it is only by maintaining a close
relationship with linguistics, its discipline of study,
that any real attempt can be made.
As such, in order to meet our objective of creatinga highly developed technology capable of processing
human language as a whole with the highest degreeof accuracy possible, we will recur to recent theories
of linguistics and second language acquisition.
Language technologies such as ones described above,
are used in telephone conversations where a person
needing information is speaking to a machine trained
to understand human language (call centers, forexample). Although these technologies have enjoyedgreat success, they are most often limiting, in sensethat they are only trained to deal with highly
specialized language. For example a NL software
employed by an internet service provider will only
‘understand’ language that is specific to this context.
In fact, it is often the case that these technologies aretrained to only pick up on certain key words (homeinternet, high speed, technical problems, billing, etc.)
uttered by the person on the phone and from thaton, infer the purpose of the call. Should the caller
ask a question ‘outside’ this scenario, the machine
will most likely not understand. As such, it can besaid that most of these technologies have divided
language into specific contexts and have focused onteaching computers to ‘understand’ scenario-specificlanguage. That is, they are trained to deduce themeaning of an utterance by picking up on certain key
words.
The VL3 thus proposes to adopt and further
adapt these technologies to the field of foreign
language learning and offer students much needed
opportunities to practice their target language in oneon-one conversations that imitate real life situations.
This of course implies the need of less restrictive
NL technology that is able to understand humanlanguage as a whole rather than only context-specificlanguage. Consequently, such a project demands a
NL technology that is based on grammatical analysis
strategy rather than keyword spotting.
The technology used by Natural Language Inc.,
our partner in this project, is already superior
to other existing ones mainly because it employs
grammatical strategies for understanding humanlanguage. Nonetheless, our research experience
within the fields of Linguistics, Second Language
Acquisition and Second Language Teaching, willallow us to further develop the existing technology
of Natural Language Inc. in order to successfully use
it as a second language-learning tool. Any speakerof a foreign language is well aware of the challengethat lays in the process of learning a language
other that one’s own as well as the many different
factors that come at play in the learning process.
The field of Second Language Acquisition has shown
us that one such factor is input in the foreign
language. In fact, input has been described as ‘thesingle, most important concept of second language
acquisition’ (Gass 1997). Input specifically refers to
exposure to the target language (oral, written, formal,
informal etc.) and no one would argue that a second
language can be learned in isolation and with no
exposure to it.
Furthermore, it has been suggested that aside from
input, interaction with a native speaker also plays
an important role in the process of second language
development. (Long 1981, 1983, 1996). As such,producing the target language as part of the learning
process (Swain 1985, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2005) has
been suggested as beneficial to the learner. One of
the benefits of interaction as part of the processof second language learning is what is known
as ‘negative evidence’ That is, when the learnersays something that their interlocutor does notunderstand, after some ‘negotiations for meaning’
take place, the interlocutor may model the correct
language form. Consequently, this feedback received
by the learner on their production will turn into morepositive input. Interaction strategies between nativeand non-native speakers such as modifications,simplifications, paraphrasing etc. have been vastly
studied as well and have clearly shown their benefits
to the language learner.
Evidently, linguistic research can provide us withvaluable information for the development of a projectsuch as the VL3. Throughout this presentation you
will have the opportunity to see how such researchhas been applied to the creation of an effective online
tool that will significantly impact the field of second
language pedagogy.

References
Gass, S. (1997). Input, Interaction and the second
language learner. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gupta P., and M. Schultze (2010). Human
Language Technologies (HLT). Module 3.5. In G.
Davies (ed.), Information and Communications
Technology for Language Teachers (ICT4LT),
Slough, Thames Valley University [Online]. Available
from: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-5.ht
m [Accessed 10 December, 2010].
Long, M. (1981). Input, interaction and second
language acquisition. In H. Winitz (ed.), Native
Language and Foreign Language Acquisition.

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Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 379:
259-278.
Long, M. (1983). Native speaker/non-native
speaker conversation and the negotiation ofcomprehensible input. Applied Linguistics 4(2):126-141.
Long, M. (1996). The Role of the Linguistic
Envronment in Second Language Acquisition. In W.
R. Ritchie and T. J. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook ofSecond Language Acquisition. San Diego: Academic
Press, pp. 413-468.
Matthews C. (1993), Grammar frameworks inIntelligent CALL. CALICO Journal 11(1): 5-27.
Salaberry R. (1996). A Theoretical foundation
for development of pedagogical tasks in computer
mediated communication. CALICO Journal 14(1):
5-34.
Swain, M. (1985). Communicative Competence:
Some roles of comprehensible input andcomprehensible output in its development. In S. Gass
and C. Madden (eds.), Input in second language
acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, pp.
235-253.
Swain, M. (1993). The Output Hypothesis: justspeaking and writing aren’t enough. The CanadianModern Language Review 50: 158-164.
Swain, M. (1995). Three functions of output insecond language learning. In G. Cook and B.
Seidlhofer (eds.), Principles and Practice in the
Study of Language. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Swain, M. (1998). Focus on form through conscious
reflection. In C. Daughty and J. Williams (eds.),
Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language
Acquisition. New York: Cambridge UP.
Swain, M. (2005). The Output Hypothesis: Theory
and Research. In E. Hinkel (ed.), Handbookof Research in Second Language Teaching and
Learning. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp.
471-483.

308‘Eric, you do not humble
well’: The Image of theModern Vampire in Text
and on Screen
Opas-Hänninen, Lisa Lenalisa.lena.opas-hanninen@oulu.fi
Department of English, University of Oulu, Finland

Hettel, Jacquelinejacqueline.hettel@gmail.com
University of Georgia, USA

Toljamo, Tuomo

toljatuo@mail.student.oulu.fi
Department of English, University of Oulu, Finland

Seppänen, Tapio

tapio.seppanen@oulu.fi
Department of English, University of Oulu, FinlandThis paper discusses the image of the vampire in
the television series True Blood and the books byCharlaine Harris on which the series is based. Our
analysis is based on cultural imagology as developed
by Johnson (2005, 2006) and Lotman (1990). To thisend we have used CATMA, the concordance program
developed at the University of Hamburg, and added
multimodal functionality to it. By time stamping andaligning the image, the soundtrack and the subtitling,
we can mark up and investigate both the linguistic
and the paralinguistic markers that describe thecharacters and their emotions. This means that weare able to move between a concordance of thesubtitling and the film itself; in addition, we havelinked the scenes of the film to the novels of Charlaine
Harris, on which the series is based. Thus, this paper
not only discusses the images created in the novels
and the television series, but also presents the tools
we have built to enable us to carry out the research.
Beliefs and legends about vampires have existed
probably as long as mankind. The earliest known
records are found among the Assyrians (Wright2006). Lores and legends of some form of thevampire can be found all around the world. The
vampire has been described as an evil, bloodsucking
creature, a force of darkness. He is seductive, smart,and a powerful predator. Sometimes the vampire isseen as a spirit; some legends say they can change
into animals, even control them (Nobleman 2007).
Vampire literature began with the Gothic tradition,a fiction that was intended to evoke a sense of dreadin the reader. During Victorian times the vampire
became more human and a powerful archetype. The

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common image, which began with Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, was one of a gentleman dressed in evening
wear and a long cloak; he was smart, polite, wealthy
and well-dressed. Of all classic horror creatures, he
has had the most sex appeal and has thus easily beenable to attract humans.
The image of the vampire has once again changed.
He (or she) is now beautiful, erotic, powerful, young
and quite human-like. He has human emotions, isdangerous when called for, but loving and good tothose humans he is attached to – a modern-day
Heathcliff, a dark and brooding sexual fantasy. Thisis largely due to Anne Rice, who changed the image ofthe vampire, and vampire literature more generally,
with her character Lestat. She achieved this byignoring the old conventions of what a vampire canor cannot do; she changed the traditional Gothic
settings by moving them from isolated houses andareas to central locations and beautiful homes; shemade the vampire the protagonist, thus moving awayfrom the more traditional narration by the victim,
and focused on their feelings and their anxieties,
making them quite sympathetic (Overstreet 2006).
We investigate the True Blood television series andthe books it is based on. These were written by
Charlaine Harris between 2002 and 2010, in otherwords well after L.J. Smith’s Vampire Diaries series
and after the television series Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, but before Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.
True Blood features Sookie Stackhouse, a humanin her late twenties, a waitress in a local bar, andher relationship to Bill Compton, quite the Southern
gentleman, and Eric Northman, the Viking, twovampires who are almost opposites of each other.
We set out to investigate what kind of an image theviewer gets of Eric; this we did through investigating
the adjectives used to describe him and those usedby him. Thus our research questions were: How doothers perceive Eric? How does Eric behave? How
does Eric perceive others? How does he describe
others? To carry out the investigation, we needed aconcordance program, but the problem of course wasthat there simply wasn’t one that could also handle
the video. Thus we turned to the CATMA team at
Hamburg University and asked whether we could
use their program and build on it. We have now
built multimodal functionality on top of CATMA andcarried out our investigation on the speech of theseries, calling up the video of each instance in the
KWIC concordance (see Fig. 1). We then marked up
the text of the original book series and linked theinstances describing Eric in the book to those in the
TV series.

Figure 1

Our results show that in the television series True
Blood, there is little description of Eric; the viewer’s
image of Eric is shaped largely by comments madeabout his behavior, such as ‘Eric, you do not humble
well’ or ‘I’m not afraid of Eric’ and ‘Eric has had athousand years of practicing deceit.’ However, theimage of Eric is not only constructed through this. In
fact, the multimodality of the television series plays
a crucial role in the construction of the charactersmore generally. Eric, for example, is created throughthe things he wears, the way he speaks, the things hedoes and the expressions on his face. Sometimes, forexample, Sookie criticizes Eric harshly and his facial
expression indicates that he is quite hurt, although
he does not say so. Thus it is crucial that in addition
to analyzing the actual speech of the characters, one
can access the visual images as well – much like inmodern conversation analysis, which also relies onsound and images, in addition to the actual words
spoken.
Another interesting aspect of the investigation is thecomparison of how the image of Eric differs between
the original novels and the television series. It seems
that much of what is conveyed to the viewer throughthe images in the television series forms what inliterary studies one would think of as that part of thecreation of a character in a novel which is left to thereader’s imagination. It is like an interpretation of
the character, perhaps even to be seen as the actor’sinterpretation, which then gets reinterpreted by theviewer. The image of Eric is also created through thejuxtaposition of him with Sookie’s other lover, Bill
Compton, who was turned into a vampire after the
Civil War and who is quite the Southern gentleman,particularly as opposed to Eric, who is the rogue; he is
the ruthless Viking, an absolute ruler, at times rather
cruel, and a sharp businessman. He is attractive towomen, whom he uses ruthlessly, but he is also very
protective of those he really cares for, which often is
not reflected in the words he speaks, but rather in his
facial expressions and gestures.
Thus, it becomes evident that in order to carry out
an analysis of data such as this, it is crucial that309

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one has access to tools which are able to handle
the multimodality of the data. Our decision to not
reinvent the wheel, but to build upon an alreadyavailable tool, was the right choice, but there is stillwork to be done to make it even more applicable toother data and other types of investigations.

References
Johnson, A. W. (2005). Notes Towards a New
Imagology. European English Messenger 14(): 50^58.
Johnson, A. W. (2006). New Methodologies:
Imagology, Language and English Philology. In H.
Anttila, J. Gear, A. Heikkinen and R. Sallinen (eds.),
Linguistic Topics and Language Teaching. Oulu:
Oulu UP, pp. 7-27.
Lotman, Yu. M. (1990). Universe of the Mind: A
Semiotic Theory of Culture, tr. Ann Shukman, intro
Umberto Eco. London and New York: Tauris.
Nobleman, M. T. (2007). Vampires. Oxford:
Raintree Publishers.
Overstreet, D. W. (2006). Not Your Mother’s
Vampire. Vampires in Young Adult Fiction. Lanham,
MD: The Scarecrow Press.
Wright, D. (2006). The Book of Vampires. 2ndrevised and enlarged edition. New York: Dover
Publications.

Electronic Deconstructionof an argument using
corpus linguistic analysis of
its on-line discussion forum
supplement
O’Halloran, Kieran Anthonykieran.o’halloran@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College, University of London, UK

1. Introduction
In the last few years, one technological innovation
has been the appending of discussion forum facilities
to online arguments, such as in online versionsof newspapers. The facility allows readers to post
responses to an argument and to debate issues raisedin it. Such online discussion forums can be regarded
as electronic supplements to these arguments.
The aim of this presentation is to report on researchwhich highlights the utility value of this electronic
supplementarity for critical reading of arguments(see O’Halloran, 2010, 2011 2012). I show how
a content analysis of an online discussion forum
appended to an argument can illuminate repression
or marginalisation in the latter of concepts which
are used in normal discussion of the argument’s
topic. In turn, I demonstrate how this can reveal
where the rhetorical structure of the argument isunstable, where it deconstructs. Since, to conduct
such content analysis, I use corpus linguistic method– the analysis of collections of electronic texts– I refer to this approach to critical reading as
Electronic Deconstruction. The theoretical stimulus
for this approach comes from an appropriation of‘the supplement’, an idea of the French philosopher,
Jacques Derrida.

2. Keyword Analysis
2.1. Concepts normally used for
discussion of a topic
If an online discussion forum is sufficiently large,
and contains a substantial number of critical posts,
it can provide illumination of what concepts arenormally used in discussion of a particular topic
regardless of how these concepts are used, e.g.
whether these concepts are assented to or not.
Should certain concepts be salient in the forum
as a whole but absent from, or at best marginal
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in, the original argument, this can offer insights
into what the argument might be said to repressor marginalise from normal conceptual discussionof its topic. Since the discussion forum is directly
related to the original argument, then arbitrarinesswill have been considerably reduced in producing
these insights.

2.2. Keywords
Salient concepts in an online discussion forum, or
any collection of electronic texts, can be revealed
through keyword analysis using appropriate corpus
linguistic software. A keyword is ‘a word which
occurs with unusual frequency in a given text…bycomparison with a reference corpus’ (Scott 1997:
236). Keywords are established through statisticalmeasures such as log likelihood (see Dunning, 1993).
A log likelihood value of ≥ 7 (p < 0.01) confers keyness
on a word. The larger the log likelihood value ≥ 7, thegreater the salience of the keyword. Importantly, thelog likelihood value, as a statistical measure, reduces
arbitrariness in what is selected as salient.
Comparison of the highest value keywords ina discussion forum with words in the original
argument can be illuminating. For this presentation,
the following types of keyword are relevant:- high value keywords in the forum which are absent
from the original argument. These are candidates
for the status of repressed concepts from theargument;- high value keywords in the forum which are usedinfrequently in the original argument. These are
candidates for the status of marginalised concepts
in the argument.
Keyword analysis should not only be quantitative.
They also need to be qualitatively explored tounderstand how they are being used. Qualitative
exploration of keywords in the discussion forum can,in turn, strengthen judgements as to marginalised /repressed candidacy in the original argument.
In order to mobilise how I use keywords ina discussion forum supplement for purposes ofElectronic Deconstruction, I take as stimulus how
Derrida conceives of ‘the supplement’.

3. Discussion forums as
supplements
3.1. Derrida’s supplement
We normally think of the word ‘supplement’ asmeaning something extra, an add-on. For Derrida,
the supplement is more subtle. This is because heilluminates how a supplement ‘adds only to replace’a lack of something. So, while the supplement may
seem like an add-on and thus outside that which
is supplemented, in fact it becomes simultaneously
inside that which it is added to. Derrida writes thatevery supplement:…harbors within itself two significations whose
cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary […] [Thesupplement] adds only to replace. It intervenes orinsinuates itself in-the-place-of (Derrida 1976 [1967]:
144-145).
Take, for example, a shop sign outside a bicycle shop.
It is outside the shop not part of the inside. It is an
add-on, an extra, signaling the nature of the shop.
However, in being outside the shop it ‘adds to replace’a ‘lack’ inside the shop – the shop cannot function
unless it can attract custom. The shop sign is thus
simultaneously an add-on and an essential part of theshop – it is both outside and oddly ‘inside’ the shop
as well.

3.2. Discussion forums as Derridean
supplements
If we apply the logic of the supplement to online
discussion forums appended to arguments, then adiscussion forum is not just outside the original
argument. It is not just an add-on, an extra. On
the logic of the supplement, concepts which arenormally used to discuss a topic as reflected in
keywords in an online discussion forum - but which
are absent in the original argument – can be seen
as ‘lacking’ in the argument. In turn, this can offer
insights into repression or marginalisation in theargument (relative to the particular supplement).
Furthermore, since keywords are generated nonarbitrarily, we have in turn a non-arbitrary basis
for intervening in the argument. We can use
these keywords to ‘add to replace’ what can beperspectivised as deficient in normal discussionof the argument’s topic, intervening to replace anabsence inside the argument with keywords outside
the argument. Via the logic of the supplement, theborder between an argument and its discussion
forum supplement is porous.
To be clear, my use of Derrida’s notion of the
supplement is an appropriation of his work. Though
Derrida is synonymous with an approach to criticalreading called ‘Deconstruction’, I am not doing
Derridean Deconstruction. While I appropriate theidea of supplements as being simultaneously insideand outside the things that are supplemented, thisdoes not mean that I concur with Derrida’s vision
where meaning is ultimately undecideable. Indeed,a corpus linguistic approach illuminates Derrida’s
focus on undecideability in language and meaning to
be misguided (see O’Halloran 2012).

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3.3. Using the supplement toinvestigate deconstruction in anargument
The next stage is to trace the extent to which anintervention in the argument ‘to add to replace’ leads
to instability in its cohesion. An argument’s rhetoricalstructure is dependent on effective cohesion. If
cohesion is disturbed by this intervention, then thecredibility of the argument diminishes.

structure of ‘new atheism’ (bad) versus ‘old atheism(good)’:
8. History’s greatest atheists, or the ‘old atheists’ as
we are now forced to call them, were humanistic andprogressive, critical of religion because it expressed
man’s sense of higher ethical purpose in a deeply
flawed fashion [emphasis added].
9. The new atheists are screechy and intolerant;
they see religion merely as an expression of mass
ignorance and delusion.

4. The argument topic: ‘New
Atheism’

10. Their aim seems to be, not only to bring belief[in] God crashing back down to earth, but also todowngrade mankind itself [emphasis added].

4.1. Orientation

Notice ‘new atheists’ are described as LOW and ‘oldatheists’ as HIGH (see italics).

I demonstrate the method of Electronic
Deconstruction on an argument in an online
version of a British newspaper.1 Written by thejournalist Brendan O’Neill, the argument criticises‘new atheism’, the atheism associated with thinkers
such as Richard Dawkins. The entire argument
rests on a rhetorical structural opposition: ‘oldatheism’ (e.g. the atheism of Karl Marx) is good while‘new atheism’ is bad. Using the corpus linguistic
software WMatrix (Rayson 2008), O’Halloran (2010,2011) generates keywords in the discussion forum
appended to the argument.2 ‘Faith’ is a keyword
with high statistical significance, its meaning mostly
equivalent to ‘religious belief’; ‘belief’ in the senseof ‘religious belief’ also has a high keyness value.
Qualitatively examining how the keywords are usedin discussion forum posts, I found that discussionof ‘new atheism’ is in relation to criticism of belief/faith in a supernatural power. That ‘religious belief’or ‘faith’ are key concerns of ‘new atheism’ can becorroborated by examining relevant websites / booksby ‘new atheists’3
Turning my attention to the argument, ‘faith’ isabsent from it and ‘religious belief’ is marginal, only
occurring twice; in contrast, the argument contains
21 instances of the general category ‘religion’. O’Neilldescribes ‘new atheists’ as being critical of ‘religion’
generally rather than of ‘faith’ / ‘religious belief’ in asupernatural power. In sum, we can say that relative
to normal discourse for ‘new atheism’ (as reflectedin the discussion forum), there is a deficiency in theargument of ‘faith’ / ‘religious belief’.

4.2. Exploring possible
deconstruction in rhetoricalstructure
Below is an example of deconstruction in O’Neill’sargument. Sentences 8-10 set up the rhetorical

312

What happens to the cohesion of this rhetoricalstructure if I ‘add to replace’ the deficiency of ‘faith’and ‘religious belief’ in normal discussion of ‘newatheism’ (as reflected in the discussion forum) insentences 9 and 10? (I do not intervene in sentence 8
since this relates to ‘old atheism’):
8. History’s greatest atheists, or the ‘old atheists’ as
we are now forced to call them, were humanistic andprogressive, critical of religion because it expressed
man’s sense of higher ethical purpose in a deeply
flawed fashion [emphasis added].
9. The new atheists are screechy and intolerant;
they see {religion}
religious belief merely
as an expression of mass ignorance and delusion[emphasis added].
10. Their aim seems to be, not only to bring belief[in] God crashing back down to earth, but also todowngrade mankind itself [emphasis added].
As a result of this intervention, the general categoryof ‘religion’ in sentence 8 is no longer in cohesion
with this general category in sentence 9. Since therhetorical structure of ‘old atheists’ = good / highand ‘new atheists’ = bad / low is dependent on
this cohesion, the rhetorical structure can be said todeconstruct. Thus, once normal discourse for ‘newatheism’ is instituted, the argument can be evaluatedas falling apart structurally.

References
Derrida, J. (1976 [1967]). Of Grammatology [transG.C. Spivak] Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Dunning, T. (1993). Accurate methods for thestatistics of surprise and coincidence. Computational
Linguistics 19(1): 61-74.

Digital Humanities 2012

O’Halloran, K. A. (2010). Critical reading of a text
through its electronic supplement. Digital Culture
and Education 2(2): 210-229.
http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/
cms/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/DCE1022_oha
lloran_2010.pdf

O’Halloran, K. A. (2011). Limitations of the logicorhetorical module: Inconsistency in argument, online
discussion forums and Electronic Deconstruction.
Discourse Studies 13(6): 797-806.

Citygram One: Visualizing
Urban Acoustic Ecology
Park, Tae Hongpark@gsu.edu
Georgia State University, USA

Miller, Benmiller@gsu.edu
Georgia State University, USA

O’Halloran,K.
A.
(2012).
Electronic
deconstruction: revealing tensions in the cohesive
structure of persuasion texts. International Journalof Corpus Linguistics 17(1): 91-124.

Shrestha, Ayush

Rayson, P. (2008). Wmatrix: a Web-based Corpus
Processing Environment. Computing Department,
Lancaster University. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix .

esangmi@gmail.com
Georgia State University, USA

Scott, M. (1997). PC analysis of key words – and key
key words. System 25(2): 233-45.
Notes
1. The argument consists of 926 words (42 sentences). The wholeargument and the discussion forum appended to it can befound at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfre
e/2007/dec/30/thenewatheism .
2. The discussion forum appended to the argument consists of
365 individual posts, which in total come to 69, 252 words.
In order for keywords to be revealed, WMatrix compares thediscussion forum with a reference corpusof around 1 million
words of written English (which WMatrix accesses online).
3. In a three minute clip, Richard Dawkins summarises a central
argument of ‘The God Delusion’: ‘The great majority of people
on this planet do believe that there is some kind of a supreme
being…historically it’s always been very important to people
their belief in some sort of a supreme being…I give in the bookthe argument…that there is no supernatural supreme being
and that belief in such a being can under some circumstances
be rather a bad thing’ [my bold]. The clip can be viewed at:
http://www.amazon.com/The-God-Delusion-Richar
d-Dawkins/dp/0618918248/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qi
d=1330788377&sr=8-1 [Accessed March 2012].

ashrestha2@student.gsu.edu
Georgia State University, USA

Lee, Sangmi

Turner, Jonathan

johnturner@me.com
Georgia State University, USA

Marse, Alexaemarse@gmail.com
Georgia State University, USA

1. Introduction
The surfaces and spaces of our planet, andparticularly metropolitan areas, are not only
manifestations of visible physical shapes, but also
include dimensions that go beyond the ocular.
Furthermore, these invisible energies are often
in a state of flux and could potentially yieldinsights into the living and breathing dimensionsof our surroundings that are underexplored incontemporary mapping research. The Citygram
project explores and develops ideas and concepts
for novel mapping paradigms that reflect aspects ofdynamicity and ‘the invisible’ pertinent to cityscapes.
The project’s main goal is to contribute to existing
geospatial research by embracing the idea of timevariant, poly-sensory cartography. Our multi-layered
and multi-format custom maps are data-driven
and based on continuous data streams captured byremote sensors. These dynamic maps can inform
us of the flux in our built environments, such asparks, museums, alleys, bus stations, freeways, anduniversity campuses.
Citygram is a large-scale project divided into a
number of manageable iterations. The current
iteration focuses on visualizing acoustic ecology andcomputationally inferring meaningful informationsuch as emotion and mood. We are currently focusing
our attention on small public spaces at the following
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university campuses: Georgia State University andGeorgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; California
Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles; and Massey
University in Wellington, New Zealand. Our aim isto render dynamic, non-intrusive acoustic maps thatare scale accurate and topologically oriented.

2. Current Mapping Paradigms
and Technologies
The most commonly used mapping paradigms are
represented by Google Maps and and Bing Maps
(PC World 2010). Many supplemental features areprovided by these platforms: street-views, webcams(1 frame/hour), and pre-recorded videos taken fromlocations. Other mapping systems, such as UCLA’s
Hypercities (‘Hypercities’ 2010), BBC’s Save Our
Sounds (‘Save Our Sounds’ 2011) and the Locus
Stream Project (‘Locus Sonus > Locustream’ 2011)
are more creative. Hypercities is an interactive
mapping system that allows temporal navigation
via layers of historic maps, which are overlaid
on modern maps via the Google Earth interface.
Save Our Sounds gathers crowd-sourced audio
snapshots, archives them, and makes ‘endangeredsounds’ available on a web interface. The Locustream
SoundMap project is based on the notion of
networked ‘open mic’ audio streaming where sitespecific, unmodified audio is broadcast on theInternet through a mapping interface. It seems thatthe project has its roots in artistic endeavors where‘streamers,’ persons who install the Locustream
boxes in their apartments, share ‘non-spectacularor non-event based quality of the streams’ thereby
revisiting a mode of listening exemplified by thecomposer John Cage.

Figure 1 shows the system overview. The datacollecting devices (d) are small computers thatwirelessly transmit feature vectors (v[n]) to a central
server. The minicomputers autonomously run thesignal processing modules for the optimal efficiencyof the entire system. Low-level acoustic feature
vectors streamed to the server are unintelligible andcannot be exploited to reconstruct the original audio
waveforms or ‘eavesdrop’ on private conversations.
This protects the privacy of individuals in public
spaces. However, to enable users to hear the‘texture’ of a space without compromising privacy
we employ a modified granular synthesis techniques(Gabor 1946) which results in shuffling the temporalmicrostructure of audio signals.

3. Citygram One: Goals, Structure,and Focus
The project’s main goals are to (1) investigate
potential avenues for capturing the flux of crowds,
machines, ambient noise, and noise pollution;(2) map, visualize, and sonify sensory data; (3)automatically infer and measure emotion/moodin public spaces through sound analysis, patternrecognition, and text analytics; (4) provide clues
to waves of contemplation and response in public
spaces; (5) provide hints into the invisible dynamics
between Citygram maps and aspects of urban
ecology such as crime and census statistics,
correlations to municipal boundaries, population
density, school performance, real-estate trends,
stock-market correlations, local, regional, national,
and global news headlines, voting trends, and traffic
patterns; (6) seek additional regional, national, andinternational collaborators.

314

Figure 1: System architecture Top: Autonomous
remote sensing devices transmitting feature vectors
Bottom: Measurement of acoustic energy (dB)

Citygram focuses on inferring useful informationfrom invisible energies. One type of avisual
information is environmental emotion or mood.
Although interdisciplinary sentiment research is stillin its nascent stages, automatic mood detection has
found increasing interest in the field of music (Liu etal. 2003; Wieczorkowska et al. 2006; Meyer 2007),
speech analysis (Chuang & Wu 2004; Vidrascu
2005; Schuller 2008; Shafran 2011), face-recognition(Cohn & Katz 1998; Yoshitomi et al. 2000; Nagpal

Digital Humanities 2012

et al. 2010), and natural language processing (Xiaet al. 2008; Tao 2004). As far as emotion detection
in music is concerned, much of the research canbe traced to Kate Hevner’s (Hevner 1936) seminal
work in musical expression (see Figure 2) and othermodels developed by Thayer and Tellegen-WastonClark (Thayer 1989; Tellegen et al. 1999) as shown in
Figure 3 and 4.

Figure 4: Tellegen-Waston-Clark mood model

4. Automatic Emotion Detection

Figure 2: Hevner’s adjective circle

Figure 3: Thayer’s model of mood

The fundamental architecture of automatic emotion
detection is shown in Figure 5. Features are extracted
from audio signals, followed by training of themachine learning (ML) algorithms via a set oftraining samples; at the final stage, the machineclassifies emotion ratings for unknown signals.
Although much of the emotion/mood detection
research for sound has been in the realm ofmusic, there is strong potential that algorithms andmethodologies similar to those used in music willtranslate to non-musical signals – many of the lowlevel feature vectors are timbral rather than musicaland reflect acoustic dimensions of sound.
We are exploring application of radial and ellipticalbasis functions (RBF/EBF) artificial neural networks(ANN) for automatic emotion classification as it has
shown promise in previous research (Park 2004;
Park and Cook 2005). We plan to compare Support
Vector Machines (SVM) with RBF/EBF ANNs as
each is based on contrasting approaches – RBF/EBF is hyperspherical/hyperellipsoid based and
SVM is hyperplane based. We are also investigating‘knowledge-based’ approaches for automatic verbal
aggression detection in acoustically complex social
environments already in use in public spaces (vanHengel et al. 2007). Feature vectors will be archived
on our server to provide users a hub for future
research on public spaces.

315

Digital Humanities 2012is the first iteration in the larger Citygram project.
Subsequent iterations of this project will include
analyzing additional types of avisual energies, such as
electromagnetic fields, humidity, temperature, color,and brightness and extending this dynamic, polysensory cartographic data into a resource for inquiry
on topics ranging from urban ontology and climatechange to sonification, and environmental kinetics.

References
Baum, D. (2006). Emomusic – Classifying Music
According to Emotion. Proceedings of the 7thWorkshop on Data Analysis, Kosice, Slovakia, July
2009.
British Broadcasting Corporation (2011). Save
Our Sounds. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservic
e/specialreports/saveoursounds.shtml(accessed 10 October 2011).

Figure 5: Mood/Emotion Detection Architecture

Natural language processing techniques will further
enrich the project’s assessment of environmental
sentiments via site-specific emotional readings fromon-line sources. Recent examples of localized text
sentiment visualization from blogs and micro-blogs
can be found in ‘Pulse of the Nation’ (Mislove et al.
2010) and ‘We Feel Fine’ (Harris & Kamvar 2011). In
conjunction with spatial acoustic emotion detection,
this analysis will help us render comprehensive,
dynamically changing emotion indices through our
on-line visualization mapping formats. The general
structure for sentiment analysis in the context of ML
is similar to general practices in ML for sound; both
apply algorithms aimed at revealing patterns throughfeatures. We are currently concentrating on keyword
spotting (Ortony et al. 1987) supplemented by‘common sense reasoning.’ Keyword spotting relies
on a pre-established lexicon of scored, significant
language. Common sense reasoning utilizes adatabase like Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) toinfer meaning from text. A toolkit like ConceptNet
is used in conjunction with OMCS to facilitate
sentiment analysis. This combination will allow us torecognize both pre-coded and emergent sentiments.
For instance, a keyword approach utilizes lists ofsignificant language and modifiers to recognize that‘unhappy,’ preceded by ‘very,’ is more significant thanjust ‘unhappy’ by itself. Recognizing that a capitalized
or exclamatory modifier, i.e.’VERY!!,’ accentuates
the keyword and intensifies its positive or negative
valence (intrinsic attractiveness vs. aversiveness)scale, requires OMCS.
This research, to better understand the dynamic
life and mood of urban spaces via acoustic ecology,
mapping, pattern recognition, and data visualization,
316

Chuang, Z., and H. Wu (2004). Multi-Modal
Emotion Recognition from Speech and Text.
International Journal of Computational Linguistics
and Chinese Language Processing 9(2): 45-62.
Cohn, J., and G. Katz (1998). Bimodal Expressionof Emotion by Face and Voice. Proceedings of the
Sixth ACM International Multimedia Conference,
New York, NY, September 1998.
Cohn J., and G. Katz (1998). Workshop on
Face / Gesture Recognition and Their Applications.
Proceedings of the Sixth ACM International
Multimedia Conference, New York, NY, September
1998.
Davies, A. (2011). Acoustic Trauma : Bioeffects ofSound. Honors Thesis, University of South Wales.
Devillers, L., V. Laurence, and L. Lori(2005). Challenges in Real-Life Emotion Annotationand Machine Learning Based Detection. Neural
Networks 18(4): 407-422.
Fragopanagos, N., and J. Taylor (2005).
EmotionRecognitionin
Human-Computer
Interaction. Neural Networks 18(4): 389-405.
Gabor, D. (1946). Theory of Communication.
Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers 93:
429-457.
Gupta, P., and N. Rajput (2007). Two-Stream
Emotion Recognition for Call Center Monitoring.
Proceedings of Interspeech, Antwerp, Belgium,
August 2007.
Harris, J., and S. Kamvar (2011). We Feel Fine
and Searching the Emotional Web. Proceedings ofthe Web Search And Data Mining Conference, Hong
Kong, China, November 2011.

Digital Humanities 2012

Hevner, K. (1936). Experimental Studies of the
Elements of Expression in Music. American Journalof Psychology 48: 246-268.

Ortony, A., G. L. Clore, and M. A. Foss (1987).
The Referential Structure of the Affective Lexicon.
Cognitive Science 11: 341-364.

Kessous, L., G. Castellano, and G. Caridakis(2004). Multimodal Emotion Recognition in SpeechBased Interaction Using Facial Expression, Body
Gesture and Acoustic Analysis. J Multimodal User
Interfaces 3: 33-48.

Park, T. H. (2004). Towards Automatic MusicalInstrument Timbre Recognition. Ph.D. thesis,
Princeton University.

Li, T., and M. Ogihara (2003). Detecting
Emotion in Music. Proceedings of the International
Society for Music Information Retrieval, Baltimore,
Maryland, October 2003.
Li, T., and M. Ogihara (2004). Content-BasedMusic Similarity Search and Emotion Detection.
Proceedings of the International Society for Music
Information Retrieval, Quebec, Canada, May 2004.
Liu, D., L. Lu, and H. Zhang (2003).
Automatic Mood Detection from Acoustic Music
Data. Proceedings of the International Society forMusic Information Retrieval, Baltimore, Maryland,
October 2003.
Liu, H. (2002). Automatic Affective Feedback in an
Email Browser. In MIT Media Lab Software Agents
Group.
Liu, H., H. Lieberman, and T. Selker (2003).
A Model of Textual Affect Sensing Using Real-World
Knowledge. International Conference on Intelligent
User Interfaces, Miami, FL, January 2003.
Liu, H., and P. Singh (2004). Conceptnet:
A Practical Commonsense Reasoning Toolkit. BT
Technology Journal 22: 211-26.
Locus Sonus (2008). LocusStream. http://locusonus.org/w/?page=Locustream . (accessed 10
October 2011).
Meyers, O. C. (2007). A Mood-Based MusicClassification and Exploration System. Master’s
thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mislove, A., S. Lehmann, and Y. Ahn (2010).
Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day
Inferred from Twitter. http://ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/twittermood/ . (accessed 1 November2011).
Nagpal, R., P. Nagpal, and S. Kaur (2010).
Hybrid Technique for Human Face Emotion
Detection. International Journal of Advanced
Computer Science and Applications 1(6).
Null, C. (2010). Which Online Mapping Service Is
Best? PC World. http://www.pcworld.com/articl

e/206702-2/which_online_mapping_service_is_best.html (accessed 30 October 2011).

Park, T. H., and P. Cook (2005). Radial/
Elliptic Basis Functions Neural Networks for MusicalInstrument Classification. Journées d’InformatiqueMusicale.
Presner, T. (2010). Hypercities: Building a Web
2.0 Learning Platform. In A. Natsina and T. Kyalis(eds.), Teaching Literature at a Distance.London:
Continuum Books, pp. 171-182.
Schnaps, J. (2009). Age and Clarity of
Imagery. http://sites.google.com/site/earth
howdoi/Home/ageandclarityofimagery (accessed
10 October 2011).
Schuller, B. W. (2008). Speaker, Noise, andAcoustic Space Adaptation for Emotion Recognitionin the Automotive Environment. Proceedingsof ITG Conference on Voice Communication(SprachKommunikation), pp. 1-4.
Shafran, I., and M. Mohri (2005). A Comparisonof Classifiers for Detecting Emotion from Speech.
Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on
Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, May 2005.
Singh, P., T. Lin, E. Mueller, G. Lim, T.
Perkins, and W. Zhu (2002). Open Mind Common
Sense: Knowledge Acquisition from the General
Public. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp.
1223-1237.
Tao, J. (2004). Context based emotion detection
from text input. Proceedings ofInternational
Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Jeju
Island, Korea, October 2004.
Tellegen, A., D. Watson, and L. A. Clark (1999).
On the dimensional and hierarchical structure ofaffect. Psychological Science 10: 297-303.
Thayer, R. (1989). The Biospychology of Mood andArousal. Cambridge: Oxford UP.
vanHengel,P.,
andT.
Andringa(2007). Verbal aggression detection in complex
social environments. Fourth IEEE International
Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based
Surveillance, London, United Kingdom, September,
2007.
Vidrascu, L., and L. Devillers (2005).
Annotation and detection of blended emotions inreal human-human dialogs recorded in a call center.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference317

Digital Humanities 2012

on Multimedia and Expo, Amsterdam, Netherlands,
July 2006.
Wieczorkowska, A., P. Synak, and Z. W. Ras(2006). Multi-Label Classification of Emotions inMusic. Intelligent Information Processing and Web
Mining 35: 307-315.
Xia, Y., L. Wang, K. Wong, and M. Xu(2008). Sentiment vector space model for lyricbased song sentiment classification. Proceedings ofthe 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics on Human Language
Technologies: Short Papers, Association for
Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, USA.
Yoshitomi, Y., S. I. Kim, T. Kawano,
and T. Kitazoe (2000). Effect of Sensor
Fusion for Recognition of Emotional States Using
Voice, Face Image and Thermal Image of Face.
IEEE International Workshop on Robot andHuman Interactive Communication, Osaka, Japan,
September 2000.

Towards Wittgenstein on
the Semantic Web
Pichler, Alois

Alois.Pichler@uni.no
University of Bergen, Norway

Zöllner-Weber, Amélieamelie.zoellnerweber@gmail.com
University of Bergen, Norway

1. Introduction
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 20,000 pages of manuscripts
and typescripts (his ‘Nachlass’) display his
continuous philosophical development and containrevisions, rearrangements and ‘multiple versioning.’
Their publication poses a number of challenges, forbook as well as for digital editions (Huitfeldt 1994).
Since its creation in 1990, the Wittgenstein Archives
at the University of Bergen (WAB) has tried to meetthese challenges through digital editorial philology.
In 2000, WAB’s ‘Bergen Electronic Edition’ (BEE)of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass was published by Oxford
University Press, and in 2009, 5000 pages from the
Nachlass were made freely available (Open Access)on the Web ( http://www.wittgensteinsource.or
g/ , cf. Fig. 1). Since 2001, XML-based text encoding(TEI P5) has been one of several central ingredients
through which WAB has worked continuously to
improve access to Wittgenstein’s manuscripts.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the Wittgenstein
Source Bergen Text Editon

One key aspect of making Wittgenstein better andwidely available is to prepare his works for the
Semantic Web (Krüger 2007, Pichler 2010, Erbacher
2011). This, in turn, creates new possibilities
for achieving deeper insights into his philosophy
and intertextual relations within and between hiswork(s). A case study for developing an ontology

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Digital Humanities 2012

for Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1922) was publishedin 2007 (Zöllner-Weber & Pichler 2007). Work
with the ontology received a significant boost fromthe EU-supported DISCOVERY project (2006-09,
Smith 2007) and established that the ontology
should permit interlinked browsing of philosophicalconcepts and primary sources. Therefore the
Wittgenstein ontology includes both classes forsources and for philosophical concepts as well as
properties which relate these classes. The ontology
was implemented using OWL. A visualization tool(cf. Fig. 2) which allowed for coordinated use ofboth classes was created: Philospace/SwickyNotes
which is today being further developed towards
a collaborative Web based ontology browser andannotation tool (Morbidoni & Nucci 2010).

Figure 3: Elements of the Wittgenstein ontology

In our view, providing a frame for documenting
and explicating different models of the world andits domains belongs to the assets of an ontology– irrespective of these models agreeing with one
other or not. Disagreement and alternative proposals
can be made visible, sharable and debatable
exactly through such an ontology. We regard theimplementation of an ontology in the field ofphilosophical interpretation as an opportunity rather
than as a hindrance.

Figure 2: Extract from the Wittgenstein
ontology in Philospace/SwickyNotes

From its start, the project was faced with a major
challenge: Wittgenstein’s work and philosophy arehighly dynamic, multi-facetted and in continuous
development. One example is Wittgenstein’s conceptof ‘meaning’ which in his Tractatus is primarily
linked to reference, in the middle period to rules,in the Philosophical Investigations (1953) to usage
and practice, and in his last years includes yet otheraspects such as ‘the atmosphere of a word.’ Even
within the same period and work a term can be usedin different and not always consistent ways. Many ofWittgenstein’s works are characterized by presenting
a range of different views and approaches (cf. Fig.
3). Wittgenstein commentators often disagree andpropose conflicting interpretations. How can suchchallenges be dealt with in ontologies?

When conceiving the ontology, WAB analysed
different dictionaries and indices of Wittgenstein’s
work, including Hanjo Glock’s valuable Wittgenstein
Dictionary (Glock 1996), and philosophicaldictionaries and works of reference more generally.
Obviously, WAB needed a bottom-up rather than a
top-down approach since its ontology should support
the use of specific texts, such as the 5000 pages ofWittgenstein Source. Another important aspect wasthat the ontology should match and support specifictasks that WAB and its partners, including guest
researchers, were involved in, such as teaching aclass on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, or joint research
on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology. In thisway, the ontology could be tested in research as wellas learning environments and developed further incooperation with Wittgenstein experts.

2. Description of the ontology
On the top level, the Wittgenstein ontology is divided
into two branches: Source and Subject (see Fig.
4). The Source class houses primary and secondary
sources relevant for Wittgenstein research; thesubclass PrimarySource divides further into
Wittgenstein sources and external sources (e.g.
Augustine’s Confessiones). The lowest subclass of
Wittgenstein primary sources is Bemerkung anddenotes the Wittgensteinian remark: typically notlonger than half a page and separated from otherremarks by one or more blank lines.
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The Subject class contains four subclasses: Issue,
Perspective, Point and Field. Issue refers to
subjects dealt with by Wittgenstein himself or in
Wittgenstein research, e.g. ‘elementary proposition’,‘logical independence’, ‘picture’ and ‘state of affairs’.
They denote the subjects which one would typically
expect to be included in the ‘subject index’ of acomprehensive study of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
Point is a specific category developed at WAB:
it refers to the point made or confirmed by anindividual Wittgensteinian remark and typicallycontains an entire statement or a question like ‘The
elementary proposition is a picture of a state ofaffairs’. Via the Source properties discussesIssue andhasPoint instances of Point can be interlinked withinstances of Issue.

Figure 4: Main classes of the Wittgenstein ontology

In order to provide for different modelling of therelations a Wittgensteinian subject can have, as wellas to serve different user needs, WAB introduced
the class Perspective. This class contains subclasses
which each represent a specific grouping or filteringof the instances of Issue and Point. As an example
the following may serve: Logical analysis (which
is an instance of Issue) is central to the methodof the philosophy from the perspective of theTractatus, while it is not from the perspectiveof the Investigations. A course on the Tractatuswill draw positive attention to that term, while acourse on the Investigations may not even have it
in its list of important subjects or start from thefollowing instance of Point: ‘Logical analysis is notcentral to philosophy’. One and the same instanceof Issue can enter different configurations, andeven configurations which contrast with each other.
For example, the subjects ‘elementary proposition’and ‘logical independence’ are in the Tractatus(1922) and “Some Remarks on Logical Form” (SRLF,
1929) combined to configurations contrasting witheach other. The first work claims: ‘Elementary
propositions are logically independent from eachother’, while the later denies this. The Tractatusperspective will include the claim ‘Elementary
propositions are logically independent from eachother’, while the later work’s perspective will include
a negation (property deniesPoint) of this claim or
the explicit claim: ‘Elementary propositions are notlogically independent from each other’ (see Fig. 3).
320

In addition, the class Field was created as suggested
by Grenon & Smith 2011. This field connects
the Wittgenstein domain with other domains
in philosophy and research more generally, e.g.
epistemology or aesthetics. Users not familiar with
Wittgenstein at all can enter Wittgenstein researchwith fields and debates from this class as theirstarting points. Each instance of Issue can beaffiliated with one or more such field.
The name of an Issue instance consists of a GermanEnglish compound; this enables both German andEnglish speakers to work more smoothly on the
ontology, and in addition provides welcome meansfor precisely disambiguating and identifying thedomain’s instances. Users browse the ontology
with a specific language set as preference: each
instance can, via rdfs:label, in principle be identified
and rendered in all languages. Currently, theontology contains about 700 Issue instances which
are rendered in German, English and Danish.
Renderings in Norwegian, French and Finnish arebeing added. WAB’s vision is that users of the
ontology shall as much as possible be enabled
to browse and access the Wittgenstein ontology
in a language of their preference. The ontology
is intended for use in the research and learning
environments of different languages.
Properties are key in WAB’s ontology: they
provide the relations which allow for interlinkedbrowsing of the ontology and Wittgenstein
primary sources. Properties of Bemerkung
which is the most important instance ofSource, include: isPartOfSource, hasAuthor,
hasDifferentVersion, refersToPerson, refersToText,
discussesIssue, hasPoint, deniesPoint a.o. Propertiesof an Issue instance can be: assertsPerspective,
isRelatedToIssue, isRelevantForField, a.o. Each
Bemerkung of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass shalleventually be associated by discussesIssue to atleast one instance of Issue, but also take on Point
properties such as hasPoint, directing to the class
Point. Thereby, a scholar searching for discussions ofcertain issues will be steered to certain remarks, andvice versa looking at a specific remark one’s attention
will be drawn also to specific issues or points.

3. Summary
WAB’s Wittgenstein ontology is still in its infancy,
especially with regard to its Subject branch. WAB
naturally cannot achieve its goal of a comprehensive
Wittgenstein ontology alone: while the first version of
the ontology and its overall structure were developedin the frame of the DISCOVERY project by WAB staff,
it has since 2010 been strengthened by international
cooperation (see http://wab.uib.no/wab_philo
space.page ). A key challenge in developing this

Digital Humanities 2012

ontology was to reflect Wittgenstein’s dynamic andmulti-facetted work, but also Wittgenstein research’s
different interpretations of this work. This wasdealt with by introducing among others the class
Perspective, allowing for concurring models in andabout Wittgenstein’s work while maintaining atechnically valid ontology. The instances of Issue are
the only stable entities of the Wittgenstein subject
domain; through the subclasses of Perspective
they can be combined and filtered in different
ways which can even contradict each other. The
ontology is related to Wittgenstein primary sources
via properties, enabling fast and easy studying ofWittgenstein within a common platform. In this way,research and learning about Wittgenstein can besignificantly enhanced.

Wittgenstein-Symposium. Kirchberg a.W.: ALWS,
pp.248-250.

References
Erbacher, C. (2011). Unser Denken bleibt gefragt:
Web 3.0 und Wittgensteins Nachlass. In S.
Windholz and W. Feigl (eds.), Wissenschaftstheorie,
Sprachkritik und Wittgenstein. Heusenstamm:ontos, pp. 135-146.
Glock, H. (1996). A Wittgenstein dictionary.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Grenon, P., and B. (2011). Foundations of an
ontology of philosophy.Synthese 182(2): 185-204.
Huitfeldt, C. (1994). Toward a Machine-Readable
Version of Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß. Beihefte zu editio
6: 37-43.
Krüger, H. W. (2007). Wittgenstein registrieren.
In Papers of the 30th International Ludwig
Wittgenstein-Symposium. Kirchberg a.W.: ALWS,
pp. 119-121.
Morbidoni, C., andM. Nucci (2010).
SwickyNotes user guide. http://www.swickynotes.org/docs/SWickyNotesStartingGuide.pdf .
Pichler, A. (2010). Towards the New Bergen
Electronic Edition. In N. Venturinha (ed.),Wittgenstein After His Nachlass. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan pp.157-172.
Smith, D. C. P. (2007). Re-Discovering
Wittgenstein. In: Papers of the 30th International
Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium. Kirchberg a.W.:
ALWS, pp. 208-210.
Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus
Philosophicus. London: Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein,L.
(1953).
Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Logico-Philosophical

Zöllner-Weber, A., and A. Pichler (2007).
Utilizing OWL for Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
In: Papers of the 30th International Ludwig
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Uncovering lost histories
through GeoStoryteller:
A digital GeoHumanities
project
Rabina, Debbie L.
drabina@pratt.edu
Pratt Institute, USA

Cocciolo, Anthonyacocciol@pratt.edu
Pratt Institute, USA

1. Brief description
In this paper, we first describe the design
and implementation of the GeoStoryteller project.
GeoStoryteller is a project where learners engage
with archival photos and multimedia narratives
in historically relevant places using a combinationof augmented reality technology and web-based
delivery via mobile devices. The initial applicationof GeoStoryteller is in partnership with theGoethe-Institut New York, the worldwide culturalorganization of Germany. In this partnership,learners – particularly German language students
in the United States – engage with content thatdetails the historical events and makes use ofreal places related to German immigration to
New York City (1840-1945). Second, based on thedesign and implementation of this project, we offer
a framework for creating location-based mobile
learning projects that could be used by others
interested in implementing similar projects.

2. Designing GeoStoryteller
GeoStoryteller builds upon recent research anddevelopment from the emerging subfield of theDigital Humanities known as GeoHumanities,
which is a term that highlights the growinginterconnections between geography and thehumanities.
GeoStoryteller
strengthens
thisconnection specifically by layering historic narratives
on a specific location and by making it available tolearners’ Internet-enabled mobile device. In the caseof the application of GeoStoryteller with the GoetheInstitut – named German Traces NYC – learners
can view location-sensitive maps and lists of historicsites related to German immigration to New York.
Once a learner arrives at a physical site, he or she
can see historic photos layered against the imagery
visible through the camera’s phone (also known as
augmented reality), as well as watch videos about
322

that particular site that include historic narratives
and archival photos. Users can also play short trivia
games that answers can only be found from being on
physical location and post their accomplishments toFacebook or Twitter.
For developing the videos – which we also referto as GeoStories – we turned to published, nonpublished, digital and non-digital sources available
from cultural and memory institutions (libraries,
archives, museums and historical societies). Using
these sources we developed historical narratives astext, and set those to audio recordings that wereaugmented with archival photos.
We then used geotechnologies to deliver the
narratives to users’ mobile devices (smart phones,
such as iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and tablets suchas iPad) at the places where these events occurred.
Geotechnologies used include global positioning
systems (GPS), digital mapping services (available
through Google) and Layar, an augmented-reality
browser for mobile devices.
For example, users can find such sites as the
Ottendorfer Library, the oldest public library in
Manhattan, opened originally to support the German
immigrant community in Kleindeutschland – orLittle Germany (today known as the East Village; see
Figure 1). While on site, learners can learn about
the people who crated the physical site, why theycreated the site (e.g., philosophies that motivatedtheir action) and how that site has changed overtime to reflect cultural and world events (e.g., antiGerman sentiment during both world wars).

3. Framework for creating
location-based mobile learning
projects
From our experience developing GeoStoryteller, weoffer a framework that can be used in the planningand implementation of similar projects.
At the core (the inner section) of this frameworkis traditional humanities research and development(see Figure 2). In the case of the GeoStoryteller
project, this included print, non-print, digital,
digitized, non-digital, archival, and publishedsources, all used to construct historical narrativesof German immigration in New York. Placing
humanities research and development at the coreof the framework highlights what distinguishes adigital humanities project from other digital projects.
Additionally, this type of research and development
could be done with other fields of the humanities,
including philosophy, literature, and the arts.

Digital Humanities 2012library). It cannot be assumed that the best learning
experience comes from the digital device, but could
result from the serendipitous interaction in the realenvironment.
From this stage, we proceed to the fourth ring, whichis the formal user research. In this stage, we use
traditional (e.g., surveys and interviews) and digital(e.g., tags, hits, time stamps) social science researchmethods to uncover the working of the interface,
address the theoretical questions, and evaluate thelearning outcomes and user engagement. Thesestudies can then influence any earlier stages (e.g.,
specific areas of content that did not engage theinterest of learners could be revised, confirming or
refuting the learning theory, or requiring changes tothe user interface).

Figure 1. Augmented-reality interface
for retrieving multimedia stories

Next, we proceed to the ‘Theory and Interface
Development’ ring. At this stage, researchers must
consider the theory that will inform their project,and how this theory will be reflected in the userinterface available to the learner. For example,
some of the theoretical questions we asked were,
how does situating historical content in physically
relevant locations affect learner engagement? And
does making augmented-reality content available
to learners further enhance engagement? Suchquestions necessarily lead to decisions about how topresent the content within a digital interface.
In the third ring, learners engage with the sociotechnical environment created by the researchers. In
the case of GeoStoryteller, this includes not simply
a user interface, but also the physically relevant
locations that the interface prompts the user toexplore. Additionally, social interactions may occur
during this stage among multiple others in theenvironment (e.g. a librarian in the Ottendorfer

Figure 2: A Process for Digital
Humanities Research and Development

4. Relevance to conference themes
The GeoStoryteller project addresses several of
the Digital Humanities 2012 conference themes
and aspects of digital humanities described in
the Call for Papers. By focusing on vertical
histories – or presenting narratives that describe
events at a specific locale throughout a period ofover 100 years – we introduce students to how
immigrant communities, their language and cultures,contributed to the fiber of New York City as weknow it today. We draw parallels between the
prejudices against, hardships, discrimination andfinally successful integration of the predominant
immigrant community of the 19th and early 20th
century immigrant and those of today. GeoStoryteller
is a completely bilingual project that serves both to323

Digital Humanities 2012

uncover lost histories of New York and demonstrate
their relevance to contemporary geohistory.

Workflows as Structured
Surfaces
Radzikowska, Milena

mradzikowska@gmail.com
Mount Royal University, Canada

Ruecker, Stansruecker@id.iit.edu
IIT Institute of Design, USA

Rockwell, Geoffrey

grockwel@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

Brown, Susan

susanirenebrown@gmail.com
University of Guelph, Canada

Frizzera, Lucianolucaju@me.com
University of Alberta, Canada

INKE Research Groupsruecker@id.iit.edu
University of Alberta, Canada

At DH 2011 in Stanford, we introduced the conceptof structured surfaces, where we extended themetaphor of interactive digital pins on a digital map
into interactive digital pins on any data visualization(Radzikowska et al. 2011). We proposed that such
structured surfaces would provide a means for people
working with digital collections to gain insight into
their material while also providing them a means offormulating an argument about the data.
More recently, in considering scholarly editions,
we became interested in how the concept of thestructured surface could be applied to the editorial
process – in effect, producing an interface derived
from the flowchart of activities that an editor can use
to manage the movement of a submitted article orother item of text (such as a book review) throughthe stages from its initial appearance in the editor’s
inbox to the final step where it is ready to send to theprinter.
Accordingly, we have designed and are in theprocess of producing experimental prototypes ofa series of these workflow interfaces for different
kinds of editorial jobs, including the publication ofjournal articles, the writing of XML-encoded original
material based on Orlando biocritical entries on
women writers, and the editing of a scholarly edition(e.g. Figure 1). In these designs, the structured
surface consists of the flowchart used by the editor,

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and the pins represent the articles, with size of pin
indicating length of article in words.

Figure 1: This workflow diagram shows the movement ofa journal article through the publication process from theperspective of the journal editor who is managing that process

Numerous other systems exist for managing
workflow in the context of digital text production,such as that devised by the Public Knowledge
Project for its Open Journal Systems and its OpenMonograph Systems. The interfaces here seek toretain the modularity and customizability associatedwith such systems but to combine them with arich prospect visualization (Ruecker, Radzikowska& Sinclair 2011) of the collection being managed
than has hitherto been implemented. Recent workin computing science has focused both on workflow
analysis (e.g. Schroeder 2009) and on algorithms forautomatic layout (e.g. Albrecht et al. 2010).
However, a workflow management tool, as usefulit might be to the editor who has not had theadvantage of using one yet, is in itself not aparticularly interesting object. It is essentially astructured checklist, composed of a collection ofstages with transitions, including occasional decision
points between them. But once such a concept isavailable for interrogation, it can begin to introduce
additional considerations.
For example, why is the structure of the stages limited
to a simple bucket? Would it not be useful to beable to distinguish different kinds of material moving
through the system? It might possible, for instance,
to automatically identify file types so that digitaltext is treated one way by the tool, while digital
film is treated another. Or the editor may wish to
produce a variant of the workflow for book reviews as
opposed to peer-reviewed articles. So we have begun
to experiment with ways of visually structuring theboxes that represent stages (Figure 2).

Figure 2: An initial attempt to turn the workflow
stage itself into a kind of structured surface

Once we have the concept of the system automaticallydoing something to the documents, it is a short step
to recalling that the original goal of the structured
surface project was to provide the user with a set ofanalytics in the form of a data visualization and anargument made by the superimposition of pins. In
that context, it seems reasonable to consider whatkinds of analytical processes might be applicable tovarious stages within the workflow, and also whatkind of information might be useful to the editor ateach stage. For example, when an article is with areviewer, the editor is likely to be primarily interested
in the following information:- the title of the article- the name and contact information of the reviewer- the dates when the article went to the reviewer andwhen it is expected backA rollover of the pin within the ‘at the reviewer’stage should therefore by default produce this listof information, with access to further information
relegated to the ‘more...’ link. At the next stage,
however, when the article is back from thereviewer(s), what the editor would like to know is theresults of the review. A rollover of the pin while inthat bucket should therefore produce the title of thearticle and the name of the reviewer(s), but also thecontents of the review.
On the analytics side, there may be processes (likereviewing) where the article is passed to anotherperson, but there may also be processes where thearticle is passed to some algorithmic treatment, suchas an automated step of metadata enhancement
where the system makes the first pass at named325

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entity recognition for people and places. Since oneof the affordances of the JiTR environment is thatany collection or subset of a collection can be passed
to a tool, perhaps the contents of the stages within
the workflow could serve as subsets for this kind oftreatment. An editor might then, for instance, decide
to take a look at a KWIC concordance for a term inevery article in the ‘accepted’ bucket for the current
edition, or run a word cloud on all the articles thathave been accepted or rejected. The wordcloud of
acceptances might provide some guidance in writing
an introductory editorial, for instance, while thelatter might help the editor see whether there is a
gap in reviewer expertise at work. Support for these
sorts of curiosity-driven activities within the editorial
process itself has the potential to change the natureof the task in a variety of ways.
Finally, the concept of an interface that combines
workflow management with analytics is of
considerable interested to the Canadian Writing
Research Collaboratory (CWRC) project, which seeks
to lower the bar to participation in online resource
creation and enhancement by mainstream scholars
without significant expertise in digital humanities,
and in so doing lower the overhead of producing
scholarly materials on the web. In order to ensure
quality control within a system such as CWRC’s,a workflow process needs to be highly intuitive
as well as modular, robust, and well integrated
with other interface components. For these reasons,
CWRC is experimenting with the structured surfaces
interface and the JiTR environment as a major
component of its interface, seeing the potential of
it for managing everything from query results toworflow management to membership coordination.
The CWRC project has presented the interface
to Collaboratory members at two workshops thisyear and is extending the prototype to handle
Orlando-like workflows and interact with an external
workflow engine.
This presentation will outline the transfer of thestructured surface concept to workflows, show thesketches and demonstrate the prototypes, and reporton user feedback to date. It will provide an analysisof the implications of this approach to supporting
the editorial process, suggesting that there are anumber of potential new affordances that make theworkflow a useful addition to the editor’s toolbox. Aninterface which integrates a tightly defined workflow
alongside the ability to invoke other tools, we argue,
can also encourage new kinds of thinking about
possible improvements or additions to the workflow.

References
Albrecht, B., P. Effinger, M. Held, and M.
Kaufmann (2010). An automatic layout algorithm
for BPEL processes. Proceedings of the 5th
326international symposium on Software visualization(SOFTVIS ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 173-182.
DOI=10.1145/1879211.1879237 http://doi.acm.org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.11
45/1879211.1879237

Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory.
http://www.cwrc.ca

Open

JournalSystems

Documentation.

http://pkp.sfu.ca/files/OJSinanHour.pdf

Open Monograph Project. http://pkp.sfu.ca/omp

Orlando Project. http://orlando.cambridge.orgRadzikowska, M., S. Ruecker, S. Brown, P.
Organisciak, and the INKE Research Group(2011). Structured Surfaces for JiTR. Paper presented
at the Digital Humanities 2011 conference. Stanford,
June 19-21, 2011.
Ruecker, S., M. Radzikowska, and S. Sinclair(2011). Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural
Heritage: A Guide to Rich-Prospect Browsing.
Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.
Schroeder, W. (2009). New tools for task
workflow analysis. Proceedings of the 27th
international conference extended abstracts on
Human factors in computing systems (CHI EA’09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3877-3882.
DOI=10.1145/1520340.1520587 http://doi.acm.org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.11
45/1520340.1520587 .

Digital Humanities 2012

Code-Generation
Techniques for XML
Collections Interoperability
Ramsay, Stephen

sramsay.unl@gmail.com
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

Pytlik-Zillig, Brianbpytlikz@unlnotes.unl.edu
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

XSLT has often been criticized for its verbosity.1
Control structures, in particular, can require many
more lines of code (and many more indicationsof start and end state) than nearly any modern
programming language. Yet for all this, XSLT has
features that make it an ideal language both forcode generation (automatic generation of XSLT using
XSLT itself) and as a target output format for otherlanguages. In this paper, we discuss our attempts totackle the problem of collections interoperability by
exploiting both features of XSLT.
The rules governing the validity of particular
XML instances are usually set forth in one ofseveral standard forms of specification (such as
RELAX NG,2 XML Schema,3 or the older Document
Type Definition4). Such schemas typically specify
the nature, number, and sequence of permissible
elements, ensure their correspondence to particular
data types, and enforce the overall referential
integrity of the instance. We have developed a system(called Abbot) that uses schema definitions locatedin a target schema to generate a stylesheet that will
effect the transformation of one or more document
collections into instances that validate against thatsame schema.5
In the trivial case, where the target schema describes
a proper subset of the collections in question,
Abbot operates more-or-less automatically, but more
complex transformations are also possible. One can,for example, give the system two collections and haveit generate a stylesheet that makes one collection
conform to the schema of the other. One can also
make several collections target an entirely different
schema. In these latter cases, it becomes necessary todescribe particular mappings in a configuration file,
but that configuration uses a simple syntax unrelated
either to that of a schema language or XSLT.
The key step here is the automatic generation of
an XSLT stylesheet. Our choice of XSLT as thelanguage that generates that stylesheet might atfirst seem slightly perverse, but because XSLT isa homoiconic language – a language in which theprimary representation of the language is itself
a data structure in that same language – code
generation can be undertaken through the useof metapgramming (in which code is passed intoanother, more abstract layer and evaluated).6
The Abbot system begins by running a ‘metastylesheet’ (analogous to a higher-order function ina traditional functional language) on both a target
schema and a configuration file. The configuration
file, while not written in XSLT, is nonethelessconverted into XSLT by the surrounding runtime(using a translation method we discuss below). By
default, that target schema describes TEI Analytics– a TEI subset that provides an encoding scheme
optimized for text analysis. This meta-stylesheet
generates, as its only output, a conversion stylesheet
used for the actual transformation of the documents.
This latter transformation yields files that will, in the
majority of cases, validate against the target schema.
When Abbot reads the target schema, it accounts forall elements and associated attributes and generates
a default XSLT template for each element. Thesedefault templates reflect the general assumption thatelements and attributes in the input files resemble
their counterparts in the target schema. If, forexample, <foo n="001"/> exists in the input fileand is specifically allowed in the target schema,then Abbot will pass the element through unalteredunder the assumption that the element is fully valid.
Anything beyond that needs to be articulated in theconfiguration file.
Ultimately, the custom transformations set forth in
the configuration file need to be instantiated as XSLT
templates and included in the conversion stylesheet
at runtime. For example, to replace the <temphead>element with <teiHeader> (its TEI P5 counterpart),
the system would need to generate the following:<transformation type="xslt" activate="yes"><desc>substitute ’temphead’ with ’teiHeader’</desc><xsl:templatematch="*[lowercase(name())=’temphead’]" priority="1"><teiHeader><xsl:apply-templates/></teiHeader></xsl:template></transformation>
To replace spaces with underscores in the extent
attribute of the <gap> element (a considerably more327

Digital Humanities 2012

complex operation), requires substantially morecode:
<transformation type="xslt" activate="yes"><desc>add underscore to ’gap’ @extents containing
a space</desc><xsl:templatematch="*[lowercase(name())=’gap’]" priority="1"><xsl:choose><xsl:when test="contains(@extent,’ ’)">
<xsl:element name="gap">

temphead -> teiHeader<xsl:for-each select="@extent">

The second, more complicated example might be
expressed as:<xsl:choose>gap[@extent=’/ /’] -> gap[@extent=’/_/’]<xsl:when test="contains(.,’ ’)">In this way, Abbot becomes not merely aframework for effecting interoperability of XML
document collections, but a general purpose XML
transformation framework that avoids the need for
XSLT itself.7<xsl:attribute name="extent"><xsl:value-of select="replace(.,’ ’,’_’)"/></xsl:attribute></xsl:when><xsl:otherwise><xsl:copy-of select="."/></xsl:otherwise></xsl:choose></xsl:for-each><xsl:apply-templates/></xsl:element></xsl:when><xsl:otherwise><xsl:copy-of select="."/></xsl:otherwise></xsl:choose></xsl:template></transformation>
Depending on the particular situation, theconfiguration file might have to contain dozensof hand-built templates for performing subtle
transformations that cannot be deduced from theschema. But here, we undertake a second codegeneration step using Clojure – a dialect of Lisp thatruns on the Java Virtual Machine.
Because Lisp is also a homoiconic language, it too
is well suited to code that reads and writes code.
Moreover, XML is itself a first-class datastructure in

328

Clojure, which can be easily (and lazily) transformed
into a map object in which descendant nodes are
represented as nested vectors. The problem ofparsing a configuration file (in which complicatedXSLT transformations are rendered in the form ofa radically simplified DSL), becomes a matter ofparsing the file into a map structure. Clojure canthen trivially transform that map directly into XML(XSLT), which can be inserted at runtime into theconversion stylesheet. The first XSLT example above
becomes something like:Thinking of XSLT as an intermediate form – alanguage that is targeted much as a compiler mighttarget assembly – allows us to imagine radicallysimplified document transformation languages thatcan (potentially) exploit the full range of XSLT
itself. In the case of Abbot, radical simplificationis possible, in part, because the problem domain
is itself highly constrained. But such constraints
constitute precisely the rationale for domain-specificlanguages that try to map a user’s domain knowledge
to a simplified syntax. Such languages, while smallerand simpler than more general-purpose languages,
often still require the full range of language design
tools (lexers, parser generators, the specification of agrammar, and so forth). Exploiting the homoiconicityof languages that possess this feature – including
XSLT itself – makes the process of designing a ‘minilanguage’ considerably easier.

References
Adler, S. (1997). A Proposal for XSL. World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org/TR/N
OTE-XSL.html (accessed 31 October 2011).
McIlroy, D. (1960). Macro Instruction Extensionsof Compiler Languages. Communications of the ACM
3(4): 214-220.
Pytlik-Zillig, B. (2009). TEI Analytics: Converting
Documents into a TEI Format for Cross-Collection
Text analysis. Literary and Linguistic Computing
24(2): 187-192.
Pytlik-Zillig, B. (2011). TEI Texts that Play Nicely:
Lessons from the MONK Project. Journal of theDigital Humanities 2012

Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities andComputer Science 1(3): 1-5.
Unsworth, J. (2011). Computational Work with
Very Large Text Collections: Interoperability,
Sustainability, and the TEI. Journal of the Text
Encoding Initiative 1 http://jtei.revues.org/2
15 . (accessed 21 October 2011).
Notes
1. A Web search for ‘XML verbosity’ will bear this out amply,
though we note that this ‘loquaciousness’ is itself consistent
with the design goals of XML, which was intended to be ahuman readable format. In the first formal XSL proposal, theauthors explicitly state that ‘Terseness in XSL markup is ofminimal importance’ (see Adler 1997).

Uncertain Date, Uncertain
Place: Interpretingthe History of Jewish
Communities in the
Byzantine Empire using
GIS
Rees, Gethin Powellgpr26@cam.ac.uk
University of Cambridge, UK

2. http://relaxng.org/
3. http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema
4. The Document Type Definition is currently defined by the
XML specification itself, though it descends from earlier
specifications associated with Standard Generalized Markup
Language (SGML). The Extensible Markup Language (XML)specification is at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
5. We have called this method ‘schema harvesting’ (see PytlikZillig 2011).
6. Homoiconicity is a property of several programming
languages, including REBOL, SNOBOL, PostScript, XQuery,
Prolog, and all dialects of Lisp. The concept of homoiconicity
is first set forth in Douglas McIlroy’s 1960 article, ‘Macro
Instruction Extensions of Compiler Languages’ (see McIlroy
1960).
7. Abbot cannot, of course, replace XSLT in all circumstances,since the DSL we are describing is not intended to capture theentire semantics of XSLT. Still, we imagine that Abbot can be
usefully employed in many situations in which large bodies oftexts are being transformed, even if interoperability is not a
primary concern.

1. Introduction
The presentation will address the problem of how
to display uncertain historical data in a web-based
Geographical Information System (GIS). In recent
years the use of internet GIS has allowed thegeneral public to access large volumes of spatial
data. Although GIS has been applied in specificareas of academic research, the technology haslargely remained the preserve of specialists, as
it can be difficult to use, requiring training andexperience (Boonstra 2009). Yet the application of
GIS to humanities research in general, and to theinterpretation of historical data in particular, has thepotential to develop and answer innovative researchquestions (Bodenhamer, Corrigan & Harris 2010).
The ‘Mapping the Jewish Communities of the
Byzantine Empire’ project will use Internet GIS
technology to disseminate data that outline thehistory of these communities. The project is based at
the Centre for Advanced Religious and TheologicalStudies, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge
and is funded by the European Research Council.
Textual, epigraphic and archaeological data allow the
project to establish the locations, dates and otherattributes of Jewish communities. Prior to our work
these data were scattered, fragmentary and difficult
to access. The project incorporates varied data inan Internet GIS which provides an efficient methodof dissemination through dynamic, interactive maps.
The GIS will feature an easy-to-use interface making
data accessible through a standard web browser.
The project team hopes that this accessibility will
promote the inclusion of the Byzantine Jewish
communities in the study of Byzantine, Jewish andminority history. A further aim is that medieval
historians with little experience of GIS will become
familiar with the technology and its potential throughuse of the website.

329

Digital Humanities 2012

The spatial perspective that the project offers
will allow research into Jewish communities todevelop in new directions. For example, the project’s
GIS could be used to aid interpretation of theinvolvement of Jews in trade, the effect of politicalchange on their distribution and lives, and thefactors that influenced the development of separate
Jewish residential quarters. The focus of thispresentation will be the role of Jews in the Byzantine
economy. A robust understanding of geography isimportant for interpreting trade and therefore theperspective that GIS offers makes it a valuable aid tounderstanding historical economies. Characteristics
of Jewish communities such as their location anddate are crucial to evaluating their interaction withthe wider economy and are fundamental to thestructure of the project’s database. Yet these data arebeset by uncertainty, causing significant problems
with their representation and interpretation in GIS.

2. Uncertain Data in GIS
The presentation of historical data using GIS is notstraightforward as the technology has developed in
the context of empirical research. Symbols used inany form of mapping can convey an unwarranted airof reliability by masking differences between features
represented in a single category. The original sourceson which maps are based are rarely revisited byscholars in the same way that references to texts
are. Maps have a veneer of objectivity making themeasily manipulated to suit particular interpretations(Monmonier 1996). Similar problems affect GIS, andthe technology has, since the late-twentieth century,
been criticised for being over-reliant on a positivist
interpretative framework. Historical or other cultural
data are often uncertain and therefore the applicationof GIS in these areas requires a different approach.
Uncertainty can be divided into three categories.
First are factors that are inherent in defining
the object of study; second are problems withsources of information and their interpretation;and third are issues with the representation andreduction of these data to feature in a database(Plewe 2002). Uncertainty can arise in each ofthese areas where characteristics are, for example,
contested, ambiguous or unreliable. These problems
are particularly acute in interpreting historical
data from medieval and earlier periods (Bartley& Campbell 1997). To be a useful resource forhistorical research, our website must incorporate
and communicate the complexity of these data
in a format that is straightforward enough to beunderstood quickly and by non-specialists. This
presentation will examine uncertainty in the locationand date of Jewish communities as these attributes
are fundamental to the structure of the project’s
database.
330

3. Representing Uncertainty
Through Transparency
The project has developed a system of symbols that
communicates uncertainty in dating and locating
Jewish communities. Degree of uncertainty isrepresented by variation in the transparency ofsymbols. To give an example, the date of a person’sbirth can be known with varying degrees of certainty.
Where one source may provide the date to the exact
day, another might only give the year. Dates may
also be reached by comparison or interpretation. If
the symbol that represents a piece of data in the
project GIS is more transparent, the user is madeaware that there is less certainty regarding its date.
Uncertain dates will be displayed as periods withreference to a time series. The system of symbols willcommunicate the certainty with which the existenceof a Jewish community at a particular date is known.
This can allows users of the website to examine
the Jewish presence within the wider framework of
Byzantine economic history with an appropriate levelof confidence.
The system will also use transparency tocommunicate uncertainty regarding where Jewish
communities were located. The location of a Jewish
community can be questioned due to, for example,
ambiguous or imprecise references in sources as well
as differences in their interpretation. The degree towhich a symbol is transparent will be determined by
the number of possible locations. The siting of Jewish
communities was influenced by and was an influenceon their role in the economy. Preliminary analysis
supports the view that some Jewish communities
resided in particular locations for economic reasons.
Internet GIS can help historians gain a better
understanding of these relationships providing that
uncertainties in the data are communicated.
To explicate the representation of uncertainty, thewebsite must communicate the sources and types of
uncertainty to the user. Information on uncertainty
and the transparency of symbols will be madeaccessible through clicking on symbols. The sources
used to produce the GIS will be communicatedthrough metadata. The symbols will also allow accessto other attribute data provided in the sources
including religious sect, occupation and name. These
attributes provide further structure to the databaseand form the basis of searches.

4. Summary and Implications
The historical study of medieval economies would
benefit from greater integration with geography,
particularly to develop a detailed understanding of
the spatial character of trade. Our project’s GIS canhelp to develop this understanding by disseminating

Digital Humanities 2012

historical data whilst being sensitive to the needsof medieval historians. It is hoped that the systemused for communicating uncertainty in our project’s
Internet GIS will be taken up by future historicalprojects that deal with uncertain data.

References
Bartley, K., and B. M. S. Campbell (1997).
Inquisitiones Post Mortem, GIS, and the Creation ofa Land-use Map of Medieval England. Transactionsin GIS 2: 333-46.
Bodenhamer, D., J. Corrigan, and T. Harris,eds. (2010). The Spatial Humanities: GIS andthe Future of Humanities Scholarship. Indiana
University Press, Indiana.
Boonstra, O. (2009). Barriers Between Historical
GIS and Historical Scholarship. In D. Bodenhamer
and P. Ell (eds.), International Journal of Humanities
and Arts Computing 3. Edinburg: Edinburgh UP, pp.
3-7.
Monmonier, M. S. (1991). How to Lie with Maps.
London: U of Chicago P.
Plewe, G. (2002). The Nature of Uncertainty inHistorical Geographic Information. Transactions in
GIS 6: 431-56.

Code sprints andInfrastructure
Reside, Doug

dougreside@gmail.com
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts,
USA

Fraistat, Neilnfraistat@gmail.com
Maryland Institute for Technology in the
Humanities (MITH), University of Maryland, USA

Vershbow, Ben

benjaminvershbow@nypl.org
New York Public Library, USA

van Zundert, Joris Job

joris.van.zundert@gmail.com
Huygens Institute for the History of The
Netherlands, The Netherlands

Over the last five years, several national andsupranational funding bodies have invested in large
digital humanities infrastructure projects designed,in part, to reduce the proliferation of projects
inventing and reinventing small, commonly needed
tools. During the same period, several very modestly
funded projects have attempted to achieve thesame results by holding working meetings – called‘code sprints’ – to develop commonly needed tools
collaboratively. Interedition, The Center for History
and New Media’s One Week | One Tool, MITH’s
XML Barn-Raising, and New York Public Library’s
Tilden Papers Project have each hosted a series ofcode camps (also known as boot camps or code
sprints) that bring together groups of humanities
scholars with serious programming expertise tospend a week working on a tool of value to each ofthem. The process has proven to be so productivethat it has recently been adopted by one of thelarge infrastructure projects, Project Bamboo, in‘CorporaCamp.’ In this panel, we will examine
the advantages and limitations of the small, agile
methods of code sprints and how they may besupported by the large, sustainable infrastructures
currently under construction by larger projects.
The advantages of codesprints are numerous. By
spending time in rapid prototyping; by gatheringscholars who are also coders (rather than those with
only one skill or the other); and by establishing a
policy of, to quote Dave Lester, ‘More Hack, less yak!’,worksprints quickly determine the real challenges
facing academic software development and often
make significant headway towards solving them.

331

Digital Humanities 2012

‘One week, one tool’ produced Anthologize which
continues under active development and use to thisday; Interediton has produced, among other things,
CollateX (a modular automated collation workflow);
the MITH barn raising produced a prototype ofa web-based XML editor: ANGLES; and NYPL’s
codesprint significantly refactored the code in theInternet Archive’s BookReader tool and prepared
it for future extensions by the participants. These
sprints not only build tools, they lay the groundwork
and point the way for the sort of infrastructure thatis truly needed.
Nonetheless, these sprints occasionally encounter
problems. Setting up code-sharing mechanisms,
installing needed dependencies, and teaching coding
dialects such as jQuery or Node.js to participants
unfamiliar with them often absorbs a full day of work.
Differing expectations and desires by participants
can sometimes (though surprisingly rarely) threaten
to derail progress. Documenting work so that it
can be taken up later or by others is sometimes
not prioritized to the extent it should be. Further,although there is often much to do at the end of
the sprints, participants frequently find it difficult
to continue working when they return home ascompeting and more immediate priorities takeprecedence. It is possible that large infrastructure
projects such as Bamboo, Dariah, and TextGrid
could provide the organizational and administrative
infrastructure needed to make codesprints more
effective and their work more sustainable.
This paper will discuss four code sprints (outlined
below), recount ‘lessons learned’, and discuss how
big infrastructure projects and light-weight, rapid
development efforts such as these may support eachother.
Sample case studies:
MITH ‘Barn Raising’: In 2010, Doug Reside(Digital curator for the Performing Arts, NYPL)
organized a ‘barn raising’ to produce a web-based
XML editor in his last weeks at the Maryland Institutefor Technology in the Humanities. The event brought
several participants from Canada and elsewhere in
the United States to College Park, Maryland, but alsoorganized a group of coders to participate remotely
via Skype and IRC. After the first two days ofthe sprint, the group divided into two groups, one
concerned with building a WYSIWIG editor and one
wanting to replicate the core functionality of popular
XML editors in a JavaScript-based web application.
The second group consisted almost entirely of remoteparticipants, but arguably built more code in thecourse of the sprint than those working together inthe same room.
BookReader Sprint: In 2011, Benjamin
Vershbow organized New York Public Library’s
332

worksprint to extend the Internet Archive’s
JavaScript widget, BookReader. The goal of the
project was to refactor the Internet Archive’s existingcode to make it more modular and extensible. Arounda dozen participants were brought to New York fromlibraries around North America for four days ofhacking on the code base. In an attempt to be open
to the many desired use-cases of the BookReader,
NYPL invited participants with a diverse set of skills
and desires which, in retrospect, probably dispersed
some of the productive energy of the sprint into
efforts that could not be realistically achieved in thecourse of a few days. However, the sprint is notably inthat it began to extend an existing, heavily used, codebase supported by a major organization.
Interedition: Over the past three years, Jorisvan Zundert organized ten boot camps as part ofEuropean Cost Action IS0704 ‘Interedition’. The bootcamps varied in participation from 5 to 15 scholars,
developers, and scholarly developers from the wider
European region and the US. The boot camps
focused transcription, annotation, and collation
as primary scholarly tasks in producing (digital)
scholarly editions that could effectively be supported
by common models and tools. The Interedition bootcamps have resulted in various new tools in the formof web services – of which CollateX probably is best
known – and considerable progress of developmentof existing tools (Juxta, eLaborate etc.). However,the production of tools is paradoxically ‘just’ a side
effect of the Interedition endeavor. Interedition’s
main objective is furthering the interoperability oftools used in the production of scholarly editions asa means of enhancing the sustainability of both tools
and digital editions. One of Interedition’s findings
was that it is pivotal to such sustainability that
there must be an academic platform supporting
researcher-developers’ interaction and collaboration
in a most concrete way: interoperability andintegration of tool development is best done together.
Corpora Camp: Neil Fraistat and Seth Denboorganized Corpora Camp as part of project Bamboo.
CorporaCamp was a key step in the design process
for Project Bamboo’s Corpora Space, which will
enable the curation and exploration of data acrossthe boundaries of large structured collections. The
primary goal of Corpora Camp was to see if overthe space of three days participants could make aprototype tool for visualization and analysis function
across three different collections. While the ‘work’of the workshop involved building this tool – which
we called WoodChipper – the tool itself was only
one of several important outcomes. CorporaCamp
not only tested our assumptions about the larger
design process for Bamboo Corpora Space, but
the rapid development process of the workshop
required us constantly to balance our long-term

Digital Humanities 2012

goals – experimenting with a distributed, extensible
architecture – against our desire to have a working
prototype implemented at the end of the three days.
In many cases the team had two development threads
running in parallel, with one group working on amore general solution and another on a simpler
fallback. This process provide a better sense of
the problems and decisions – and the range ofconsequences of those decisions – that would be
faced with in developing Bamboo architecture andapplications.

Digital Genetic Criticism of
RENT
Reside, Doug

dougreside@gmail.com
New York Public Library, USA

While textual critics of medieval and classic texts
require expertise in paleography, those studying
contemporary works, and in particular contemporary
multimodal works such as musical theater, requirea similar sort of facility with digital forensics. In
this paper I will detail the digital forensic techniques(and a few dumb hacks) that I have used to createa detailed biography of the musical, RENT, from it’searliest its earliest incarnation in 1989 to the final
version edited by Larson and saved just two weeks
before his death in 1996. I will also suggest a setof skills those attempting similar work may wish toacquire.
Jonathan Larson, the Broadway composer andlyricist, used his personal computer as a creative tool
throughout his brief career from the mid-1980s to his
premature death at 36 in January of 1996. After his
death, around 180 of the floppy disks he used to save
his work were donated to the Library of Congress. In
2007, I was permitted to create complete, bit-for-bit,
data images of these disks and study any file related
to the creation of Larson’s most famous musical,
RENT. These disks contain several dozen drafts of
RENT.
In some cases, multiple drafts are recoverable froma single file. In 1992, when most personal computersran only about 5% as fast as an iPhone 4, saving
an entire file to a floppy disk was a potentially time
consuming activity. While writing RENT, Larson
mostly used Microsoft Word 5.1, which had a feature
called ‘fast save.’ The fast save feature sped thesaving process somewhat by replacing the entire
file only once every 14 saves or so. In most cases,
it would simply append changes to the end of afile with information about where they belonged in
the original document. When the file was openedin Word 5.1, the software would integrate thesechanges back into main text; however, by opening
this file with a simple text editor, it is possible tosee the text of the last full save along with all theemendations made during fast saves in an apparently
uninterrupted text stream stored at the bottom of the
file.
Unfortunately, the Word 5.1 standard has no openly
published documentation. Thus, while additional
text stored by a ‘fast save’ are visible, the way in333Digital Humanities 2012

which this text maps onto the ‘base text’ is not
immediately obvious. Fortunately, with the help ofMicrosoft Research, I have obtained documentationthat describes the standard (unfortunately provided
under a non-disclosure agreement), which describes
how this mapping was accomplished. Therefore,
although this paper will not include a complete
description of the specification for legal reasons, itwill demonstrate how several versions of a Larson’s
text might be reconstructed from a single Word file.
For example, throughout 1992 there are several files
and folders on Larson’s disks that contain versions
specially formatted for the laser printer. In 1992
Larson generally used a ‘dot-matrix’ printer thatworked by pushing ink from a small typewriterlike ribbon onto paper in a series of small dotsthat composed the desired letters or the image. The
printer would advance the paper through a spool
in increments as tall as the printer ribbon as eachline of dots was printed. Although this method of
printing was relatively inexpensive and was capableof representing image that could be composed outof the dots (rather than, say, a fixed set of lettersand numbers), it produced copies that, even in the
1990s, appeared amateurish. There were a finite (andrelatively small) number of dots available on any
line which made text appear jagged, and ink would
transfer from the ribbon inconsistently, creating a
faded, uneven look. Larson was content with thistechnology for rough drafts, but when he needed a
copy to give to a potential producer, he would print
the text on a laser printer (perhaps at a copy service
store).
There was a complication, however. Text formatting
conveys a good deal of meaning in musical theater
libretti. Stage directions are often represented
alongside spoken text as typed marginalia;
overlapping lines sung in unison or counterpoint
are represented in different columns. At this period,
the relatively low resolution of the screen Changes
in typeface or margins can change the line lengths
and create wrap-around text where a hard break
was intended creating an amateurish appearance
that the use of the laser-printer was supposed toprevent. Larson’s usual font ‘New York,’ like manyof those designed for early versions of the Macintosh
operating system, was a ‘bitmap’ typeface, meaningthat each character was stored as a small image.
Just as a small ‘thumbnail’ image downloaded froma website becomes fuzzy or ‘pixelated’ when it’s size
is increased much beyond the original size, the sizeof a bitmap font cannot be attractively increased
beyond the original size of the character images.
Moreover, the quality of the characters themselves –how smooth or jagged they appear – will not changeeven if the monitor or the printer quality improves.
‘Vector’ fonts, like the ‘Courier’ font used in Larson’s334‘laser’ drafts, on the other hand, are generated
not from an image file but from an equation that
describes the lines and curves of the characters. The
result is that the characters can be smooth as themonitor or printer can make them and can be scaled
up to any size without loss of quality. Moreover,‘Courier’ was designed as a ‘monospace’ font – thatis, each character occupies the same amount of space(an ‘M’ is the same width as an ‘I’). ‘Monospacing’makes the process of aligning text much easier than
it would be with fonts of variable width as one canbe confident how many characters will fit on a line
(regardless of what the characters might be). Thus,
for those drafts which needed to look especially goodon the page as well as on the screen, Larson would
reformat his text to meet the requirements of theprinter.
Thus, there are folders on Larson’s disks withtitles like ‘Rent Laser’ that contain versions of thescript formatted for higher quality printing. By
consequence revising the script during the rehearsal
process, when all copies should be printed on a laser
printer, was difficult. In some cases, probably during
the rehearsal or preview period when it was necessary
to distribute frequent changes to a cast, Larson foundit preferable to print only revised passages on alaser printer and then to literally cut and paste theserevisions onto an older laser-printed version andphotocopy the result. These pasted-together drafts,
preserved in the Library’s paper collection, exemplify
the awkward hybrid of centuries old print traditions
with the advantages and quirks of new media andserve as a strikingly appropriate metaphor the historyof the text to which they bear witness.
Of course, RENT, is hardly the only text for which
both digital forensic and bibliographic expertise
will be needed to conduct a contemporary critiquegénétique. Indeed, editors and textual scholars ofmost work composed after (at the latest) 1995,
are likely to encounter digital drafts among theirwitnesses. This paper is intended to serve as akind of early exemplar for the kind of techniques acontemporary digital textual scholar must learn andpractice.

Digital Humanities 2012

On the Internet, nobody
knows you’re a historian:
exploring resistance to
crowdsourced resourcesamong historians
Ridge, Miam.ridge@open.ac.uk
Open University, UK

Crowdsourcing, the act of taking work once
performed within an organisation and outsourcing itto the general public in an open call (Howe 2006),
is increasingly popular in memory institutions as atool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data,as projects such as Galaxy Zoo and Old Weather(Romeo & Blaser 2011), Transcribe Bentham (Terras2010) and the Australian Newspapers Digitisation
Program (Holley 2010) have shown. However, thevery openness that allows large numbers of experts
and amateurs to participate in the process ofbuilding crowdsourced resources also raises issues ofauthority, reliability and trust in those resources. Can
we rely on content created by pseudonymous peers or
members of the public? And why do academics often
feel that they can’t? This paper explores some of thecauses and forms of resistance to creating and using
crowdsourced resources among historians.

References
Holley, R. (2010). Crowdsourcing: How and Why
Should Libraries Do It? D-Lib Magazine 16(3/4).
Howe, J. (2006). The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired
14.06. [Online] Available from: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

Romeo, F., and L. Blaser (2011). Bringing Citizen
Scientists and Historians Together. In J. Trant
and D. Bearman (eds), Museums and the Web
2011: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum
Informatics.
Terras, M. (2010). Digital curiosities: resource
creation via amateur digitization. Literary and
Linguistic Computing 25(4), 425-438.

‘Participant digitisation’ is a specialised formof crowdsourcing in which the digital records
and knowledge generated when researchers accessprimary materials are captured at the point ofcreation and potentially made available for future
re-use. Through interviews with academic andfamily/local historians, this paper examines thefollowing: the commonalities and differences in how
these two groups assess the provenance, reliability
and probable accuracy of digital resources; how
crowdsourcing tools might support their working
practices with historical materials; the motivationsof historians for sharing their transcriptions andimages in a public repository; the barriers that would
prevent them from participating in a project that
required them to share their personally-digitisedarchives; and the circumstances under which theywould selectively restrict content sharing. From thispreliminary investigation, the paper will go on toconsider implications for the creation of digital
humanities resources for academic and amateur
users.

335

Digital Humanities 2012

Formal Semantic Modelingfor Human and Machinebased Decoding of Medieval
Manuscripts
Ritsema van Eck, Marianne Petra
nanne.rve@gmail.com
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands

Schomaker, Lambertschomaker@ai.rug.nl
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands

In recent years, archival institutions storinghistoric handwritten document collections havebeen somewhat reluctant to invest in digitization(scanning). The reasons for this are threefold.
Firstly, early, rigorous digitization campaigns of
the past (1985-2000) were costly and sometimes
disappointing. Secondly, the quality of Optical
Character Recognition (OCR) techniques is very
low for handwritten manuscripts. Thirdly, thedigitization of historical documents and thepermanent storage of the resulting digital images
is costly. Such investments are generally only
considered worthwhile if it is possible to access andbrowse the digitized material quickly and easily, in amanner which satisfies a large user base.
The Monk system was developed in answer tothe afore-mentioned problem: the aim of thisproject is build an interactive search engine
for browsing handwritten historical documents,using machine-learning and pattern classification.
Ultimately, it should become possible to ‘google’
for a search-term in large collections of digitizedhandwritten document images. Traditional OCR
fails in handwriting, because patterns are largely
connected, noisy and difficult to read, even forhumans. In addition, historical script types varytremendously according spatio-temporal origins.
Furthermore, traditional Automatic Handwriting
Recognition (AHM) techniques require many
examples of a single word or letter class from asingle writer to be considered feasible in this case,and training occurs off line, in a lab or company.
Therefore, an innovative new bootstrapping method
based on user-based word labeling was developed totrain a computer system, Monk, to read historicalscripts (Zant, van der et al. 2009). This system has
been used successfully in the first massive processingof early twentieth century handwriting in the Dutch‘Cabinet of the Queen.’ The success of this endeavorstimulated the research in the direction of older,
more difficult material.
336

2. A Difficult Case: the Leuven
Alderman’s Rolls
The Leuven city archive is currently in the processof digitizing its collection of the Leuven Alderman’srolls, early fifteenth century. This text is the urban
record of voluntary jurisdiction and disputes settled
by the Aldermen; individual cases are describedin short legal acts. As a pilot study, the book of
the year 1421 (MS SAL 7316, Leuven City Archive,
Belgium) was ingested by the Monk system, withthe aim of achieving handwriting recognition on thecurrent Gothic minuscule these hundreds of pages
are written in. Indeed, this is no easy feat, consideringthat contemporary humans need special training to
be able to read this script. However, even if one – as ahuman – can decipher series of individual characters(letters, abbreviations, glyphs) in the text, this does
not directly lead to understanding. Firstly, there isa linguistic barrier: the rolls are written mostly in
Latin and occasionally in Middle Dutch. Secondly, inorder to understand what the text means one needs
much background knowledge about the type of text
and the administration of justice in medieval Leuven.
As the Monk system still makes many mistakes in its
attempts to read the script of the Leuven alderman’srolls, it seems that additional modeling is needed to
improve results of computer-based reading.

3. Contextual Modeling: Language
and Semantics
The idea of top-down linguistic support forbottom-up word hypotheses generated by a script
classifier such as Monk – is not entirely new.
The use of a statistical language model to improveoffline handwriting recognition has been proposed(Zimmerman & Bunke 2004). However, the use ofa general language model or syntax will not do incase of the Leuven Alderman’s rolls. Firstly, the text
employs a register of highly artificial legal language.
Secondly, no formal language models are existentfor the Middle Dutch and Medieval Latin it employs
and no encoded text corpus exists for the automatic
generation of a ‘stochastic grammar’ (Manning &Schütze 1999).
Therefore, a semantic model was developed tosupport recognition by Monk in the rolls. Whilesyntactic modeling may fail due to input variationand variability, semantics are invariably present in
any utterance of language. A semantic framework
can support both the human- and machine-based
decoding. In the case of the Leuven Alderman’srolls, meaning, i.e. higher knowledge levels, supports
the recognition of words and letter forms at thelexical and orthographical level. Human readers, as
opposed to digital document processors, sample text

Digital Humanities 2012

opportunistically and take into account contextual
information eclectically (Schomaker 2007). To
distinguish the /v/ from the /b/ in current
gothic minuscule the human reader may rely
on contextual information where an uninformed
computer program cannot. More specifically, theinterpretation of the ink patterns on a page isdetermined by an expectancy on what to find in
the text. In case of an ‘IOU’, for instance, thereader expects to find, somewhere, the names of
two persons, a sum of money, and possibly a dateof payment. The more difficult the deciphering of
patterns at the small scale, the more important is
the role of such additional high-level informationand expectation at a larger scale of observation:
the semantics expressed by a text block of about aparagraph or administrative entry (‘item’) in the caseof an administrative archive.

4. Semantic Support
During the present project a framework for disclosing
the semantics contained in the digital image ofthe manuscript page was attempted. First, theaccomplishments of historical philological method
and manuscript studies were put into practice tocreate a ‘world model’ as introduced in the fieldof artificial intelligence (Schank 1975), specifying
objects, their attributes and their mutual (abstract)
relationships. Such a model is the necessary‘historical backdrop’ for understanding the text. It
includes vital information elements, such as the
specific type of legal text and its place in the process ofadministering voluntary justice (Synghel G. v. 2007;
Smulders 1967).
Secondly, a typology of types of acts was formulated,with the help of scholarship on the comparablealderman’s rolls of Den Bosch (van Synghel 1993;
Spierings 1984). This typology of acts functions as
a fundamental part of the interpretative apparatus.
Exhaustive knowledge about which key phrases
encode for a certain type of act, immensely help in
identifying the real-life legal transaction an act refers
to. However, the gap between high level meaning andthe 2-dimensional format of the document still needs
to be bridged.

5. Towards a Formal Semantic
Modeling of the Act
In the research field of document structure and layout analysis a distinction is commonly made between‘geometrical layout’ and ‘logical content’; referring
to specific visual regions on the page, and theircontent and/or functional label, and reading order.
The logical structure can then be mapped to therelevant geometrical regions on the page, to achieve

optimal analysis of the document image (Haralick
1994; Namboodiri & Jain 2007).
During the second phase of the project ‘The
Legal transactions’ a formal semantic model wasconstructed based on the basic distinction between
geometrical and logical representation, viz. digital
image and semantic content respectively. The
geometrical branch is subdivided in polygonal
regions of interest (ROIs), which again break down
into smaller nodes such a ‘ink’ and ‘background’. The
logical branch describes the structure of semantic
content in legal acts. By interlinking the relevant
nodes the two branches using unique identifiers(idROIs), it becomes possible to cross-refer between
manuscript page and content.
Several XML schemes for layout and content
modeling exist; however, to date none of thesestandards is designed for handwritten text (Stehno,
Egger, & Retti 2003; Bulacu, van Koert & Schomaker2007). These formalisms are suitable for regular,
printed text and rectangular elements. Due to theerratic nature of the page layout and line formation
in medieval handwritten manuscripts a system ofpolygonal visual regions connected to the semantic
model by unique identifier codes needs to be used for
Monk, comparable to layout modeling tools such as
TrueViz and GEDI.
Noneof these formalisms provide an easysolution for linkage between layout and thesemantic level: such a connective layer needs tobe developed for each particular document type. If
it is elaborated in Web Ontology Language (OWL)or Resource Description Framework (RDF), the‘aldermen’ semantic model can be used to train
Monk to recognize the structural elements of actsand formulate hypotheses about their meaning.
Conversely, the same model may assist in interactive
teaching of humans as to where to locate the desired
information in an act. The most exciting finding of
this study was that superficial low-level ink patterns
and glyphs can be used to infer clues about thesemantic content, which in turn constrains the large
number of possible text interpretations.
As an example, a selection of the most basic logicalcomponents in the legal acts was made:- the start of a new act is signaled by ‘Item’ (X0,Y0)- the semantic anchor reveals the type of legaltransaction (X1,Y1)- names of presiding aldermen and (X2, Y2)- the date give the act legal force (X3,Y3)

337

Digital Humanities 2012

- the ‘solvit’ glyph signals that a charter was issued
and seal-money paid (X4,Y4)
From a number of pages, 22 acts were manually
analyzed in terms of the geometric distribution ofelement in the horizontal plane. Based on the relative
geographical location of these semantic elements
and their probability of occurrence in the plane,
Monk may weigh his bottom-up hypotheses usinga Bayesian model (see fig. 1). The small sample
includes only the most basic semantic elements on
the page; many more may be added to improverecognition accuracy.

Spierings, M. (1984). Het Schepenprotocol
van’s-Hertogenbosch, 1368-1400. Tilburg: Stichting
Zuidelijk Historisch Contact.
Stehno, B., A. Egger, and G. Retti (2003)
METAe – Automated Encoding of Digitized Texts.
Literary and Linguistic Computing, 18: 77-88.
Synghel, G. van (1993). Het Bosc’’ Protocol: een
Praktische Handleiding. ’s-Hertogenbosch: Werken
met Brabantse bronnen 2.
Synghel, G. van (2007). “Actum in camera
scriptorum oppidi de Buscoducis”: De stedelijke
secretarie van’s-Hertogenbosch to ca. 1450.
Hilversum: Verloren.
Zant, T. van der, et al. (2009). Where are
the Search Engines for Handwritten Documents.
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 34: 228-39.

Figure 1

References
Balacu, M., R. van Koert, and L. Schomaker(2007). Layout Analysis of Handwritten Historical
Documents for Searching the Archive of the Cabinetof the Dutch Queen: Proceedings of the 9thInternational Conference on Document Analysis
and Recognition. Curitiba, Brazil, September 2007.
Haralick, R. M. (1994). Document Image
Understanding: Geometric and Logical Layout:
Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition Conference. Seattle, June 1994.
Manning, C. D., and H. Schütze (1999).
Foundations of Statistical Language Processing.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Namboodiri, A., and A. Jain (2007). Document
Structure and Layout Analysis. B. B. Chaudhuri (ed),Digital Document Processing. London: Springer, pp.
29-48.
Schank, R. C. (1975). Conceptual Information
Processing. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing
Company.
Schomaker, L. (2007). Reading Systems: An
Introduction to Digital Document Processing. In B.
B. Chaudhuri (ed), Digital Document Processing.
London: Springer, pp 1-26.
Smulders, F. W. (1967). Over het Schepenprotocol.
Brabants Heem 19: 159-65.

338

Zimmerman, M., and H. Bunke (2004).
Optimizing the Integration of a Statistical Language
Model in HMM based Offline Handwriting Text
Recognition: Proceedings of the 17th International
Conference on Pattern Recognition. Cambridge, UK,
August 2004.

Digital Humanities 2012

The Swallow Flies Swiftly
Through: An Analysis of
Humanist
Rockwell, Geoffrey

geoffrey.rockwell@ualberta.ca
Department of Philosophy and Humanities
Computing, University of Alberta, Canada

Sinclair, Stéfan

stefan.sinclair@mcgill.ca
Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures,
McGill University, Canada

We’re 14 years old now, a venerable age in thismedium, like everything else somewhere between
coming into being and going out of it, ‘like the swift
flight of a single sparrow through the banquetinghall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s
day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst
there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside,
the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This
sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the halland out through another. While he is inside, he is safe
from the winter storms; but after a few momentsof comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry
world from which he came.’1
HUMANIST has been one of the few stable discussion
spaces where people in the digital humanities candiscuss the field. The metaphor of the swallow flying
though the banqueting-hall captures what we would
like our commons to be, warm and comfortablecompared to the winter outside, and a feast of
methods, ideas, and conversation. This paper will
fly though the hall of HUMANIST on the wings ofanalytical methods. Specifically this paper will takea retrospective look at the evolution of the digital
humanities through an analysis of HUMANIST using
Voyant, a suite of web text tools we have developed
for handling large corpora like this. In the paper wewill therefore,- Ask why we might look at our history now?
- Discuss the data analyzed and the methods used
- Discuss the shift from humanities computing to thedigital humanities- Look at the effect of the web on the field

1. Why look back now?
In the space of a very few years the digital humanities
seems to have gone from a marginal field trying
to gain respect to a favorite of many university

administrators. Digital humanists now need to define(and justify) what the digital humanities is to people
who ask us – instead of trying to explain it to anyone
willing to listen. It is difficult to pin down exactly
when this transition happened, but one importantmoment was when William Pannapacker wrote in
the Chronicle that ‘Amid all the doom and gloom of
the 2009 MLA Convention, one field seems to bealive and well: the digital humanities.’ He continued
with ‘the digital humanities seem like the first “nextbig thing” in a long time’.2 As John Unsworth
noted in his ‘State of the Digital Humanties, 2010’
address to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute(DHSI), when a field is perceived to have jobs
(while other humanities fields are seeing a dramatic
decline) ‘it’s bound to attract some notice, especiallyamong bright, goal-oriented graduate students who
are approaching the job market.’3 As universities try
to get into the game by posting not jobs but clusters
of jobs, and graduate students try to adapt to thosejobs, issues of definition and self-definition became
important.
Alternatively this self-conscious turn could be due
to funding agencies noticing and creating programsfor the digital humanities like the Image, Text,
Sound and Technology program of SSHRC thatfirst made awards in 2003-4 and the Office ofDigital Humanities programs of the US National
Endowment for the Humanities. We shouldn’t
underestimate the degree to which funding programs
can get attention.
The self-conscious turn can also be seen in papers
looking at the field and asking about it. Some
examples include a paper by Wang and Inaba
presented in Taipei and then published under thetitle, ‘Analyzing Structures and Evolution of Digital
Humanities Based on Correspondence Analysis andCo-word Analysis.’4 Another is by Patrik Svensson
titled ‘The Landscape of Digital Humanities.’5 Bothessays provide a ‘birds-eye’ view of the field,
though in very different ways. Wang and Inaba
use text analysis and text mining techniques to
ask about the shift from ‘humanities computing’ to‘digital humanities’; Svensson takes a cultural studies
approach looking at the actors and discourse.

2. Data and Methods
Like Wang and Inaba our method is to use
DH methods like correspondence analysis, but weanalyzed a different, messier and fuller text, thearchives of the HUMANIST listserv. HUMANIST isa discussion list that was started by Willard McCarty
when he was at the Centre for Computing in the
Humanities at the University of Toronto in 1987.
The first message introducing the list started with,‘HUMANIST is a Bitnet/NetNorth electronic mail339

Digital Humanities 2012

network for people who support computing in thehumanities.’6 The list is still running, and, except
for an interlude of a few years, is still moderated
by Willard. HUMANIST has limitations that will be
discussed in the full paper, but it provides a rich text
for understanding the field in the English-speaking
world.
Voyant, formerly called Voyeur, is a suite of text
analysis tools that can be used individually or
combined into ‘skins’ on texts that you upload orlink to.7 Voyant is a second generation of web
analytical tools that benefited from lessons learned
by HyperPo and TAPoR. Our first generation oftools could only handle smaller texts (up to about
500K or the equivalent of a book or two) andtherefore weren’t suitable for the study of large
corpora. These tools were also developed as close(re)reading tools in a context of literary study of asingle text or small corpus. In this project we adapted
Voyant to handle the sort of corpus that allows us
to do diachronic analysis and distant reading; weadded mining tools that facilitate the formation andvalidation of hypotheses.
Part of our methodological practice is to develop
a series of hypotheses about the last 25 years of
Humanist. These are then tested, adapting andadding features to Voyant as needed. The tool
development is thus deeply integrated with theanalytical process. We will use the hypotheses andunexpected themes to discuss our flight through the
corpus.

Figure 1: Digital humanities and humanities computing

4. The Passing of Centers
A second hypothesis we started with was that the
1980s and 1990s had been a time of centers thatmade computing available in labs, but that the field
had moved on to a more distributed project model.
We did not find evidence for this. While the word
project becomes more popular and it is true thatsome centres has closed, we found others had started
up. Perhaps our particular experience with certain
centers closing biased us into thinking this was alarger phenomenon.

5. The Turn of the Web
The most dramatic evidence of change was so obviousthat we didn’t think about it or hypothesize it until wedeveloped a tool that could show clusters of years andkeywords using correspondence analysis.

3. From Humanities Computing to
Digital Humanities
We started with the expectation that there had
been a shift from ‘humanities computing’ to ‘digital
humanities’ as discussed by Wang and Inaba. While
we certainly found ‘digital humanities’ taking off
in 2004-5, we were surprised that ‘humanities
computing’ continues to be a popular phrase. Whatis harder to do is to pinpoint why the term started
to be used. One of the limitations of a public list isthat it is suitable for epidemiological studies that tell
you what happened and what correlated with what
happened, but it is harder to tell what motivatedpeople to change how they named the field.

Figure 2: Scatter plot from correspondence analysis

The scatterplot display of the major dimensions
generated showed a strong pull of patterns like ‘web’,‘www’, and ‘html.’ There seem to be three phases inthe data studied:- 1987-95: a phase when humanities computing isinterested in computers, software, hardware, texts,
and English.
- 1996-2000: a transitional period which may be an
artifact of the corpus.

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Digital Humanities 2012

- 2001-present: a shift to digital web services andcollaborative projects.

Figure 5: Social, media and content

6. Conclusion

Figure 3: Net, web and internet

We believe the use of the web by humanists in themid 1990s was a transformative for the field and may
explain why less and less of our discussion was about
hardware and software.

The new-found traction of the digital humanities
in academia is an opportunity to reflect on how
the discipline has evolved and what it has become.
Our contribution here is twofold: 1) a reading of
HUMANIST that can help understand who we are
and 2) a presentation of text analysis in practice. Of
course, this is just our fly-through the corpus; withaccessible web archives and tools like Voyant, the hallis open.
Notes
1. Humanist
DiscussionGroup
15(1),
seewww.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/Archives/Virginia/
v15/0000.html (www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/Archives/Virginia/v15/0000.html) .
2. Pannapacker, W. (2009). The MLA and the Digital Humanities.
Brainstorm: The Chronicle Review’s blog, Dec. 28, 2009chronicle.com/blogPost/The-MLAthe-Digital/19468/ (chronicle.com/blogPost/The-MLAthe-Digital/19468) .
3. Unsworth, J. (2010). The State of Digital Humanities,
2010. Address to the Digital Humanities Summer
Institute, University of Victoria, Victoria, June 2010.
The PDF is available at www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/state.of.dh.DHSI.pdf (www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unswo
rth/state.of.dh.DHSI.pdf) .

Figure 4: Software, services and hardware

As computers became ubiquitous in the 1970s
and 1980s, humanities computing was concernedwith supporting the new hardware and software.
HUMANIST itself was initially conceived as a
discussion list for those who supported others.
Many humanists in 1986 were just beginning to use
computers for word-processing and most didn’t have
email. With the web as a canvas for digital projects
we started to pay less attention to ‘processing’ andmore to ‘methods.’ We began to make our own tools
after the hard work of developing scholarly electronic
texts. Above all we returned to ‘content’ going beyond
text to look at other ‘media’ and the ‘social.’

4. Wang, X., and M. Inaba (2009). Analyzing Structures andEvolution of Digital Humanities Based on Correspondence
Analysis and Co-word Analysis. Art Research, No. 9, Mar.
2009, pp. 123-134.
5. Svensson, P. (2010). The Landscape of Digital Humanities.
Digital Humanities Quarterly 4(1). This is actually the first ofa multi-part essay.
6. Thisistheopeninglineofthe‘Welcometo
HUMANIST’
message,
14
May
1987.
See www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/Archives/Virginia/
v01/8705.1324.txt (www.digitalhumanities.org/human
ist/Archives/Virginia/v01/8705.1324.txt)
7. Seevoyant-tools.org(voyant-tools.org)
voyeurtools.org (voyeurtools.org)

or

341

Digital Humanities 2012

The Digital Mellini Project:
Exploring New Tools &Methods for Art-historical
Research & Publication
Rodríguez, Nuria

nro@uma.es
University of Málaga, Spain

Baca, Murtha

mbaca@getty.edu
Getty Research Institute, USA

Albrezzi, Francesca

falbrezzi@getty.edu
Getty Research Institute, USA

Longaker, Rachelrlongaker@getty.edu
Getty Research Institute, USA

1. Background
This paper will present the project Digital Mellini:
Exploring New Tools & Methods for Art-historical
Research & Publication, a joint initiative of the Getty
Research Institute (Los Angeles) and the Universityof Málaga (Spain). This paper shall discuss several
aspects and challenges related to the development ofdigital resources for art-historical research.
The main objectives for the Digital Mellini Projectare:
1. To explore new methods and tools with which
to reinvent the concept of scholarly work andcritical publishing in the field of humanities,
particularly in the context of art history, in which
the convergence of text and image is essential
and provides an interesting context for research– a context that has not yet been adequately
investigated.1

the challenges offered by the digital society – weneed to analyze and reflect critically on the ‘digital
status’ of the discipline of art history from both themethodological and epistemological perspectives.
We must be willing to open innovative and creative
paths in the design of digital resources for arthistorical research – paths that will lead to new lines
of investigation and new methods of and attitudes
toward information-sharing.
Art historians must participate in the developmentof tools in the Digital Humanities. In an article
published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in2009,
Johanna Drucker pointed out that many of
the critical debates that have characterized thedevelopment of the humanities in recent decades– subjectivity of interpretation, multicultural
perspectives, a recognition of the social natureof the production of knowledge, etc. – areabsent in the design of digital resources. Instead,more emphasis has been placed on adapting
to the characteristics of digital media than tothe epistemological and interpretive exigencies ofthe various humanistic disciplines.2 Lev Manovich
made similar observations in a Digital Humanities
conference held in June 2009 in Maryland, when heasked, ‘Is it sufficient to borrow techniques from thefields of computer science, information visualizationand media art – or do we need to develop newtechniques specific to the humanities?’ (Manovich
2009: xv).
Regarding the hope that Digital Humanities willassume this new role, we perceive the need to build
environments that are intellectually productive andwill facilitate interpretive and critical studies aboveand beyond simple information systems designed forthe storage and retrieval of data.
The Digital Mellini Project is a response to thesechallenges, as the aim of the project is to contributeto the development of virtual research environments(VRE) to promote critical research in the field of art
history.

2. To create a methodological model for developing
collaborative digital publications that incorporate
texts, digital facsimiles, images, computational
tools for linguistic analysis and visualcommunication, and forums for exchanging ideas
and sharing knowledge. The ultimate goal is thatthe international community of specialists canutilize this methodological model and apply to avariety of art-historical projects.

The Digital Mellini Project includes anotherdesideratum that has emerged in recent years:
the production of knowledge based on aggregationand collaboration. The culture of open, sharedknowledge, which was already being promulgatedby UNESCO as early as 2005 as a fundamental
way to transition from the information society to
the knowledge society, along with the possibilities
offered by Web 2.0 technologies, is an essential factor
within the evolution of digital scholarship.

These objectives can be seen within the frameworkof the recent growing interest that many of us in
the art-historical community have in response to

There are already several projects oriented toward
the development of collaborative environments(NINES3, The VRE-SDM Project4 , The Transcribe342

Digital Humanities 2012

Bentham Project5, etc.); and there is a burgeoning
bibliography on this topic (Deegan & McCarty 2011).
Proof of this interest has also been shown by thehigh percentage of presentations that dealt with thisproblem in the last Digital Humanities conference,
held at Stanford University in June 2011.
Electronic publications and digital editions are not
new in the realm of Digital Humanities; the firstreflections on what an electronic edition might
be appeared in Finneran (1996) and Bornstein
and Tinkle (1998). There are also reflections
and proposals relating to collaborative editionsof unpublished manuscripts in which a dispersed
community of scholars could add annotations, as in
the case of the Peirce Project (Neuman et al. 1992)
and the Codex Leningradensis (Leningrad Codex
Markup Project 2000).

To carry out this critical collaborative edition, theDigital Mellini Project is developing a computational
prototype. Exploring the possibilities of Drupal, adigital environment is being designed and conceived
specifically to this analytic objective. Currently, theproject team has completed an alpha version of
the digital workspace. The first prototype of a beta
version is expected to be finished by the end of 2012.
This prototype was constructed around the object of
the critical edition, Mellini’s text, and it includes:- text itself - A diplomatic transcription encoded in
XML-TEI, translations into English and Spanish,
and a digital facsimile – provided in an interface
that allows comparative analysis [Fig. 1];

Nevertheless, as Susan Hockey (2004) states in her
summary of the history of Digital Humanities, ‘The
technical aspects of this are fairly clear. Perhaps lessclear is the management of the project, who controls
or vets the annotations, and how it might all bemaintained for the future’.
Similarly, the Digital Mellini Project intends tocontinue this line of research, addressing thequestions that still remain open and launching newones, cultivating debate and reflection.
Figure 1

2. Digital Mellini Project:
development and intellectual
questions
The Digital Mellini Project focuses on a particular
text, an unpublished manuscript written in 1681 by
Pietro Mellini, a Roman nobleman. This text belongs
to the Getty Research Library, Special Collections,found under the title Relatione migliori di Casa delle
pittura Melini. Pietro Mellini poetically described
the best works as he inventoried the collection of
his family’s paintings. This text carries a self-interest
for art historical research due to its uniqueness –it is the only document known to date that has
a hybrid composition of ekphrastic description inpoetic form with a factual descriptive inventory.
In addition, it is an important source for studies
related to collecting, the market valuation of art, theprovenance of collections, etc. Most of the works areunidentified and to analyze their possible allocations
through the descriptions provided by Pietro Mellini
is a very attractive task for art historians. Lastly,
this text gives us an opportunity to explore thepossibilities that digital media offers to deepen
the relationships between text and image. One ofthe objectives of the critical edition is to establish
hypotheses about the identity of the works describedwithin the manuscript.

- A representative image gallery, consisting ofimages of works proposed by experts as
possible identifications of the paintings describedby Mellini. Additionally, provisions within theenvironment make it possible to establish
comparisons between images and with the
linguistic descriptions, so scholars can deepen theanalysis of the word-image relationship;- Tools to complement or extend into other areasof research. For example, a repository of thematic
texts and/or those structurally related to theMellini’s text.
- Tools for aggregating critical annotations to thetext. These annotations can be written by eachparticipating scholar, according to a methodologyof action and interaction developed for thispurpose. Also, these annotations can be arranged
as a response or reply to other entries, thus
generating a critical debate among the communityof scholars participating [Fig. 2].
- Space for debate and reflection on issues related tothe text where it can be more broadly discussed.

343

Digital Humanities 2012

3. How to face the problem of authorship? How tomaintain the legitimate intellectual property rightsof each participant in a publication that emerges
from the aggregation of many?
4. What are the real behaviors and research practicesof art historians using such environments? Do
these practices lead to the emergence of a new arthistorical knowledge of a digital nature or not?
5. How to develop specific methodologies andprotocols for action to guide, assist, and coordinate
the participation and interaction of specialists inthis type of environment?
Figure 2Note, therefore, that what is proposed as a digitalcritical edition is far from the conventional academic
model of a print publication, which would exist ina static format as the end result of an interpretive
study. The result may have been made by one orseveral specialists, but in the end, what we findis the proposal of one particular interpretation.
It is also far from the digital editions that fit
this model (eg Van Gogh Letters Project) orelectronic repositories focused mainly on the analysis
and exploration of texts (The Orlando ProjectHistory of British Women’s Writing). The proposedmodel is multifaceted. Digital Mellini simultaneously
integrates multiple and sometimes contradictoryand paradoxical views. It is open and dynamic.
Due to processing system records and the dialogue
between specialists in the critical annotation process,we can reconstruct the interpretive process itself,
as aggregation and contributions grow over time.
Therefore, the digital edition is not only the end
product of a study and/or research, but also theintellectual and interpretive process through which it
unfolds.
In the digital edition, in addition to showing thisprototype and its performance, we will addressin more detail the intellectual and methodologicalquestions that confront us while developing a
resource of this kind, taking into consideration thegoal of advancing digital scholarship in the field of art
history and the Humanities in general. These topics
include:1. How to show different viewpoints contributed by
specialists, and displaying through visual means
the diversity of interpretations and perspectives
that converge simultaneously on a text fromdifferent contexts – geographical, ideological,
theoretical, methodology, etc.?
2. How to deal with the problem of linguistic
variability in a multilingual community of
specialists without circumscribing to the mostprevalent language?

344

6. How to encourage the participation of specialists
in the context of an academic system that doesnot ‘recognize’ the work developed in these digital
environments? For example, what kind of scientificproduction – monographs, articles, papers – arecontributions that fit within critical annotations toa digital edition when referenced in an academic
CV? Should we think, then, of the incorporation of
new categories of scientific production in line withthe specificities of digital media?
Finally, the conclusive question: how can thediscipline of art history move away from single
authorial models toward more open, collaborativemodels of research and publication?

References
Bornstein, G., and T. Tinkle (1998). The Iconic
Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P.
Deegan, M., and W. McCarty (2011).
Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities.
Surrey: Ashgate.
Drucker, J. (2009). Blind Spots. Humanist mustplan their digital future. The Chronicle Review 55, is.
30. http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i30/30b00
601.htm (acessed 15 October 2011).
Finneran, R. J. (1996). The Literary Text in the
Digital Age. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P.
Hockey, S. (2004). The History of Humanities
Computing. In S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, and J.
Unsworth, eds (2004), A Companion to Digital
Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell.
http://www.di
gitalhumanities.org/companion/ (accessed 15
October 2011).
Leningrad Codex Markup Project (2000).
Project ‘ EL ’ : The XML Leningrad Codex. http://
www.leningradensis.org (accessed 15 October2011).
Manovich, L. (2009). Activating The Archive,
or: Data Dandy Meets Data Mining. In DigitalDigital Humanities 2012

Humanities 2009. Conference abstract. Maryland:
Maryland Institute for Technology in the
Humanities, p. xv.
Neuman, M., M. Keeler, C. Kloesel, J.
Ransdell, and A. Renear (1992). The Pilot
Project of the Electronic Peirce Consortium. In
ALLC-ACH92 Conference Abstracts and Program.
Oxford, pp. 25-27.
Rodríguez Ortega, N. (2010). Digital Resources
for Art-Historical Research: Critical Approach.
In Digital Humanities Annual Conference 2010.
Books of Abstracts. London: Office for Humanities
Communication – Centre for Computing in the
Humanities, King’s College, pp. 199-201.
Rodríguez Ortega, N. (2010). La cultura históricoartística y la Historia del Arte en la sociedad digital.
Una reflexión crítica sobre los modos de hacer
Historia del Arte en un nuevo contexto. Museo y
Territorio 2-3: 9-26.
Zweig, R. W. (1998). Lessons from the Palestine
Post Project. Literary and Linguistic Computing 13:
89–97.
UNESCO (2005). Hacia las sociedades
conocimiento. París: Ediciones UNESCO.

del

Notes
1. Nevertheless, interesting research has been carried out onlinking images to text. See Zweig 1998
2. ‘Many humanities principles developed in hard-fought critical
battles of the last decades are absent in the design ofdigital contexts (…) For too long, the digital humanities, theadvanced research arm of humanistic scholarly dialogue withcomputational methods, has taken its rules and cues fromdigital exigencies’ (Drucker 2009).
3. http://www.nines.org/ (accessed 15 October 2011).
4. Virtual workspace for the study of Ancient Documents,
University of Oxford. http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/VRE-SDM (accessed 15 October 2011).
5. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/(accessed 15 October 2011)

Intertextuality and
Influence in the Age of
Enlightenment: Sequence
Alignment Applications for
Humanities ResearchRoe, Glenn H.

glenn.roe@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
University of Oxford, UK

The ARTFL Project
University of Chicago, USA

1. Introduction
The relationships between texts are multifaceted andcomplex, ranging from directly attributed quotations
to indirect influences and faint allusions. Tracingthese links at all levels is a core humanistic endeavorthat can illuminate the meaning and reception of
texts through the identification and examination ofreferences, commonplaces, borrowings, re-workings,
and even plagiarism. To aid in this sort ofintertextual discovery, computational methods for
examining literary text reuse can draw uponsequence alignment techniques developed primarily
for gene sequencing programs in bio-informatics
and plagiarism detection systems, with specificadaptations to suit the needs of humanities scholars.
This paper examines just such an approach,first describing an open-source software package
developed by the ARTFL Project at the Universityof Chicago for text reuse discovery in digitized text
collections, and then offering a concrete applicationof this technique for literary critical research.
The software, named ‘PAIR: Pairwise Alignmentfor Intertextual Relations’ (Horton et al. 2010),
applies sequence alignment techniques to large
collections of literary and historical texts over several
languages. The PAIR system first indexes documentsby breaking them into overlapping sequences ofwords, called ‘n-grams’ or ‘shingles,’ and then createsa database of the occurrences of each shingle in agiven corpus. This index allows for the discovery oftext reuse by looking for occurrences of the sameword sequences shared between documents or withindifferent parts of the same document. Throughvarious tuning parameters, this technique can bemade flexible enough to find sequence matches withminor differences in word order, missing words,
orthographic variations, misrecognized characters,
and other textual variants. The first part of this345

Digital Humanities 2012

paper will thus examine the philosophy behind
the PAIR approach, the algorithmic design, its
implementation as an open-source Perl module, andits eventual application to a variety of tasks relevant
to humanities and social science research.

2. Background
While technology is a relatively new entrant to
the domain of textual studies, it nonethelessoffers scholars important tools for tracing thecurrents of literary text reuse. Indeed, this formof ‘intertextuality’ can be considered a specificcase of the more general problem of sequencealignment; that is, the task of identifying regions ofsimilarity shared by two strings or sequences, often
thought of as the longest common substring problem.
This technique is widely applied in the field bioinformatics, where it is used to identify repeatedgenetic sequences, and for plagiarism detection in
texts or computer programs (Clough et al. 2002;
Lyon et al. 2001; Bourdaillet & Ganascia 2007).
In creating PAIR, we attempted to adapt existing
techniques to suit the particular needs of humanities
scholarship. Many algorithms such as BLAST exist
for identifying duplicated DNA, for example, butthese tend to emphasize speed over completeness.
In text analysis, our corpora are small enoughand our interest deep enough that we canemphasize retrieving as many hits as possible, sincecomputation time is cheap and literary scholars
are not traditionally in a hurry. The scholar’s time,
however, is quite valuable, so we want to returnresults that are of maximal interest, avoiding a
preponderance of banal commonplaces such as ‘Your
devoted, humble servant.’
PAIR is thus based on k-tuple heuristics that provide
a suitable balance of efficiency against completeness.
Applied to text data, this involves the generationof ‘shingles’ (or n-grams), which are overlapping
sequences of words. Preprocessing, such as removalof function and short words and reduction oforthographic variants (accents, spelling changes,
case, etc.), is performed during shingle generation.
This has the effect of folding numerous shingles into
one underlying form for matching purposes, thus
eliminating minor textual variations, which makes
matching more flexible or ‘fuzzy.’ It also somewhat
reduces the overall number of unique shingles, which
aids speed of search (Seo & Croft 2008).
Once identified, the shingles within a defined window
surrounding the shared shingle in each document
are compared and evaluated. PAIR allows the user
to set criteria for the acceptability of matches, suchas the minimum overlap in shingles between thetwo sets, the minimum length of a shared shingle
sequence, or the maximum number of consecutive
346

gaps allowed between matching sequences in either
set. If the criteria are met, the match is expanded,examining wider contexts in each document, until
the criteria are violated, at which point the matchis terminated and recorded. Furthermore, user
configurable parameters for match retention andexpansion allow for the fine-tuning of results,
which is particularly important given the often‘noisy’ information space of many humanities text
collections.

3. Use Case: Voltaire and theEncyclopédie
As a concrete use case for the PAIR approach outlined
above, we examined the intertextual relationshipsof two of the 18th-century’s most important text
collections: Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert’s
philosophic war machine, the Encyclopédie (28 infolio volumes, published from 1751 to 1772 – digital
edition provided by the ARTFL Project, Universityof Chicago), and the Complete Works of Voltaire(over 100 volumes, data provided by the VoltaireFoundation, University of Oxford). Both resources
represent monuments of Enlightenment thought aswell as model digital humanities databases: highly
curated collections of historically significant texts
built using the open-source PhiloLogic search andanalysis software developed at the University of
Chicago. By comparing these two data sets using the
PAIR sequence alignment approach, we can cometo a better understanding of the multifaceted and attimes problematic relationship – one of influence,anxiety, and intertextuality – between the French
Enlightenment’s most emblematic writer and its
most widely-read text.
Though initially enthusiastic about the promise
and ambitions of Diderot and d’Alembert’s project,
Voltaire nonetheless contributed only 45 articles
to the enterprise (Voltaire 1987). This curious lackof engagement on the part of one of the leading
philosophes in the most important publication of
the mid-18th century has led many to conclude
that this diminished role was due to philosophicaldifferences between Voltaire and the Encyclopédie’s
editors (Jacob 2006). Or, as Jonathan Israel has
recently contended, as a leading figure of the‘mainstream’ brand of enlightenment (essentially
Lockean-Newtonian in nature), Voltaire was inno way eager to follow the Encyclopédie as
it steadily moved in the direction of a more
‘Radical Enlightenment,’ fundamentally Spinozistmaterialist in inspiration (Israel 2006). The validityof this interpretation, however – which relies on
a superficial reading of Voltaire as ‘author’ in the
Encyclopédie rather than as ‘authority’ – begins to
break down once one is presented with the resultsof the PAIR comparison. Indeed, even a cursory

Digital Humanities 2012

examination of the more than 10,000 matchingsequences between Voltaire’s Complete Works andthe Encyclopédie, demonstrates the preponderanceof Voltaire’s textual presence as an authority over
and against his relatively restrained role as anencyclopedic author; a fact that without sequencealignment would have likely gone largely unnoticed
or at least greatly underestimated.
Nowhere is this interaction between Voltaire andthe Encyclopédie more pronounced than in his
last, longest, and perhaps least known work,
the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770-74). Here,
Voltaire revisits the ‘encyclopedic moment’ of the
1750s and recasts many of the concerns still
relevant to he and his fellow philosophes some 20
years later. Adopting the same textual strategies
as the encyclopédistes before him – indirect
citation, playful borrowings, veiled references, etc. –Voltaire’s reassessment of the encyclopedic texts isa treasure-trove of hidden intertextual associations.
Our exploration of the Questions using the PAIR
system will thus, for the first time, give us a moregeneral idea of the scope and scale of Voltaire’s
prolonged engagement with the Encyclopédie andits contributors. Finally, this extended vision (orversion) of Voltaire’s ‘encyclopedism’ – madepossible through the application of the sequencealignment techniques outlined above – implies acertain continuity of Enlightenment thought (at leastby its main protagonists) from 1750 to 1775. By wayof this ‘intertextual’ continuity, we thus arrive at amore comprehensive understanding of the French
Enlightenment than is currently reflected by recent
attempts (Jacob 2006; Israel 2006) at dividing its
participants into binomial ‘mainstream’ and ‘radical’camps.

Horton, R., M. Olsen, and G. Roe (2010).
Something Borrowed: Sequence Alignment andthe Detection of Similar Passages in Large Text
Collections. Digital Studies - Le Champ numérique
2.1.
Israel, J. (2006). Contested Enlightenment:
Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of
Man 1670-1752. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Jacob, M. (2006). The Radical Enlightenment:
Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London:
Cornerstone Publishing.
Seo, J., and B. W. Croft (2008). Local text reusedetection. SIGIR ’08: Proceedings of the 31st annualinternational ACM SIGIR conference on Researchand development in information retrieval. New
York, NY, pp. 571-578.
Voltaire (1987). Œuvres complètes. Volume 33.
Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.

Digital resources
The ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (University of
Chicago): http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/
Voltaire électronique database (Voltaire Foundation,
University of Oxford): http://www.lib.uchicago.
edu/efts/VOLTAIRE/

PAIR: http://code.google.com/p/text-pair/

References
Altschul, S. F., W. Gish, W. Miller, et al. (1990).
Basic Local Alignment Search Tool. The Journal of
Molecular Biology 215: 403–10.
Bourdaillet, J., and J.-G. Ganascia (2007).
Alignment of noisy unstructured data, IJCAI-2007,
Hyderabad, India - January 8, 2007.
Clough, P., R. Gaizauskas, S. S. L. Piao,
and Y. Wilks (2002). METER: MEasuring TExt
Reuse. Proceedings of the 40th Anniversary Meetingfor the Association for Computational Linguistics,
pp. 152-159.
Lyon, C., J. Malcolm, and B. Dickerson(2001). Detecting Short Passages of Similar Text
in Large Document Collections. Proceedings of the2001 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing, pp. 118-125347

Digital Humanities 2012Engaging the Museum
Space: Mobilising Visitor
Engagement with DigitalContent Creation
Ross, Claire Stephanieclaire.ross@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Gray, Stevensteven.gray@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Warwick, Clairec.warwick@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Hudson Smith, Andrew
a.hudson-smith@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

Terras, Melissa

m.terras@ucl.ac.uk
University College London, UK

The following paper presents the results of the
QRator research project which aims to understandhow digital technologies, such as interactive labels
and smart phones, create new ways for users toengage with museum objects; investigate the value
and constraints of digital sources and methods
involving cultural content; and demonstrate how
crowdsourced digital interpretation may be utilised
as a research source.
Museum exhibitions have been transformed by
the addition of digital technology to enhance thevisitor experience. Ubiquitous mobile technologies
offer museum professionals new ways of personallyengaging visitors with content, creating new
relationships between museums and their users.
Museums and other cultural institutions havemade significant investments in developing anddisseminating digital content in the physical museum
space to reach and engage users, marking a shift
in how museums communicate publicly their roleas custodians of cultural content and their attitude
towards cultural authority. Despite recent technicaladvances in collections access and interpretation, anumber of key issues still remain. Does the rapidlychanging technological environment provide a moreengaging and participatory visitor experience?
The QRator project explores how mobile devices
and interactive digital labels can create new models
for public engagement, visitor meaning-making and348

the construction of multiple interpretations insidemuseum spaces. This project is located within theemerging technological and cultural phenomenon
known as ‘The Internet of Things’; the technical andsocial shift that is anticipated as society moves to aubiquitous form of computing in which every deviceis ‘on’, and connected to the Internet. QRator is basedon ‘Tales of things’ ( http://www.talesofthings.com ) which has developed a ‘method for cataloguing
physical objects online which could make museums
and galleries a more interactive experience’ (Giles
2010). QRator takes the technology a step further,allowing users to take part in content creation on
digital interactive labels- static iPads and their own
mobile phones: a sustainable model for two-way
public interaction in museum spaces. The QRator
project uses iPads installed in the UCL Grant
Museum of Zoology to provide a fully interactive
experience where visitors respond to questions posedby the curators, contribute to discussions, andleave comments about individual exhibits. Visitors’comments are synchronised with the QRator website( http://www.qrator.org ) to allow them tocontribute to the continuing discussion away froma museum setting. The application provides eachexhibit with a QR code, a matrix barcode thatembeds information such as text or an URL withina graphic that users can read using mobile devices,which links the physical exhibit with the associatedconversations. When scanned these codes allow users
to discover information about an object and join
the conversation from their own mobile device.
The unpredictable, multiple forms of interpretation
produced by the use of mobile devices and interactive
labels make us to reconsider ways in which museums
provide information about objects and collections
and should also allow museums to become moreengaging for visitors.

1. Methodology
Data from the ten QRator iPads was collected byarchiving contributions from March to July 2011;
each individual visitor contribution is simultaneously
uploaded to the master database on the Tales ofThings website, followed by the QRator website
pulling the data about each case label (current
question) from the master database and integrates
these comments within QRator online. These
comments are then aggregated together basedon the current questions originally asked by themuseum. This resulted in a corpus of 1463 visitor
contributions, totalling 13,308 words and 2,708
unique tokens, providing a rich dataset for the
analysis of visitor experience.
Visitor contributions were categorized qualitatively
using open coded content analysis where eachcomment was read and categorized. Contributions

Digital Humanities 2012were divided into three basic categories; about
the current question or topic, about the museum,or noise. Despite the apparently simplistic
categorisation it is possible to discover patterns ofuse and begin to understand how visitors are relating
to and interpreting the exhibitions, and making
meaning from their experience.
For the purpose of this study, various quantitative
measures were used such as analysing the frequency
of comments according to date and time, comparing
comment rate between the ten iPad’s and suitabletext analysis tools were used to interrogate thecorpus. One of these purpose built tools emulates the
popular Wordle1 visualisation where the frequencyof words within the whole corpus is sized in relation
to the words font size. This tool provided more
stylistic control over the visualisation than otherweb-based services like Wordle. In addition, thecorpus was analysed using a Sentiment analysis
tool, SentiStrength2 developed by Thelwall et al,(forthcoming), in order to automatically measureemotion in the visitor comments, which provides
an indication of a positive or negative museum
experience.

2. Findings
The largest proportion of the comments in the
corpus fell into the category of topic (42%), triggered
predominately by the QRator interface and questions
posed by the museum curators, suggesting that
visitors are inspired to share their own experiences,thus co-constructing a public multiple interpretationof museum objects. This is very pleasing, since thiswas exactly what the museum professionals had
hoped might happen.
The lack of spam and inappropriate commenting
is surprising (22%). Many museums have been
hesitant to open up communication to greater
participation by visitors. There is an ingrained
fear in the museum profession that visitors will
leave inappropriate comments when there is no
moderation or intervention by the museum (Russo
et al. 2008) despite research showing that museum
visitors want to engage with complex, controversial
topics by making comments or talking to staff andother visitors (Kelly 2006). The QRator project
and the Grant Museum have, however, adopted theconcept of ‘radical trust’ in the visitor community:‘Radical trust is about trusting the community.
We know that abuse can happen, but we trust(radically) that the community and participation
will work. In the real world, we know thatvandalism happens but we still put art and sculpture
up in our parks. As an online community we come up
with safeguards or mechanisms that help keep open

contribution and participation working ’ (Fichter2006).
Inherent in the term is the suggestion of a previous
lack of trust shown by museums towards visitors,
but also the admission that such trust is regarded
as new and perhaps dangerous. Nevertheless, the
QRator data suggests that ‘radical trust’ in visitors
does indeed work: spamming and inappropriate
commenting does not appear to have happened to asignificant extent in the Grant Museum.
Interestingly, many of the visitor comments focusedon opinions of the museum as a whole (36%).
This raises the question of whether a digitaltechnology used in this way promotes of an
opportunity for visitors to make meaning fromtheir whole experience, rather than engage with theexhibit specific content and interpret the exhibitions
themselves.
The length of comment may also be used as anindicator of engagement- if we assume that those
who are interested in an issue or topic may wish towrite at greater length. Indeed the average length ofcomment increased significantly between categories.
The noise category had an average of 4.071429
words, comments on the museum had 7.431599
words and visitor contributions on topic had an
average of 15.36672 words. This is pleasing, since itsuggests that visitors were inspired by the questions
to engage with topics in a relatively complex fashion.
Additionally when compared to the SentiStrength
results, which classifies for positive and negative
sentiment on a scale of 1 (no sentiment) to 5 (verystrong positive/negative sentiment), highlights thatthe comments on the museum were in average
more positive in sentiment (2.04 positive) whereas
the comments on topic had an equal positive tonegative response (1.52 positive; 1.55 negative).
Suggesting more engaged texts often contain a mixof positive and negative sentiment, in contrast to lessengagement which is more likely to produce a single
sentiment result.

3. Conclusion
Digital technologies are becoming more embedded,
ubiquitous and networked, with enhanced
capabilities for rich social interactions, context
awareness and connectivity. This has led tounprecedented changes in the provision of digital
museum resources, which are beginning totransform the experience of visiting museums. The
QRator project represents a shift in how culturalorganisations act as trusted and authoritarian
institutions; communicate knowledge to thecommunity; and integrate their role as keepersof cultural content with their responsibility tofacilitate access to content. It also suggests that349

Digital Humanities 2012users are willing to take part in a dialogue,
and express their views about their visit andindividual object via digital technologies. It further
suggests that in most cases they can be trusted
to do so in a thoughtful, serious fashion. The
challenges that digital technology and participatory
media bring to museums demonstrate a change
from a one to many transmission to a many tomany interaction, in which museums use theirown voice and authority to encourage participatorycommunication and content creation with visitors.
The growing emphasis on the interactional andinformal nature of learning in museums provides theperfect opportunity to showcase digital interactive
technologies as important resources for engaging
visitors in exhibits and more generally in museums
as a whole (Thomas & Mintz 1998; Marty & Burton
Jones 2007; Heath & vom Lehm 2010).
Acknowledgments
The authors of this paper would like to acknowledge
the other members of the QRator team: Jack
Ashby and March Carnall (UCL Grant Museumof Zoology), Sally MacDonald (UCL Museums andPublic Engagement), Sussanah Chan (UCL) andEmma-Louise Nicholls (UCL Grant Museum of
Zoology). QRator was funded through Beacons for
Public Engagement Innovation Seed funding and
we would like to thank Hilary Jackson (UCL Public
Engagement) for her support and advice throughout
the project.

References
Fichter, D. (2006). Web 2.0, library 2.0 and radical
trust: A first take. April 2. Accessed 27th October 2011at http://library2.usask.ca/~fichter/blog_on_the_side/2006/04/web-2.html

Giles, J. (2010). Barcodes help objects tell theirstories. New Scientist (17th April, 2010).
Heath, C., and D. vom Lehn (2010). Interactivity
and Collaboration: new forms of participation inmuseums, galleries and science centres. In R.
Parry (ed.), Museums in a Digital Age. Abingdon:
Routledge, pp. 266-280.
Kelly, L. (2006). Museums as sources of
information and learning: The decision-making
process. Open Museum Journal 8, accessedat http://archive.amol.org.au/omj/volume8/v
olume8_index.asp

Marty, P., and K. Burton Jones (2007). Museum
Informatics: People, Information, and Technology
in Museums. New York: Routledge.
Russo, A., J. Watkins,L. Kelly, and S. Chan
(2008). Participatory communication with social
media. Curator 51(1): 21-31.
350

Thelwall, M., K. Buckley, G. Paltoglou, D.
Cai, and A. Kappas (forthcoming). Sentiment
strength detection in short informal text. Journal of
the American Society for Information Science andTechnology.
Thomas, S., and A. Mintz, eds. (1998). The
Virtual and the Real: Media in the Museum.
Washington, DC: American Association of Museums.
Notes
1. http://www.wordle.net/
2. http://sentistrength.wlv.ac.uk/

Digital Humanities 2012

Aiding the Interpretation ofAncient Documents
Roued-Cunliffe, Henriette

henriette.roued@classics.ox.ac.uk
Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents,
University of Oxford, UK

How can Decision Support System (DSS) software
aid the interpretation process involved in the readingof ancient documents? This paper discusses thedevelopment of a DSS prototype for the readingof ancient texts. In this context the term ‘ancient
documents’ is used to describe mainly Greek and
Latin texts and the term ‘scholars’ is used to describe
readers of these documents (e.g. papyrologists,
epigraphers, palaeographers). However, the resultsfrom this research can be applicable to many othertexts ranging from Nordic runes to 18th Century love
letters.
In order to develop an appropriate tool it isimportant first to comprehend the interpretation
process involved in reading ancient documents. This
is not a linear process but rather a recursive process
where the scholar moves between different levelsof reading, such as ‘understanding the meaning ofa character’ or ‘understanding the meaning of aphrase’ (Youtie 1963; Terras 2006). This realization
has been paramount to the development of the DSS
prototype.

1. Aiding, not making decisions
When examining whether a tool such as DSS can
aid the reading of ancient documents it is importantfirst to realize what such a tool can and should
do and what it cannot and should not do. I did
not set out to develop a tool that could automate
the process of reading ancient documents without
human interaction. Firstly, I did not wish to see
humans removed from this interpretational process
and replaced with robotics.
Good reading is a reflective as well as asensational process which engages our abstract
mental faculties, and we give it up at our peril(Deegan & Sutherland 2009: viii).
Secondly, interpretation is a part of the ‘higher levelsof analytic and creative functions which are theprerogative of the human mind’ (Busa 1980: 89) andthe symbol-processing powers of a computer should
not be mistaken for this (Jonscher 2000: 149).
Instead this research has examined how the useof DSS technology can support the interpretative

process, among other things, by remembering thecomplex reasoning that forms a large part of thisinterpretation process. Remembering decisions andthe complex reasoning leading up to decisions issomething that DSS is good at. The DSS prototype
has demonstrated how this is possible.
Furthermore the prototype has demonstrated otheraspects of reading ancient documents, apart from theinterpretation process, where IT tools can provide
support such as searching huge datasets and theautomated publishing of editions.

2. The DSS Prototype
The prototype was developed as a proof of concept.
First I used existing research on reading ancient
documents (Bowman & Brady 2005; Terras 2006;
Tarte 2011) to model the network of interpretation(Roued-Cunliffe 2010), and then I developed the DSS
prototype to demonstrate how a DSS can aid theinterpretation process based on this model.

Figure 1: Screenshot from the DSS
prototype (Roued-Cunliffe 2012: 87)

The prototype (Fig. 1) demonstrates how it would
be possible to input data and edit the structure andmeaning of a document on different levels. Scholars
can begin by entering basic structure such as lineor character elements and work back and forth
between this level and higher levels such as editing
the meaning of a letter or word. Furthermore, theprototype enables scholars to use the letters andcharacter elements they have input to search relevant
corpora databases for possible parallels.
The prototype uses the concept of argumentation,
which can be defined as ‘the process of constructing
arguments about propositions, and the assignmentof statements of confidence to those propositions
based on the nature and relative strength of theirsupporting arguments’ (Fox et al. 1996: 428). In
the prototype these statements of confidence are
merely whether the user believes the reading to
be right or wrong. It does not require users tosignify how much they believe in a certain decision.
Furthermore, the arguments are either for oragainst the interpretation in question. No matter
how many arguments are for or against any one
interpretation the prototype will not try to persuade351

Digital Humanities 2012

the user to make a certain decision. The prototype
is first and foremost flexible and user-driven and its
role is purely that of a good assistant, reminding usersof their own decisions and reflections.

3. Future DSS
The DSS prototype, presented in this paper, hasbeen successful in illustrating how this technology
can aid such a complex interpretation process, asis the reading of ancient documents. However, in
future this prototype will need to be re-developed
to contain, among others, a more advanced userinterface. With this in hand it would be possible toconduct user testing, which would give a basis forthe development of a fully working DSS. I have asuggestion for a future layer-based system that would
be user-friendly and could work well in conjunction
with a DSS and other useful tools for aiding thereading of ancient documents.

4. Conclusion
The research presented in this paper aims
to illustrate how DSS software could aid theinterpretation of ancient documents and has beensuccessful in doing this through the developmentof the DSS prototype. The DSS prototype covered
different areas of the interpretation process from
input to argumentation for and against different
decisions. It has illustrated how DSS software
can assist scholars by remembering their complex
reasoning and suggesting readings along the way.
Furthermore, the research describes an idea for a
fully formed future DSS based on the finding from thedevelopment of the prototype.
Acknowledgements
This research is a part of the author’s thesis:‘A Decision Support System for the Reading ofAncient Documents’ at the Faculty of Classics,
University of Oxford. It is funded by an AHRC
Doctoral Studentship attached to the e-Science andAncient Documents (eSAD) project ( http://esa
d.classics.ox.ac.uk/ ). I wish to thank Prof.
Alan Bowman, Prof. Sir Michael Brady, Dr. Melissa
Terras, Dr. Segolene Tarte, Dr. Charles Crowther,
Margaret Sasanow and John Pybus for their support
throughout my research.

References
Bowman, A. K., and M. Brady (2005). Images
and Artefacts of the Ancient World. London: British
Academy.
Figure 2: Drawing of the layer-based
DSS concept (Roued-Cunliffe 2012: 132)

The layer-based system would contain four types oflayers that users can swap and switch between sothat they can edit the different layers at any timeand edit one layer while others are visible below (Fig.
2). The first types of layers are the image layers.
These image layers could be the original image of an
object, PMT images of an object (Earl et al, 2011) or
enhanced images (e.g. with wood-grain removed or
the illumination corrected (Tarte et al, 2011)). The
second type of layers are the editor layers which can
include a layer for hand-drawn transcriptions of thetext, a layer in which to edit the structure of thetext (i.e. lines, words, characters and spaces in thetext) and a layer in which to add meaning to the text
(i.e. this letter is b). The third type of layers is the
DSS layer which would resemble the DSS prototype.
The fourth and final type of layers are the suggestion
layers from which it would be possible to retrieve forexample suggested words from a word search engine
based on letters input in the earlier editor layer.

352

Busa, R. (1980). The Annals of Humanities
Computing: The Index Thomisticus. Computers andthe Humanities 14: 83-90.
Deegan, M., and K. Sutherland (2009).
Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and theForms of Print. London: Ashgate.
Earl, G., P. Basford, A. Bischoff, A.
Bowman, C. Crowther, J. Dahl, M. Hodgson,
L. Isaksen, E. Kotoula, K. Martinez, H.
Pagi, and K. E. Piquette (2011). ReflectanceTransformation Imaging Systems for AncientDocumentary Artifacts. http://ewic.bcs.org/u
pload/pdf/ewic_ev11_s8paper3.pdf(accessed
07.03.2012)
Fox, J., P. Krause, and M. Elvang-Gøransson(1996). Argumentation as a General Framework for
Uncertain Reasoning. In D. Heckerman and E. H.
Mamdani (eds.), UAI ’93: Proceedings of the Ninth
Annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial
Intelligence, July 9-11, 1993, The Catholic Universityof America, USA. San Fransisco: Morgan Kaufmann
Publishers, pp. 428-434.

Digital Humanities 2012

Jonscher, C. (2000). Wired Life: Who Are We in
the Digital Age? London: Anchor.
Roued-Cunliffe, H. (2010). Towards anInterpretation Support System for Reading AncientDocuments. Literary and Linguistics Computing
25(4): 365-379.

The Twelve Disputed‘Federalist’ Papers: A Casefor Collaboration
Rudman, Joseph

Roued-Cunliffe, H. (2012). A decision Support
System for the Reading of Ancient Documents.
D.Phil Thesis, Classics Faculty, University of Oxford.

jr20@heps.phys.cmu.edu
Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University,
USA

Tarte, S. (2011). Papyroligical Investigations:
Transferring Perception and Interpretation into theDigital World. Literary and Linguistics Computing
26(2): 233-247.

1. Introduction

Tarte, S., M. Brady, A. K. Bowman, and M.
Terras (2011). Image Capture and Processing forEnhancing the Legibility of Incised Texts. In V.
Vahtikari, M. Hakkarainen, and A. Nurminnen,
Eikonopoiia. Digital Imaging of Ancient Textual
Heritage, Technological Challenges and Solutions.
Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 129.
Helsinki: Academy of Finland, pp. 173-88.
Terras, M. (2006). Image to Interpretation:
Intelligent Systems to Aid Historians in the Readingof the Vindolanda Texts. Oxford Studies in AncientDocuments. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Youtie, H. C. (1963). The Papyrologist: Artificer ofFact GRBS 4: 19-32.

This paper discusses the controversy over theauthorship of the Federalistpapers as seenand studied by traditional historians and by over 100
non-traditional authorship attribution practitioners.
The Federalist papers were written during the years
1787 and 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay,
and James Madison. These 85 ‘propaganda’ tracts
were intended to help get the U.S. Constitution
ratified. They were all published anonymously under
the pseudonym, ‘Publius.’ The authorship of certainof the Federalist essays was disputed from the
beginning. Both Hamilton and Madison produced
lists that claimed some of the same papers. Therefollowed a series of lists, some claiming authorshipfor Madison and some for Hamilton.
The consensus of traditional scholarship, seconded
by Mosteller and Wallace, allocates the papers:
Hamilton 51 (1, 6-9, 11-13, 15-17, 21-36, 59-61,
65-85); Madison 29 (10, 14, 18-20, 37-58, 62, 63); Jay
5 (2-5, 64).
In 2005, I presented a paper at the ACH/ALLC
conference, ‘The Non-Traditional Case for the
Authorship of the Federalist Papers: A House
Built on Sand?’’ After 7 more years of ‘traditional’’research and the addition of over 70 non-traditional
studies of the Federalist, I am able to remove thequestion mark and put forth a reasoned argumentthat many, if not all, of the twelve disputed papers
are a collaboration and not written solely by Madison,as the consensus of traditional scholarship and nontraditional authorship studies claim.
In 1964, Mosteller and Wallace, building on theearlier unpublished work of Frederick Williams
and Frederick Mosteller, published their nontraditional authorship attribution study, Inference
and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist. It isarguably the most famous and well respected of
all of the non-traditional attribution studies. Since
then, well over a thousand papers have cited
the Mosteller and Wallace work and over 100

353

Digital Humanities 2012

non-traditional practitioners have analyzed and/or
conducted variations of the original study.

- Editorial Interpolation

Mosteller and Wallace set the boundary conditions
for the subsequent non-traditional work – e.g., notusing the Jay articles as a control. Most of these later
practitioners do not select or prepare the input text
as carefully as Mosteller and Wallace – and theirselection and preparation was not as rigorous andcomplete as it should have been – as we will see.

(C) De-editing

2. Problems with the nontraditional case
There are many problems with the Mosteller andWallace study and with the over 90 other nontraditional studies that cast strong doubts on theirresults:- Printer Interpolation- Quotes- Plagiarism- Collaboration- Graphs and Numbers- Guide Words- Foreign Languages- Translations(D) Editing- Encoding the Text
- Regularizing(1.) The Federalist Papers- Lemmatizing

A crucial step of any non-traditional authorship study
is to obtain a ‘starting text.’ As a rule, the closest text
to the ‘final’ holograph should be found and used.
Every step away from that holograph introduces
systematic errors.

There are many significant weaknesses in the text
preparation part of the Mosteller and Wallace study.
For example, they state that:(2.) The Hamilton Texts
Mosteller and Wallace go outside of the Federalist
papers to construct their block of Hamilton tracts.
(3.) The Madison Texts
Mosteller and Wallace also go outside of theFederalist papers to construct their block of Madison
tracts. In the case of the Madison block, there is a 20
year difference in their production dates. And what
is worse – some of these outside essays have beenshown to be not by Madison.
(4.) The Control Texts
There is not one non-traditional study that uses any
meaningful controls. The Mosteller and Wallace andWachal use of a ‘training set’ is not a control. The
closest test to a necessary control is found in the‘validation’ of four Hamilton papers (79, 80, 82, 85)
and other sets by Mosteller and Wallace.

3. More problems – Arriving at
the analysis texts(A) Background and Definitions
No attribution practitioner should question the factthat valid texts are needed if valid results are to beobtained. No matter how sophisticated the statisticalanalysis is, a bad text invalidates the results.
(B) Unediting354- They ignore the extent of the editing done by theother man [i.e. Hamilton or Madison] and by all ofthe ‘outside’ editors.
- They did not disambiguate words – e.g. thepersonal pronoun ‘I’ is teated the same as the
Roman numeral ‘I’ – the noun ‘abuse’ is treatedexactly like the verb ‘abuse’.
- They do not publish complete details of their‘little book of decisions’ or the rational behind
any of these decisions. –- They do not use the newspaper versions of thefirst 77 papers.
- They typed the text onto cards to be read by thecomputer, but for reasons of ‘economics’ theyused hand counts for much of their study. They
write about the many problems this introduces
but do not assign any systematic errors – e.g. (1)they show the differences in the hand counts vs.
the machine counts, (2) they tell us that their
proofreaders missed missing words, repeatedlines, and single word repetitions.
- Missing bibliographical sources – e.g. Smyth andWachal.
One of the guiding principles of any scientific study
is ‘reproducibility.’ Any other practitioner shouldbe able to reproduce a given study and get identicalresults. None of the over 90 Federalist studies
mentioned in this paper give anywhere near the
information needed – a fatal flaw.
Time will not allow for a detailed explication of thesestudies. In essence, they are all fatally flawed – many

Digital Humanities 2012

do not indicate which edition they used, most either
did no unediting, de-editing, or editing – or they failto say if they did anything to the text.

4. The case for ‘collaboration’There can be no doubt that the Federalist project wasa collaboration – a collaboration on many levels – but
the depth of that collaboration is what is in question.
We know that Publius’ Federalist series was the
product of three men – Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.
No one disputes this, as long as specific papers are
not discussed.
Most scholars agree that Federalist 18, 19, and20 were written jointly by Hamilton and Madison.
Exactly what parts were by which man is not agreed
upon.

- Do the Multiple Flaws in the Non-traditional
Studies Invalidate the Results
The bibliography for this paper contains well over
300 entries. The following is just a sample.

References
Adair, D. (1944). The Authorship of the Disputed
Federalist Papers. The William and Mary Quarterly(Third Series) 1(2): 97-122.
Bosch, R. A., and J. A. Smith (1998). Separating
Hyperplanes and the Authorship of the Disputed
Federalist Papers. The American Mathematical
Monthly 105(7): 601-607.
Carey, G. W. (1984). Publius – A Split Personality?
The Review of Politics 46(1): 5-22.

There is strong evidence that Hamilton and Madison
also had joint hands in many other numbers of theFederalist – including the twelve disputed papers.

Collins, J., et al. (2004). Detecting Collaborationsin Text: Comparing the Authors’ Rhetorical Language
Choices in The Federalist Papers. Computers and the
Humanities 38(1):15-36.

The evidence comes from traditional and nontraditional authorship attribution methodologies.

Cooke, J. E., ed. (1956).The Federalist. Cleveland:
Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company.

Traditional

Davis, G. (2003). `RE: Gutenberg Editionof Federalist. Private E-mail, 20 November 2003,
18:46:51.

- 1840 – Renwick’s Lives of John Jay and Alexander
Hamilton.
- 1894 – Whitaker’s, ‘A Problem in Authorship: Who
Wrote “The Federalist?”’- 1978 – Smyth’s, ‘The Federalist: The Authorship ofthe Disputed Papers.’- 1984 – Cary’s, ‘Publius – A Split Personality.’- 1984 – Furtwangler’s, The Authority of Publius: A
Reading of the Federalist Papers.
- 1999 – Kesler’s ‘Introduction to the Federalist
Papers.’Non-Traditional
The Collins et al. study, ‘Detecting Collaborations in
Text: Comparing the Authors’ Rhetorical Language
Choices in the Federalist Papers’ confirms thepremise of a deeper collaboration. Most of the non
traditional authorship studies do not agree with eachother. A list will be shown that reveals how manytimes each of the twelve disputed papers have been
attributed to Hamilton in the over 90 other nontraditional studies.
This paper concludes with a discussion of thefollowing:- Acceptance ofPractitioners

ResultsbyNon-Traditional- Acceptance of Results by History Scholars

Farringdon, M. G., and A. Q. Morton(1990). Fielding and the Federalist. CS Report
Series University of Glasgow CSC 90/R6.
Forsyth, R. S. (1995). Stylistic Structures: A
Computational Approach to Text Classification. Diss.
University of Nottingham.
Fung, G. (2003). The Disputed Federalist Papers:
SVM Feature Selection via Concave Minimization.
Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Diversity in
Computing. Atlanta, Georgia, pp. 42-46.
Gerritsen, C. M. (2003). Authorship Attribution
Using Lexical Attraction. M.S. Dissertation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hilton, M. L., and D. I. Holmes (1993).
An Assessment of Cumulative Sum Charts for
Authorship Attribution. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 8(2): 73-80.
Holmes, D. I., and R. S. Forsyth (1995). The
Federalist Revisited: New Directions in Authorship
Attribution.Literary and Linguistic Computing
10(2): 111-127.
Jockers, M. L., and D. M. Witten (2010). A
Comparative Study of Machine Learning Methods
for Authorship Attribution. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 25(2): 215-224.

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Khmelev, D. V., and F. J. Tweedie (2001).
Using Markov Chains for Identification ofWriters. Literary and Linguistic Computing 16(3):299-307.
Kjell, B. (1994). Authorship Determination Using
Letter Pair Frequency Features with Neural Network
Classifiers. Literary and Linguistic Computing 9(2):119-124.
Koppel, M., N. Akiva, and I. Dagan (2006).
Feature Instability as a Criterion for Selecting
Potential Style Markers. Journal of the American
Society for Information Science and Technology
57(11): 1519-1525.
Levitan, S., and S. Argamon (2006). Fixing
the Federalist: Correcting Results and Evaluating
Attribution.’ Paper presented at Digital Humanities
2006. Paris, Sorbonne 2006 (Paper courtesy ofauthors.)
Martindale, C., and D. McKenzie (1995). On the
Unity of Content Analysis in Authorship Attribution:
The Federalist. Computers and the Humanities 29:
259-270.
Marcus, L. S. (2000). Afterword: Confessionsof a Reformed Uneditor. In A. Murphy (ed.),The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality.
Manchester: Manchester UP, pp. 211-216.
Marcus, L. S. (1996). Unediting the Renaissance:
Shakespeare, Marlow, Milton. London: Routledge
1996.
McColly, W., and D. Weire (1983). Literary
Attribution and Likelihood-Ratio Tests: The Case of
the Middle English Pearle-Poems. Computers andthe Humanities 17: 65-75.
Merriam, Th. (1989). An Experiment with theFederalist Papers. Computers and the Humanities
23(3): 251-254.
Mosteller, F., and D. L. Wallace (1964). Applied
Bayesian and Classical Inference: The Case of The
Federalist Papers. New York: Springer 1984. CSLI
Publications published a reprint of the second editionin 2007 with a new introduction by John Nerbonne.
Mustafa, T. K., et al. (2010). Dropping Down
the Maximum Item Set: Improving the Stylometric
Authorship Algorithm in the Text Mining for
Authorship Investigation. Journal of Computer
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Oaks, M. (2004) Ant Colony Optimisation for
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Pennebaker, J. W. The Federalist. Unpublishedpreliminary work – courtesy of the Author.
Piaia, J. [For Frederick Mosteller] Private E-mail,Tuesday, 22 July 2003, 10:57:38.
Project Gutenberg[9-30-2003].

http://promo.net/pg/

Rokeach, M., et al. (1970). A Value Analysis of the
Disputed Federalist Papers. Journal of Personality
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Scigliano, R., ed. (2000). The Federalist. New
York: The Modern Library.
Smyth, L. Qu. (1978). The Federalist: The
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Stamatatos, E., N. Fakotakis, and G.
Kokkinakis (2001). Computer-Based Authorship
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Disputes. Physica A 329(3-4): 473-483.

Digital Humanities 2012

Writing with Sound:
Composing Multimodal,
Long-Form Scholarship
Sayers, Jentery

jentery@uvic.ca
University of Victoria, Canada

Historically speaking, the fields of digital humanities
and media studies have remained parallelat best, with the former anchored more incomputational practices and technical competencies
than the latter. However, recent work – such as
Sharon Daniel’s ‘Public Secrets’ (2007), Kathleen
Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence (2011), Matthew
Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms (2008), Kari Kraus’s‘Conjectural Criticism’ (2009), and Lev Manovich’s
cultural analytics (2012) – suggestively troubles thisparallelism. From the vantage of media studies,digital humanities allows scholars to shift fromcommenting about new media and technologies
to constructing arguments with and through them
(McPherson 2009: 120). Informed by claims fromexperience and anchored in embodied acts ofbuilding, digital humanities arguments necessarily
become ‘hands on,’ and scholarly distance fromtechnologies no longer holds. Meanwhile, media
studies investments in cultural criticism and situatedknowledge-making are increasingly important totoday’s digital humanities practitioners, involved
such as they are in multimodal communication (e.g.,interactive visualizations, geospatial representations,rich exhibits, and gaming). For instance, Alan Liu
argues that ‘digital humanities should enter into
fuller dialogue with the adjacent fields of new
media studies and media archaeology so as toextend reflection on core instrumental technologies
in cultural and historical directions’ (Liu 2012:
501, emphasis added). This fuller dialogue would
enhance the field’s awareness of how work withtechnologies and data intersects with the relevantsocial, economic, and political issues of our time.
Assuming those conversations are inevitable (andthat media studies and digital humanities should
continue to overlap and intersect), a key question
thus emerges: what would be an appropriate
platform for such forms of scholarly communication?
How would it function, and under what assumptions
about how digital humanities and media studies arepracticed?
With these questions in mind, this talk uses theauthor’s ongoing book project (tentatively titled,
How Text Lost Its Source: Magnetic Recording
Cultures) to present his findings on the yet-to-be-released Scalar platform. Supported by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the U.S.
National Endowment for the Humanities, Scalar isdesigned for authoring and publishing multimodal
books. Built using PHP ARC2 (a MySQL-based
Semantic Web/RDF framework), HTML, CSS,
jQuery, XLST, Dublin Core, and other ontologies
including SIOC, it enables users to assemble
media (e.g., audio files) from multiple sources
and juxtapose them with their own writing. The
platform particularly facilitates work with visualmaterials; however, it also lends itself to audio,
which is central to the history articulated in
How Text Lost Its Source. Throughout the talk,‘multimodal’ is preferred over ‘multimedia’ because
the term stresses systems of ‘sensory or perceptual
experience’ over the ‘means of conveying [or storing]a representation’ (Anastopoulou, Baber & Sharples
2001). And in the particular case of a Scalar
book, it assumes that: (1) attention behaviors
such as reading, watching, and listening are notinherent to or determined by a medium, (2)digital communication frequently entails blending
approaches to composition (e.g., through images,
audio, video, text, and databases), (3) layers ofdigital content are materially distinct and yetfunction relationally, and (4) scholarly interpretation
demands several sensory modes (e.g., listening
closely, scanning, and clicking).
The author’s preliminary findings on Scalar show
that, most importantly, it encourages reflexive
approaches to the computational processes involved
in digital humanities research. Influenced by thework of LaDona Knigge and Meghan Cope (2006)
as well as Mei-Po Kwan (2002), the author
organizes these findings according to how Scalar
fosters: (1) exploratory research across multiple
archives, (2) iterative and recursive argumentation,(3) an oscillation between abstract and concrete
expressions, and (4) multiple interpretations ofmedia and cultural history. Throughout, an emphasis
is placed on juxtaposing critical writing with thecritical use of audio in Scalar, including a few
demonstrations of How Text Lost Its Source.
In the case of exploratory research across multiple
archives, the platform is persuasive because it affords
composites of text, audio, video, and images drawn
from the various histories of magnetic recording,enabling the author to represent audio acrossthe material specificities of multiple media (rather
than reducing audio to simply sound or text). It
also allows historical evidence to be modeled andexhibited independently of the author’s writing (e.g.,
audiences can navigate all audio files collected for thehistory without reading the author’s interpretations).
However, any given audio file in a Scalar bookcan be annotated through discrete, time-stamped

357

Digital Humanities 2012

commentary by the author, and this commentary
is displayed within the medium’s own temporality.
While such features are now typical in visual culture(e.g., annotating lexia in Commentpress or tagging animage in Flickr), few such mechanisms exist for thescholarly treatment of sound.
Additionally, Scalar facilitates iterative and recursive
expression because it not only keeps a version historyof all contributions and makes that history public;it also allows authors to duplicate media content(e.g., a magnetic tape recording) in another context
and then re-evaluate it. Evidence in a scholarly
argument thus becomes subject to constant revisitation and re-use (e.g., the same tape recording
is interpreted several times), underscoring the factthat media histories emerge from multiple (and often
conflicting) perspectives, worldviews, and accounts.
Importantly, these media – together with theauthor’s writing – are presented throughout a Scalarbook both in the aggregate and in the particular.
Using RDF/XML and D3.js dynamic visualizations,
any single instance (i.e., anything with a URL)
in the book can be situated in relation to thebalance of the content. Consequently, the book’s
historical materials are structured and expressed insuch a way that they can be studied in isolation
but cannot exist independently. And when a bookis modeled effectively, its audiences can study
complex cultural relationships (e.g., between two
audio files) established by the author. Importantly,
such relationships are frequently constructed andencoded based on what has not been written orrecorded in media history. While RDF/XML andD3.js help scholars organize and convey it, no
computational practices exist (as of yet) for mining orvisualizing implicit content, especially in the case ofsound.
Finally, the Scalar platform excels at fosteringvarious interpretations of media history by allowing
audiences to – in the fashion of context-sensitive
design – select how a book’s content is viewed. Theseviews range from ‘text-only’ and ‘media-emphasis’to a radial visualization, a force-directed graph, anda history browser. Again, this array of perspectives
brushes against any totalizing account of media
history, the cultural history of magnetic recording
included. It also destabilizes a scholar’s authority
over an audience’s interpretation as it allows themto arrange and re-arrange content. Such an emphasison the constructedness of arguments is especially
key in a moment when visualizations are gaining
traction in the field. The dynamic juxtapositionsof writing and media in Scalar – D3 visualizations
among them – actively demonstrate how our dataand content are taken, not given (Drucker 2011).
They also facilitate robust and often contradictory
accounts of material histories, where scholars can:358(1) argue with and through the media they study;(2) present material relationally and discretely, eitherwith or without commentary; (3) author within
a medium’s temporality; (4) exhibit the otherwise
ignored processes of research and revision; (5)duplicate and interpret media in multiple contexts;and (6) underscore the contingent character ofhistorical artifacts, to such an extent that any
complete description of a given media object isdifficult to say the least.

References
Anastopoulou, S., C. Baber, and M.
Sharples (2001). Multimedia and Multimodal
Systems:
Commonalities
andDifferences.
Proceedings of the 5th Human Centred
Technology Postgraduate Workshop. University of
Sussex. http://www.syros.aegean.gr/users/man
ast/Pubs/Pub_conf/C03/C03.pdf .
Daniel,S.
(2007).
PublicSecrets.
Vectors 2(2). http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?
page=7&projectId=57.
Drucker, J. (2011). Humanities Approaches toGraphical Display. Digital Humanities Quarterly5(1). http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html .
Fitzpatrick, K. (2011). Planned Obsolescence:
Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the
Academy. New York: New York UP.
Kirschenbaum, M. (2008). Mechanisms: New
Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Knigge, LaDona, and M. Cope (2004). Grounded
Visualization: Integrating the Analysis of Qualitativeand Quantitative Data through Grounded Theory and
Visualization. Environment and Planning A 38(11):2021-2037.
Kraus, K. (2009). Conjectural Criticism:
Computing Past and Future Texts. Digital
Humanities Quarterly 3(4). http://www.digitalh
umanities.org/dhq/vol/3/4/ 000069/000069.ht
ml .

Kwan, M.-P. (2002). Feminist Visualization: Reenvisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic
Research. Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 92: 645-661.
Liu, A. (2012). Where Is Cultural Criticism in
the Digital Humanities? In M. K. Gold (ed.),Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, pp. 490-509.
Manovich, L. (2012). Trending: the Promises andthe Challenges of Big Social Data. In M. K. Gold (ed.),Digital Humanities 2012

Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, pp. 460-475.
McPherson, T. (2009). Media Studies and theDigital Humanities. Cinema Journal 48(2): 119-123.

Intra-linking the Research
Corpus: Using Semantic
MediaWiki as a lightweight
Virtual Research
Environment
Schindler, Christophschindler@dipf.de
German Institute for International Educational
Research, Germany

Ell, Basil

basil.ell@kit.edu
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Rittberger, Marc

rittberger@dipf.de
German Institute for International Educational
Research, Germany

In recent years, virtual research environments(VREs) emerged as a topic referring to theestablished research field in the digital humanities:
enabling research practices with digital tools. First
projects in this area are realized and discussed by
the community (Carusi 2010; Dunn 2009; Neurothet al. 2009). In the humanities, researchers pointout that the so-called ‘data deluge’ (Hey et al.
2003), which has influenced several national andsupranational information policy agendas in thesciences, does not cover the full range of aspects ofresearch practices in the humanities. While digital
libraries and archives offer a new plurality of
research resources in the humanities, the ‘complexity
deluge’ (Dunn 2009) formulates an opposite agenda
addressing the sometimes fuzzy, interfering anddispersed practices of humanities research.1In thispaper we want to address this tension between
research data, metadata and collaborative actionin the design of research corpora carried out
within a VRE. Therefore we will focus the ongoing
corpus re-arrangement and the potentials of Social
Semantic Media technologies to expand metadata
creation and use in qualitative research. Tools
for qualitative research target the flexible coding
system, i.e. allowing researchers to annotate researchresources according to a classification system that
may evolve over time. However, the tools have been
criticized for the limited metadata interoperabilityof resources and research findings (Corti et al.
2011). In our paper, we outline the aspects ofinteroperability in qualitative corpora research andfocus on researchers’ capabilities to intra-link the
corpus. We use the term intra-linking 2to address359

Digital Humanities 2012a main aspect in qualitative research: to create andto describe entities while allowing for the ongoing
re-arrangement of entities and their properties in
the research process. These capabilities will be
discussed and exemplified within the scope of
the project Semantic MediaWiki for Collaborative
Corpora Analysis (SMW-CorA) which aims toreconfigure Semantic MediaWiki as a lightweightvirtual research environment.3
The field of corpora centered research in the digital
humanities offers interesting insights into the designof VREs. In the early 1990s, Biber pointed out
main aspects of corpus design by problematizing apriori determinations of its boundaries and formal
specifications. He recommends the selection of
relevant objects and the formal description to berealized as a cyclic or iterative process of corpus
work (Biber 1993: 256). While a linguistic approach
mainly aims at a statistical ‘representation’ inrelation to a target population, qualitative corpus
research, which is focused here, pursues a socalled qualitative selection, i.e. a typification of yet
unknown properties in research (Bauer 2000: 20).
We argue that this indeterminacy of entities andproperties in qualitative research emphasizes theaffordance of a VRE enabling researchers to intralink the corpus – it means to give them the ongoingcapabilities to create, modify and re-arrange entities
and properties while doing research. This topic ofqualitative corpus research addresses the researchand design desideratum of qualitative annotations(Juola 2008) and a demanded shift to further
capabilities for the researcher to control the data
(Smith 2008: 178).
While the SMW-CorA project targets the re-use of
its VRE infrastructure in different research contexts
in the mid-term, its initial design is subject to a
co-operation with a research project in the historyof education, involving a major library in this field.
The educational research project encompasses theanalysis of a corpus of 25 educational lexica datingfrom 1774 to 1942, reconstructing the developmentof educational science. Discourse, field and content
analysis are supported and applied to grasp the
networked relationships in this scholarly field.
The Library for the History of Education (BBF)
hosts a large part of the lexica at the digital
library Scripta Paedagogica Online (SPO).4 The
collection amounts to nearly 22,000 articles. Eachlexicon is bibliographically described and accessible
online as image files. Participatory and agile design
approaches are used to offer an adequate sharedspace for the different stakeholders to articulatepossible potentials and boundaries of the VRE.
The SMW-CorA project builds on a Social Semantic
Media technology which in turn is based on the Web

360

2.0 software MediaWiki (MW),5 which is used at
the well-known online encyclopedia Wikipedia, andthe extension Semantic Media Wiki (SMW).6 The
latter enables the use of semantic annotations andintegration within the Semantic Web through importand export of semantic data and linking to external
entities. While other VREs7 have been realizedusing this wiki technology, the SMW-CorA project
promotes research on a corpus by configuring thefacilities of MW and SMW and by developing further
extensions to offer a configurable and lightweightVRE.
As such, the basic framework MediaWiki offerssome facilities for creating and typifying entities
in a corpus for research (in our case: lemmas,
authors, institutions etc.). The online encyclopedia
Wikipedia demonstrates, besides the collaborative
creation of texts, the capability to store documents
and digital objects. Therein a wiki page can be related
to other entities by hyperlinks and arranged withina hierarchical category system. SMW extends this byoffering an increased granularity for describing andlinking the corpus by adding metadata descriptions
used in the Semantic Web. The unspecific hyperlinks
between entities can be typified by metadata andthereby entities can be enriched with attributes or
semantic relations to other entities. Furthermore, it
is possible to import and export metadata in the
Semantic Web standard RDF.
Within the scope of the project a set of usecases is explored comprising the scholarly workin the research life cycle from importing researchresources, coding, classifying and analyzing these to
the export for re-use. The supported and envisaged
use cases have in common that entities can be
integrated, created, modified and interlinked (i.e.
intra-linking). This functionality is focused within
the project and supported by tools to enable
researchers to carry out an ongoing re-arrangementof their corpora. While the aspects of importing
lexica from a digital library and of exporting thebibliographic data in RDF are discussed in (Schindler
et al. 2011), further use cases exemplify thesecapabilities. Besides this import functionality, theenrichment of entities such as editors, authors, andrelated affiliations with properties by using Semantic
Web Browsing technologies is a further example.8
Thereby, semantic properties from digital archives,
libraries or further collections can be integrated
and adapted to the locally used metadata schemain the VRE. This enables researchers for example
to add biographical data of authors or editorsfrom authority files (e.g. German National Library
GND). Furthermore the import and collaborative
development of taxonomies (e.g. classification orcoding schema) are supported by interlinking entities
within the VRE and linking entities into the Web ofDigital Humanities 2012

Data. These links to the world external to the corpus,
together with the data export facilities of the VRE,
enable the reuse of the content created within the
VRE. Additionally, the VRE provides functionalities
for creating and re-arranging metadata schema as
well as a bottom-up task management to allow
supervision of the research process.
To summarize, we identified the need of researchers
to create, manage and intra-link entities andmetadata objects in a research corpus. Thisfunctionality is relevant for multiple use cases
where researchers perform a qualitative analysis
on a corpus of resources such as digital/digitized
documents and images. Our main contribution isthe development of a lightweight collaborative andadaptive VRE that enables researchers to performthese tasks as well as to enable export of thecreated data and the content’s sharing and reuse.
Since the VRE is based on a flexible Open Source
platform it can be tailored by the researchers towards
their specific needs. Therefore this lightweightenvironment may serve as a starting point for further
re-uses and re-configurations in unforeseen researchsettings and functionalities required in the future.
Funding
This work was supported by the German Research
Foundation (DFG) in the domain of ‘ScientificLibrary Services and Information Systems’ (LIS).
The funded project is entitled: ‘Entwicklung
einer Virtuellen Forschungsumgebung für die
Historische Bildungsforschung mit Semantischer
Wiki-Technologie – Semantic MediaWiki for
Collaborative Corpora Analysis’ [INST 367/5-1, INST
5580/1-1]

References
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity:
Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes toMatter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture andSociety 28(3): 801-831.
Bauer, M. W., and B. Aarts (2000). Constructing
a research corpus. In M.W. Bauer and G. Gaskell(eds), Qualitative researching with text, image andsound: a practical handbook. Thousand Oaks: Sage,
pp. 19-37.
Biber, D. (1993). Representativeness in corpus
design. Literary and linguistic computing 8(4):243-257.
Carusi, A., and T. Reimer (2010). Virtual
Research Environment. Collaborative LandscapeStudy. A JISC funded project. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications /vrelands
capereport.pdf (accessed 30 October 2011).

Corti, L., and A. Gregory (2011). CAQDASComparability. What about CAQDAS Data
Exchange? Forum: Qualitative Social Research12.
http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/viewArticle/1634 .
(accessed 30 October 2011).
Dunn, S. (2009). Dealing with the complexity
Deluge – VREs in the arts and humanities. Library
Hi Tech (27)2: 205-216.
Edwards, P. N., M. S. Mayernik, A. L.
Batcheller, et al. (2011). Science friction: Data,
metadata, and collaboration. Social Studies of
Science 415): 667-690.
Hey, T., and A. Trefethen (2003). The Data
Deluge: An e-Science Perspective. In F. Berman, G.
Fox, and T. Hey (eds.), Grid Computing: Making
the Global Infrastructure a Reality. Chichester: John
Wiley & Sons, pp. 809-824.
Huvila, I. (2008). Participatory archive: towards
decentralised curation, radical user orientation, andbroader contextualisation of records management.
Archival Science 8(1): 15-36.
Juola, P. (2008). Killer Applications in Digital
Humanities. Literary and Linguist Computing 23:
73-83.
Neuroth, H., F. Jannidis, A. Rapp,andF.
Lohmeier(2009).
Virtuelle
Forschungsumgebungenfüre-Humanities.
Maßnahmen zur optimalen Unterstützung vonForschungsprozessen in den Geisteswissenschaften.
Bibliothek. Forschung und Praxis 2: 161-169.
Schindler, C., C. Veja, M. Rittberger, and D.
Vrandečić (2011). How to teach digital library data
to swim into research. Proceedings of I-SEMANTICS
2011: 7th International Conference on Semantic
Systems, Sept. 7-9, 2011, Graz, Austria New York:ACM International Conference Proceedings Series(2011), 142-149
Smith, N., S. Hoffmann, and P. Rayson(2008). Corpus Tools and Methods, Today
and Tomorrow: Incorporating Linguists’ Manual
Annotations. Literary and Linguist Computing 23:
163-180.
Notes
1. It should be mentioned that a similar field of tension isarticulated for the sciences as ‘science friction’ (Edwards etal. 2011) by addressing the problems of different disciplines
working on the same phenomena and trying to interoperate.
2. This term refers to the concept of ‘intra-action’, which
describes the interrelations and re-configurations of research
apparatuses in respect of ‘locally stabilized phenomena’ (Barad
2003: 817).

361

Digital Humanities 2012

3. This project is realized in co-operation between the German
Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF), theKarlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Library for
Research on Educational History (BBF) and educational
researchers mainly of the Georg-August-University Göttingen.
See http://www.dipf.de/en/projects/virtual-res
earch-environment-for-research-in-the-history-of-education-smw-cora .
4. The lexica are available at http://bbf.dipf.de/digitale-bbf/scripta-paedagogica-online/digitalisierte-nachschlagewerke .

Corpus Coranicum: A
digital landscape for the
study of the Qu’ran
Schnöpf, Markus

schnoepf@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences andHumanities, Germany

5. See http://www.mediawiki.org
6. The extension Semantic MediaWiki is described at http://
www.semantic-mediawiki.org
and offers further
extensions at http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/
Help:Extensions .
7. Some interesting cases using MW or SMW as a VRE are
http://www.docupedia.de/ , a reference work in thearea of historical research, http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org and in the context of archives (Isto, 2008).
Some further examples of using SMW are listed on the
webpage http://smw.referata.com/wiki/Special:B
rowseData/Sites?Data_type=Science .
8. A prototype of this SMW-based extension Semantic Web
Browser is developed in collaboration with KIT – Benedikt
Kämpgen, Anna Kantorovitch, and Denny Vrandečić – and isaccessible at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extens
ion:Semantic_Web_Browser .

1. Introductiom
In 2007 begun the project Corpus Coranicum locatedat the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Scienceand Humanities with an estimated duration of
twelve years. A goal of the project is a holistic
documentation of the holy text. The project consistsof different modules: Collection of early manuscripts,
documentation of environmental texts to the Quran,
documentation of alternate writings and finally acommentary on each sura of the Quran. In thelast years the technological infrastructure has been
set up and data was collected in a SQL database.
The commentary of the was realised in XML
and is stored in a XML-database. The website of
the project thus combines SQL and XML in an
integrated information system. Lately, a bibliography
consisting of 8000 references was added to thesystem. Further investigations are directed more
on a scientific dating, analysing the materiality ofearly written documents. They are scheduled for2012/13 within a French-German joint research
project. Another new module is a glossary of the andearly Arabic literature. For overcoming troubles in
the presentation of early Arabic script a special font
has been developed: The Coranica.
The project Corpus Coranicum began at the BerlinBrandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities
in 2007 with a planned duration of 12 years. The
project aims at both a holistic edition of the Quranand also an extensive commentary. In addition to the
Al-Azhar Quran edition from 1923/1924, this projectwill provide the reader with early written testimonies
as well as oral reading variants that are manifested inearly islamic literature.

2. Manuscripta
The project sees the module Manuscripta Coranica
as following the tradition of G. Bergsträßers planned
Apparatus Criticus, which due to Bergsträßers early
death could never be realised. Thus the project
aims at a new approach to the text of the Quran.
Bergsträßer collected the oldest Quran manuscripts

362

Digital Humanities 2012by travelling the Arabic world in the 1920s with a 35mm camera.

3. Lectiones
This is the module Lectiones Coranicae, in which we
present the different readings of the Quran. In thismodule only these variants that have phonetic effects,
are collected. Each variant is assigned to one or more
reader or the bequeathing person. A synoptical viewon these variants looks like a score of the Quran.

Figure 1: A page from the Kodex Meknes
from the collection of Bergsträßer

These photographs remained lost until members of
the Corpus Coranicum found the filmstrips in 2008
(Higgins 2008). Immediately we began to digitize theimages in levels of grey. The project can therefore
present digitizations from Quran manuscripts in themodule Manuscripta Coranica that are lost today.
A database containing metadata that includes therange of verses in one image has been developed
and filled. The early manuscripts have a high degreeof ambiguity, as vocals and diacritics were usedirregularly and different from today. Thus thesemanuscripts document the continuity as well as thedevelopment of the Arabic writing system.

Figure 3: Lectiones Coranicae

4. Commentary
The commentary on each sura contains different
parts. First, texts from the environment of the Quran
like the bible, Talmud and early Arabic inscriptions,
papyri and others have to be mentioned. We call thesetexts intertexts. Here one encounters a high diversityof different writing systems, such as Greek, Syrian,
Pahlawi and others. Sources are therefore foundin many different languages. With this collectionof heterogeneous texts connected to each verse of
the Quran the user will be able to draw a map oftraditions that were mentioned in the holy text.

Figure 2: Same page in the module Manuscripta Coranica

The Quran was revealed to Mohammed from God
via the angel Gabriel beginning in 610 (western
dating). Until 632, the year of Mohammed’s death,the divine revelations were mainly orally memorized
and written on palm leaves. The Quran consistsof 114 chapters that are called suras. Each suraconsists of a different number of verses with a
total number of 6326 verses. The length of theverses degrees from sura one to 114. The Corpus
Coranicum aims at documenting the double stringof the quranic textual history, as it was handwritten
and orally (which was codified in later islamicsources) passed on next generations. So, beneaththe module Manuscripta Coranica, which documents
the handwritten tradition of text, the oral reading
tradition of the Quran has to be documented as well.

Figure 4: The module commentary on the Quran

The grammar in the suras is the theme of thesecond part of the commentary. A word canbe explained through comparisons with othermanifestations of the word in the Quran. In
addition, the identification of Quranic loan words
must be mentioned. In order to facilitate thiswork, a database Glossarium Coranicum has beendeveloped. The formal structure of each sura is
the subject of another part of the commentary.
The literal appearance of oaths, revelations and363

Digital Humanities 2012

other structural phenomena are recorded in thissection, thus documenting the formal history of
Quranic speech. After having captured the lexical,
grammatical and literal characteristics of the sura,
it is possible to identify insertions, in so far as
they can be proofed following the interpolation
hypothesis. The interpretation is the last part of thecommentary for each sura. On the one hand eachtext can be assembled in different ways, reflecting
the chronology of the sura’s formation. On the other
hand the differences to the intertexts can be used toshow the uniqueness of the sura.

5. The digital landscapeComing to the digital environment of the project, we
try to organize the information in different databasesthat provide the backbone of the Corpus Coranicum:

within the project, called Coranica, which we offer aswell for download as open source.
Arabic digital philology is a young and emerging
field in the digital humanities. Speech technologies
like the Hopper of the Perseus project or
the Buckwalter ensive arabic dictionary, remainunfulfilled. However, freshly published resources likethe Lane dictionary can be used to broaden theperception of Arabic texts. In my presentation I will
demonstrate the techniques and web-contents of the
Corpus Coranicum, as the first results of the project
goals are published in the first half of 2012. Thus the
Quran will be presented for the first time as a digitalreference system not only for the Quran itself, but aswell integrating other sources from the early Arabic
and old Ancient world. Thus, philology must makesense to the text itself (Pollock 2009).

- Manuscripta Coranica

References- Lectiones Coranicae

Bergsträsser,
G. (1993). Nichtkanonische
Koranlesarten im Muhtasab des Ibn-Ginnī / von G.
Bergsträsser. Egelsbach: Hänsel-Hohenhausen.

- Bibliographia Coranica- Glossarium Coranicum- Intertexts- Quran itself

Higgins, A. (2008). The Lost Archive. Wall Street
Journal. Available at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120008793352784631.html (accessed 25
March 2012).
Pollock, S. (2009). Future philology? The fate of asoft science in a hard world. Critical Inquiry. 35(4):931-961.
Spitaler, A. (1935). Die Verszählung des Koran
nach islamischer Überlieferung. München: Bayer.
Akad. d. Wissenschaften.
Wansbrough, J. (2004). Quranic Studies: Sources
and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation. London:
Prometheus Books.

Figure 5: The module intertexts

The connection between these databases is thesura and the verse. It is thus possible to show
all connected information for one verse: themanuscripts showing the verse, the intertexts ofthe verse and the loan words used in the verse.
The commentary for each sura is stored in XML,following and extending the transcription rules of
the Text Encoding Initiative. We therefore, have aheterogeneous digital information landscape, where
different and yet separated information systems
are bundled under one umbrella. Generally stated,the different cultures the project deals with are
combined within this information system. The usageof different writing systems and languages are thus
another challenge in the project. As available fonts
were unable to represent ancient Arabic writings (thevocalisation points are orientated on modern Arabic
writing systems) a special font had to be developed364

Digital Humanities 2012

The MayaArch3D
Project: A 3D GIS Web
System for Querying
Ancient Architecture andLandscapes
Schwerin, Jennifer vonjvonschw@unm.edu
University of New Mexico, USA

Richards-Rissetto, Heather
heathmrr@hotmail.com
University of New Mexico, USA

Agugiaro, Giorgio
agugiaro@fbk.eu
FBK Trento, Italy

Remondino, Fabio
remondino@fbk.eu
FBK Trento, Italy

Girardi, Gabrio

gabrio.girardi@graphitech.it
GraphiTech Trento, Italy

In this paper, we highlight the need in humanities
research for 3D tools with enhanced analytical
functionality and present an innovative 3D Web GIS
system that we are developing – called QueryArch3D– for studies of ancient architecture and landscapes.
We explore the role this tool is playing in thedevelopment of new methodologies and formulating
and addressing research questions in humanities
research. Specifically, we demonstrate how researchand teaching on archaeology and art history canbe dramatically assisted by a Virtual Research
Environment that offers the ability to search andquery segmented 3D models (both CAD and realitybased) that are linked to attribute data stored ina spatial database in the context of an online VR
landscape – in this case, the eighth-century Maya
kingdom of Copan, Honduras.
Modern sensor and computing technologies arechanging the practice of art history and archaeology
because they offer innovative ways to document,
reconstruct, and research the ancient world (e.g., ElHakim et al. 2008; Reindel & Wagner 2009). 3D
digital models and virtual reality (VR) environmentsallow for remote viewing of objects, as well as
multiple iterations of hypothetical reconstructions,and offer the sense of space and experience that
researchers now desire (e.g., Barcelo et al. 2000).
But, as has been pointed out, there is a common

perception that while 3D models are good for
education or data conservation, they are not usefulfor research because they are often deemed as
purely illustrative and not useful for analysis (e.g.,
Frischer & Dakouri-Hild 2008). One promising
opportunity offered by 3D models is to use themas visualization ‘containers’ for different kinds ofinformation. Given the possibility to link theirgeometry to external data, 3D models can beanalyzed, split into sub-components, and organizedfollowing proper rules. Powerful 3D visualization
tools already exist, but often they implement
no or only limited query functionalities for data
retrieval, and very few of these are web-based.
In contrast, Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
include queries as standard functions and allow forcomplex spatial analyses – and therefore are wellsuited to research (e.g., Bodenhamer et al. 2010;
Conolly & Lake 2006).
Along these lines, archaeologists are using GIS to
perform quantitative analyses, such as visibility,
accessibility, and network studies, to explore thestructure of ancient societies and relationships
between anthropogenic and natural phenomena. GIS
software, however, falls short when dealing withdetailed and complex 3D data. It is comprised of
2.5D data, which are not ideally suited to approaches
such as performance studies, phenomenology andaesthetics, the relationship of architecture andlandscape, and archaeoastronomy that are becoming
increasingly common in archaeology and art
history. 3D models of architecture are simply more
appropriate for these kinds of investigations, but
most 3D digital models of architecture are single
objects, removed from the context of their place in thelandscape and are not linked to scientific data.
In 2009, the MayaArch3D Project (http://
mayaarch3d.unm.edu) was begun to explore thepossibilities of integrating GIS and 3D digital
tools for humanities research. This interdisciplinary,international project was funded largely by two
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants from the
National Endowment for the Humanities (USA)and brings together art historians, archaeologists,and cultural resource managers with experts inremote sensing, photogrammetry, 3D modeling, andvirtual reality. The project was founded by Jennifer
von Schwerin and Heather Richards-Rissetto at
the University of New Mexico working with datafrom the UNESCO World Heritage site and ancient
Maya city in Copan, Honduras, when they realizedthat their research goals would be better served
if they could join their separate sets of data ina tool that linked GIS and 3D data in a virtual
reality environment. Von Schwerin, an art historian,
had turned to digital 3D tools in order to test
her reconstructions of an eighth-century temple at365

Digital Humanities 2012

Copan (Figure 1). But other aspects of her researchseek to analyze the temple within its larger urban
context and the role that space plays in humanexperience – something for which GIS is well-suited.
Richards-Rissetto, an archaeologist, created a GIS for
Copan to study the visual and spatial relationships
between built forms and natural landscape features,
but soon realized that her research could benefit
from a 3D perspective, as the 2D perspective of
GIS maps limited her interpretations (Figure 2).
Working together, von Schwerin and RichardsRissetto asked themselves: What are the real researchpossibilities for 3D models? How can we create an
online resource for researchers of Maya architecture
where they can compare and study geo-referenced
3D models and attribute data? How can we perform
quantitative and qualitative comparisons with other
Maya structures and analyze architecture in larger
spatial and temporal contexts?
To address these questions, the MayaArch3D Project
developed a new computing pipeline in order to build
a prototype tool for an online, searchable repository –called QueryArch3D – that brings together GIS data,
3D models, and virtual environments for teaching
and research on ancient architecture and landscapes.
This pipeline uses PostgreSQL as spatial repository
back-end and allows for the import and export ofstandard GIS formats, as well as 3D models as
triangulated meshes via the common obj format.
Like traditional databases, this tool can curate,query, and compare 2D digital objects (such as
drawings, maps, diagrams, text, photographs, andvideos). However, what is unique and technologicallycutting-edge is that QueryArch3D enables users to1) integrate and edit 2D and 3D data of multiple
resolutions, 2) to perform attribute and spatial
queries of archaeological data, and 3) to visualize,
compare and analyze 3D buildings and artifacts– all in a single online, navigable virtual reality
landscape. Developed in 2010 in collaboration with
Fabio Remondino and Giorgio Agugiaro at theBruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) in Trento, Italy,
and Gabrio Girardi at Graphitech, in Trento, Italy,
the QueryArch3D tool stores both low resolution
models, high resolution reality-based, hybrid models
and all ancillary attribute data in an open source
spatial database, and then makes them queryable
via a virtual reality environment that runs on the
Unity 3 game engine. Currently the contents of thedigital resource include collections on ancient Copan(Figure 3). Overall, our preliminary research results
indicate the QueryArch3D tool is poised to offer a
new level of collaborative work in any field that works
with 3D models, GIS, and large data sets, because
it allows researchers to bring 2D and 3D datasetsfrom separate projects into a single environment andwork in real-time using the online query and analysis
capabilities.
366

This paper presents this new tool and the resultsof the beta-testing that was carried out in fall 2011
with researchers, students, and educators in thehumanities. Beta testers unanimously were enthused
about the tool, particularly at having the ability to (1)navigate online through a virtual model of an ancient
Maya city, (2) access higher resolution models ofobjects, (3) query the archaeological database via themodel – and vice versa. Suggestions for improvement
centered on decreasing the initial download time,
improving the user interface (changes to navigationcommands, adding a text search box), and adding abroader range of spatial queries. Because the projectis still in its initial stages, the paper also summarizes
current research problems, and the tasks to besolved in the project’s next stage of development,in collaboration with the German Archaeological
Institute and the University of Heidelberg. The
paper concludes with a critical assessment of thepossibilities that 3D Web GIS systems currently
offer scholars and educators in terms of organizing,searching, and visualizing data, and identifying
patterns over space and time.

Digital Humanities 2012

Figure 3: QueryArch3D tool showing different data visualization
modes and levels of detail. Graphic: Giorgio Agugiaro

Referencesa)
Selected
Publications:

MayaArch3D

Project

Agugiaro G., F. Remondino, G. Girardi, J.
von Schwerin, H. Richards-Rissetto, and R.
de Amicis (2011). QueryArch3D: Querying andvisualising three-dimensional archaeological models
in a web-based interface. In Geoinformatics, Facultyof Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University,
ISSN 1802-2669.

Figure 1a and 1b: Working hypothetical reconstruction and
3D model of Temple 22 created by the MayaArch3D Project(Graphic: Raul Maqueda, from von Schwerin et al. 2011)

Remondino F., A. Gruen, J. von Schwerin, H.
Eisenbeiss, A. Rizzi, S.Girardi, M. Sauerbier,and H. Richards-Rissetto (2009). Multi-sensor
3D Documentation of the Maya Site of Copan.
Proceedings of the 22nd CIPA Symposium, 11-15
October, 2009, Kyoto, Japan (2009). http://cipa.icomos.org/KYOTO.html .
Richards-Rissetto, H. (2012). Studying Social
Interaction at the Ancient Maya Site of Copán,
Honduras: A Least Cost Approach to Configurational
Analysis. In D. A. White and S. Surface-Evans (eds),
Least Cost Analysis of Sociocultural Landscapes:
Archaeological Case Studies, Accepted by Universityof Utah Press, January 2011.
von Schwerin, J. (2011). The Sacred Mountainin Social Context: Design, History and Symbolismof Temple 22 at Copán, Honduras. AncientMesoamerica 22(2): 271-300.

Figure 2: Copan GIS (Graphic: Heather Richards-Rissetto 2011)von Schwerin, J., H. Richards-Rissetto, F.
Remondino, G. Agugiaro, M. Forte, and R.
Maqueda(2011). The MayaArch3D Project;
Digital Technologies for Research in Maya
Archaeology. Final Performance Report and White
Paper for NEH Digital Humanities Level II Start- Up
Grant.
b) Related Publications:
Barcelo, J. A., M. Forte, and D. Sanders
D. (2000). Virtual Reality in Archaeology. BAR
International Series 843, Oxford.
367

Digital Humanities 2012

Bodenhamer, D. J., J. Corrigan, and T. M.
Harris (2010). The spatial humanities: GIS andthe future of humanities scholarship. Bloomington :Indiana UP.
Conolly, J., and M- Lake (2006). Geographical
Information Systems in archaeology. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Dear M., J. Ketchum, S. Luria, and D.
Richardson (2011). GeoHumanities Art, History,
Text at the Edge of Place. New York: Routledge.
El-Hakim, S., J.-A. Beraldin, F. Remondino,
M. Picard, L. Cournoyer, and M. Baltsavias(2008). Using terrestrial laser scanning and digital
images for the 3D modelling of the Erechteion,
Acropolis of Athens. Proceedings of the DMACH
Conference, Digital Media and its Applications in
Cultural Heritage. Amman, pp. 3-16.
Frischer, B., and A. Dakouri-Hild (2008).
Beyond illustration: 2d and 3d digital technologies
as tools for discover in archaeology. Oxford:
Archaeopress.
Llobera, M. (2006). What you see is what you get?:
Visualscapes, visual genesis and hierarchy. In P. Daly
and T. Evans (eds.), Digital Archaeology: Bridging
Method and Theory. New York, London: Routledge,
Taylor and Francis, pp. 148-167.
Manferdini, A. M., F. Remondino, S.
Baldissini, M. Gaiani, and B. Benedetti(2008). 3D modeling and semantic classificationof archaeological finds for management andvisualization in 3D archaeological databases.
Proceedings of 14th Int. Conference on Virtual
Systems and MultiMedia (VSMM 2008), pp.
221-228
Reindel, M., and G. A. Wagner, eds. (2009).
New Technologies for Archaeology: Multidisciplinary
Investigations in Palpa and Nasca, Peru. Natural
Science in Archaeology. Heidelberg/Berlin.
Remondino, F., S. El-Hakim, S. Girardi, A.
Rizzi, B. Benedetti, and L. Gonzo (2009). 3D
Virtual reconstruction and visualization of complex
architectures-The 3D-ARCH project. IAPRS&SIS
Vol.38(5/W1)
Robertson, E., J. Seibert, D. Fernandez, and
M. Zender, eds. (2006). Space and Spatial
Analysis in Archaeology. University of New Mexico
and University of Calgary Press: Albuquerque andCalgary.

368

Multi-dimensional audiovisual technology: Evidence
from the endangered
language documentation
Sharma, Narayan P.

narayan.sharma57@gmail.com
SOAS, University of London, UK

The audio-visual documentation of endangered
language provides multi-dimensional data which caneffect outcomes of research such as understanding
the complexities of linguistic diversity andtransmitting memory and knowledge. Audio-visual
documentation also allows for observing the uniquecultural heritage embedded in the culture, and also
for understanding the environmental, multilingualand socio-cultural context of the speech community.
This study investigates how the digital audio-video
capturing can record several types of information
simultaneously and how it has become a successful
method for not only documenting the language but
also observing the cultural uniqueness.
Linguists such as Daniel L. Everett (2001) prefers
monolingual field method for studying the languages,
but others like George Cowan (1975) claims thatthe monolingual approach is a serious barrier
to maintaining the good-will of the community
members. A common obstacle that linguists faceneeds to understand the lingua franca, which isessential for practical and administrative purposesof studying a language (Newman & Ratliff 2001). As
most of the speakers in this study are multilingual,the language of elicitation and the medium ofinterview are also influenced by this factor andmultilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon
among Pumas. The medium of conducting interview
and the elicitation for this study are in a ‘lingua
franca’, Nepali language. Interviewees in the study
speak Nepali as a second or first language. The
findings reveal that monolingual research is only
contextual and it is not sufficient to study endangered
languages.
In 2010 field research was conducted in Nepal to
study the ‘Morpho-syntax of Puma, which is anendangered language. During eight months in thefield site, a total of 45 informants both male andfemale were selected and interviewed from all Puma
speaking Village Development Committees. A totalhour of audio and video recording was 08:35:03
in the natural settings. The recorded corpus isdivided into 83 different sessions and all of them

Digital Humanities 2012

have been transcribed in Puma, mostly by native
speakers and then translated into Nepali, and English
by the researcher. The software/ digital tools andmajor recording equipments used in this work are as
follows:(a) Software- Transcriber (for transcription from audio and/or
video data) .trs file
- Toolbox (for glossing/segmenting, adding soundfiles into texts and creating a dictionary) .txt file
- ELAN (for linking audio-visual data with texts;
video annotation) .eaf
- Handbrake to convert original video format (MTS/
AVCHD) into MP4- Kigo Video converter to convert original video
format (MTS/ AVCHD) into MP4(b) Recording equipments- Zoom-4Hn Recorder for audio recording- Canon Legaria HF S200 for video recording- Audio-Technica AT8022 stereo microphone- Audio Technica Pro 70 Lavalier- Rod NTG2 microphone- Canon Powershot Digital Camera
WAV, MP4 and text files of the data have beencreated and can be archived and disseminated foruse. In the case of many endangered languages,
such materials are essential for developing
pedagogical materials in mother tongue educationand language revitalization. Csató and Nathan(2003) emphasize that whereas linguists working
in the community earlier contributed throughtraditional academic publishing, linguists in recent
years create multimedia resources to highlight theirrelationships with the community.
This paper attempts to explore fundamental
questions of direct elicitation.
Based on complex verbal morphology and paradigms
in Puma, without direct elicitation, it is notpossible to gather authentic data on verbal
paradigms, deixis, compound verbs and among
others. Identifying morphemes and their multiple
usages are challenging in the Puma language. Usingquestionnaires and basic sentences are still the mostwidely and commonly used method for linguistic
research. Dixon (2010) states that the only way tounderstand the grammatical structure of a language
is to analyse recorded texts but not elicited sentences.
The findings in the study pose that elicited sentences
are quite essential and significant especially foreliciting Puma verb paradigms and figuring out
deictic categories. We can never neglect direct

elicitation, and the established questionnaires andbasic sentences (i.e Dahls’ 1985 questionnaire) can berecorded in Puma.
The recording of speech from different genres suchas narratives, conversations, myths and stories, life
histories, songs, poetry and daily accounts is thecore of linguistic fieldwork. Both recording of text
and direct elicitation are essential tools that havetheir own variety of uses. Since none of them are
sufficient for all linguistic analysis, both of themshould not be overlooked (Mithun 2001). The text
collection, its transcription and translation, andglossing are important tools for understanding andlearning languages.
Metadata is the additional but essential informationneeded for archiving and managing language
documentation and can be referred to as metadocumentation, which includes information about
the identity of stakeholders, the attitudes of language
contributors and the methodology (Austin 2010;
Nathan 2010). The linked-metadata should be kept
and all files name such as text file, WAV file, MP4file, ELAN file and transcriber file must be the sameotherwise there would be great problem not only for
future researchers but also for archiving.
Linguists cannot avoid cultural aspects of speakers
while studying their language, as culture is an
integral part of the language community. The
study shows evidence that certain unique genresof ritual speech, like the hopmacham, a chantpraising the forces of creation during marriages(CPDP 2004-2008), are still well-known and inpractice in the Puma community while it has alreadydisappeared in other neighboring ethnic groups. In
this study hopmacham was initially recorded likeother texts but its cultural heritage and uniquenesswas unknown until it was glossed and translated into
Nepali. The recordings allowed for deeper analysis ofculture in the community.
Integrating linguistic and cultural resources is a
crucial endeavour for documentary linguistics. The
audio-visual data include many different types of
information which can record several types of
information simultaneously such as linguistic andcultural diversity, ethnography of speaking traditionsof both everyday and ritual language, socio-cultural
aspects of the community such as rites and rituals.
It also captures some anthropological considerations
such as religion, settlement, clans, emigration, andthe socio-linguistic aspects, and most importantly
videos and photographs of informants and local
features. Thus, the analysis of the study makes
clear that digital audio-video method is the best
method for documenting endangered language andintegrating linguistic and cultural data for archive,
dissemination, and mobilization in the humanities.
369

Digital Humanities 2012

References
Austin, P. K. (2010). Current Issues in Language
Documentation. In P. Austin (ed.), Language
Documentation and Description. London: SOAS,
vol. 7, pp. 12-33.
Chintang and Puma Documentation Project(CPDP) (2004-2008). http://www.uni-%09leipzi
g.de/~ff/cpdp/ .
Cowan, G. (1975). The monolingual approach to
studying Amuzgo. In A. Healey (ed.), Language
Learner’s Field Guide. Ukarumpa, Papua New
Guinea: SIL, pp. 272-276.
Csató, É. Á., and D. Nathan (2003). Multimedia
and documentation ofendangered languages.
In P. Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and
Description. London: SOAS, vol. 1, pp. 73-84.
Dahl, Ö. (1985). Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Dixon, R. M. W. (2010). Basic Linguistic Theory.
Oxford: Oxford UP.
Everett, D. L. (2001). Monolingual field research.
In P. Newman and M. Ratlif (eds.), Linguistic
Fieldwork, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 166-88.
Mithun, M. (2001). Who shapes the record: thespeaker and the linguist. In P. Newman and M. Ratlif(eds.), Linguistic Fieldwork, Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, pp. 34-54.
Nathan, D. (2010). Language documentation andarchiving: from disk space to my space. In P. Austin(ed.), Language Documentation and Description.
London: SOAS, vol. 7.
Newman, P., and M. Ratliff (2001). Linguistic
Fieldwork. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Contours of the Past:
Computationally Exploring
Civil Rights Histories
Shaw, Ryan Benjaminryanshaw@unc.edu
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Historical insight is only achieved when thecontours of our view of the past are as clear as
possible.
(Frank Ankersmit)
Each history provides a unique view of the past by
picking out a path through the field of possible events(Veyne 1984: 36). And because histories respondto earlier histories, their paths intersect. At theseintersections lie events which become taken for
granted as ‘sites to be visited’ on ‘a pre-arranged
itinerary marking out the recommended scenic route(and the beaten track) from one major point ofinterest to the next’ (Rigney 1990: 37). Some of theseitineraries are then reified as periods.
If we accept these itineraries too readily, we risk
missing opportunities for new insights. Historicalinsight results not just from the accumulation of new
facts about the past, but from the development of
new views upon the facts we already know. The morestories we have about some piece of the past, ‘thedeeper our insight into it will be […] because only
the presence of other stories enables us to draw thecontours and to recognize the specificity of the viewof the past presented in each one’ (Ankersmit 1983:
219).
In 1983, Frank Ankersmit theorized a procedurefor drawing these contours by clustering stories
that contain overlapping sets of propositions. By
taking a set of stories about a person, place,or period, transforming each story into a list of
propositions, and aligning them in such a way thatthe lists could be compared, Ankersmit posited that‘certain classificatory patterns [would] automaticallyappear’ (Ankersmit, 1983: 145).
The Contours of the Past project is testing
Ankersmit’s theory by building tools for comparing
and contrasting histories of the civil rights
movement. The historiography of the civil rights
movement exemplifies how periods coalesce around
dominant stories. The first generation of civil rights
scholars ‘conceived of the civil rights struggle
as primarily a political movement that secured
legislative and judicial triumphs’ (Lawson 1991). The

370

Digital Humanities 2012chronology of this movement began with Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 and ended
with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Due in part tointense media coverage, by the end of the twentiethcentury this chronology had become a well-beaten
path not only among scholars but also in popular
understanding.
In the past decade, a new generation of scholars
has sought to broaden this itinerary, telling ‘thestory of a ‘long civil rights movement’ that tookroot in the liberal and radical milieu of the late
1930s, was intimately tied to the ‘rise and fall of the
New Deal Order,’ accelerated during World War II,[and] stretched far beyond the South’ (Hall 2005).
The concept of the Long Civil Rights Movement(LCRM) is about more than simply replacing one
story with a new one. By widening the scope of thecivil rights movement, the LCRM opens space for agreater diversity of stories, enabling greater insightbut making it more difficult to grasp the movement as
whole. We aim to show how computational analysis
might complement the work of scholars evolving
new periodizations and perspectives, by providing
tools for comprehending narrative patterns in a more
complex whole.
We are applying cutting-edge text analysis
techniques to two corpuses: eighty-seven books madeavailable by the UNC Press through their Publishing
the LCRM project, and transcripts of approximately
350 interviews conducted by the Southern Oral
History Program as part of their LCRM initiative.1
The specific techniques we are applying are event
parsing and narrative clustering.
Event parsing involves identifying sentences that
communicate some event, for example a strike, aprotest, a bombing, or a legislative act. Specifically,
it involves identifying frames, conceptual structuresthat describe particular events along with their
participants and settings.2 Typically event parsing
has been used for detection and tracking of topics
in news media, automated question answering, text
summarization, and the production of structured
data from unstructured text.
We apply event parsing to different ends. We do
not treat events as ‘facts’ that can be consumed
independently of the histories from which they were‘extracted.’ Historical knowledge inheres within the
narrative form, so the ‘extraction’ metaphor is a poor
fit for tools that aim to enhance access to historicalknowledge (Shaw 2010). Instead, we use the resultsof event parsing as features for comparing stories
though narrative clustering: treating stories as ‘bagsof events’ and applying statistical techniques forgrouping together similar ‘bags.’

We envision two forms of comparison. First, along
the lines of Ankersmit’s original proposal, we canhighlight the specificity of a given history by showing
which events it recounts that are not recounted bysimilar histories. In conjunction with information
about the history such as when, where, and by whom
it was produced, such comparisons could provide a
powerful means of assessing the depth and scope ofa given collection of histories.
Second, given a group of histories recounting
overlapping sets of events, we can compare their‘speeds.’ Roland Barthes noted that an event thattakes up dozens of pages in one history may becovered by just one in another – a phenomenon hecalled acceleration.3 Because we propose to bring
together histories that recount the same events, andbecause those events are parsed from the actual textsof those histories, we can potentially compare how
different histories speed up and slow down time.
Contours of the Past is comparable to recent projects
applying topic modeling to historical sources suchas diaries and newspaper archives (Blevins 2011;
Nelson). Topic modeling is a statistical technique fordiscovering independent topics in some collection of
documents, where a ‘topic’ is defined as a group of
words that tend to appear in the same documents(Blei, Ng and Jordan 2003). Topic modeling has
found favor among digital humanists for quickly
identifying themes in a large collection of documents
without having to specify some set of themes aheadof time.
However, topic modeling as it is usually applied
directly to the words used in historical documents
will mainly reflect patterns of word usage. This isexactly what is desired for investigations of diction
and style, but for identifying common patternsof historical narration, this may not be the best
approach. An oral history containing a firsthandaccount may use language that is very different fromthat found in a scholarly monograph, even if both
sources are describing the ‘same’ event. Yet two
sentences may evoke the same semantic frame even
if they do not have any words in common. Thus wecan potentially find common patterns of historicalnarration across different kinds of narrative source
by applying clustering techniques, not at the surface
level of language (the specific words used), but at thelevel of frame-semantic representation.

References
Agirre, E., and P. G. Edmonds (2006).
Word Sense Disambiguation: Algorithms andApplications. Dordrecht: Springer http://www.wsd
book.org/ .

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Ankersmit, F. R. (1983). Narrative Logic: A
Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. The
Hague: M. Nijhoff.
Barthes, R. (1981). The Discourse of History.
Translated by S. Bann. In E. S. Shaffer (ed.),Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook 3. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Blei, D. M., A. Y. Ng, and M. I. Jordan (2003).
Latent Dirichlet Allocation The Journal of Machine
Learning Research 3: 993 http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jmlr.2003.3.4-5.993 .
Blevins, C. (2011). Topic Modeling Historical
Sources: Analyzing the Diary of Martha Ballard.
Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2011. Stanford,
CA, 19-22 June 2011. http://dh2011abstracts.st
anford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml .
Gildea, D., and D. Jurafsky (2002). Automatic
Labeling of Semantic Roles. Computational
Linguistics 28(3): 245 http://dx.doi.org/10.11
62/089120102760275983 .
Hall, J. D. (2005). The Long Civil Rights Movement
and the Political Uses of the Past. Journal of
American History 91(4): 1235 http://www.jstor.
org/stable/10.2307/3660172 .
Lawson, S. F. (1991). Freedom Then, Freedom
Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights
Movement. The American Historical Review 96(2):456 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2163219 .
Nelson, R. K. Mining the Dispatch. Digital
Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/ .
Rigney, A. (1990). The Rhetoric of Historical
Representation: Three Narrative Histories of theFrench Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Shaw, R. (2010). From Facts to Judgments:
Theorizing History for Information Science. Bulletinof the American Society for Information Science andTechnology 36(2): 13 http://dx.doi.org/10.100
2/bult.2010.1720360207 .
Veyne, P. (1984). Writing History: Essay on
Epistemology. Translated by M. Moore-Rinvolucri.
Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP.
Notes
1. See the Publishing the LCRM project at http://https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog/ and the LCRM Initiative
at http://www.sohp.org/content/our_research/the_long_civil_rights_movement_initiative/
2. More specifically, it involves two tasks: first identifying theframes invoked by particular words in a text (a form of
word sense disambiguation) and then assigning entities to thevarious roles in each frame, known as semantic role labeling.

372

For an overview of the former, see Agirre and Edmonds (2006).
For the latter, see Gildea & Jurafsky (2002).
3. Barthes (1981: 9) hypothesized that ‘the nearer we are to thehistorian’s own time […] the slower the history becomes.’

Digital Humanities 2012

Notes from theCollaboratory: An Informal
Study of an Academic DH
Lab in Transition
Siemens, Lynne

siemensl@uvic.ca
University of Victoria, Canada

Siemens, Raymondsiemens@uvic.ca
University of Victoria, Canada

1. Introduction
Digital Humanities (DH) as a discipline is highlycollaborative and as such requires a departure fromtypical humanities work patterns with its focus on
the lone scholar (Siemens 2009; Siemens et al. 2011).
In particular, DHers must develop new skills andknowledge and negotiate new ways of conducting
research and organizing people, financial resources,
space and other factors (Scholars’ Lab 2011). In
this regard, the Sciences and Applied Sciences canprovide guidance and suggest several models uponwhich DH can draw to achieve project objectives.
The Sciences use two primary models of organisation
for conducting research. The first model is the typicalfaculty-directed laboratory where the lead researcher
creates a research vision and hires staff to conduct
the research. This individual is ultimately responsible
for research results, including publications, patents,
discoveries, and use of funds, to their department,
faculty, university, academic discipline, funders andothers. Collaboration occurs at the level of researchvision execution, rather than the development ofthat vision (Haynes et al. 2006). Ultimately, thelead researcher is evaluated by traditional academic
measures, including the number of articles, books,
patents, lines of software code, and level of grantfunding (Cantwell 2011). Many books and manuals
are available to guide the new scientist on now to set
up and manage a lab, people and resources (Cohen& Cohen 2005; Howard Hughes Medical Institute &Burroughs Wellcome Fund 2006).
Alternatively, Big Sciences are using collaboratories
to create ‘centres without walls’ where researchers
work together to create common access to data andinstruments, such as supercomputers, telescopes,
and global history databases within an umbrella
research area, but do not necessarily work on thesame research projects. These collaborations aremost successful when everyone contributes to thesame degree that they draw upon the common
instruments and data (de Moor & van Zanden 2008;
Wulf 1993). Various studies have been conducted toevaluate the productivity of these different models(Finholt 2003; Haynes et al. 2006).
Alongside these well-evolved and understood modelsof collaboration – that is those that follow patternsof the single-researcher directed ‘collaborat-ory’and that of the multiple-researcher directed colaboratory (Glasner 1996: 111) – opportunities exist
to create hybrid organisations and apply within the
Sciences and beyond to the Humanities and Social
Sciences. But how do these models work within DH?
Can they be applied directly to DH or does thiscommunity need collaborative research models thatdiffer from those typically found in the Sciences?
This paper will examine the experiences of one
academic DH lab as it adapts these models, develops
collaborative structures, meets its research objectives
and produces outputs that can be evaluated bytraditional academic measures. It will conclude withrecommendations for other Digital Humanists whoare setting up their own labs or are collaborating on
the creation of new DH centres.

2. A Case Study
The case study focuses on the evolution a DH
lab as it experimented with different organisational
forms to support collaboration over a seven year
period of growth, and three distinct stages oforganisation and operation. It initially operated asa single faculty-directed lab with graduate research
assistants, postdoctoral fellows, programmers, andothers as staff in its first four years. At that point,
those who worked in the lab underwent a researchvisioning exercise, the results of which suggested
that a hybridised ‘collaborator’ model would be
the most appropriate organisational form, one thatwould allow a fuller and more active participation offaculty, staff and contractors in visioning, consensual
decision-making, and leadership. Finally, the lab
returned to a more standard model, with a plan for
more structured growth in the future.
Over all these transitions, the impacts of thesevarious internal operational models were tracked
against standard academic and funding agency
benchmarks that included measurable researchresource intake, provision of teaching and service,
and research outputs, such as books, articles,
conference papers, and other types of production,
more DH-oriented research outputs in the form oftools and prototype development, and further issues– some measureable, such as documented internaland external complaints, and some less so. As otherlabs have found, not meeting these targets can leadto reduced grant funding and lack of research space373

Digital Humanities 2012

(Cantwell 2011) and, so, meeting such targets isdirectly tied to the ongoing operation of a lab.
Particularly notable among the results discussed isthat the lab’s experimentation with a hybridised
collaboratory model unintentionally introduced adiffused accountability structure; many internalmechanisms and accountability structures thatallowed earlier successes were inadvertently
removed as part of the process of hybridising the twomodels. As a result, with the checks and balancesthat ensured consideration of basic collaboration
principles removed, lab productivity by all measures
fell drastically and almost-immediately, and teamfunctionality became severely handicapped. Formal
accountability structures themselves became viewed
as contrary to collaborative principles and, without
those accountability structures in place, it became
increasingly difficult for team members to follow
through on the development and implementationof project plans; acts of planning became lessmeaningful in this context as well. Without aset structure that ensured that those contributing
resources and those who were accountable to outside
structures (Department, the Faculty, university andfunding agencies) enacted a leadership role, few
sanctions for non-performance existed (de Moor etal. 2008) and ‘free-riding’ became the chief mode ofinteraction among staff and contractors. Further, an
informal work culture developed that was contrary
to local and university policies as well as, in somecases, funding agency guidelines; internal lab groups
formed, striated, clique-ified, and could not work
together. This situation contributed to a dramaticincrease in personnel complaints.
In the end, the experiment could be judged to be a
failure as measured by many common benchmarks.
Despite attempts to fuse what the lab felt to be
the most desirable features of the single-researcher
directed ‘collaborat-ory’ and that of the multipleresearcher directed ‘co-laboratory’, the lab became
neither. Upon the feedback from the lab’s advisors,
the research lead is moving towards [1] a return to themodel of the single-researcher directed ‘collaboratory,’ with [2] promise to implement plans to become,more formally, a multiple-researcher directed ‘colaboratory’ – all the while retaining the strong
internal operational structures and hierarchies thatwere in place before the experiment.

3. Conclusion
This case study contributes to ongoing discussions
in DH about appropriate organization forms andaccountability mechanisms (de Moor et al. 2008;
Dormans & Kok 2010; Warwick 2004) , roles,
contributions, and status within projects (#altacademy, 2011) , and the nature of collaboration

374(Siemens 2009) . It provides several lessons forconsideration. First, Science models for collaborationand the creation of well-functioning labs can beapplied within DH (Bland & Ruffin IV 1992;
Haynes et al. 2006) . Second, some hierarchy
is necessary, particularly when one individual is
responsible for sourcing the money and otherresources which sustains the lab. This lead researcher
is accountable for these funds and ‘must haveultimate authority’ (Lawrence 2006; Rogers-Dilon
2005: 449). Having said this, consensus andactive participation in discussions around ways toachieve a lab’s research direction can create an
exciting and intellectually productive environment
and working relationships, as measured by staff
satisfaction and academic metrics. These roles must
be backed up with clear objectives, tasks, timelines
and consequences for non-performance. Lastly, thiscase study serves as a cautionary tale for new
DH researchers who will be tasked with setting
up their own labs, managing staff and research,creating partnerships, while remaining accountable
to stakeholders inside and outside the university.

References#alt-academy (2011). #alt-academcy: A media
commons project http://mediacommons.futureof
thebook.org/alt-ac/ [November 1, 2011].
Bland, C. J., and M. T. Ruffin IV(1992). Characteristics of a productive research
environment: Literature review. Academic Medicin,
67(6): 385-397.
Cantwell, B. (2011). Academic in-sourcing:
International postdoctoral employment and newmodes of academic production. Journal of Higher
Education Policy & Management 33(2): 101-114.
Cohen, C. M., and S. L. Cohen (2005). Lab
dynamics: Management skills for scientists. Cold
Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Habor
Laboratory Press.
de Moor, T., and J. L. van Zanden (2008). Do
ut des (i give so that you give back): Collaboratories
as a new method for scholarly communication andcooperation for global history. Historical Methods
41(2): 67-80.
Dormans, S., and J. Kok (2010). An alternative
approach to large historical databases. Historical
Methods 43(3), 97-107.
Finholt, T. A. (2003). Collaboratories as a new formof scientific organization. Economics of Innovation
and New Technology 12(1): 5-25.
Glasner, P. (1996). From community to‘collaboratory’? The human genome project and theDigital Humanities 2012changing culture of science. Science and Public
Policy 23(2): 109-116.
Haynes, L., S. Pfeffer, J. M. Boss, et al. (2006).
Lab management: Insights for the new investigator.
Nature Immunology 7(9), 895-897.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute &Burroughs Wellcome Fund (2006). Making
the right moves: A practical guide to scientificmanagement for postdocs and new faculty (2nd ed.).
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Howard
Hughes Medical Institute, Burroughs Wellcome
Fund.
Lawrence, K. A. (2006). Walking the tightrope:
The balancing acts of a large e-research project.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The
Journal of Collaborative Computing 15(4): 385-411.
Rogers-Dilon, R. H. (2005). Hierarchicalqualitative
researchteams:
Refiningthemethodology. Qualitative Research 5(4): 437-454.
Scholars’ Lab (2011). The praxis program at thescholars’ lab http://praxis.scholarslab.org/[September 12, 2011].
Siemens, L. (2009). It’s a team if you use ‘Reply
all’: An exploration of research teams in digital
humanities environments. Literary & Linguistic
Computing 24(2): 225-233.
Siemens, L., R. Cunningham, W. Duff, etal. (2011). A tale of two cities: Implications of
the similarities and differences in collaborative
approaches within the digital libraries and digital
humanities communities. Literary & Linguistic
Computing 26(3): 335-348.
Warwick, C. (2004). ‘No such thing as humanities
computing?’ An analytical history of digital resource
creation and computing in the humanities. Paper
presented at the Joint International Conference of
the Association for Computers and the Humanities
and the Association for Literary & Linguistic
Computing. tapor.humanities.mcmaster.ca/html/
Nosuchthing_1.pdf [May 25, 2006].
Wulf, W. (1993). National collaboratories:
Applying information technology for scientificresearch. Washington, DC: National Academies
Press.

XML-Print: an Ergonomic
Typesetting System forComplex Text Structures
Sievers, Martinsievers@uni-trier.de
Trier Center for Digital Humanities(Kompetenzzentrum), Germany

Burch, Thomasburch@uni-trier.de
Trier Center for Digital Humanities(Kompetenzzentrum), Germany

Küster, Marc W.

kuester@fh-worms.de
Worms University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Moulin, Claudine

moulin@uni-trier.de
Trier Center for Digital Humanities(Kompetenzzentrum), Germany

Rapp, Andrea

rapp@linglit.tu-darmstadt.de
TU Darmstadt, Germany

Schwarz, Roland

schwarzr@uni-trier.de
Worms University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Gan, Yugany2d01@uni-trier.de
Trier Center for Digital Humanities(Kompetenzzentrum), Germany

1. Introduction
The software XML-Print is used to typeset arbitrary
XML files. The joint research project is funded by theGerman Research Foundation (DFG) for the period
starting 1 March 2010 to 28 February 2014. It is a
key component of the TextGridLab, which has been
under continuous development since 2008.1
XML-Print supports users in formatting theirsemantically annotated data rulebased and in
outputting a high-quality PDF document. Based on
existing standards like XSL (XSLT and XSL-FO),
Unicode and OpenType, a modern graphical userinterface offers different kinds of layout options.
Those are then processed by a newly developed
typesetting engine using the functional programming
language F#.

375

Digital Humanities 2012

2. Scholarly Typesetting
XML-Print targets in particular specific challenges
from the typesetting of scholarly texts such as criticaleditions, multilingual synoptic editions or scholarly
dictionaries.
Taking the example of critical editions as a key
product of philological research, they regular attempt
to fully describing alternative existing witnesses of
the text (old manuscripts, early prints, etc.) and fully
covering the genesis of the text (authorial or scribal
additions, deletions, comments, etc.).
Critical editions in print use specific layout
conventions. The editor notes witnesses in one
apparatus and often adds their explanations in a
critical apparatus which constitutes a fourth ﬂow on
the page. More complex layouts can include morecritical apparatus and/or annotations in margins.
Other challenges beyond the ‘normal’ typesetting
tasks include in particular synoptic prints, marginalia
with complex references, unusual or non-standard
characters and symbols, including those not (yet)present in the Unicode specifications etc.

3. State of the Art
Many humanities scholars have started to encode
their work as XML files. The TEI guidelines havebeen a major contribution to that. However, whenit comes to the stage of publication often problems
arise: What tool should be used for that? There
are of course well-known solutions: Open-source
typesetting engines like TeX (Knuth, 1986) and
TUSTEP (Ott, 1979) can be ‘programmed’ to convert
large amounts of XML data somehow into their own
markup language and then into an output format,
typically PDF. However both batch systems need anexperienced and skilled user in order to get highquality results. Very often individual and highly
specialized extensions have to be added, in particularin view of the challenges of non-standard typesetting
requirements such as multiple apparatus. In addition
these systems suffer from the problem of content
mixed up with formatting information.
Apart from batch systems many proprietary‘WYSIWYG’ software came up through the years,
e.g. the Critical Edition Typesetter (CET) and theClassical Text Editor (CTE). These are, however,mostly isolated solutions with data – once input andannotated – ‘getting lost’ in a proprietary format.
From the commercial ‘desktop publishing’ sector
Adobe InDesign is a reasonable choice using its own
XML format as a medium step, but it lacks in theimplementation of scientific printing. The same isvalid for office suites which are not meant for highquality typesetting of scientific content.
376

More about the requirements of scientific typesetting
and existing solutions can be found in Küster andLudwig (2008).

4. Functionality
The following use case is a typical example forthe publication of an XML file using XML-Print:
A scholar has a critical edition encoded in XML
and wants to present a first printed version to theircolleagues. In order to do so they have to perform thefollowing steps:- Identify different structures and think about
corresponding ways of formatting, e.g. forchapters, sections, footnotes, paragraphs etc.
- Create a format for each of the identified
structures. Set sizes, spaces, text decorations andother attributes as needed. Modify the standard
format if necessary.
- Use the mapping dialog to select pairs of XML
elements and formats.
- Start the integrated typesetting engine to get a PDF
document.
- If necessary, make changes to the XML source and/or alter formats and mappings.
Figure 1 illustrates the overall data ﬂow.

Figure 1: Data ﬂow in XML-Print: The user decides on theformatting of an annotated XML text with the help of a
GUI (front-end). Those information are then merged into a
XSL-FO+ file and converted into an internal intermediate
format for typesetting (back-end). At last the renderer
outputs a PDF file (or any other supported format)

4.1. Graphical User Interface (GUI)A user-friendly and modern GUI is essential for theacceptance by the ‘community’ (cf. Nielsen 1993;
Warwick et al. 2011). To make integration into thetoolbox of the TextGridLab easier, the front-end
has been implemented as an Eclipse plug-in using
the Rich Client Platform (RCP) technology. It offers
ways to select different layout options which arethen incorporated into a dynamic XSLT stylesheet togenerate an XSL-FO+ file. This format is based on thestandard XSL-FO, but continuously extended where
needed.2
Figure 2 shows the user’s view on the XML-Print
GUI.

Digital Humanities 2012

Functional programming coexists with imperative
programming for quite some time3, but was often
considered to be too ‘academic’. This has, however,changed over the last years not least becauseof some important advantages arising from thedifferent approach on modern multicore systems
that are available everywhere: no side effects,
better evaluation techniques and strong abilities formodularization and parallelism (see e.g. Hughes
1990).
Figure 2: The user’s view on the GUI of XMLPrint is tripartite: On the left the XML tree can be
expanded while the formats are listed on the right. The
middle part links those both together by mappings

Formats
Each format is a set of XSL-FO+ attributes. They
determine the concrete rendering later on by thetypesetting engine. The attributes are divided into
categories inspired by the XSL-FO terminology(block, inline, footnote etc.) to easily navigate
through. This idea was derived from similar software
familiar to many users. This way the user can set all
appropriate values as needed.
New formats can be created and existing ones may becopied, edited or deleted. The complete set of formats
can then be saved and transferred to another scholaror can be used for any other XML-Print project.

Of course, all essential features of recent typesetting
engines are to be implemented, i.e. good line andpage breaking, support of OpenType fonts, ﬂoating
objects, tables, lists etc. For the underlying accessto OpenType fonts and PDF generation we leverage
existing cross-platform, open-source libraries such
as iTeXtSharp. The main focus, however, has beenon those algorithms which substantially improve thequality compared to existing programs. Thus wehave already implemented an interface to typeset anarbitrary number of footnotes and apparatus. Other
important and requested features are multi-column
layout, especially parallel text, and marginals.
The resulting program can be run stand-alone (batchmode) or integrated in the Eclipse plug-in. A Web
service will be offered as well.
Figure 3 shows an example of an XML-Print output.

Mappings
Each XML element can be mapped to a format.
Different attribute values can be considered aswell, e.g. to distinguish <note type="footnoteA">from <note type="footnoteB">. The selection ofcorresponding structures can be easily done directlyon the XML tree. Alternatively an arbitrary XPathexpression can be used.
Mappings can not only be created, edited anddeleted, but also deactivated for testing purposes. A
rank order is also established to allow the scholar
to use overlapping mappings, i.e. XML structures
belonging to more than one mapping.

4.2. Typesetting Engine
The disadvantages of existing approaches statedin section 3 led to the decision for a completely
new typesetting engine. Established algorithms likethe one by Knuth and Plass (1981) are combinedwith new ideas (cf. Brüggemann-Klein et al. 2003)
and open-source libraries like Hunspell and iText
are incorporated by a functional approach using
the programming language F# as part of the .NET
framework and its implementation both under
Microsoft .NET and its open-source, cross-platform
counterpart Mono.

377

Digital Humanities 2012

Figure 3: Resulting output of the typesetting engine: Apartfrom paragraph handling and the use of different fonts thetwo different types of ‘notes’ (<note type="footnoteA"> <note
type="footnoteB">)are both set as footnotes. They are sorted andnumbered automatically according to their corresponding format

5. Further Enhancement
XML-Print has been released as an alpha version andis tested by researchers of different projects, e.g. fora volume of selected letters of Kurt Schwitters (cf.
project’s web site, 2011 and figure 3). The typesetting
engine as well as the GUI are continuously enhanced,
taking into account new user requirements. By
extending the attributes for formatting and userfriendly ways, e.g. to generate registers, tables or
the type area, XML-Print will offer more and morefeatures to researchers. The development processcontinues bipartite: On the one hand the support ofall standard XSL-FO elements and basic typesetting
functionality has to be completed and maybe adapted
to a new specification or other output formats, on theother hand advanced algorithms for more complex
problems will be developed and implemented.
Within the next months the following tasks will betargeted:378

Digital Humanities 2012

- Continuous work on typographic requirements
based on ‘real life examples’- Integration of the open-source tool xindy forindexes- Implementation of more output formats, especially
PDF variants like PDF-X and PDF-A- Development of a preview mode to allow faster
response to minor changes
With the integration into TextGridLab another large
group of new users will get in touch with the softwareand help to improve it.

Notes
1. Version 1.0 of the TextGridLab was released in July 2011.
2. There are many attributes intended for XSL-FO 2.0 (e.g.
fo:marginalia) and other structures not even specified there.
We had to add attributes, e.g. for the placement of footnote
apparatus. See the requirements and the latest version of the
XSL-FO working draft for more examples.
3. Lisp was the first functional-flavored language in the late
1950s. Modern examples apart from F# are Scala, Haskell and
XSLT.

References
Brüggemann-Klein, A., R. Klein, and S.
Wohlfeil (2003). On the Pagination of Complex
Documents. In R. Klein, H. Six and L. Wegner(eds.), Computer Science in Perspective. Berlin and
Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 49-68.
Hughes, J. (1990). Why Functional Programming
Matters. In D. Turner D. (ed.), Research Topics
in Functional Programming. Reading: AddisonWesley, pp. 17-42. http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pe
ople/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf (accessed
13 March 2012). First published 1989: 10.1093/
comjnl/32.2.98
Knuth, D. E. (1986). The TeXbook. Reading:
Addison-Wesley.
Knuth, D. E., and M. F. Plass (1981). Breaking
paragraphs into lines, Journal Software: Practiceand Experience 1111: 1119–1184.
Küster, M. W., and C. Ludwig (2007).
Publishing. http://www.textgrid.de/fileadmin/TextGrid/reports/TextGrid-R1_4_Publishing.pdf (accessed 13 March 2012).

Nielsen, J. (1993). Usability Engineering. London:
Academic Press.
Ott, W. (1979). A Text Processing System for the
Preparation of Critical Editions. Computers and the
Humanities 13(1): 29–35.
Warwick, C., M. Terras, P. Huntington, N.
Pappa, and I. Galina (2006). The LAIRAH Project.
Log Analysis of Digital Resources in the Arts andHumanities. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/claire-warwick/publications/LAIRAHreport.pdf (accessed 13 March 2012).

Wie Kritik zur Kunst wird. Project web
site, http://www.avl.uni-wuppertal.de/forschung/projekte/wie-kritik-zu-kunst-wird.html(accessed 13 March 2012).

379

Digital Humanities 2012Federated Digital Archives
and Disaster Recovery:
The Role of the Digital
Humanities in Postearthquake Christchurch
Smithies, James Dakinjames.smithies@canterbury.ac.nz
University of Canterbury, New Zealand

The Canterbury region, in the South Island of New
Zealand, experienced two major earthquakes during
2010 and 2011. On September 4, 2010 a magnitude
7.1 quake struck at 4.35 am, causing widespread
damage and two serious injuries. Significant
aftershock sequences followed. On February 22
2011 a 6.3 magnitude quake hit at 12.51 pm. This
earthquake caused severe damage and resulted in theloss of 181 lives, making it the second worst natural
disaster in New Zealand history. Like the first, thesecond quake has been followed by thousands ofaftershocks, including two significant earthquakes onJune 13th 2011.
The University of Canterbury CEISMIC Canterbury
Earthquake Digital Archive draws on the exampleof the Centre for History and New Media’s (CHNM)
September 11 Archive, which was used to collectdigital artefacts after the bombing of the World Trade
Centre buildings in 2001, but has gone significantly
further than this project in its development as
a federated digital archive. The new Universityof Canterbury Digital Humanities Programme –initiated to build the archive – has gathered together
a Consortium of major national organizations tocontribute content to a federated archive based onprinciples of openness and collaboration derived
directly from the international digital humanities
community. Two primary archive ‘nodes’ have been
built by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage(‘QuakeStories’) and the University of Canterbury(‘QuakeStudies’) to collect content from the public
and researchers respectively, and a ‘front window(www.ceismic.org.nz) has been provided by the
University of Canterbury to bond the Consortium,
raise funds, and provide a platform for future
aggregated search functions, which will be powered
by New Zealand’s bespoke cultural heritage schema
maintained by Digital NZ. Other nodes in thefederation include The Museum of New Zealand Te
Papa Tongarewa, the National Library, Christchurch
City Libraries, NZ On Screen, and the Canterbury
Museum. The aim is to create a permanent recordof digital objects for both present and future380

generations. To this end the technical requirements
for QuakeStudies have been reviewed by the National
Digital Heritage Archive with a view to ingesting
significant subsets of content (if not creating acomplete dark archive) for long-term preservation.
Significant attention has been paid during thedesign process to multi-cultural and multi-lingual
requirements, to ensure content from a broad rangeof New Zealand communities can be ingested andresearched. Future development aims to create a bilingual interface in English and Māori.
The story behind the UC CEISMIC Canterbury
Earthquake Digital Archive goes somewhat further
than other similar digital archives. Not only is it
being used to initiate New Zealand’s first Digital
Humanities programme, but it hopes to fulfil an
important role in the cultural and intellectual
recovery of the Canterbury region following theearthquakes of 2010 and 2011. New Zealand is acountry with significant levels of technology uptake,and the vast majority of content produced following
the earthquakes was created in digital form. As thecentral focus of the recovery efforts was, of necessity,
focussed on the physical and spiritual well-being of
the Canterbury public, it was quite possible that large
amounts of valuable content would be lost to future
generations. This altered somewhat after the initial
phase of critical response ended, only to be replacedwith new issues. Various institutions began gathering
digital content into their separate repositories, but
no co-ordinated approach was taken, creating asituation where disparate ‘nodes’ of content might
be stored with little possibility of sharing and reuse.
It was becoming possible that, although terabytesof content would be captured, future generations ofcitizens and researchers would need to go to myriad
different archives, each with their own metadata
standards, in order to get a complete picture of
events. Aside from the obvious inconvenience of
this, such a situation would seriously constrain thepossibility of sophisticated downstream data analysis
and content reuse.
The digital humanities ethos of sharing and open
collaboration has had a significant positive effectin this context. Consistent recourse to the digital
humanities’ message of collaboration has fostered aculture of trust that has in turn allowed an extremely
broad Consortium to be initiated. Although there
is little chance that the resulting federation will
be technically seamless, this has allowed potential
conflicts of interest to be put aside and technicaldiscussions to start at a relatively early stage inproceedings, significantly enhancing the chances ofdeveloping a highly functional distributed archive.
Additionally, the digital humanities’ emphasis on
open communication and community engagement
has fostered a healthy culture across the federation,

Digital Humanities 2012

which has contributed significantly to the success ofthe project. This is represented most forcefully inthe use of not only crowd-sourcing techniques, but
a mobile recording studio fitted out with video andaudio equipment, that has been taken to the suburbsof Christchurch to record public reaction to theearthquakes. This pro-active approach, coupled withrobust attention to project structure, governance andhuman ethics, has created not only a digital archive,
but a community of friends and partners, and avibrant new digital humanities programme.
The project is also unusual for a digital humanities
project in it becoming a flagship project forthe broader university. Although the project andresearch teams are predominantly from the artsand humanities, close collaboration is also occurringwith computer scientists, health researchers, social
scientists and economists. As with the interest fromNew Zealand’s national heritage agencies, digital
humanities principles of collaboration and sharing,combined with well-considered metadata ontologies
and system architecture, has prompted the projectto occupy a central position in the post-earthquake
recovery landscape. More than just an IT project, the
CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive isproviding local, national and international public andresearchers with a forum for discussion, organizationand collaboration as well as a heritage asset in itself.
This paper will outline the project and present
a model that will hopefully allow our approach
to be reproduced in similar post-disaster recovery
situations. Key to this model is the conscious useof digital humanities methodologies such as crowdsourcing, community building and attention to open
metadata ontologies and open access principles tocreate a robust and functional federated archive
system. The model has several benefits, including
the ability to develop a ‘distributed nodal network’of archives and repositories independently, thus
reducing the need for centralisation that would
encumber development, but it requires a long-term
vision and a strong governance framework to ensure
the federation holds together and organizations feel
comfortable sharing content. Similarly, while it offers
excellent potential for teaching and research acrossthe humanities as a whole, the relatively advanced
nature of the project provides limited opportunity
to involve students in system development. Instead,the project has created internships that will see
students working as ‘curators’ on the research nodein the federation, uploading content and taking
responsibility for metadata quality and the integrityof manual procedures.

Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve 19:325-35.
Berry, D. (2011). The Computational Turn:Thinking About the Digital Humanities. Culture
Machine 12.
Cloonan, M. (2007). The Moral Imperative to
Preserve. Library Trends 55(3): 746-55.
Conway, P. (2010). Preservation in the Ageof Google: Digitization, Digital Preservation, andDilemmas. Library Quarterly 80(1): 61-79.
Day, M. (2008). Toward Distributed Infrastructures
for Digital Preservation: The Roles of Collaboration
and Trust. The International Journal of Digital
Curatin 3(1): 15-28.
Gourley, D., and P. Viterbo (2010). A sustainablerepository infrastructure for digital humanities: the
DHO experience Digital Heritage, pp. 473-81.
Granger, S. (2002). Digital Preservation
and Deep Infrastructure. D-Lib Magazine8(2). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february02/g
ranger/02granger.html (Accessed 28 February2012).
Bellardo, T. H. (2008). Mass digitization:
implications for preserving the scholarly record.
Library Resources & Technical Services 52(1): 18-26.
Lehmann, K. (1996) Making the Transitory
Permanent: The Intellectual Heritage in a Digitized
World of Knowledge. Daedalus 125(4): 307-29.
Martin, J., and Coleman, C. (2002). Change The
Metaphor: The Archive as an Ecosystem. Journal of
Electronic Publishing 7( 3).
Neri, M. (2001). Putting the Cart Before theHorse: Understanding the Pros and Cons of Digital
Preservation. Library & Archival Security 17: 59-64.
Scheinfeldt, T. Stuff Digital Humanists Like:
Defining Digital Humanities by Its Values. Found
History, n.d. http://www.foundhistory.org/201
0/12/02/stuff-digital-humanists-like/(Accessed 28 February 2012).

References
Adams, W. R. (2009). Archiving Digital Materials:
An Overview of the Issues. Journal of Interlibrary381

Digital Humanities 2012

Modeling Medieval
Handwriting: A New
Approach to Digital
Palaeography
Stokes, Peter

peter.stokes@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College, London, UK

As many hundreds of thousands of medieval
manuscripts are now being digitised, with many
millions of pages becoming available, the questionof how to find specialised content in this material
is becoming increasingly urgent. In this paper I
present a new conceptual model for the description
and therefore retrieval of features of handwritingin Western medieval script. Digital Humanities
requires first a theoretical model which outlines all of
the features of a given domain and the relationships
between them (McCarty 2004), and this is the focusof the present paper. However, the implications of
this work are very much wider: just as the TEI
has lead to ‘a new data description language that
substantially improves our ability to describe textual
features’ (Renear 2004: 235), so the formal model ofhandwriting presented here sharpens and could evenresolve long-standing problems in palaeographers’
own terminology and practice.1

1. The Problem
Common research questions in palaeography include
finding examples of a particular way of writing
a given letter, or scribes who constructed lettersin particular ways. For example, it has beenasserted that a specific form of t was used only
by English scribes in the ninth century (Dumville
1984: 249-250), and that ‘Square’ features in AngloCaroline minuscule of the late tenth century is
distinctive of Canterbury (Bishop 1972: xxii). Theseassertions have generally been made with little
supporting evidence, in part because the corpus
of surviving manuscripts is too large to support
systematic analysis, but one should now be able toovercome this by producing an online resource forsearching and viewing scribal practices and examplesof script. This is an objective of the DigiPal project,2
which will provide an online catalogue of about 1,200
samples of English handwriting from the eleventh
century, along with annotated digital images of about
half of these. However, this objective is made very
difficult by several factors. Image retrieval is very
well studied, with approaches ranging from Content

382

Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) such as that used by
Google Images, to tagging with complex taxonomies
like IconClass, as well as intermediate combinationsof the two such as that provided by font identification
software.3 However, CBIR cannot easily be tuned
to scholars’ criteria if these do not match themachine’s perception of ‘content’. Similarly, systems
like IconClass are very large, very intimidating,and require specialised training to use effectively.
IconClass also depends on a shared vocabulary
and this is famously absent from palaeography: theComité international de paléographie latine wasestablished in 1953 partly for this purpose but it
has not produced even a draft document some fiftyeight years later.4 This can partly be overcome bythesauri which map equivalent terms from different
practices, but an even more fundamental lack is thatof a rigorous conceptual model for handwriting itself.
The textual community has been debating ‘what text
is’ for some time, partly because of the TEI (Pierazzo& Stokes 2011: 399-401), but no discussion like thishas yet arisen in palaeography (though see Stokes
2010: 1228-1230). With neither a clear model nor acommon vocabulary, it is hardly surprising that the
few attempts at digital catalogues to date have been
unsuccessful.5

2. The Model
To illustrate the difficulties, consider the following
list of possible research questions:6- Show me a list of all manuscripts containing the‘Insular’ form of a (Fig. 1a).
- Show me images of all occurrences of the ‘Caroline’
form of s written by scribes who otherwise wrote
Insular minuscule (Fig. 1b).
- Tell me which scribe(s) habitually wrote the‘rounded’ form of a in combination with a hooked
top-stroke of t (Fig. 1c).
- Give me images of all letters with forked ascenders(Fig. 1d).

Fig. 1a: ‘fela’

Fig. 1b: ‘kynges
Fig. 1c: ‘wat’

Fig. 1d: ‘hit’

Figure 1: Examples of Medieval Handwriting

Although these questions may look similar, they
have a range of important differences which arelargely concealed by the ambiguous word ‘letter’.
The challenge is therefore how to model handwriting
in sufficient detail to represent these nuances,considering not only a scribe’s general practice but

Digital Humanities 2012

also its specific instances. It requires first a clear
distinction between script (‘the model which thescribe has in mind’s eye when he writes’), and(scribal) hand (‘what he actually puts down on
the page’: Parkes 1969: xxvi). The word ‘letter’ isalso ambiguous, and so further terms are usefulhere. Starting with the most concrete, a graph is
an instance of the letter as written on the page. In
contrast, an idiograph is ‘the way (or one of theways) in which a given writer habitually writes’ agiven letter, and an allograph is a recognised way ofwriting the given letter, as shared by a group rather
than being distinctive of any given individual (Davis
2007: 254-255; cf. also Emiliano 2011).7 A grapheme
is a letter-entity as an idealized, abstract, discrete,unit of a writing system. Also useful is Unicode’s
character to refer to the intermediate level between
grapheme (which by definition has no physical form)
and allograph. Thus the grapheme <a> has (at least)
two characters, ‘capital’ A and ‘small’ a. The second ofthese has many allographs, one of which is Insular a,this is normally found in the script known as Insular
cursive minuscule; in Figure 1a and 1c we have
two distinct allographs of a; and so on. Graphemeand character are both ‘emic’, whereas allograph,idiograph and graph are all ‘etic’.
Two further terms are required to describe specificdetails of letters. Component refers to the basic
parts which make up characters, such as ascenders,descenders, serifs and so on; components maythemselves have further components. Features aredescriptive labels which may apply to one or morecomponents: thus a descender may be straight or
curved, long or short, and so on. Finally, we also need
general stylistic features which may not refer to any
specific component, such as the thickness and angleof the pen.
From these terms, a formal model has beendeveloped which captures these entities and therelationships between them; this is represented in a
simplified UML diagram in Figure 2 below.
According to this model, a grapheme has one or morecharacters, each character can be represented by anarbitrary number of allographs which in turn are
represented by any number of idiographs and thosein turn by graphs; a scribal hand comprises a set ofgraphs, scribal practice a set of idiographs, and so on.
Each character, allograph, idiograph and graph canbe made up of components, every component has atleast one feature, and so on.

Figure 2: A Simplified UML Diagram showing
the conceptual model of medieval handwriting

3. Significance and Usage
This model allows us to phrase palaeographicalresearch questions much more precisely. It also
allows structured descriptions of both habitual andspecific writing-practices, thereby allowing complex
queries. For example, we can specify:
1. A set of possible characters and thecomponents that each character must have.
2. A script, namely a set of allographs which
are normally written together, including theircomponents and features.
3. A scribal hand, namely the set of idiographs
which a scribe normally uses.
4. A set of graphs, for example those in an image ofa particular manuscript page.
This model is also significant for capturing not only
forms of letters but also specific stylistic features
which apply across letters: not only particular formsof b, for example, but also the type of wedges
on ascenders of any letter, or indeed wedges on
ascenders of all letters except b.
An important further advantage is that if one levelis fully defined then many details of the levels
below that can be inferred automatically and so only
exceptions need be recorded. For example:
1. The character b has an ascender and a bowl.
2. Insular minuscule script normally features wedges
on ascenders.
3. It follows from (1) and (2) that allographs of b in
Insular minuscule will normally have wedges on
ascenders.
This allows rapid data capture despite the highly
detailed model – a crucial point in a context where
many thousands of graphs and idiographs will need
to be described in order to be worthwhile. One

383

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limitation of the model is that it allows one simply
to record the presence of a feature, rather than (forexample) numerical values to indicate ‘fuzzy’ cases
where a feature is only partially present. The model
could easily be adapted to accommodate this, but theincreased time in data-entry would be prohibitive.
Instead, in the implementation used for DigiPal,
many features have n-ary distinctions instead: forexample, ascenders can be wedged or clubbed orbarbed or deeply-split or without decoration, and soon (see further Stokes 2011, Part v).
This paper will present the model and also
demonstrate its use in practice through anannotation tool and search interface which are being
developed for the DigiPal project. Reference will
also be made to alternative uses which are being
planned in the near future, including (we hope)
application to Hebrew and Cuneiform script. The
paper will also reflect on the process as an example
of Digital Humanities bringing rigour to an existing
discipline. McCarty has argued that modeling andthe computer’s ‘demand for complete consistency’
leads directly ‘to the epistemological question of
how we know what we know’ (2004). However,this question is itself fundamental to palaeography,
where one of the biggest challenges has been to
make explicit the apparently subjective judgmentsof experts. As Derolez wrote of these, ‘their great
deficiency … lies in the difficulty of putting theminto words’, and, more generally, he asked ‘whether
morphological features [i.e. the shapes of letters] canbe described in an unambiguous way’ (2003: 7). If
a model such as this can achieve what fifty-eight
years of the Comité could not then that would surely
be a significant achievement in a field which hasoften viewed quantitative approaches and the Digital
Humanities with significant mistrust (Derolez 2003:
7-9; Stokes 2009).

References
Bishop, T. A. M. (1971). English Caroline
Minuscule. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davis, T. (2007). The Practice of Handwriting
Identification. The Library, 7th series, 8: 251-276.
Derolez, A. (2003). The Palaeography of Gothic
Manuscript Books. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Dumville, D. N. (1983). Motes and Beams. Peritia
2: 248-256.
Emiliano, E. (forthcoming 2011). Issues in the
Typographic Representation of Medieval Primary
Sources. In Y. Kawaguchi and M. Minegishi(eds.), Corpus Analysis and Diachronic Linguistics.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

384

McCarty, W. (2004). Modeling: A Study in Words
and Meanings. In S. Schreibman, R. Siemens and
J. Unsworth, A Companion to Digital Humanities.
Oxford: Blackwell. 254-270.
Parkes, M. B. (1969). English Cursive Bookhands
1250-1500. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Pierazzo, E., and P. A. Stokes (2010). Putting
the Text Back into Context. In F. Fischer et al.
(eds.), Kodikologie und Paläographie im Digitalen
Zeitalter. Norderstedt: Books on Demand, vol. 2, pp.
397-430 http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/4360/ .
Renear, A. (2004). Text Encoding. In S.
Schreibman, R. Siemens and J. Unsworth, A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
218-239.
Stokes, P. A. (2007/08). Palaeography and Image
Processing. Digital Medievalist 3 http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/3/stokes/ .
Stokes,P.
A.
(2009).
Computer-Aided
Palaeography: Present and Future. In M. Rehbein
et al. (eds.), Kodikologie und Paläographie im
Digitalen Zeitalter. Norderstedt: Books on Demand,
pp. 309-338 http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/volltexte/2009/2978/pdf/KPDZ_I_Stokes.pdf .
Stokes, P. A. (2010). Scripts. In A. Classen (ed.),Handbook of Medieval Studies. Berlin: de Gruyter,vol. 3, pp. 1217-1233.
Stokes, P. A. (2011). Describing Handwriting (Partsi–). London: King’s College http://digipal.eu/blogs/blog/describing-handwriting-part-i/ .
Stokes, P. A. (forthcoming). Palaeography andthe “Virtual library”. In B. Nelson and M. Terras(eds.), Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern
Material Culture. Arizona: Center for Medieval andRenaissance Studies.
Unicode Consortium (2011). Glossary of Unicode
Terms http://unicode.org/glossary/ .
Notes
1. For initials expression of the ideas in this paper see the DigiPalblog (Stokes 2011).
2. http://digipal.eu
3. http://www.iconclass.nl ; http://www.identifont.com/ ; http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont
4. http://www.palaeographia.org/cipl/ciplGen.htm. See further Derolez 2003: 6-9, and Stokes 2010: 1229-1230.
5. See the Palaeographic Catalogue at http://www.arts.manc
hester.ac.uk/mancass/C11database/letter_catalogue.php , and that by Stokes (2007/8: §§24-26). The
shortcomings of both are discussed by Stokes (forthcoming).
6. These emerged from a workshop for the DigiPal project at
King’s College London, 6 September 2011.

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7. Idiograph should not be confused with ideograph, a ‘symbolthat primarily denotes an idea or concept’ (Unicode 2011).

A Digital Geography of
Hispanic Baroque Art
Suárez, Juan-Luisjsuarez@uwo.ca
The University of Western Ontario, Canada

Sancho-Caparrini, Fernando
fsanchocaparrini@gmail.com
Universidad de Sevilla, Spain

In Toward a Geography of Art, Thomas
DaCosta Kaufmann, stated that his research would‘investigate how notions of place, of the geographical,
have been inflected into writing about change
through time as it has been and is still discussed inart history’ (DaCosta 2004). He goes back to some of
the ideas of this book in his contribution to the multivolume Catalogue of the 2010-2011 international
exhibition Painting of the Kingdoms. There he insistson the fact that political geography and artistic
geography do not coincide as countries, viceroyalties,
native areas, and notions of center and peripherysuperpose one another in different research works
and cataloguing efforts. Da Costa Kaufmann alsoemphasizes the need of a theory of diffusion that
help explain the movements of creators, paintings
and features from territory to territory and the effects
that this transfers have in the spatial organization ofart that experts carry out.
Here, we present the results of a multi-disciplinary
collaboration in Digital Humanities, Computer
Science and Art History that focuses in proposing
a digital geography of Hispanic Baroque art. By
digital geography we imply the various possibleorganizations of the place of art by digital means
in a manner that connects various types of data
about authors and art-works with different notionsof space. This digital geography of art also takes
advantage of recent advances in data mining andvisualization to offer multiple views of the spaceof Hispanic Baroque art, as related to geography,
movement through territories, transfers over timeand cultural borders, clusters of artistic centers (asopposed to centers and peripheries), and movementsof works from their places of origin due tocontemporary practices of collection by museums
and private collectors.
The results shed light on the different ways in whichsocial practices – from creation to circulation tocollection – affect the spatial organization of art
beyond political territories. The paper also shows
how culture – defined as information that affects
humans’ behavior and represented here by the case385

Digital Humanities 2012of Hispanic baroque paintings – organizes different
real and symbolic ‘places’ in different times. We
argue that the study of large-scale cultural systems
such as the Hispanic Baroque is better suited by a
combination of tools and concepts that deal withthe complex and evolving nature of the system andcan study it through multi-scale techniques that
reduce that complexity to a minimum, offering new
ways of arranging the space in which that system
unfolded over time. Finally, we argue that thismethodology can be extended to other projects in
Digital Humanities.
Over
the
last
few
years,
wehavecollected
anonlineBaroqueArt(http://
baroqueart.cultureplex.ca/) database of more than
12,000 paintings and more than 1,500 creators
associated with the territories of the Hispanic
Monarchy from the 16th to the beginning of the 19th
centuries. The database also contains around 400
series, 200 schools and 2500 geographical locations1.
On top of the data stored under a traditional
entity-relation model, we implemented a system ofannotations that would allow to work on the objects
stored in the database and that would provide enoughflexibility to describe all aspects of any artwork,
defining a hierarchy in a structure similar to an
ontology. From a set of more than 200 descriptors
we carried out a manual semantic annotation of all
artworks (with an average of 5.85 descriptors/workand peaks of 14 per work).
To analyze the resulting dataset we represent it
as a graph in which artworks are nodes and that
relations among them are established as a functionof the descriptors shared by the works (for example,
if an artwork is described through 7 descriptors
and another work is also using the same set ofdescriptors, then we say that these artworks areconnected through a weighted link with weight 7).
We limited our experiment to the period 1550-1850
and divided the global graph into 12 sub-graphs inorder to study the temporal evolution, each of themcovering a period of 25 years (see Fig.1).

386

Figure 1: Graph obtained from one of the periods

Then, for each of the periods of our data wedetermine which are the clustering classes, thatcan be considered bags of ‘similar artworks’, andcalculate the distances between classes by measuring
the frequency of use of descriptors in the artworks
contained in the cluster. We apply our own algorithm
to distribute those classes in a 2D space so that theirrelative positions represent the relative distancesamong them (the closer the clusters are, the moresimilar descriptors they use). We are aware that 100%
accuracy is impossible because of the size of thedescriptors pool we are using, that would require ahigher dimensional space.
Once these clusters are organized in our space witha size proportional to the amount of artworks they
have, we go back to the descriptors they containand we generate the areas of influence of each
descriptor as a potential field. As it is normal that,
due to the ontological organization of the descriptors,some of these areas contain other areas or sectionsof them, we also represent the borderlines of theareas to show how these intersections play out.
This allows us to generate different views of theart-space, taking into account elements such as
time, descriptors by modularity class, or specificdescriptors closely related to current discussions by
art historians specializing in the period (see Figure2). These different views provide as many different
facets of a digital geography of Hispanic Baroque Art.

Digital Humanities 2012

Also, we calculate distances between similarity
classes in different time periods so that we caninfer which class evolve from previous ones anddraw the semantic evolution of the artworks. Thisis fundamental for a better understanding of thegeneration of families of artworks and the variants
that this evolution produces, what would help us toconnect this process with explanations in political,
artistic or economic discourses.

better understanding of art history from a spatial
point of view and will also shed light on culturaltransfers in complex systems.
Funding
This work was supported by the Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council of Canada and by the
Canada Foundation for Innovation.

References
DaCosta Kaufmann, T. (2004). Toward a
Geography of Art. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, p. 6.
Suárez, J. L., F. Sancho, and J. de la Rosa
(2011). The art-space of a global community: the
network of Baroque paintings in Hispanic-America.
Proceedings of the I nternational Conference on
Culture and Computing 2011 at Kyoto University,
Japan, 2011, pp. 45-50.
Suárez, J. L., F. Sancho, and J. de la
Rosa (2012; forthcoming). Sustaining a Global
Community: Art and Religion in the Networkof Baroque Hispanic-American Paintings. Special
Section of Leonardo Journal (MIT Press).
Notes
1. For a detailed explanation of the methodology, please see Juan
Luis Suárez, Fernando Sancho and Javier de la Rosa (2011 and2012).
Figure 2: Art-space of one period fromthe point of view of main descriptors

Finally, and from the geographical information
available for a subset of artworks (where original
location and current location has been determined)
we can make a representation of the movement of
the artworks along time, and obtain information
about how the museums (the main repositories
of artworks currently) and other collectors havecollected artworks from specific areas or attending
to the semantic groups we have discovered fromprevious analysis.
This methodology allows us to address different
issues related to the political, geographic andcultural aspects of art production, reception, andconsumption. Some of these issues are: arepaintings local, regional, or national?; how different
visualizations affect the clustering of art-works andartists?; are there differences between political andartistic territories?; what is the transmission offeatures across time and space like?; which is theeffect of flows of art-works away from their place oforigin due to market forces?; how different clustersof art behave and what its effect is on centerperiphery debates?. The result is a digital geographyof Hispanic Baroque art that will contribute to a387

Digital Humanities 2012

Approaching Dickens’ Stylethrough Random Forests
Tabata, Tomoji

tabata@lang.osaka-u.ac.jp
University of Osaka, Japan

part of a text with a frequency greater than chanceoccurrence alone would suggest’ (Henry & Roseberry
2001: 110). A popular method to measure ‘keyness’
is to calculate an LLR to assess the significance ofdifference between the expected frequency and theobserved frequency of a word in a text. However,
one drawback of this approach emerges when wecompare Dickens’ texts with, for example, a set oftexts by his contemporary Wilkie Collins.

1. Outline of this study
This paper describes a new approach to Dickens’
style, applying a state-of-art machine-learningclassification technique in an effort to distinguish
Dickens’ texts from a reference corpus of texts.
This study makes use of Breiman’s (2001) ‘Random
Forests’ in order to spotlight lexical items Dickens
consistently used or avoided in his texts incomparison with the control set.
By demonstrating how we can identify Dickensianstylistic markers, this study also proposes Random
Forests as a more powerful alternative for traditional‘key word’ analysis, a popular method in corpus
linguistics for extracting a set of words thatcharacterize a particular text, a particular register/(sub)corpus, or a particular diachronic set of texts,
etc. from others.
In a typical key word analysis, the significance ofdifference between two sets of texts in the frequency
of a word is calculated based on log-likelihood ratio(LLR, henceforward; Tun- ning 1993; Rayson &Garside 2000). However, LLR alone provides little
information about proportion of difference between
the sets, not to mention whether or not a particularword is distributed evenly throughout each set oftexts. LLR tells us only about the ‘significance’ (NOTthe ‘degree’ of) of discrepancy between two setsof texts with respect to frequency of a partic- ular
lexical variable. Thus, a potential drawback of themethod is seen in a case where a word occurringwith exceptionally high frequency in a single text
can over-represent the entire set it belongs to. Using
Random Forests, this study will address such an issue
and provide means to identify a more reliable set ofmarkers of Dickens’ style.

2. The drawbacks of traditional‘key’ word analysis
Textual analysis often begins with identifying key
words of a text on the assumption that key words
reﬂect what the text is really about and that they
are likely to reﬂect stylistic features of the text as
well. Key words as a corpus linguistic terminology
are defined as words that ‘appear in a text or a
388

Table 1: 40 most significant key words of Dickens compared with
Wilkie Collins (sorted according to log-likelihood ratio (LLR))

Although proper names such as Dombey, Pecksniff,and Boffin are ranked among the top 40 Dickensian‘key’ words, none of these would normally be counted
as important at least from a stylistic perspective,
apart from the fact these represent a few peculiar
Dickensian characters, who appear only in a single
text. As we go down the list, it turns out that 19 outof the top 100 are those which occur only in a single
text. As we turn our eyes to words listed as Collins’s
key words, we see 35 out of the top 100 are from asingle text. If we include words that occur only in avery small number of texts, the proportion becomeseven greater.

Digital Humanities 2012

Another (though less obvious) drawback comes fromthe mathematical fact that LLR em- phasizes highfrequency items: in fact, high-frequency words tend
to predominate towards the top of the list in Table 1,with words in lower frequency-strata not tending tobe highlighted easily. A better alternative is needed.

3. Random Forests as astylometric tool
Random Forests (henceforth, RF) are a very efficientclassification algorithm based on ensemble learningfrom a large number of classification trees (thus‘forests’) randomly generated from the dataset.
As RF builds a classification tree from a set ofbootstrap samples, about one-third of the cases areleft out for running an internal unbiased estimateof the classification error each time. The process
is iterated until n-th (500th by default) tree isadded to the forests, there being no need for crossvalidation or a separate test (Breiman and Cutler,
ND). One of the most prominent features of RF
is its high accuracy in respect to classificationof data sets. In the experiments reported by
Jin and Murakami (2007), RF was unexcelled inaccuracy among other high-performance classifiers,
such as k Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector
Machine, Learning Vector Quantification, Bagging
and AdaBoosting, in distinguishing between 200
pieces of texts written by 10 modern Japanesenovelists. In my own experiments, RF constantly
achieved accuracy rates as high as 96–100% in
distinguishing Dickens’s texts from the control set oftexts.
RF is capable of handling thousands of input
variables and of running efficiently on large
database.1 The first series of experiments with RF in
this study were on a set of 24 Dickens’s texts versus acomparable set of 24 Wilkie Collins’ texts with from
more than five thousand to as few as fifty wordvariables. The results were fairly consistent with over
96% accuracy. The best of the results was seen when
300 input variables are used (Table 2). The out-ofbag (OOB) estimate of error rate was 0%, or 100%
accuracy in distinguishing between Dickens’s andCollins’s texts.

Table 2: A result of running Random Forests

Figure 1: A multi-dimensional scaling diagram based on theproximity matrix generated by RF: Dickens versus Collins

RF computes proximities between pairs of casesthat can be visualized in a multidimensional
scaling diagram as in Figure 1. Dickens’s texts andCollins’s texts, respectively, form distinct clusters,with two unusual pieces by Collins shown as
outliers: Antonina (1850), which has its setting in
ancient Rome, and the travel book Rambles beyond
Railways (1851).
Of further merit is the ability to highlight thelexical items that contribute most strongly toauthorial classifications. RF shows the importance ofvariables in two measures: Mean-DecreaseAccuracy
and MeanDecreaseGini. The former indicates themean of decrease in the accuracy of classification
when a particular variable is excluded from analysis.
The latter shows the mean of decrease in Gini
index, an index of uneven distribution of a particularvariable between the groups, when the variable inquestion is excluded from analysis. The two indices
are comparable to each other. Table 3 list marker
words of Dickens and Collins, respectively, in theorder of importance (sorted according to the mean
decrease in Gini index).

Table 3: Import variables: Dickens markers andCollins markers (in the ordner of importance)

A close comparison of Table 3 with Table 1willshow how RF helps identify words with highdiscriminatory power. Proper nouns and words
distributed unevenly in each set now have effectively
made way for words which are consistently more
frequent in one author than the other. Although
Table 3 in itself is worth scrutiny in that it reveals
how Dickens markers are contrasted with Collins
markers, it is necessary to compare Dickens texts

389

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with a larger and more representative corpus ofwritings in order to spotlight Dickens’s stylisticfeatures in a wider perspective.

4. Comparing and contrasting
Dickens with a reference corpus of
18th-and 19th-Century authors
In the following analysis, the set of 24 Dickens’ texts
was compared with a reference corpus consistingof 24 eighteenth-century texts and 31 nineteenthcentury texts.
When 300 input variables were used, the OOB
estimate of error rate fell down to 1.28%, or
98.72% of runs correctly distinguishing Dickens fromthe reference set of texts. Fig. 2 distinguishes
between the Dickens cluster and the control cluster.
One seeming anomaly is the position of A Child’s
History of England (1851), which finds itself as an
outlier. This history book for children is considerably
different in style from other Dickensian works.
Therefore, it is not unexpected for this piece to befound least Dickensian, a phenomenon in consistent
with previous multivariate studies based on otherlinguistic variables, such as collocates of gentleman(Tabata 2009: 272), –ly adverbs (Tabata 2005: 231)
and part-of-speech distribution (Tabata 2002: 173).

Figure 2: A multi-dimensional scaling diagram
based on the proximity matrix generated
by RF: Dickens versus reference corpus

Table 4: Important variables: Dickens versus
the reference corpus (in order of importance)

Table 4 arrays major Dickens markers. Althoughrelationships among these words are com- plex
enough to defy straightforward generalization, one
could see the predominance of words related todescription of actions – typically bodily actions – or390

postures of characters rather than words denoting
abstract ideas. Words like eyes, hands, saw, looked,
back in particular have caught eyes of critics suchas Hori (2004) and Mahlberg (2007a, 2007b), whichsuggests the present methodology is well-grounded.
Stubbs (2005) states:[E]ven if quantification only confirms what we havealready know, this is not a bad thing. Indeed , indeveloping a new method, it is perhaps better not
to find anything too new, but to confirm findings
from many years of traditional study, since tis gives
confidence that the method can be relied on (Stubbs
2005: 6).
In order to determine local textual functions(Mahlberg 2007a, 2007b) each of these words
performs, it is of course necessary to go back to texts
and examine the words in local contexts with the helpof other tools such as concordance, collocation, andn-grams. However, the present method opens up a
promising pathway to deeper textual analysis. The
results of this study will also point to the effectivenessof this approach in cases of disputed authorship.

5. Appendix

Table 5: Dickens component of ORCHIDS

Digital Humanities 2012

Hori, M. (2004). Investigating Dickens’ Style:
A Collocational Analysis. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Jin, M., and M. Murakami (2007). Random
forest hou ni yoru bunshou no kakite no doutei(Authorship Identification Using Random Forests),
Toukei Suuri (Proceedings of the Institute of
Statistical Mathematics) 55(2): 255-268.
Mahlberg, M. (2007a). Corpus stylistics: bridging
the gap between linguistic and literary studies. In
M. Hoey et al. (eds.), Text, discourse and corpora.
Theory and analysis. London: Continuum, pp.
217-246.
Table 6: 18th Century component of ORCHIDS

Mahlberg, M. (2007b). Clusters, key clusters andlocal textual functions in Dickens. Corpora 2(1): 1-31.
Rayson, P., and R. Garside (2000). Comparing
Corpora Using Frequency Profiling. Proceedings ofthe Workshop on Comparing Corpora, Held in
Conjunction with the 38th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL
2000), 1-8 October 2000, Hong Kong, 1-6. Available
online at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computi
ng/users/paul/phd/phd2003.pdf .
Stubbs, M. (2005). Conrad in the computer:examples of quantitative stylistic methods.
Language and Literature 14(1): 5-24.
Tabata, T. (2002). Investigating Stylistic Variationin Dickens through Correspondence Analysis of
Word-Class Distribution. In T. Saito, J. Nakamura
and S. Yamasaki (eds.), English Corpus Lin- guistics
in Japan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 165-182.
Tabata, T. (2005). Profiling stylistic variations in
Dickens and Smollett through correspondence analysis of low frequency words. ACH/ALLC
2005
Conference Abstracts, Humanities Computing andMedia Centre, University of Victoria, Canada, pp.
229-232.

Table 7: 19th Century component of ORCHIDS

References
Breiman, L. (2001). Random forests. Machine
Learning 45: 5-23.
Dunning, T. (1993). Accurate methods for thestatistics of surprise and coincidence. Computational
Linguistics 19(1): 61-74.
Henry. A., and R. L. Rooseberry (2001). Usinga small corpus to obtain data for teaching genre. In
M. Ghadessy, A. Henry and R. L. Roseberry (eds.),
Small Corpus and ELT. Amsterdam,Philadelphia,
Pa.: John Benjamins, pp. 93-133.

Tabata, T. (2009). More about gentleman in
Dickens. Digital Humanities 2009 Conference
Abstracts, University of Maryland, College Park,
June 22–25, 2009, The Association for Literaryand Lin- guistic Computing, the Association for
Computers and the Humanities, and the Society for
Digital Humanities – Société pour l’étude des médias
interactifs, pp. 270-275.
Notes
1. Breiman, L., and A. Cutler, Random Forests. Online resource.
(Last accessed 20 October 2011.) http://statwww.berkeley.edu/us
ers/breiman/RandomForests/cc_home.htm

391

Digital Humanities 2012

Interfacing Diachrony:
Visualizing Linguistic
Change on the Basis of
Digital Editions of Serbian
18th-Century Texts
Tasovac, Tomattasovac@humanistika.org
Center for Digtial HumanitiesBelgrade, Serbia

Ermolaev, Natalian.ermolaev@rutgers.edu
Program in Library and Information Science,
Rutgers University, USA

Analyzing, indexing and marking-up raw data andproviding various types of annotations and metadata,named entities and other contextual information
is essential for effective searching and retrievalof cultural heritage content (Borin et al.; Borinet al. 2007; Schreiber et al. 2008; Christopher
2011). With commercial search engines dominating
our day-to-day interaction with information andframing our data access with non-transparent pageranking mechanisms, it is especially important for
institutions of learning and cultural preservation touse available technologies to encourage meaningful
and profound engagement with digital content. In
this respect, the interface must not only function as
the frame for direct access and data retrieval, butalso as the platform for the user’s cognitive, aesthetic
and performative interaction with digital objects assuch. DH projects, however, often approach interface
design in a haphazard way, more as an afterthought
than as an essential system component (Warwick et
al. 2008). They also tend to be dominated by taskoriented and efficiency-driven paradigms of machineengineering that disregard the performative natureof the interface as a reading space (Drucker 2011a,
2011b).
Ongoing research in digital humanities, humancomputer interaction and interface design is focusing
on ways to explore textual data by visualizing
relations between different sets of data andidentifying patterns such as word trends, namedentities, collocations etc. (Bederson & Schneiderman
2003; Unsworth 2005; Don et al. 2007; Fry 2007;
Greengrass & Hughes 2008; Rockwell et al. 2010).
Collins (2010) has explored interactive interfacesthat provide direct access to both the online natural
language processes, such as statistical translation,
keyword detection, and parsing, and the outcomesof sophisticated linguistic analysis. So far, however,392

no attempts have been made to visually link theuser’s subjective experience of archaic texts witha graphic representation of diachronic changes inlanguage. In this paper, we describe our design anddevelopment of an interface for representing andhighlighting linguistic change on the basis of ourannotated digital editions of Serbian 18th-century
literary texts (Tasovac & Ermolaev 2011). We treat
the interface not only as a dynamic framework forengaging with the text, but also as a ‘provocation tocognitive experience’ (Drucker 2011a: 9).
Unlike many European languages, which underwent
relatively uninterrupted linguistic and cultural
evolutions, the modern Serbian literary language,
as codified by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in the 19th
century, was largely based on the vernacular of histime and had little in common with the literarystandards of the previous epoch (Ивић 1990). As
a consequence of this radical caesura, 18th-century
texts pose a formidable challenge to the modern
reader who is unaccustomed to these archaic (Old
Church Slavonic) and foreign (largely Russian)
imprints (Albin 1970). That is why the Digital Libraryof Serbian Cultural Heritage of the 18th Century –a joint project of the Belgrade Center for Digital
Humanities and the National Library of Serbia –employs a host of mark-up and annotating strategies
to make these texts more accessible. The texts are
encoded as a word-aligned corpus of TEI XML
documents in two versions: one using traditional
18th-century orthography, including the graphemesthat have since disappeared from Serbian, andone using modernized and standardized Serbian
spelling that increases the legibility and, to a certain
degree, searchability of these texts for modern
users. Furthermore, the corpus contains lexical andsemantic annotations that introduce a large numberof modern-day equivalents to the largely archaic
vocabulary of the corpus, as shown in the following
table:
Original
orthography

Modernizedorthography

Modern-day
equivalentType of change

богъ

бог

бог

orthographicлюбовъ

љубов

љубав

phoneticутѣшенїе

утешеније

утеха

morphologicalблагодѣтель

благодетељ

доброчинитељ lexicalлюбезница

љубезница

драга особа
(женског
пола)

conceptual(term nolongerlexicalized)

By applying basic techniques of cross-lingual
information retrieval to a historical dimension of
one language, and making provisions for multiple
indexing and annotations, our project exposes a
notoriously difficult chapter in the development of
the Serbian language to a wider audience, without
sacrificing the edition’s scholarly potential. The

Digital Humanities 2012user can search the corpus not only using modern
standardized spelling, but also the above-mentioned
range of modern-day equivalents. This type of
extended search, which results in a larger pool of data
than a search based on original, non-standardized
orthographic forms alone, has the potential ofradically opening up the text for the modern reader
and leading to discoveries of previously unnoticed
thematic similarities and correspondences acrossdifferent works and authors.
The interface is built dynamically using XQueryand advanced JavaScript on top of the TEI XML
files which are stored in the eXist database. We
offer three basic views of the text: a static view, auser-driven dynamic view, and the system-driven
dynamic view. The static view is the most basic: theuser can choose to read the text in either the original
orthography (OO) or its modernized version (MO). In
either version, each word is also a hyperlink: clicking
on a word reveals a pop-up window which lists theform of the corresponding orthographic version as
well as the lexical or semantic annotation , whenappropriate. In the static view, the user can alsochoose to juxtapose (place side by side), interpolate(view line by line) or superimpose (merge anddifferentiate by means of color) the two orthographic
versions of the text.
The user-driven dynamic view stresses the evolutionof linguistic change: it allows the reader totreat the original 18th-century text as a temporalsnapshot – a frozen expression of a certain timeand age – that can be, using the familiar UI
device (slider) ‘updated’ (or ‘fast-forwarded’) to its
other more modern linguistic forms. The stages oftransformation include: modernized spelling thatkeeps the linguistic peculiarities of the original,
phonetic changes morphological changes, lexicalchanges and, finally, conceptual reformulations.
Each stage of transformation can be viewed
separately or in combination with others. And eachchange takes place inside the text by means of in-line
animated transformations of individual word forms.
Finally, the system-driven dynamic view is themost experimental: it creates a unique reading
environment in which annotated words change their
linguistic form in-line, but each at its own, randomly
assigned speed. In this playful space, the linear
reading act becomes predicated upon a chanceencounter with a traditional or modern form, an
exercise in Benjaminian translation (Benjamin 1972)
where the site of alterity (in our case temporal
alterity) quite literally (and never in quite the same
sequence of transformations) disturbs the text’s
imaginary stability. Reading becomes a performancein which the reader is performing the text, and viceversa.

By providing these various visual interfaces in our
Digital Library of Serbian Cultural Heritage of the
18th Century, we address for the first time in theframework of visual DH, the subjective perspectiveof the reader’s process of decoding archaic language.
We treat the linguistic expression of the 18th-century
Serbian culture not as a stable and self-evident entity,
but as a locus of meaning that can (and should)
be transformed by the reader. While the interface
provides access to systematic linguistic, cultural andhistorical annotations, it also creates an opportunity
for playful interaction with the text as a space of
linguistic and cultural mutability.
The more possibilities at a user’s disposal to engage
with a digital cultural heritage object, the greater
its impact will be at the levels of both individual
and institutional experience. The framework of
the Digital Library of Serbian 18th-Century Texts
can serve as a model for other smaller, lesserresourced languages struggling with the quest to keep
their cultural heritage alive after historical ruptures,
linguistic caesuras, changes of alphabet etc.

References
Albin, A. (1970). The Creation of the SlavenoSerbski Literary Language. The Slavonic and East
European Review 48(113): 483-91.
Bederson, B., and B. Schneiderman (2003).
The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings
and Reflections. San Francisco, CA.: Morgan
Kaufmann.
Benjamin, W. (1972). Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.
Gesammelte Schriften IV/1, 9-21. Frankurt Main:
Suhrkamp.
Borin,L.,
M.
Forsberg,
andD.
Kokkinakis (2010). Diabase: Towards adiachronic BLARK in support of historicalstudies. http://spraakbanken.gu.se/personal/
lars/pblctns/lrec2010-diabase.pdf . Accessed
15 March 2010.
Borin, L., D. Kokkinakis, and L.-J. Olsson(2007). Naming the past: Named entity and animacy
recognition in 19th century Swedish literature.
Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural
Heritage Data, pp. 1-8.
Christopher, A. (Cal) Lee (2011). A framework forcontextual information in digital collections. Journalof Documentation 67(1): 95-143.
Collins, Ch. M. (2010). Interactive Visualizationsof Natural Language. University of Toronto.
Don, A., et al. (2007). Discovering Interesting
Usage Patterns in Text Collections: Integrating
Text Mining With Visualization. Proceedings of the393

Digital Humanities 2012

Sixteenth ACM Conference on Information andKnowledge Management, pp. 213-22.
Drucker, J. (2011a). Humanities Approaches toInterface Theory. Culture Machine: 121-20.
Drucker, J. (2011b). Performative Materiality andInterpretative Interface. Digital Humanities 2011:
Book of Abstracts, pp. 39-40.
Fry, B. (2007). Visualizing Data: Exploring andExplaining Data With the Processing Environment.
Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media.
Greengrass, M., and L. Hughes, eds. (2008).
The Virtual Representation of the Past. Aldershot
Hants, England; Burlington VT: Ashgate.
Rockwell, G., et al. (2010). Ubiquitous Text
Analysis. Poetess Archive 2(1): 1-19.
Schreiber, G., et al. (2008). Semantic annotationand search of cultural-heritage collections:
The MultimediaN E-Culture demonstrator. Web
Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on theWorld Wide Web 6(4): 243-49.
Tasovac, T., and N. Ermolaev (2011). Encoding
Diachrony: Digital Editions of Serbian 18thCentury Texts. Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
6966497-500.
Unsworth, J. (2005). New Methods for
Humanities Research. The 2005 Lyman Award
Lecture. November 11. National Humanities Center.
Research Triangle Park, NC. http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/lyman.htm . Accessed
June 10 2011.
Warwick, C., et al. (2008). If You Build It Will
They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying theUse of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities
through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 23(1): 85-102.
Ивић, Милка (1990). О jезику Вуковом и вуковском
. Нови Сад: Књиж. заjедница Новог Сада.

394

Promise and Practice ofEnhanced Publications
to Complement
Conventionally-Published
Scholarly Monographs
Tatum, Clifford

clifford@tatum.cc
eHumanities Group, Royal Netherlands Academy ofArts and Sciences, The Netherlands

Jankowski, Nicholas

nickjan@xs4all.nl
eHumanities Group, Royal Netherlands Academy ofArts and Sciences, The Netherlands

Scharnhorst, Andrea

andrea.scharnhorst@dans.knaw.nl
eHumanities Group, Royal Netherlands Academy ofArts and Sciences, The Netherlands

The authors of this paper have been involved in
preparing a series of enhanced publications aspart of a national initiative to introduce ‘enhanced
publishing’ to scholars in the Netherlands. Oneof these publications is the scholarly monograph
Virtual Knowledge, in production at MIT Press.
This paper reviews different approaches to enhanced
publications. In particular, it reports the intentions,challenges, achievements and tensions in theactual workflows in preparation of the Virtual
Knowledge enhanced publication version of themanuscript. An enhanced publication can generally
be described as scholarly text and relatedmaterials presented in a Web environment withinterlinking of document ‘objects’ (Jankowski etal. 2011). These objects may include: researchdata, instrumentation, additional analyses, postpublication addendums, and exchanges between
book authors and readers. These objects areoften identified in a manner facilitating accessand involving utilization of uniform standards ofidentification. Basic enhancements to this particularvolume involve preparation of supplementaryresources (e.g., links, blogs, appendices), chapter
visualizations (e.g., animations, figures, tables),
hyperlinks to materials in and external to thebook, and opportunities for conducting searches
within and external to the book. The enhancements
also emphasize integration of informal scholarly
communication (e.g., social media) with traditional
academic publishing. The enhanced component
also emphasizes integration of informal scholarly
communication (e.g., social media) with traditional

Digital Humanities 2012

academic publishing, and the efforts to achieve this
aspect are highlighted in the paper.
The overall design strategy for this project wasoriented toward introducing book content on the
web with two primary objectives in mind: 1) tofacilitate compatibility with contemporary Webbased discursive practices, and 2) to facilitate content
interoperability in both Web 2.0 and Semantic
Web formats. Challenges involved with the firstobjective are related to varied work practices among
participating authors. In addition to variation inskills, competencies, and preferences in working
with the web medium, the benefits from therequired additional work remain uncertain. The
individual career benefit from publishing a bookis in most cases largely the same with or without
the Web-based enhancements. The second objective
entails integration of two distinct content structures.
The resulting design is a hybrid platform thatleverages Web 2.0 participatory modes of scholarly
communication combined with formalized content
structures imposed by Semantic Web formats.
Differences in the affordances provided by thesetwo content schemas brings into focus contemporary
tensions related to scholarly communication in thedigital era and raises interesting questions about
the emerging role of digital media in scholarly
communication.

publication. Paper, PKP conference. Available
at: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2
011/pkp2011/paper/view/326/185

The expected contribution of this approach toenhanced publications pertains to consumption of
the book content by both humans and machines.
The platform facilitates situating a published book
among related scholarship, institutional settings, andwith regard to prior work from contributing authors.
This is seen as particularly useful for interdisciplinary
research, and especially within a still emerging field.
This sort of contextualization is by itself envisioned
as value added from the standpoint of consumersof book content and for those engaging in Webbased intertextual discourses. Another contribution
is the ways in which the book content is structured
in the Web environment. Facilitated through links,
categories and tags, and the co-location of relatedmaterials, contextualization of content also creates
object relationships, e.g. between an author andwith regard to intertextual relationships, which
are readable by search engines. Fundamental toachieving these objectives is an understanding of the
Web as an environment that is dynamic and evolving,which is far removed from not only the printed book,
but also from the environment of digital repositories.

References
Jankowski, N. W., C. Tatum, Z. Tatum,and A. Scharnhorst (2011). Enhancing scholarly
publishing in the humanities and social
sciences: Innovation through hybrid forms of395

Digital Humanities 2012

Culpeper’s legacy: How title
pages sold books in the 17th
century
Tyrkkö, Jukka Jyrki Juhani
jaytyrkko@me.com
University of Helsinki, Finland

Suhr, Carla Maria

carla.suhr@helsinki.fi
University of Helsinki, Finland

Marttila, Ville

ville.marttila@helsinki.fi
University of Helsinki, Finland

Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654) was the best known
name in seventeenth century medical publishing in
London and is listed in the English Short Title
Catalogue (ESTC) as the author of more than
230 books and as the translator of dozens more.
An apothecary, man-midwife, and astrophysician,Culpeper is best remembered as the translator
and editor of the London Dispensatory (1649),
an unlicensed and best-selling translation of thePharmacopoeia Londinensis, the official medicine
book of the Royal College of Physicians. However,modern scholarship tells us that Culpeper was only
partly responsible for his prodigious and lasting
success. Much of his fame can be attributed to theefforts of his many publishers and printers, whoover several decades turned the name Culpeper into
a commercial brand by reprinting, reissuing, andfrequently misrepresenting the author’s relatively
few authentic works (see McCarl 1996; Furdell
2002). During his lifetime Culpeper became oneof the first names in scientific writing that could
sell books. Books bearing his name were widely
published throughout the eighteenth century, andsporadically to the present day.
This paper takes the case of Culpeper as a pilot
study of title pages as a form of advertisement.
Extra copies of title pages were commonly printed
as flyers and posted on booksellers’ stalls, hung oncleft sticks, or tacked to walls (Shevlin 1999: 48). In
the seventeenth century, the title page – including
the title of the work – was largely the domain of thebookseller and printer (McKerrow 1928: 91; Shevlin
1999: 52), making title pages a part of what Genette
calls ‘publisher’s peritext’ (1997: 16). In this paper
we investigate the typographic and text-structuralfeatures of the title page in books attributed to
Culpeper. The work builds on an earlier pilot study(Tyrkkö 2011) that identified the systematic naturein which printers and publishers made commercial
396

use of not only the name Culpeper, but also theparatextual features of his previous books in an effort
to emulate the style of his authentic works.
To enable the structural and typographical analysisof these title pages, the title pages of all books
listed from the period 1649-1700 that mention
Culpeper’s name and are available at the British
Library, Cambridge University Library or Wellcome
Trust Library were transcribed and annotated forstructural parts and named entities, as well as forvisual features such as layout, graphic elements,
and different typefaces and font sizes thereof. The
annotation process started with the taking of close
measurements, down to one fifth of a millimeter, of
the aforementioned elements from original artefacts,
and was completed using digital facsimiles from
Early English Books Online (EEBO).
The annotation scheme is based on the TEI
P5 Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding andInterchange, using elements from the Core, Default
text structure, and Names, Dates, People, andPlaces modules to annotate the textual structureand named entities, and elements from the Core,
Representation of primary sources and Tables,
Formulæ, and Graphics modules to annotate thevisual layout of the title page. For the purposes ofannotating the typographical layout with sufficientaccuracy and consistency, we have developed anexperimental system for annotating the different
typefaces and their sizes, using the ’rend’ attributeand a controlled value set. This system – which isbased on relating the size of the different typefaces
used on the title page to the absolutely measured’base type’ of the text – is intended to combine thebenefits of absolute and relative measurement andto alleviate the difficulties caused by working withdigital facsimiles, such as unknown scaling factors
and distortion of proportions.
The quantitative analysis related the visual andstructural features of the title pages to thebibliographic and sociohistorical parameters of thetexts – such as stated target audience, format,
identity and geographic location of the publisher
and printer, publication year (whether before orafter Culpeper’s death) and the known relationshipof the text to Culpeper. This data is imported
into a database together with the abovementioned
bibliographic and sociohistorical data, obtained fromthe ESTC, the British Book Trade Index (BBTI), theOxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)
and earlier book historical research.
The database of paratextual, bibliographic andsociohistorical data will be queried using methodsof multivariate analysis to identify relationships
between the physical features of the title pages
and the variables of their production histories. The

Digital Humanities 2012

analyses will reveal diachronic trends in the designof title pages bearing the name Culpeper, and bringto light the underlying factors which influenced thedecisions regarding the physical presentation of thetexts and to highlight the different means used byprinters and publishers to market their products.
More specifically, this allows us to reconstruct atimeline of how the commercial brand of Culpeper
was created and identify which features of thetitle page were specific to the brand, which weretypical for the time and which were specific toparticular publisher’s or printer’s house style. The
findings will be examined in light of broader book
historical scholarship on such features in an effort todistinguish features specific to the corpus of Culpeper
books.

References
Early English Books Online (EEBO). http://www.eebo.chadwyck.com/ .
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) . http://

The Differentiation of
Genres in Eighteenth- andNineteenth-Century English
Literature
Underwood, Ted

tunder@illinois.edu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Sellers, Jordan

eseller2@illinois.edu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Auvil, Loretta

lauvil@illinois.edu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Capitanu, Boris

capitanu@ncsa.illinois.edu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

www.estc.bl.uk/ .

Furdell, E. L. (2002). Publishing and Medicine in
Early Modern England. Rochester: U of Rochester P.
Genette, G. (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds ofInterpretation. Tr. by J. E. Lewin. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
McCarl, M. R. (1996). Publishing the Worksof Nicholas Culpeper, Astrological Herbalist andTranslator of Latin Medical Works in SeventeenthCentury London. Canadian Bulletin of Medical
History / Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine
13(2): 225-276.
McKerrow, R. B. (1928). An Introduction to
Bibliography for Literary Students. 2nd impression
with corrections. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography(ODNB). http://www.oxforddnb.com .
Shevlin, E. F. (1999). “To reconcile book and title,
and make ‘em kin to one another”: The evolution of
the title’s contractual functions. Book History 2(1):42-77.
TEI Consortium, eds.
TEI P5: Guidelines
for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.
Version 1.9.1. Last modified 5 March, 2011. TEIConsortium. http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/ . (Accessed 31 October, 2011).
Tyrkkö, J. (2011). Selling Culpeper: A case study
into the use of title pages in seventeenth century
commercial publishing. Presentation at SHARP
2011, Washington D.C., July 14-17, 2011.

The title of this paper has changed, because our effort
to answer one question (about linguistic register)
exposed a larger question with broad relevanceto literary study, and indeed to the definition of‘literature.’
To start where the process of inquiry actually began:what happened to English poetic diction around
1800? William Wordsworth’s claim to have brought
poetry back to ‘the language of conversation in
the middle and lower classes of society’ in Lyrical
Ballads has long been represented as a turning point
in literary history. Given the weight attributed to thisclaim, it is surprising that scholars haven’t tried totest it. Did the language of poetry actually become
more formal or specialized in the eighteenth century?
And if so, did the change reverse itself around 1798?
Finally, was this phenomenon restricted to poetry,or was it a broader transformation of diction that
affected other genres as well?
We are increasingly in a position to answer questions
like these. True, we can’t ask eighteenth-century
English speakers to demonstrate ‘the language of
conversation in the middle and lower classes ofsociety.’ Moreover, standard contemporary tests
of difficulty (like the Flesch-Kincaid ReadabilityTest) are not very applicable to earlier periods,
because they rely on sentence length. Practicesof punctuation have changed over time, making
the average sentence steadily shorter from theseventeenth century through the twentieth.
It is more practical to assess the formality ofdiction. This assessment is particularly easy to make397

Digital Humanities 2012

in English because of an important peculiarity of
its history: English was for two hundred years(1066-1250) almost exclusively a spoken language,
while French and Latin were used for writing. Any
English word that survived this period had to be
the kind of word that gets used in conversation.
Words that entered the language afterwards were
often borrowed from French or Latin to flesh out
the learned vocabulary. Even today, the distinction
between these two parts of the lexicon remains animportant aspect of linguistic register. For instance,
Laly Bar-Ilan and Ruth Berman have shown that
contemporary spoken English is distinguished fromwriting by containing a higher proportion of words
from Old English. Moreover, this differentiation
between writing and speech increases as students
enter high school, where they also learn to use agreater proportion of words from French and Latinin formal expository prose than they do in written
narrative (Bar-Ilan & Berman 2007).
If learned and informal registers were distinguishedthis way in the thirteenth century, and the same thingholds true today, then one can reasonably infer that itheld true in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
as well (for further evidence, see DeForest & Johnson
2001). Thus an etymological approach to diction canshow us how the ‘register’ of a given genre changed
across time, becoming more conversational or moreformal.

Figure 1

We have explored this question in a collectionof 3,724 volumes. The eighteenth-century partof the collection was manually keyed by ECCOTCP; the nineteenth-century part of the collection
was digitized by OCR, but has been correctedwith a fuzzy-matching script that has a machinelearning component and is extensively optimized
for nineteenth-century OCR (our strategy was basedon Lasko & Hauser 2002). More importantly, the398

comparative logic of this inquiry largely factors out
the false negatives produced by imperfect OCR.
Instead of distinguishing ‘Germanic’ and ‘Latinate’
diction, we have used the first attested date for each
word, choosing 1150 as a dividing line because it’s
the midpoint of the period when English was not
used in writing. But date-of-entry of course correlates
strongly with the Germanic/Latinate division. One
can in fact simply measure the average lengthof words and produce very similar results (thecorrelation between the pre/post-1150 ratio andaverage word length is usually -.85 or lower). We
exclude a generous list of stopwords (determiners,
prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, and the verb
to be). The reason is that, as Bar-Ilan and Berman
point out, ‘register variation is essentially a matterof choice’ (15). There is usually no alternative tostopwords, so they may not reveal much about
register. We also exclude abbreviations, proper
nouns, and words that entered the language after1699.
The results of this inquiry do suggest that the registerof poetry took a new turn in the late eighteenth
century. In the course of the nineteenth century
older, pre-1150 words became dramatically morecommon in poetry. It is reasonable to infer thatpoetic diction became more familiar and less overtly
learned. But this particular detail is hardly the moststriking fact about Fig. 1. What’s salient is rather abroader process of generic differention from 1700
to 1899 that affected prose fiction and nonfiction
as well as poetry. In the year 1700, these genres
each had their own peculiarities of diction, but they
didn’t belong to sharply distinguished registers of
the language. By 1899, they did. The ratio of preto post-1150 words became almost twice as highin prose fiction as in nonfiction, and almost threetimes higher in poetry. This suggests that the story
usually told about Wordsworth may be misleading:far from rebelling against specialized poetic diction,
he was producing a manifesto for a style that was –less recondite, to be sure – but also more sharply
differentiated from prose.
This result matters, more broadly, because it bears
an interesting relationship to the emergence of‘literature’ as a distinct cultural category in the same
period. In the early eighteenth century, ‘literature’
could encompass anything read by the middle andupper classes, emphatically including nonfiction. By
the end of the nineteenth century, ‘literature’ wasa category sharply distinguished from nonfiction
prose, and valued for special aesthetic qualities. If
this conceptual shift was also accompanied by asystematic transformation of diction, we may beable to learn something about the nineteenth-century
concept of ‘literature’ by paying close attention to theway diction changed.

Digital Humanities 2012

To start a debate on this topic, we will present anargument with two parts. First, we will show thatthe differentiation of genres was not merely a matterof linguistic register. When we compare genres ina more general way (using metrics like Spearman
correlation and cosine similarity) it remains true thatpoetry, fiction and, to some extent, drama became
steadily less like nonfiction prose in the period
1700-1899 (for the rationale behind these metrics,
see Kilgarriff 2001).

The arguments and methods in this paper have been
deeply shaped by conversation with Natalia Cecire,
Tanya Clement, Katherine Harris, Ryan Heuser,
Natalie Houston, Matt Jockers, Benjamin Schmidt,
John Unsworth, and Scott Weingart.
Funding
This work was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation grant, Expanding SEASR Services.

References
Bar-Ilan, L., and R. A. Berman (2007).
Developing register differentiation: the LatinateGermanic divide in English. Linguistics 45: 1-35.
DeForest, M., and E. Johnson (2001).The
Density of Latinate Words in the Speeches ofJane Austen’s Characters. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 16: 389-401.
Lasko, T. A., and S. E. Hauser (2002).
Approximate String Matching Algorithms for
Limited-Vocabulary OCR Output Correction. US
National Library of Medicine http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/hauser/Tompaper/tompaper.php

Figure 2

Second, we will begin to interpret the meaning of thedivergence, by examining lists of words that became
relatively more (or less) overrepresented in literary
genres over this period. Briefly, we will suggest thatthe transformation of literary diction dramatizes atransformation of the logic of cultural capital. In
the eighteenth century, literary diction explicitly
thematized the social status associated with finewriting (‘muse,’ ‘pomp,’ ‘taste,’ ‘applause,’ ‘genius,’‘merit,’ ‘talents.’) In the nineteenth century, literary
diction became more concrete, to be sure, and lessexplicitly learned – but it also tended to disavow thesocial in favor of a pure subjectivity embodied, forinstance, in nouns and verbs of perception (‘listened,’‘heard,’ ‘looked,’ ‘felt,’ ‘dream,’ ‘eye’). We proposethat this emphasis on subjectivity and immediacy infact dramatizes a mode of cultural capital associatedwith literature’s autonomy from other institutions(Ross 1998). We don’t pretend to have proven that
hypothesis. There is room for a great deal more study
and argument. We do, however, claim to have shownthat the diction of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction
prose differentiate from each other over the period
1700-1899 – a puzzle that will need some kind of
explanation. We offer the puzzle itself as an exampleof the way text-mining is already beginning to shapedebates in literary history and critical theory.

Kilgarriff, A. (2001). Comparing Corpora.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 6:
97-133.
Ross, T. (1998). The Making of the English Literary
Canon. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP.
Wordsworth, W. (1798). Advertisement. Lyrical
Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, by William
Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge. Bristol: Biggs &Cottle.

Acknowledgments399

Digital Humanities 2012

Digital editions witheLaborate: from practice totheoryvan Dalen-Oskam, Karina

karina.van.dalen@huygens.knaw.nl
Huygens Institute for the History of theNetherlands – Royal Dutch Academy of Arts andSciences, The Netherlands

van Zundert, Joris Job

joris.van.zundert@huygens.knaw.nl
Huygens Institute for the History of theNetherlands – Royal Dutch Academy of Arts andSciences, The Netherlands

1. Introduction
The aim of this paper is to show how the development
and use of a web based scholarly environment for thecreation of digital editions leads to meta reflection
and further theorizing on what a digital edition
could or should be. This effect of deploying andusing virtual environments in turn may lead to
improved versions of such working environments
or to improvements to other tools facilitating thecreation of digital editions.
However creative and inventive scholars may be, it
is extremely difficult to contemplate all possibilities
and consequences of digital editions without actual
hands on experience in a digital environment inwhich such editions can be created and experimented
with. For this and for other reasons, eLaborate
was developed by the Huygens Institute for theHistory of the Netherlands, an institute of theRoyal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
eLaborate is an online research environment inwhich scholars can create an edition of a text,
individually or in a group. They can upload scans of
the manuscript or printed book they want to edit,
transcribe the text using a zooming and panning
tool, write annotations to the text, categorize these
according to their own needs, and publish the edition
online with minimal interference of IT developers.
eLaborate version 3 was released in the Fall of 2011.
eLaborate3 is built on a new IT architecture, because
the wishes and needs of users of eLaborate1 (2005)
and eLaborate2 (2009) could not be accommodated
in the technological framework that was chosen as
the base at the start of the first project in 2003.

400

2. How eLaborate changes
editorial practice
For more information about the changing
organizational practices that arise in a collaboratively
made edition, we refer to (Beaulieu, van DalenOskam & van Zundert [to be published] andPierazzo 2008). In this paper, we will focus on theedition itself, taking as the subject of our case one
already published online digital edition made witheLaborate2.
The example we take is Marjolein Hogenbirk’s
edition of the Middle Dutch Arthurian romance
Walewein ende Keye (‘Gawain and Kay’), published
online at http://www.waleweinendekeye.huyg
ens.knaw.nl/(Hogenbirk 2009). The mostprominent representation of the edited text is percolumn in the manuscript. See for example 182ra( http://www.waleweinendekeye.huygens.knaw.
nl/path/editie/kolom/182r/182ra ). eLaborateshows the facsimile of this column, the transcription,
and at the far right all the annotations to thetranscription are listed. The user can adjust theplacement of the facsimile in its panel and zoom in,change the width of the panels (cf. Fig. 1), or click
panels away to give the other panels more space.

Figure 1: The eLaborate Walewein ende
Keye edition opened on colum 182ra

The freedom of customization available to the user
goes even beyond this. The key here is the ‘Options’button in the top right of the screen, where the user
can adjust the display of abbreviations: show these initalics, or show these in roman font (in the example
they are shown in italics). Another choice concerns
line numbers: the user can choose the line numbersof the current edition as well as that of an earlier
edition, or choose not to see any of these (in theexample only the line numbers of the current edition
are shown). The other Options-tab enables the user
to choose which of the annotations to see (Fig. 2). The

Digital Humanities 2012

edition of Walewein ende Keye has three different
annotation categories, which are marked with threedifferent colours in the transcription panel. Hoveringover them with the mouse makes the content andcategorization of the specific annotation visible. All
annotations are visible in the right hand panel. But
the user can deselect those categories that need not be
visible for now. When deselected, they immediately
disappear as coloured markings in the transcription
panel and from the list in the right hand panel.

Figure 2: The eLaborate Walewein ende Keye options
tab on ‘Annotatiecategorieeën’ (‘Annotation categories’)

The editor has of course added markingsof abbreviations, line numbers, and annotation
categories in the work environment. This leads us
to a very important new basic point of departure or
principle for digital editions derived from current
practice: everything that is explicitly marked in theedition should be easily made invisible on the flyby the user, whereas it is impossible for the user
(as well as for the editor himself) to add nonsystematical information on the fly. The occurrenceof medieval abbreviations e.g. is unpredictable andtherefore cannot be added by current technology
correctly automatically. The same goes for thegeneral presentation of the edition. The edition wasmade column for column, and chapter headings weremarked. Therefore it can also be viewed chapter bychapter (‘Overzicht per hoofdstuk’) or as a complete
text (‘Volledige tekst’). Should the editor have chosen
for a complete text only, the column presentation
would not have been possible.

3. How practice leads to newtheorySimple as this new guideline may seem, it leads
to a more theoretical reflection on the natureof digital editions in general and on its possible
future(s). For example, we could also apply theprinciple to more fundamental levels. Based on a.o.
funding possibilities, an editor of medieval texts

until now had to choose for which audience hewould prepare the edition. A diplomatic edition
for linguistic and literary scholars, with the exact
spelling as in the manuscript or print and withabbreviations marked in italics? Or a criticaledition for students, with adaptation of spelling,interpunction and capitalization, and with solved
abbreviations? With limited funding the last option
usually seemed best. But a critical edition closes theedition down for certain kinds of research. Spellingand interpunction are changed and therefore cannot
be researched anymore. This also makes it much
more difficult to establish the probable date andlocation of writing. Such a ’closed-down’ edition has
only limited usability and limited influence on thegeneral progress of knowledge. It can even introduce
difficult-to-check mistakes that could do harm (cf.
van Dalen-Oskam & Depuydt 1997).
Can we address both scholarly users and students
in one and the same digital edition without closing
down the edition? The basic approach seems to bethat the text in a form as close as possible to thesource is the basis of all types of representations
and that almost all kinds of interpretations by theeditors are kept separate from this basic text. The
editor transcribes the words or signs diplomatically,
for instance the word auenture ‘adventure’. The
word could receive an annotation that the criticalrepresentation of this word is aventure (generated
automatically if the editor has run a parser forlemmatization and part-of-speech tagging, having
confirmed or corrected the results). The form of
the added knowledge would be very different fromnow, but still depends on the expertise of the editor.
Ofcourse we do need a user-friendly way to add
all these layers of interpretation to the base text.
It is clear that the stand-off mark-up approach as
advocated by a.o. (Schmidt 2010) is a necessity tomake this work. And then perhaps another problem
can also be addressed. What if we have several
versions of a text and we want to reconstruct theversion as it may have functioned at a certain
point in time? If we make one edition with one
reconstruction, other kinds of research would again
be excluded. So we need to experiment whether
we can add a separate layer to editions based on
the different manuscripts, with its own annotation
categories, which could generate the text in theselection and the order the scholar needs. The user
could then toggle between a representation of theoriginal sources and the reconstructed text (vanDalen-Oskam, under review).
Should this be possible, text and interpretation will
be separate for ever, making sure all kinds of research
are still possible on (different representations of) thesame digital edition. But the role of the editor as
analyzing, reconstructing, and validating knowledge

401

Digital Humanities 2012

remains as firm as ever – with a much higher level ofreusability.

References
Beaulieu, A., K. H. van Dalen-Oskam, andJ. J. van Zundert (to be published). Between
tradition and Web 2.0: eLaborate as social
experiment in humanities scholarship. In T. Takseva(ed.), Social Software and the Evolution of User
Expertise: Future Trends in Knowledge Creation
and Dissemination. To be published by IGI Global.
eLaborate: eLaborate1 (2005). Not available
anymore.
eLaborate: eLaborate2 (2009). http://www.elaborate.nl/en/ .
eLaborate: eLaborate3 (2011). http://www.ela
borate.huygens.knaw.nl/ .
Hogenbirk, M., ed. (2009). Walewein ende Keye.
Een dertiende-eeuwse Arturroman overgeleverd inde Lancelotcompilatie. Digitale editie, bezorgd door
Marjolein Hogenbirk, met medewerking van W. P.
Gerritsen. Eerste editie. November 2009, online
op: http://www.waleweinendekeye.huygens.kna
w.nl .
Pierazzo, E. (2008). Editorial Teamwork in
a Digital Environment: The Edition of theCorrespondence of Giacomo Puccini. Jahrbuch fürComputerphilologie 10, http://computerphilolo
gie.tu-darmstadt.de/jg08/pierazzo.html .
Schmidt, D. (2010).’The inadequacy of embedded
markup for cultural heritage texts. Literary and
Linguistic Computing 25(3); 337-356.
van Dalen-Oskam, K., and K. Depuydt (1997).
Lexicography and philology. In K. H. van DalenOskam, K. A. C. Depuydt, W. J. J. Pijnenburg,
and T. H. Schoonheim (eds), Dictionaries ofMedieval Germanic Languages. A Survey of Current
Lexicographical Projects. Turnhout: Brepols, pp.
189-197. (Selected Proceedings of the International
Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 4-7 July1994).
van Dalen-Oskam, K. (under review). All in one,
one for all? A possible world of digital editions. Under
review for Variants.

402

Delta in 3D: Copyists
Distinction by Scaling
Burrows’s Delta
van Zundert, Joris Job

joris.van.zundert@huygens.knaw.nl
Huygens Institute for the History of theNetherlands - Royal Dutch Academy of Arts andSciences, The Netherlands

van Dalen-Oskam, Karina

karina.van.dalen@huygens.knaw.nl
Huygens Institute for the History of theNetherlands - Royal Dutch Academy of Arts andSciences, The Netherlands

This paper reports on our ongoing stylistiscs
research and tool development in the specific caseof authorship attribution for the Middle Dutch
Arthurian novel Roman van Walewein (Romanceof Gawain). First we introduce the use case, andwe concisely recapture our prior research. We thenprogress to the description of the re-issued improved
software and algorithm we developed and applied to
our use case. We conclude with an overview of thefirst results we derived from applying our tools andapproach.
The Roman van Walewein (ca. 1260, Middle Dutch)
was written by two authors, Penninc and Vostaert.
Only one manuscript containing the complete text,
explicitly dated as copied in the year 1350, is left tous. Some fragments of another, probably somewhat
younger manuscript contain about 400 lines. The
text in the complete manuscript consists of 11,202
lines of rhyming verse. The manuscript was written
by two copyists. The first seems to have written thelines 1-5.781 and the second the lines 5,782-11,202.
The second author, Vostaert, explicitly claims to haveadded about 3,300 lines to Penninc’s text. Several
scholars of Middle Dutch have pointed out on various
grounds that Vostaert (or the copied text) can not
be correct in this claim. We decided to apply current
state of the art authorship attribution techniques tofind whether this would point us to a specific line in
the text where the text before that line and the text
after that line contrast the most. In prior research
we have used a lexical richness measure, Udney
Yule’s Characteristic K, and Burrows’s Delta to try
to determine the position in the text where Vostaert
may have started to complete Penninc’s text. We
thus found that applying Burrow’s Delta indeed gives
relatively strong grounds to assume that Vostaert
simply stated a truth. Figure 1 can be read as asupport of this finding, showing a significant change

Digital Humanities 2012of stylistic stability occurring around verse line 7,882(cf. van Dalen-Oskam & van Zundert 2007). New
knowledge that we derive from this result is that
Vostaert may well have reworked the last portion ofhis predecessor’s work. However, the most surprising
result was that our analysis pointed towards thepossibility that Delta is a better indicator for a changeof copyists than anything else (cf. the clear local
maximum in the graph of figure 1, which is locatedaround verse line 5,783 and reflects the change ofhands that takes place in the manuscript).

Figure 1: ‘Walking’ Delta. The text corresponding to lines
8,000 - 11,000 in Vostaert’s part of the romance was used
as a subset for the procedure. From this subset the top most
50 frequently used words were used for comparison withthe text in a ‘sliding window’ of each consecutive 1,000
lines. Taken from (van Dalen-Oskam & van Zundert 2007)

In our research until 2007 we were only able
to tentatively look into this copyist distinguishingability of the Delta measure, and it remains to
be investigated until now how effective Delta is
as a procedure for copyist distinction. Although
Kestemont and van Dalen-Oskam (Kestemont & van
Dalen-Oskam 2009) verified the difference between
the two scribes of the extent Walewein manuscript
using a lazy machine learning technique on otherfeatures such as character n-grams and several
simple rations, they did not apply a form of Delta
procedure to this problem. In our 2007 article westated that the current application cannot easily
and automatically generate and compare a large
collection of Delta graphs based on an iterative
subselection of a word frequency list’ (van DalenOskam & van Zundert 2007: 360). This is the point
where we resume our research endeavor.
We have further developed our ‘sliding window’
approach to measuring the stylistic consistency oftexts (i.e. the ability to establish the stability of thevalue of Delta throughout a single text). We will
release the MIT licensed open source Ruby codefor this version of the software to Github in June
2012. This version will include a REST-full interface
to accommodate polling this tool as a web enabled

programmatically negotiable service, a web GUI for
human-computer based interaction with the tool,and user documentation as well as format description
specifics required for files to be parsed with this tool.
Our analyses until 2007 relied on stepping a‘window’ through a text, computing the Delta forthat window of text using the complete text asa statistical background and a sizeable portion of
the part unanimously attributed to Vostaert as a
Delta comparison base. The graphs thus computed
showed the consistency (or non consistency) of
Delta throughout the text tested. Having improved
scalability and performance of the algorithm we are
now able to run several Delta measuring windows
through a text at higher speeds, enabling near instantanalysis (typically <5s analysis time for a 65k tokens
sized text, analyzed through an approximately 8k
token sized window).
This improved approach has enabled us to return tothe research question at hand: how well does Delta
discriminate copyists? With the current software weare able to determine how stable the characteristic
is for Delta that we found in our first computations(see Fig. 1.) throughout the word frequency spectrumof the text. Our algorithm computes the Deltacharacteristic of a text in an iterative subselection of
the word frequency list. For instance, it computes thischaracteristic first in the top 50 highest frequency
spectrum, then it does the same for the top 10 to 60
highest frequencies, then for the top 20 to 70 highest
frequencies, then 30–80, 40–90, etc... The size and‘pace’ of the frequency subset window can in fact bechosen arbitrarily, though sensible heuristics need
to be applied to yield meaningful results. In essence
then, the current algorithm not only slides a window
for Delta measurement through the text, but alsoslides a measurement window through the frequency
spectrum of the vocabulary of the text. In the case of
Walewein this yields typically a result as depicted inFig. 2.

Figure 2: Sliding the ‘walking’ Delta through a consecutive subsetof the full vocabulary frequency spectrum of the text of Walewein403

Digital Humanities 2012

There are several conclusions we can draw fromthis result. The general characteristic we foundin our earlier attempts to establish the stylistic
consistency throughout the text of Walewein holds
for any subspectrum of high frequency vocabulary
we choose. We conclude that the reproduceabilityof this characteristic in different frequency spectra,means that indeed this is a viable method of tracing
stylistic consistency in a text. We also note that thevalue for Delta on average rises slightly when our
window on the subset of high frequency word usage
descends through the full spectrum of vocabularyfrequencies. This in itself confirms that Delta is avalid indicator for stylistic similarity, or at least forsimilarity in high frequency word usage. But more
important: because the peak of stylistic inconsistency
around verse 5,782 is stable our findings also confirm
our tentative assumption that ‘semi-high’ frequency
word usage is a better indicator for copyist change
than high frequency word use – at least in the specificcase of the Walewein. We can in the case of Waleweinalso infer which part of the high frequency word use
spectrum is the best indicator of copyist change: the80 to 130 most frequently used words. Discussing thelexical characteristics of this part of the vocabulary as
well as what this may indicate about copyist behavior
will be part of our paper.
Further testing on known use cases of copyist change
need to establish whether this result is generalizable.
If so, we may have found in this particular applicationof the Delta procedure an adequate identification
procedure for copyist change.

References
Burrows, J. F. (2007). All the Way Through:Testing for Authorship in Different Frequency Strata.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 22: 27-48.
Burrows, J. F. (2002). ‘Delta’: a Measure of
Stylistic Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 17: 267-287.
Hoover, D. (2004). Testing Burrows’s Delta.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 19: 453-475.
Van Dalen-Oskam, K. H., and J. J.van Zundert(2007). Delta for Middle Dutch: Author and copyist
distinction in “Walewein”. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 22: 345-362 (First published June 2,
2007: 10.1093/llc/fqm012).
Kestemont, M., and K. H. van Dalen-Oskam(2009). Predicting the Past: Memory-Based Copyist
and Author Discrimination in Medieval Epics.
Proceedings of the twenty-first Benelux conference
on artificial Intelligence (BNAIC, 2009), Eindhoven,
The Netherlands, pp. 121-128.

404

Smith, P. W. H., and W. Aldridge (2011).
Improving Authorship Attribution: Optimizing
Burrows’ Delta Method. Journal of Quantitative
Linguistics 18: 63-88 (First published February 24,
2011: 10.1080/09296174.2011.533591).
Stein,S.,
andS.
Argamon(2006).
A Mathematical Explanation of Burrows’s
Delta. Proceedings of Digital Humanities
2006, Paris, France, July 2006, p. 207< http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/down
load?doi=10.1.1.71.8771&rep=rep1&type=pdf >(accessed 14 March 2012).
Johnson, D. F., and G. H. M. Claassens(2000). Dutch Romances I: Roman van Walewein.
Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Digital Humanities 2012

Wiki Technologies for
Semantic Publication of Old
Russian Charters
Varfolomeyev, Alekseyavarf@psu.karelia.ru
Petrozavodsk State University, Russian Federation

Ivanovs, Aleksandrs
aleksandrs.ivanovs@du.lv
Daugavpils University, Latvia

The term ‘semantic publication’ denotes an electronic
text publication that is provided with additional
information layers, which represent knowledge about
the text in a formalized way suitable for automatic
processing. In the modern Web environments,
semantic publications, especially in digital libraries
and electronic journals, have become quite topical(Baruzzo et al. 2009; Shotton et al. 2009; de Waard
2010). Their advantages are rather obvious. Firstly,
semantic publications provide better facilities forsearching for information, since such publications
draw together search algorithms used by humans
and computers. For instance, if in an ontology ismentioned that a definite term has a synonym,
searching for the term and its synonym can be
performed simultaneously; and it is not necessary tomention the synonym in the request. Secondly, sinceformalized knowledge can generate new knowledge,
semantic publications can be used as a knowledge
base in order to advance hypotheses for further
research by means of automatic inference.
It seems that semantic publications of historical
records have one more advantage different fromthe above-mentioned common advantages: semantic
layers in the publications of historical records reflect
researchers’ interpretations, which can be verified bymeans of formalized, computer-based procedures.
In order to reveal the advantages of semantic editions
in research of medieval documentary records,
this paper presents a prototype of the semantic
publication of the 13th century Old Russian charter
corpus, which forms a constituent part of the vast
collection of medieval and early modern records‘Moscowitica–Ruthenica’ kept in the Latvian State
Historical Archives, a structural unit of the Latvian
National Archives (Riga, Latvia). This collectionof documents provides historians with firsthandinformation about relations of Old Russian and
Byelorussian lands and towns (Smolensk, Novgorod,
Pskov, Polotsk, etc.), as well as Lithuania (later– Poland-Lithuania) with Riga, Livonia, Hanseatic
League and some German towns in the late

12th – early 17th centuries. For the first time,‘Moscowitica–Ruthenica’ – a historical name of thisdocument collection – was mentioned in the archival
inventories dated back to the 1630s. Although‘Moscowitica–Ruthenica’ as a department of theLatvian State Historical Archives does not exist any
more, its documents constitute a natural complex ofhistorical records, which should be studied as a whole(Ivanovs & Varfolomeyev 2005).
In the prototype of the semantic publication, fiveinterconnected charters have been used (Charters
nos. 1, 3a, 4, 5, and 6, see Ivanov & Kuznetsov2009). Actually, there should be mentioned twelve
charters that reveal the course of relations between
Riga and Smolensk in the 13th – first half of the
14th century, however, the presentation has its limits,
therefore the basis of the prototype has been reduced.
In the centre of the semantic network represented
in the prototype, there is the Missive of Archbishop
of Riga Johann II to Fedor Rostislavich, Princeof Smolensk, blaming inhabitants of Vitebsk forunjustified complaint against Rigans (Charter no. 6,
1285–1287).
In order to provide the texts with additionaldescriptive metadata, information about persons,sites, documents, etc. mentioned in the charters isrevealed and linked with the corresponding data
extracted from different specialized ontologies. In thelast years, a great number of different ontologies havebeen created, including those intended for historicaland source studies, e.g. ontology CIDOC CRM. In
this ontology, there are classes and relations thatcan be used in description of historical persons,sites, and historical events, which are related tomuseum objects (Doerr 2003). On the basis of
this ontology, a number of specialized ontologies
for description of definite historical aspects havebeen elaborated. There can be mentioned ontologies
created within Pearl Harbor Project in the
USA (Ide & Woolner 2007) or CultureSampo
Project in Finland (Ahonen & Hyvönen 2009).
Unfortunately, such ontologies can not meet all
the requirements of the semantic publication ofcharter corpora, since they do not reflect the
specificity of written historical records. Therefore,
the authors of the paper propose a documentoriented approach to creation of ontologies (incontrast with event-oriented approaches accepted in
the above-mentioned ontologies).
The semantic publication of the charters constitutes
two kinds of semantic links. First, there are links
between historically and thematically interconnectedcharters (these interconnections emerged when
the charters were drawn up, in the course of
documenting of relations between Smolensk andRiga in the 13th century). Thus, diverse links
between information reflected in the charters within405

Digital Humanities 2012

this complex of historical records can be revealed.
Second, there are links with other historical records,
which do not belong to the complex ‘Moscowitica–
Ruthenica’. In this case, information extracted fromthe complex of charters ‘Moscowitica–Ruthenica’ (itcan be called ‘internal information’) is linked with‘external’ information, provided either directly (byother historical records), or indirectly (by research
papers, specialized ontologies, etc.).
Within the semantic publication, relations between
its objects are described using triplets: ‘a charter iswritten by a person’, ‘a charter is sent to a person’,‘a charter mentions a person’. As it is commonly
done in different ontologies, inverse relations canalso be introduced, e.g. ‘a person is mentioned in acharter’. It should be noted that this publication ispartly based on hypothetical data; hypothetic natureof some relations may be reflected using definite
combinations of words (‘probably refers to’ instead of‘refers to’).
However, production of semantic publications on
the basis of ontologies, which are recorded using
Semantic Web technologies – RDF or OWL, is timeconsuming. It seems that opportunities and tools
provided by semantic Wiki-systems can facilitate
this process. For instance, Semantic MediaWiki(Krötzsch et al. 2007) offers specialized, rather
simple markup tools that can be used to indicate
different objects (place-names, persons’ names, etc.)
in the texts of the charters and to supply the texts
with meta-information. The principle feature of thissystem is the use of typified hyperlinks between
pages. These pages constitute the objects of thesemantic network, but hyperlinks – denote relations
between the objects.
On the site http://histdocs.referata.com, the textof the Charter no. 6 is presented. The text has
been translated from Old Russian into English andpublished applying Semantic MediaWiki. In the
published text, hyperlinks to other pages of thissemantic network have been marked out. Thesepages contain texts of the charters of the complex‘Moscowitica–Ruthenica’, as well as data related tohistorical persons, places, etc. Below the text, thefacts related to a definite charter are mentioned (e.g.
‘Charter 6 mentions Helmich’, ‘Charter 6 probablyrefers to Charter 4’, etc.) These facts are linked withthe text, and this linkage is based on researcher’sinterpretation of the document.
It should be noted that within the semantic
network different facts about the objects, which
are recorded by means of Semantic MediaWiki
tools, can be automatically transformed into RDF
triplets. Therefore, Wiki-systems can be used for
production of semantic publications of charters andother written documents.
406

However, some shortcomings of Wiki-systems canbe mentioned. For example, non-standard fonts can
not be used in transcription of the texts; the textsof the charters can not be linked with raster imagesof the documents; the texts can not be marked
up on the basis of XML markup standard (e.g.
in accordance with TEI or CEI markup schemes).
Therefore, a specialized Wiki-system for charters’
editing purposes should be developed. In thepresentation of the paper, some possible solutions to
the problems mentioned above are examined.

References
Ahonen, E., and E. Hyvönen (2009). Publishing
Historical Texts on the Semantic Web – A Case
Study. Proceedings of the Third IEEE International
Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC2009).
Berkeley, pp. 167-73.
Baruzzo, A., et al. (2009). Toward Semantic
Digital Libraries: Exploiting Web2.0 and Semantic
Services in Cultural Heritage Journal of Digital
Information 10( 6). http://journals.tdl.org/j
odi/article/viewArticle/688/576 (accessed 14
March 2012).
de Waard, A. (2010). From Proteins to Fairytales:
Directions in Semantic Publishing. IEEE Intelligent
Systems 25( 2): 83-88.
Doerr, M. (2003). The CIDOC Conceptual
Reference Module: An Ontological Approach to
Semantic Interoperability of Metadata AI Magazine24( 3): 75-92.
Ide, N., and D. Woolner (2007). Historical
Ontologies. In K. Ahmad, C. Brewster and M.
Stevenson (eds.), Words and Intelligence II: Essaysin Honor of Yorick Wilks. Dordrecht: Springer, pp.
137-52.
Ivanov, A., and A. Kuznetsov (2009).
Smolensko-rizhskie akty, XIIIv. – pervaia polovina
XIVv.: Dokumenty kompleksa Moscowitica–
Ruthenica ob otnosheniiakh Smolenska i Rigi
[Treaties between Smolensk and Riga: 13th – First
Half of the 14th Century: Documents of the Complex
Moscowitica–Ruthenica about Relations between
Smolensk and Riga]. Riga.
Ivanovs, A., and A. Varfolomeyev (2005).
Editing and Exploratory Analysis of Medieval
Documents by Means of XML Technologies. In
Humanities, Computers and Cultural Heritage.
Amsterdam: KNAW, pp. 155-60.
Krötzsch, M., et al. (2007). Semantic Wikipedia.
Journal of Web Semantics 5( 4): 251–61.
Shotton, D., et al. (2009). Adventures in Semantic
Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of aDigital Humanities 2012

Research Article. PLoS Computational Biology 5( 4):e1000361. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000361 (accessed 14 March 2012).

L’histoire de l’art àl’ère numérique – Pourune historiographie
médiologique
Welger-Barboza, Corinne

corinne.welger@sfr.fr
université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

Le tournant numérique en Histoire de l’art se
prend plus difficilement que dans les autres
disciplines des Humanités. L’une des raisons est latransparence dans laquelle ont longtemps été tenus
les instruments de l’étude et de la recherche. Et bienque l’image soit considérée comme la pierre angulairede la méthodologie de la discipline, ses dimensionsde médiation et de médiatisation sont rarement
abordées, les dispositifs complexes auxquels lesimages participent, pas davantage. Mais on constate
que le tournant numérique donne une nouvelle
impulsion aux études qui s’attachent à penser
la technologie de la discipline, à ses différentesépoques. Plus encore que la quantité, les orientations
de ce regain de curiosité en font l’intérêt.
La clarification des conditions d’exercice del’enseignement, de l’étude et de la recherche,à l’ère du numérique, nécessite d’étudier lesconditions passées (techniques, supports et modesde circulation des images des oeuvres). En
d’autres termes, je fais l’hypothèse que letournant numérique requiert l’élaboration d’une
historiographie médiologique de l’histoire del’art afin d’appréhender les singularités d’une
pratique numérique des images ainsi que son impact
sur cette discipline.

1. Les tendances d’une
historiographie médiologique
Pour ce qui concerne le régime photographique de la
reproduction, en partie associé à la culture imprimée,on dispose déjà d’une historiographie conséquente :d’abord, les écrits sources relatant les usages dela technique et les réflexions épistémologiques desgrandes figures de la discipline des 19ème et début
20ème siècles sont désormais restituées ;un balisage
rendu aisé par W. Freitag (1979-1980), 1998).
Quant aux mérites du nouveau support, au regard
des différentes techniques de gravure, l’ouvragede William M. Ivins (1953) fait date. Le fait quede la photographie accompagne l’établissement dela discipline académique et de ses méthodes, est
unanimement reconnu.
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Pour une bonne part, ces écrits sont traversés parles thématiques de l’exactitude et de l’interprétation,– le thème de la fidélité au référent ou à ‘l’espritde l’artiste’ – en écho aux débats conflictuels entre
graveurs, lithographes et photographes de la secondemoitié du 19ème (Renie 2001). Au moment dutournant numérique, on retrouve cette perméabilité
entre les préoccupations de l’histoire de l’art et desdémarches relevant de l’esthétique ou de la théorie
de l’art – le concept d’aura de Benjamin (1935-1939)
dont on peut douter qu’il concerne directement
les méthodes de la discipline. L’appropriation duprocédé technique par les historiens de l’art du 19ème
et du 20ème siècle, est elle-même intriquée à leur‘vision’ de l’art (Wölfflin 1896, 1897, 1915).
Mais des travaux plus récents visent à saisir une
plus grande complexité médiologique: à ce titre, on
citera la notion ‘d’économie visuelle’ qui, outre lesrapports entre les moyens de reproduction coexistantà une époque donnée (2nde moitié du 19ème siècle),leurs coût et efficacité, rend compte des modesde réception (Bann 2001); ou encore, les quatre
colloques Photo archives and the Photographic
Memory of Art History, qui abordent, pour lapremière fois fois, le fait archivistique même danstoutes ses dimensions, au-delà de l’aptitude dusupport à rendre compte de son référent (Caraffa2011).
Ces déplacements de la recherche historiographiqueconcernent également l’étude des périodes
antérieures et manifestent que ce mouvement deréflexivité excède le régime documentaire que l’on
est en train de quitter. Des études récentes portent
sur les ‘musées de papier’, des recueils d’antiquaires
jusqu’aux sommes illustrées d’histoire de l’art etsoulèvent des enjeux épistémologiques associés àl’environnement médiologique.

2. De l’expérience à la culture
visuelles
Ainsi, on tente de restituer certains aspects de lapratique des images. Les collections de dessins etde gravures ne donnent que partiellement lieu à desvolumes reliés et laissent les feuilles libres; aussi,
par exemple, le Museo Cartaceo, premier recueil
du genre, favorise-t-il l’examen visuel, ‘ispezione
oculare’ en donnant lieu à des manipulations
diverses de confrontation des images, engageantla combinaison du travail de l’œil et du geste(Bickendorf 2010).
L’agencement même des images représentant lesœuvres fait l’objet d’attentions nouvelles. Ainsi,
par exemple, les planches comparatives de Séroux
d’Agincourt (1810-1823), mettent en oeuvre unprogramme didactique voué à démontrer la408

corruption du goût antique, la décadence du Moyen
Age (Mondini 2005).
Ces travaux partagent une même ambitionépistémologique : la réhabilitation d’une histoirede l’art par l’image, à même de réévaluer lepoids respectif du visuel et du discursif dansl’historiographie de la discipline. Plus amplement,
ces musées de papier s’inscrivent dans une enquête
épistémologique qui associe arts et sciences, dansles transformations de la culture visuelle au 17ème
siècle, époque d’instrumentation de la vision par letélescope et le microscope.
La ‘fabrique du regard’ (Sicard 1998) est illustrée
par une première figuration d’objets observés audelà du visible à l’œil nu. La fameuse abeille grossie,
réalisée par Francesco Stelluti, en 1625, devient unrepère signifiant (Bickendorf 2010). Cette innovation
participe de la culture visuelle en gestation danslaquelle baigne Cassiano del Pozzo.
C’est encore la fabrique d’un nouveau regard qui
soutient la constitution de La République de l’œil,(Griener 2010). L’auteur vise à rassembler leséléments matériels et immatériels, intellectuels,
cognitifs, de la culture visuelle du 18ème siècle.
L’instrumentarium de l’historien de l’art s’y compose
aussi bien des techniques de reproduction desœuvres (dessins, gravures) que des régimes deperception et de mémorisation qui s’instaurent.
Les travaux de Locke aussi bien que la dépose
des pigments d’un support à un autre forment lesconditions de possibilité de la ‘lecture des œuvres’;l’image se détache ainsi de l’oeuvre et prend forme
dans un espace mental qui fonctionne en corrélation
entre les espaces d’exposition (Salons, musées) etcelui du livre.
Ces approches ont pour point commun de réinsérer lelivre d’images dans un dispositif complexe: contexte
intellectuel, pratiques cognitives ou sociabilité desacteurs impliqués.

3. En écho avec les préoccupations
actuelles de l’histoire de l’art
numérique
L’étude des remédiations successives de l’image
recèle un potentiel heuristique. Ainsi, la multiplicité
des montages numériques d’images fait pièce à laréduction méthodologique liée au photographique(modèle binaire de la double projection, standards
de l’imagerie imprimée); la liberté des agencements
dans les livres anciens peut inspirer.
Par exemple, la grille comme organisation
structurelle d’images montre sa permanence. (Fig.
1) Mais alors que dans le régime imprimé, la grillecomparative soutient une proposition didactique

Digital Humanities 2012achevée, (Cf. supra), avec le numérique, ellefavorise la prévisualisation de corpus d’images(Welger-Barboza 2011) (Fig. 2) Ici, l’agencement
est indissociable de la notion d’agentivité ; c’est
en termes d’affordance des interfaces que l’on doit
analyser les conditions sémiotiques et cognitives dela manipulation des images, de l’action conjuguée del’œil et du geste (Rueckert, Radzikowska & Sinclair2011).

aux dimensions variables du dispositif numérique[navigateur, bases d’images et éditions numériques
produites par d’autres opérateurs, individuels
ou institutionnels]. Les partitions entre lesdifférentes situations de travail et de communication(personnel/collectif, privé/public, institutionnel/
non-institutionnel), dans l’accès et l’utilisation desimages, sont fluides, les délimitations poreuses. La
culture numérique en gestation, avec ses outils et
ses pratiques, forme le cadre de l’expérience visuellepour la discipline, en transforme les méthodes
comme les objets, la culture académique aussi bienque les modes de socialisation.
Dans la brève histoire de l’art numérique, desdéplacements font pendant à ceux que l’on remarquedans l’historiographie médiologique de l’histoirede l’histoire de l’art. Les premières réflexions
se sont naturellement portées sur les propriétésdu document numérique versus le document
photographique, sur l’impact de l’accessibilité degrands corpus d’images, sur la réactualisation duMusée imaginaire étendu à la 3D – Piero Project(1994, Princeton) est emblématique. Désormais,l’approche de la complexité du dispositif numériquepeut se nourrir de l’étude des supports du passé del’histoire de l’art.

References
Bann, S. (2001). Photographie et reproduction
gravée. Études photographiques, [En ligne],
mis
en
ligne
le
10
septembre
2008.
URL: http://etudesphotographiques.revues.o
rg/index241.html Consulté le 12 mars 2012.
Benjamin, W. (1935-1939). L’œuvre d’art àl’époque de sa reproductibilité technique. Œuvres T.
III. Paris: Gallimard 2000.

Figure 1: Jean-Baptiste Louis Georges Séroux d’Agincourt (Vol.
IV, planche LXIV : Tableau historique et chronologique desfrontispices des temples, avant et durant la décadence de l’art

Bickendorf, G. (2004). Dans l’ombre de
Winckelmann : l’histoire de l’art dans la ‘républiqueinternationale des Lettres’ au 18ème siècle. Revue del’Art n°146/2004-4, L’histoire de l’histoire de l’art,
pp. 7-20.
Bickendorf, G. (2010). Musées de papier –Musées de l’art, des sciences et de l’histoire. In
Musées de papier: l’Antiquité en livres, 1600-1800.
Paris: Le Louvre/Gourcuff Gradenigo – Catalogue
d’exposition, Musée du Louvre, 25-09-2010 au
03-01-2011
Caraffa, C., ed. (2011). Photo Archives and the
Photographic Memory of Art History. Berlin andMunich: Deutscher Kunstverlag.

Figure 2: Grille de vignettes –Gestionnaire personnel d’images (Picasa)

Autre changement d’envergure, le cadre d’expériencede la pratique visuelle contemporaine, est lié

CIHA London (2000). Thirtieth International
Congress of the History of Art, Art History for
the Millenium: Time., Section 23, Digital Art
History Time, London, 3-8 September 2000. AHWA
409

Digital Humanities 2012

Archive en ligne: http://www.unites.uqam.ca/AH
WA/Meetings/2000.CIHA/index.html , Consulté le12/03/12.
Decultot, E. (2010). Genèse d’une histoire del’art par les images – Les recueils d’antiquités
et la naissance du discours historique sur l’art,
1600-1800. In Musées de papier: l’Antiquitéen livres, 1600-1800. Paris: Le Louvre/Gourcuff
Gradenigo – Catalogue d’exposition, Musée du
Louvre, 25-09-2010 au 03-01-2011.
Falguieres, P. (1996). Les Raisons du catalogue.
Du Catalogue, Cahiers du musée national d’art
moderne nº 56/57, pp. 5-20.
Freitag, W. M. (1979-1980). Early Uses of
Photography in the History of Art. Art Journal 39(2):117-123.
Freitag, W. M. 1(998). Histoire de l’art et nouvelles
techniques de reproduction. In Histoire de l’histoirede l’art, Tome II. XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, (Dir.
Edouard Pommier) Actes du colloque du musée du
Louvre. (1994-1995). Paris: Klincksieck/Musée du
Louvre.
Greenhalgh, M. (2004). Art History, A
Compagnion to Digital Humanities. Oxford:
Blackwell http://www.digitalhumanities.org/c
ompanion , Consulté le 12/03/12.
Griener, P. (2010). La République de l’œil –L’expérience de l’art au siècle des Lumières. Paris:
Ed. Odile Jacob.
Haskell, F. (1987). La difficile naissance du livre
d’art. Paris: RMN 1992.
Ivins, W. M. (1969 [1953]). Prints and Visual
Communication. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969(1953). (Londres: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
Mondini, D. (2005). Mittelalter im Bild. Séroux
d’Agincourt und die Kunsthistoriographie um 1800.
Zürich: Zurich InterPublishers.
Recht, R. (1996). La Mise en ordre, Note surl’histoire du catalogue. Cahiers du musée nationald’art moderne nº 56/57, pp. 21-35.
Renie, P. L. (2001). Guerre commerciale, batailleesthétique: la reproduction des œuvres d’art
par l’estampe et la photographie, 1850-1880. V.
Goudinoux et M. Weemans (dir.), Reproductibilité
et irreproductibilité de l’œuvre d’art. Bruxelles: La
Lettre volée, pp. 59-81.
Ruecker, S., Radzikowska, M., and S. Sinclair(2011). Visual Interface Desing for Digital Cultural
Heritage – A guide ro Rich-Prospect Browsing.
Farnham: Ashgate.

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Seroux d’Agincourt, J. B. L. G. (1810-1823).
Histoire de l’art par les monumens, depuis sa
décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement
au XVIe. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 6 vol.
Sicard, M. (1998). La fabrique du regard (XV-XXe
siècles).Paris: Ed. Odile Jacob.
Welger-Barboza, C. (2011). Pratiques numériquesdel’image.
Observatoire
critique,Etude
des resources numériques pour l’histoire del’art http://observatoire-critique.hypotheses.org/

Wölfflin, H. (1896, 1897, 1915). Comment
sculptures.
Présentation,
photographierlestraduction et notes par Jean-Claude Chirollet. Paris:
L’Harmattan 2008.

Digital Humanities 2012

Benefits of tools andapplications for a digitized
analysis of Chinese
Buddhist inscriptions
Wenzel, Claudia

claudiawen@googlemail.com
Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Germany

The research project ‘Buddhist stone scripturesin China’ hosted at the Heidelberg Academy of
Sciences and Humanities and headed by Prof.
Lothar Ledderose is devoted to the documentationof holy Buddhist scriptures that were carved onto
rocks, boulders and stones from the sixth to theeighth century in China. The digital processing
and presentation of these stone carved texts offers
remarkable benefits with regard to facilitation of
the workflow, incorporation of spatial relations, andtransparency.

1. Application of digital tools
for enhancing the workflow oftranscribing and editing the texts
to establish the corpus of carved
stone sutras
Traditionally, pre-modern Chinese texts engravedon durable materials like metal or stone were first‘copied’ by brushing a moistened sheet of paper into
the cavities of the carved surface, and applying black
ink on all outstanding parts, leaving the traces of
the chisel in white on the paper. These transportablerubbings were collected from the eighteenth century
on by Chinese epigraphers, who studied their ancientscripts and transcribed them for further publication.
However, the rubbings are in no way a faithful copyof what was originally written into stone. The very
process of taking them from the stone cut characters
already involves a reading and interpretation of lesswell preserved glyphs.
To avoid such flaws and short-comings of the
traditional Chinese procedure of text documentation,
our project relies solely on the carved text to provide
the lemmas for the corpus of stone sutras. The
original stone is documented either by photographs
alone, or by both scans and photographs. Then it
is collated with several text witnesses, including
different versions of rubbings, and different versionsof the text extant either in manuscripts, or printed
editions of the Buddhist canon, as well as the digital

edition of the Buddhist canon, edited by the Chinese
Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA). As aresult, the original stone text can be transcribed byreconstructing lost or damaged characters, and canbe discussed in text critical annotations.
Digital research and publication helps making thisediting process more transparent and replicable. The
web application documents each inscription on fivelevels by providing (1) a scan or photograph of theoriginal stone, (2) one or several paper rubbings ofthe stone, (3) a transcription in Unicode charactersreflecting the original layout of characters in verticalcolumns on the stone, (4) a transcription in Unicodecharacters with modern punctuation and reading
direction in horizontal lines from left to right, and(5) an English translation of the text including
text critical annotations. In this way, text editing
is significantly enhanced in terms of correctness aswell as transparency, since the user can follow thetranscribing of each stone character step by step.
The basis for the transcription process is the
documentation of the original stone, which is done
ideally by 3D laser scans. After processing, theinscriptions can be viewed either in 2 D or 3 D view bymeans of an applet developed for the project by the i3
Mainz (University of Applied Sciences, Mainz).1 Thisapplet was already implemented in the workflow ofreading and transcribing the text in modern Unicodecharacters, but it is also available online. It provides
various options like zooming, adjusting the light
position, or applying colors for better legibility of
the carved characters, thereby empowering users to
not only better comprehend the editing process, butalso to continue research by themselves. The use ofthis digital tool exceeds by far the possibilities of
traditional print media.
Another main challenge of the edition of the medieval
stone sutras is their transcription in modern Unicodecharacters. Many of the ancient carved texts use
glyphs not yet encoded in the Unicode standard.
Although more Chinese ideographs are being added
currently to the Unihan database, the problems
of mapping ancient glyphs to Unicode characters
are complex, and cannot be solved completely
by encoding more glyphs. By programming andimplementing a ‘snippet tool’ that is able to searchand line up images of the same character connected
to a certain Unicode character, we not only provide atool for an analysis of writing styles, but also bring tolight the complexity of the issue of mapping glyphs tounified characters.

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2. Incorporation of spatial
relations
For a comprehensive understanding of the historicalbackground behind the creation of stone carved
sutras in China, each inscription site has to be
seen in its particular topography in which it isembedded. The choice of the site is of religious
importance, and infers particular ritual uses. Interspatial relations between multiple sites are also ofinterest. 2 For this reason, all inscriptions and sites
were GIS documented and can now be addressed oninteractive maps.3 In cooperation with the Instituteof Geography of Heidelberg University, more tools
for a GIS based analysis have been developed toclarify the spatial history of the creation of inscription
sites, the related spreading of Buddhist sutras, andthe migration movements of the monks responsiblefor it.4
Right from the start, the project has generated
3D models of larger inscription sites that havebeen integrated into the project’s web-application.
At first, we made use of these models to provide
map-like views of the general layout of inscriptions
at particular sites. In one case, the course of apilgrim’s path was simulated in a flash animation.
More recently, the visualization with 3D models
has become even more rewarding for a particular
type of inscription sites, namely those hostingstone sutras inside caves. Now the user can findthe inscription site on a map, zoom in, select aparticular cave, and by means of a panoramic view,
approach the inscriptions inside the digital caveand read them herself by means of high-resolution
photographs. In this respect, digital space is not
only a synthesis of traditional documentation withrubbings, photographs, and printing, but offers a newlevel of close-to- reality documentation.5

3. (Future6) digital publicationof research results and theirtransparency for the community
All data of the project are stored in an open source
XML database called eXist (exist-db.org); the markup of texts follows TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)
standards. On the basis of the same set of data, a web
application as well as a print publication is generated.
For the latter, the data is being transformed by
XSLT. The digital as well as the print publication
are set up similarly. The scheme of documenting
each inscription on the aforementioned five levels
pervades the digital and the print publication.
While the purpose of this structure is to provide
maximum transparency about the editing process
for the reader/user, the electronic publication is in412

this respect even more efficient. By integrating the
aforementioned digital tools (Mainz applet, snippettool, GIS analysis tools) into the project’s webapplication, the (future) user is enabled to replicate
the editing of stone scriptures, and to continue
research herself.
Funding
This work was supported by the Heidelberg Academyof Sciences and Humanities (Heidelberger Akademie
der Wissenschaften), Germany. The development ofdigital tools mentioned was supported by the German
Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) withina program on interdisciplinary research between
natural and social sciences, namely the research
project ‘3D-Sutras: A web based atlas of laser scanned
Buddhist stone inscriptions in China,’ co-operated by
the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, the Departmentof Geography of Heidelberg University, and theInstitute for Spatial Information and Surveying
Technology, i3mainz, of the University of Applied
Sciences in Mainz.

References
Auer, M., B. Höfle, S. Lanig, A. Schilling, andA. Zipf (2011). 3D-Sutras: A web based atlas of laser
scanned Buddhist stone inscriptions in China. 14th
AGILE International Conference on Geographic
Information Science, Utrecht, The Netherlands 18-21
April 2011.
Lanig, S., A. Schilling, M. Auer, B. Höfle,N. Billen, and A. Zipf (2011a). Interoperable
integration of high precision 3D laser data and large
scale geoanalysis in a SDI for Sutra inscriptions in
Sichuan (China). Geoinformatik 2011– Geochange,
Münster, Germany.
Lanig,S.,
B.
Höfle,
M.
Auer,
A.
Schilling, H. Deierling, and A. Zipf
(2011b). Geodateninfrastrukturen im historischgeographischen
Kontext–
Buddhistische
Steinschriften in der Provinz Sichuan/China. AGIT
2011. Symposium Angewandte Geoinformatik,
Salzburg, Österreich.
Ledderose, L. (2012, in print) Fünf Perspektiven
auf Steinerne Sutren. In I. Reichle and V.
Lepper (eds.), Perspektiven. Berlin: BerlinBrandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften2012.
Schmidt, N., R. Schütze, and F. Boochs(2010a). 3D-Sutra – Interactive Analysis Tool for a
Web-Atlas of Scanned Sutra Inscriptions in China.
Proceedings of the ISPRS Commissi on V MidTerm Symposium Close Range Image Measurement
Techniques, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom.

Digital Humanities 2012

Schmidt, N., F. Boochs, and R. Schütze(2010b). Capture and Processing of High
Resolution 3D-Data of Sutra Inscriptions in
China. http://www.springerlink.com/content/
978-3-642-16872-7/ Digital Heritage, http://www.springerlink.com/content/0302-9743/ Lecture
Notes in Computer Science 6436: 125-139, DOI:
10.1007/978-3-642-16873-4_10, Limassol, Zypern

The ARTeFACT Movement
Thesaurus: toward an
open-source tool to minemovement-derived data

Tsai, S., and C. Wenzel (2009). The Stone
Inscriptions of the Six Mountains of Zoucheng.
Die Steinschriften der Sechs Berge von Zoucheng.
In Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln und
Forschungsstelle der Heidelberger Akademie derWissenschaften, Buddhistische Steinschriften in
Nord-China (eds), The Centenary of the Museumof East Asian Art in Cologne. The Heart of
Enlightenment. Buddhist Art in China 550-600. 100
Jahre Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Köln. Das
Herz der Erleuchtung. Buddhistische Kunst in China
550-600. Köln, pp. 24-37.

slw4w@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Notes
1. Schmidt et al. 2010b: 3-9; Schmidt et al. 2010a: 2-5.
2. Tsai & Wenzel 2009: 24.
3. Auer et al. 2011: 2-5; Lanig et al. 2011 b: 3-4.
4. Lanig et al. 2011a: 4-5; Lanig et al. 2011b: 7-8.
5. Ledderose 2012.
6. According to the agreement of the Chinese-German cooperation project, a print publication has first priority; thedigital publication has to follow afterwards. For this reason,
the project’s web-application at http://www.stonesutr
as.org is to date still password protected. Access will be
granted by request; please contact Claudia.Wenzel@urz.uniheidelberg.de.

Wiesner, Susan L.
Bennett, Bradford
bcb3a@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Stalnaker, Rommie L.
rstalnaker81@gmail.com
Kennesaw State University, USA

1. Problem
The 20th century was a period of vast growth indance especially in Western cultures, with multiple
genres being created and codified techniques being
developed. Along with the explosion of new works(danced texts) came an upsurge of research into
dance and its acceptance as a scholarly discipline.
However, research into movement, and movementbased arts, depends greatly on the ability to peruse
documentation beyond static written texts andphotographic (still) images. Thus, as visual capture
technologies developed, the preferred means ofrecording and studying a dance work is film and/or
video (i.e. visual data). As beneficial as access to film
has been to the discipline, this method of preserving
and accessing dance contains its own challenges. The
current practice of viewing hours of film hinders
researchers’ abilities to (a) find movement-derived
data (b) find that data quickly (c) find data accurately
described and (d) reuse the data. Further, while
there are standards for preserving video, there are
no standards for providing access and any attempt
at mining data from a moving image is fraught withdifficulty. Therefore, a new model is required, onethat exploits advances in computer software andhardware and can enhance research and innovation
into movement-based research in the humanities.

2. Our Solution
With funds from an NEH Level II Digital Start-up
Grant, the ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus (AMT)
uses motion capture technologies to study movement
patterns through a corpus of movement-derived
data. In the third phase of the ARTeFACT project,a multi-disciplinary project first developed at the413

Digital Humanities 2012

University of Virginia, the AMT includes over 200
movements derived from codified techniques: ballet,
jazz, modern dance, and tai chi. Prior to motion
capture of movements, we defined and categorizedeach movement ‘STEP’ in order to develop an
ontology (saved as xml files). An eight-camera
Vicon system captures individual movements andmovement phrases typically seen in the studio andon stage. Using custom Matlab software, 3-D dataof individual movements are quantified throughmathematical interpretation of joint positions, using
the ground truth data of the VICON motion capturesystem for its input to develop the algorithms. In
future, the program, idMove, (developed for the DHSUG) will be modified to use only 2-D data.
The second planned future component is thedevelopment of algorithms to convert 2-D images
from the video into files of position data (in practicethe second component, creating the position datafrom video would be applied first to generate the data
for movement identification). These two components
will be worked on in parallel. In addition, work will be
undertaken to examine and improve the robustnessof the algorithms when data sets are incomplete.
We will validate that the code works with dancers
of different morphologies and levels of ability. Also
there are often times in dances when body parts are
obscured by other dancers or by the dancer him or
herself and we will develop our algorithms to workwhen sections of movements can not be seen. Finally,
we will consider movement phrases, a series of dancemoves, (the current software is designed for films
of a single dance move) and will develop the ability
to identify the individual moves within a string ofmoves.
As choreographers rarely create dances based solely
on individual STEPS, and prefer to use them tocreate a new vocabulary per the requirements ofthe dance work, we are moving beyond the codified
technical movements to incorporate conceptualized
movements into the AMT. At this time, we are using
Lakoff and Johnson’s work on conceptual metaphor
as a basis for pattern recognition of embodied
semantics, and we plan to utilize corpus linguistics
methods as a basis to formulate a statistical analysisof the STEPS (words) ‘spoken’ in a dance work.
This approach is admittedly problematic, in that a
movement phrase does not parallel written phrases;
however, we are continuing to work with the ideasof statistical analysis against distinct movement
vocabularies created as representative of a concept.
Thereby we are creating a lexicon of dance based bothupon technical description of the moves (STEPS) as
well as theme based moves. We are striving toward
a future in which researchers will be able to upload
videos and have the dance “annotated” by the AMT
software for data mining of movement-based texts.

414

3. Rationale
Dance movement, as a non-verbal language, cuts
across cultures without the need of ‘translation.’
The body speaks through a kinesthetic voice. While
appreciating that there may be cultural differences
at work in choreography, in western theatre dance
there is generalized understanding of movement
techniques and vocabulary. Therefore, the response
to a work, especially as to the meaning of a dance,
allows most viewers to understand the work. In otherwords, there is a set of movements that can be readeither by an understanding of the technical form or
through mutual conceptual frameworks. That said,
the most common verbal languages used in dance are
English and French with steps codified to such an
extent that dancers and researchers the world overunderstand a passé, a fondue, a frappe, a fouette, aflat back, a brush knee, etc. Thus, we have begun
loading the AMT with codified movements. This
will allow researchers to view these movements,
performed by a subject-matter-expert, via the step
name or by individual movements of body parts(at this time, the knee and foot). By extending
the AMT to include conceptual movements, we will
enable researchers to search based on an idea (thefirst conceptual set we are including incorporates
movements based on the conceptual metaphor
Conflict).

4. Conclusion
We will present the NEH funded portion of the
ARTeFACT project: the AMT. This is a major step
toward providing access to movement-derived data
through sophisticated data mining technologies. By
using motion capture technologies we are developing
a sophisticated, open source tool that can help makefilm searchable for single movements and movementphrases. By bringing together engineers, movement
specialists, and mathematicians we will forge ahead
to break new ground in movement research and takeone step closer to the creation of an automated meansof mining danced texts and filmed movements.

References
Ahmad, K., A. Salway, J. Lansdale, H.
Selvaraj, and B. Verma (1998). (An)Notating
Dance: Multimedia Storage and Retrieval.
Conference Proceedings, International Conference
on Computational Intelligence and Multimedia
Applications, World Scientific. Singapore, p. 788.
Bailey, H., M. Bachler, S. Buckingham Shum,
A. Le Blanc, S. Popat, A. Rowley, and M.
Turner (2009). Dancing on the Grid: Using eScience Tools to Extend Choreographic Research.

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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A(13 July 2009) 367 (No. 1898): 2793.
Coartney J., and S. Wiesner (2009) Performanceas digital text: Capturing signals and secret messages
in a media-rich experience. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 24: 153.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson (1999). Philosophy
in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenges
toWestern Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson (1980). Metaphors
We Live By Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Starkweather, J. A. (2003). Overview: ComputerAided Approaches to Content Recognition. In G.
Gerbner et al. (eds.), The Analysis of Communication
Content. New York: John Wiley & Sons, p. 339.
Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors
London: Cornell UP.
Wiesner, S. L. (2011) Framing Dance Writing: A
Corpus Linguistics. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic
Publishing.

The electronic ‘Oxford
English Dictionary’, poetry,
and intertextuality
Williams, David-Antoine
david.williams@uwaterloo.ca
University of Waterloo, Canada

1. Overview
This paper will discuss recent research carriedout in the context of two grant projects: ‘Poetry
and Contingency’ (funded by a Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council of Canada [SSHRC]
Insight Development Grant – Digital Economy
Priority Area) and ‘Applying search and stylometry
techniques to OED2 and poetic text corpora’ (funded
by a UWaterloo SSHRC Institutional Grant). It will
discuss the processes and methods developed foranalyzing and comparing large, heterogeneous text
datasets, as well as preliminary results of theseanalyses and their applications in and implications
for traditional literary studies. With implications
for digital humanities research, computational
approaches to language and literature, linguistics,
lexicography, poetics, and literary criticism, thepaper will address conference themes of ‘cultures,
languages, and methods’ and several of theirintersections.

2. Context
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely
considered to be the greatest philological andlexicographical achievement in English. The core of
the work is its 2.5 million quotations, a significant
portion of them from poetic and other literary texts,
which both shape and illustrate the various sense
definitions of roughly 600,000 English words andword forms. Conversely, since its publication, poets
have relied on the OED to guide their deployments
and arrangements of English words in poems. This
reciprocal intertextuality has led to two striking facts
which have received insufficient scholarly attention:1) that the OED’s definitions of English words depend
to a significant degree on poetic language, whichis striking because by any standard account, poetic
usage tends away from the denotative or definitional
and towards the connotative and metaphorical; and2) that much English poetry of the last hundredyears contains a philological, etymological, andlexicographical dimension, informed by the OED.

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Although the Second Edition of the OED (Murray
et al. 1989) was among the earliest large books to
be presented to public and academic communities indigitized, marked-up form, and despite the ongoingcomprehensive rewriting of the Dictionary (Simpson& Weiner 2000-) no version has ever been marked
for quotation genre, meaning that until now thereciprocal influences between dictionary and author
have been difficult to identify, and impossible or
impracticable to quantify with reference to specificliterary genres (e.g. poetry or verse drama, etc.).
My projects use the 1989 electronic OED2, digitizedat the University of Waterloo, alongside electronic
corpora of poetry, derived from Project Gutenberg,
Chadwyck-Healey, and other datasets, to generatequantitative and qualitative assessments in two
broad fields of inquiry: 1) What has been theinfluence of poetry on the English language’s mostcomprehensive lexicographical work? and 2) What
influence has the OED had on English-language
poetry?

3. Work in Progress
The first prong of the project involves creatinga parallel OED2 in which poetic quotations aremarked for genre, to allow for advanced search andcomparison of poetic quotations. Marking OED2
for quotation genre will allow for fast, comparative
analysis of the influence of poetic writing on thecompilers of the OED. I will discuss the challenges ofthis task and the methods developed to achieve it, as
well as the search and comparison scripts developed
to query the new resource. I will give examples anddiscuss the kinds of queries and comparisons madepossible by this new resource, and their implications
for literary studies and lexicography.
If the first prong is designed to generate questions
and answers about poetic influence on OED2, thesecond prong investigates a more intricate and subtle
problem: the influence of the OED on poetry. For
instance, it is a trivial thing for a critic to supposethat Geoffrey Hill’s talk of ‘wrinching and spraining
the text’ is a reference to Milton, since it is contains
nonstandard spelling, is italicized, and appears ina poem with Milton in the title (Hill 2008: 5).
But OED2 also quotes exactly those words from Of
Reformation (Milton 1698: 269) under both ‘wrench,v.’, and ‘sprain, v.’ suggesting a second possible
source text for Hill. Testing an individual poem forpotential OED2 intertextuality requires a set of text
comparison techniques plus an appropriate methodof applying these. The process can also be appliedsystematically, to an electronic corpus (or several
corpora) of poetry written since c.1884, the year
OED1 fascicles began to be published. Relatively
simple text-similarity approaches to the two corpora(including, e.g., string, n-gram, functional n-gram,
416

and low-probability statistical approaches) will yield
hundreds if not thousands of instances such as these,
without depending on the poet to flag his or her
source. More sophisticated stylometric techniques
will give more promising indications of potential
poetic intertextuality with various dictionary entries,
including their etymology, definition, and quotation
fields. Using these tools, we can quickly identify avery large number of candidates for intertextuality
in English poems. I will discuss the comparison
methods developed, as well as preliminary results ofthese, and their implications for literary studies.
A few facts make OED2 intertextuality a specialcase, overlapping with cases of attribution orallusion, but not identical to these. For one, OED2
is already a multiauthored and intertextual text,
written and compiled by hundreds of lexicographers
over more than a hundred years, following varying
practices and relying on thousands of sources
comprising millions of quotations. Secondly, though
OED2
carries linguistic information (such as
pronunciations, etymologies, definitions, etc.) as wellas historical usage information (in the quotations)about every English word that is likely to occur in apoem or anywhere else, it is not often the only text tocarry any one subset of this information. This meansthat finding OED2 in poems may point to anothersource for a poetic passage than (just) OED2 itself.
Comparing the etymology field of a word in OED2
to its occurrence in a poetic text, for instance, might
point to an etymological play on words, without
conclusively attributing this to OED2. Or comparing
the quotation fields may suggest an allusion to a textthat happens to be quoted in OED2, even if OED2 is
not itself the source of the allusion. But it may also
point to true influence, in the form of a poetic allusion
or reference which has been occasioned by OED2 andnot the original text. I will discuss, with the helpof preliminary results, the value and implications ofeach type of discovery, and ways of differentiating
among these possibilities when appropriate. This is,I will argue, a discussion which takes up the crucial
question of how, and to what extent, computing
technologies can benefit the field of literary criticism,as a species of literary scholarship with its own goals
and commitments.

References
Brewer, C. (2008). Treasure-House of theLanguage: The Living OED. New Haven: Yale.
Brewer, C. (2009). Literary Quotations in the OED.
Review of English Studies 61: 93-125.
Brewer, C. (2011). ‘Happy Copiousness’? OED’s
Recording of Female Authors of the EighteenthCentury. Review of English Studies 62: 86-117.

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Burchfield, R. W. (1989). Unlocking the English
Language. London: Faber.
Forstall, C. W., and W. J. Scheirer(2010). Features from Frequency: Authorshipand Stylistic Analysis Using Repetitive Sound.
Proceedings of the Chicago Colloquium on
Digital Humanities and Computer Science,
1(2). http://https://letterpress.uchicago.ed
u/index.php/jdhcs/article/view/56/67(accessed March 2012).

Heaney, S. (1996). Opened Ground: Poems
1966-1996. London: Faber.
Hill, G. (2008). A Treatise of Civil Power.London:
Penguin.

Simpson, J., and E. S. C. Weiner (2000-). OED
Online. 3rd ed., rev. J. A. Simpson et al. Oxford:
Oxford UP.
Tompa, F., E. Blake, E., and T. Bray (1991).
Shortening the OED: Experience with a grammardefined database. Waterloo: UW Centre for the New
Oxford Dictionary and Text Research.
Trillini, R. H., and S. Quassdorf (2010). A ‘Key to
All Quotations’? A Corpus-Based Parameter Model ofIntertextuality. Literary and Linguistic Computing
25(3): 269-86.
Vogel, C., and G. Lynch (2008). Computational
Stylometry: Who’s in a Play? Lecture Notes in
Computer Science 5042: 169-186.

Hollander, J. (1981). The Figure of Echo. Berkeley:
U of California P.
Holmes, David I. (1998). The Evolution of
Stylometry in Humanities Scholarship. Literary and
Linguistic Computing 13(3): 111-17.
Irwin, W. (2001). What is an Allusion? The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59(3): 287-297.
Koppel, M., and J. Schler (2004). Authorship
Verification as a One-Class Classification Problem.
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on
Machine Learning, pp. 489-95.
Koppel, M., J. Schler, and E. Bonchek-Dokow(2007). Measuring Differentiability: Unmasking
Pseudonymous Authors Journal of Machine
Learning Research 8: 1261-1276.
Literature Online . http://lion.chadwyck.com(accessed March 2012).
Milton, J. (1698). Historical, Political, andMiscellaneous Works. Amsterdam.
Muldoon, P. (2001). Poems, 1968-1998. London:
Faber.
Murray, J., et. al., eds. (1989). Oxford English
Dictionary. 2nd ed., compiled by J. A. Simpson and
E. S. C. Weiner, 20 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Neumann, P. Statistical metalinguistics and Zipf/
Pareto/Mandelbrot. http://www.csl.sri.com/us
ers/neumann/#12a (accessed March 2012).
Project Gutenberg.
(accessed March 2012).

http://gutenberg.org

Ricks, C. (2002). Allusion to the Poets. Oxford:
Oxford UP.
Ruthven, K. K. (1969). The Poet as Etymologist.
Critical Quarterly 11(1): 9-37.

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Reasoning about Genesis or
The Mechanical Philologist
Wissenbach, Moritz

moritz.wissenbach@uni-wuerzburg.de
University of Würzburg, Germany

Pravida, Dietmar

dpravida@goethehaus-frankfurt.de
University of Frankfurt, Germany

Middell, Gregor

gregor@middell.net
University of Würzburg, Germany

1. Introduction
Dating manuscripts is one of the most demanding
tasks of textual scholarship (see e.g. Bockelkamp
1982; Tyson 1987). While there is a vast bodyof literature on dating and constituting witness
stemmata for ancient and medieval codices (West1973; Bischoff 2009), there seems to be hardly
any systematic discussion on the issue of dating
modern manuscripts. There have been successful
approaches to date older material by computational
phylogenetics (Robinson et al. 1998) with theconsecutive import of quantitative methods and tools
into the field, but to our knowledge, there is no
approach that uses formal logics.1
Usually, the tools at the modern philologist’s disposal
are very basic: A pencil or marker pen and amaximal writing surface (Figure 1: Reconstructionof the genesis of Faust manuscript VH2). In
this paper, we examine the use of a formal
knowledge representation to facilitate the dating ofa large corpus of inscriptions on manuscripts. The
knowledge representation is to be a
- point where diverse and possibly conflicting
research sources can be integrated- working tool for the philologist to be queried andmodified during research- basis of facts for a formal reasoning calculus- database for users.
The quality of the results of automatic reasoning will
be of special interest. Will they be incorrect or correct,
and in case of the latter, will they be largely expectedor to some degree unexpected?

418

Figure 1

1.1. Relativedating of modern
manuscripts
By inscription we understand any portion of written
text on a manuscript in one specific phase of writing.
If there is no absolute chronology at hand, the only
possibility left is to try to give a relative chronology.
We believe that a considerable part of conventional
dating procedures can be reduced to a combinationof more elementary steps that allow a more explicit
and even formal approach.

1.2. Inductive vs. deductive reasoning
Relations between inscriptions can be used as
predicates in a formal logic and reasoned upon bya suitable calculus. In order to reason deductively,a general rule or a set of rules is required. It is
imaginable for this set to be induced automaticallyby a machine learning algorithm. In this study,
however, the set of rules is manually defined. Thus,
the presented approach is purely deductive.

1.3. Dealing with contradictions
Some assertions are taken from various sourcesof research, others are calculated automaticallyfrom existing data and even others are establishedmanually. There will inevitably be contradictions.
Possible solutions are:

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1. Do not try to resolve and thus conceal thecontradictions.
2. Try to specify explicit rules that prioritize one classof assertion over the other.
3. Use a method of approximate reasoning.
We have decided for the second approach, as itpreserves the advantages of the first while still
enabling a very unambiguous specification andinterpretation.

2. Reasoning rules for relative
datingTo our knowledge there is no extensive list of typicalmodes of philological reasoning available, so we will
try to give some elementary suggestions (following
Pravida 2005:58f.).

2.1. Relations between inscriptions
Chronological anteriority
The relation that we are interested in as a result isa temporal one: Which inscriptions predate otherinscriptions:Text-genetic anteriority
chronological anteriority.

bydefinition

implies

Exclusive containment
The overall syntagmatic interval of one inscription,I, is said to be exclusively contained by the overall
syntagmatic interval of another inscription J, if somepart of the text of inscription I lies within the overall
syntagmatic interval of inscription J, where they
have a larger coherent textual neighbourhood than in
inscription I:

The notion of exclusive containment captures thecase of additional amplification of a passage.
Exclusive containment is some special case of textgenetic posteriority with regard to some portion of an
inscription. (Exclusive containment is very common
in the working manuscripts of Brentano; we take it asa matter of course that it will be necessary to refine
our set of relations as soon as we will extend ourapproach to other authors.)

2.2. Rules

Syntagmatic precedence
Inscription I syntagmatically precedes a second
inscription J if the text of J follows the text of I withrespect to a larger text that contains them both:

Rules or axioms can be defined as a basis fordeduction. The language we use is that of predicate
logic. The transitivity of the predates relation, e.g.,
can be expressed as

Other properties of relations can be modelled for therespective relations accordingly.
Paradigmatic relationshipPrecedence

Inscription I is paradigmatically related to a second
inscription J if they share text:

Rules that might potentially lead to contradictions
need to be ordered, so that it is clear which rule has
precedence over another. Consider the two rules

Text-genetic anteriority
Inscription I text-genetically precedes an inscriptionJ, if I contains an earlier stage of a text contained by J:

In order to subordinate rule b under rule a, we add
a conjugation of the negated antecedent of the first
rule:

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In this way, all rules can be ordered and thus the setof rules be made logically consistent. In the following,
we will list the rules ordered by priority from lowest
to highest. The term pi is used to designate priority.
Syntagmatic precedence

Paradigmatic relations
The paradigmatic relation is symmetric. For dating,another hint (term c) must be considered (material,
elementary genetic classification, textual):
Figure 2

From textual evidence we know that:
Containment

Text-genetic anteriority(**)

3. An Example from Clemens
Brentano’s Romances of the
RosaryOur reasoning machine concludes:

The twelfth canto of the Romances of the Rosary
serves as an example that our default assumptions
and their formalisation do in fact yield adequate
results (cf. Pravida 2005; Brentano 2006). We
consider the drafts (inscriptions) J1-6.
From the data which can be obtained frommanuscript descriptions, we gather the relations
shown in Figure 2:

Which establishes a total order (Figure 3):420

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forthcoming). We expect that the genesis of the whole
work will permit an analysis closely following theselines. As there is much more electronically encodedmaterial, a computer-assisted approach seems very
promising to us.
We used first-order logic and a theorem prover(Schulz 2002). The required expressivity of thelogical formalism is probably lower than firstorder logic (e.g. it will not need quantification),but more expressive than commonly used Semantic
Web logics (e.g. OWL/SWRL) for the purposeof rule prioritisation. The adequacy of a nonmonotonic logic, such as default reasoning (Reiter
1980; Delgrande & Schaub 1997), or multi-valued
logics and approximate reasoning is to be evaluated.
As many facts as possible should be automaticallyextracted or calculated from existing data, e.g. bymeans of automatic collation (Stolz & Dimpel 2006),
etc.

References
Birdsall, J.N. (1992). The Recent History of New
Testament Textual Criticism (from Westcott andHort, 1881, to the present). In Aufstieg undNiedergang der römischen Welt. Geschichte undKultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung. Vol.
II,26,1. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 99-197.
Bischoff, B. (2009). Paläographie des römischen
Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters. 4th
ed. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.
Bockelkamp, M. (1982). Analytische Forschungenzu Handschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts. Hamburg:
Hauswedell.
Brentano, C. (2006). Romanzen vom Rosenkranz.
Frühe Fassungen. Ed. by Dietmar Pravida. Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer 2006.
Delgrande, J. P., and T. Schaub (1997).
Compiling Reasoning with and about Preferences
into Default Logic. Proceedings of the International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 1, pp.
168-175.

Figure 3

4. Application to the Faust
edition / Outlook
The above example is well suited for our purpose,
perhaps exceptionally so. Other texts may prove to
be more difficult. Goethe’s habits of composing, forexample, are much less linear. Yet, we can show thatthe genesis of the last act of Faust II can be captured
in a way that resembles our example (Pravida,Greg, W. W. (1927). The Calculus of Variants. An
Essay on Textual Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon.
Lachmann, C. (1842). Testamentum Novum
Graece et Latine. Vol. 1. Berlin: Reimer.
Pravida, D. (2005). Die Erfindung desRosenkranzes. Untersuchungen zu Clemens
Brentanos Versepos. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Pravida, D. (forthcoming). Die Entstehung vonFaust II, 5. Akt (1. Fassung). To appear in Jahrbuch
des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (2012)421

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Quentin, H. (1922). Mémoire sur l ’établissement
du texte de la Vulgate. 1re partie: Octateuque. Paris:
Gabalda.
Reiter, R. (1980). A Logic for Default Reasoning.
Artificial Intelligence 13: 81-132.
Robinson, P., A. Barbrook, N. Blake, and C.
Howe (1998). The Phylogeny of ‘The Canterbury
Tales’. Nature 394: 839-840.

The Digital Daozang Jiyao –How to get the edition into
the Scholar’s labs
Wittern, Christiancwittern@gmail.com
Kyoto University, Japan

Schulz, S. (2002). E – A Brainiac Theorem Prover.
Journal of AI Communications 15(2/3): 111-126.
Stolz, M.. and F. M. Dimpel (2006).
Computergestütztes Kollationieren und dynamische
Textpräsentation – Ein Werkstattbericht aus dem
Parzival-Projekt. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:
nbn:de:kobv:b4360-1004567

Tyson, A. (1987). Mozart: Studies of the autographscores. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.
West, M. L. (1973). Textual criticism and editorialtechnique, applicable to Greek and Latin texts.
Stuttgart: Teubner.
Notes
1. Our purpose of mechanizing the operation of manuscript
dating has obvious parallels in various approaches (e.g.
Quentin 1922; Greg 1927) of charting relationships between
different manuscript readings by means of a formula systemor a decision procedure (conveniently summarized in Birdsall
1992: 153sq). Dom Quentin, Greg and their followers could
build on a highly sophisticated tradition of theoreticalreflection on establishing manuscript genealogies without theintervention of subjective interpretation (Lachmann 1842: v)
for which there is no analogue in our particular field of interest.

1. Introduction
The Daozang jiyao project aims not only at providing
a new text-critical edition of an important collectionof Daoist works, but also to serve as a research hub
to any research concerning the collection and indeed
Daoism in China since the 18th century1.

2. The Daozang jiyao 道臧輯要
The Daozang jiyao was first put together as ashorter compendium of the enormous Ming Dynasty
Daozang, a collection that features some 1500 texts
in thousands of scroll, hence its name, whichtranslates as ‘Essential of the Daozang’. On closer
examimnation, only about 60 percent of the text
are from the earlier collection however, with muchcontemporary material added by the group around
Jiang Yuanting 蔣元庭 (style Yupu 予蒲, 1755-1819),
who reportedly added 79 texts not contained in
the Daozang of the Ming during the Jiaqing era(1796-1820). This edition is still available at somelibraries around the world, but inspection of theseholdings revealed that almost none of these editions
are identical; the texts included have been reshuffled,
added or removed, woodblocks for missing pages
have been recarved and new material has been added.
To complicated matters even further, a reprint wasdone in Chengdu, Sichuan at the beginning of the20th century, for which all text have been recarved
according to the standards of the time, which resulted
in a great number of changes to the text and thecharacters used for writing it. The collection now
contains slightly more than 300 texts.
The whole complexity of the textual tradition came
only gradually to the light through bibliographicalresearch done by Monica Esposito and other project
members, but it become also clear that the digital
edition should not only be able to reflect the textual
history accurately but should also be done in a
way that allows modern day scholars to make fulluse of the digital edition, which meant that amodern text with normalized characters and modern
interpunction had to be produced as well.

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In addition to the digital text itself, a compendium
with introductions to the texts in English andChinese, as well a detailed catalog that details thecontent of the different editions are planned.

different versions of the text in different branchesof the system and could thus easily align them. The
algorithms to collate the texts are then partly drawn
from Schmidt & Colomb (2009), a working session
with a text to be processed is shown in Figure 1.

3. Towards a digital edition
Given the rather limited resources of the project,
an efficient editing routine had to be established,some of which have been already reported in earlier
presentations (Wittern 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c).
A multitude of workflows
When the project started in 2006, a first draft of thetext files would be made by a partner institution, theInstitute for Chinese Literature and Philosophy, at
Academy Sinica in Taiwan. In Kyoto, these text files
were transformed to TEI conformant XML markup
and then proofread and collated in one single step.
Figure 1: Work on the CK-KZ branch of the
Daozang jiyao in a specialized Emacs editing mode

It proved to be very slow, first of all, because
proofreading and collation are very different
activities that are not easily performed together, butalso because the editing of the XML source proved to
be challenging for the members of the project, who
where mostly specialists in Daoist studies.

Towards publication

As a remedy, the workflow of collation andproofreading was separated and performed with a
specialised web application, that would allow theoperators to see both the digital facsimile and thetranscribed text on the same page. This application
was developed based on a new text model, thatallowed convenient handling even of characters,that could not be distinguished by there character
encoding; details of this can be found in Wittern(2010a).

The expected publication will thus have two faces:

Both stages of the workflow, the web application andthe Emacs bases solution have been built not only
for internal use, but as a prototype for the eventual
publication. This will not only allow us to makemore efficient use of scarce resources, but also gives
plenty of time to collect experience and improve theinterface.

- For the casual user, a web based digital edition will
provide easy access to all features of the edition
without the need to install specialized software or
learn a new tool.

However, as it turned out, this was not yet the endof the work. For further steps, including the collationand subsequent structural markup of the texts, theweb based user interface proved to be too limiting
and time consuming to use, so another solution had
to be found. We were reluctant to go back to editing
the XML source, because that made it less convenient
to align the text with the digital facsimiles, so a
specialieed editor was preferred.

- For scholars, who want to incorporate the texts
into their own digital library and work on themusing their own tools, a git repository will provide
access to all ’branches’ of the edition and thus
the full range of the established texts, including anormalized version.

As it happened, around that time Emacs 23 wasreleased, the first version which truly supported
Unicode (although for some of the more arcane
characters, a patch was still needed), so it became
feasible to provide a customized interface forcollation and structural editing.

All of these editions will continue to be enhanced
as the knowledge of the texts and their backgroundincreases. Since the texts are not simply madeavailable for download, but are set up in a DVCS
repository, not only can updates be integrated withlocal changes of users of the text, but they can makeavailable other branches of the text through separate
repositories.

Instead of trying to directly add the results of thecollation to the XML file, as has been tried at the
beginning of the project, we used now the ideas
presented in Wittern (2011) to use the distributed
version control system (DVCS) git to maintain the- A master XML version, which documents the text
using TEI conformant text-critical markup will
also be available through a repository.

423

Digital Humanities 2012

4. Conclusions
Most of the text studied in the Humanities, andespecially the material which is at the focus of
this project, has come upon us through a long
history of writing and re-writing of the text. To fully
understand the text requires also an understandingof its tradition and the events that made it possible
for us to hold the text in our hand, which might
be excavations and spectacular finds or simply thesteady and silent work of generations of curators andlibrarians that preserved the text for us. To realize its
full potential, the digital text will thus not only try to
reproduce one specific material edition, but allow thereader to look at versions of the text as they existed atcertain points in history, so as to know what versionof the text was current when it was read (and quoted)
by such and such person. At the same time, the text
will also be available together with other reference
tools and research material in each of the Scholar’s
digital library or ‘labs’.
Now, one of the real fundamental differences
between digital text and printed texts as we have
known it for centuries is the fact that the latter isa single product, whereas a text in the digital
medium really wants to be seen in the context of allother texts, read in collaboration with other readers,in short requires a platform for scholarly editions,a ’Scholar’s Lab’, rather than simply a desk to be put
on. How such a platform might be constructed andwhat it needs to do is a matter of heavy debate at the
moment; I hope to voice my views at the presentationof this paper.

References

Schmidt, D., and R. Colomb ( 2009). A data
structure for representing multi-version texts online.
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
67(6): 497-514.
Shillingsburg, P. (2006). From Gutenberg toGoogle : electronic representations of literary texts.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Shillingsburg, P. (2009). How Literary Works
Exist: Convenient Scholarly Editions. DHQ: Digital
Humanities Quarterly 3(3).
Shillingsburg, P. (2010). How Literary Works
Exist: Implied, Represented, and Interpreted.
Text and Genre in Reconstruction: Effects ofDigitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products andInstitutions. Willard Mc-Carty (ed). Cambridge:
Open Book Publishers.
Wittern, Ch. (2009). Digital Editions of premodern
Chinese texts: Methods and Problems – exemplified
using the Daozang jiyao. In Early Chán Manuscripts
among the Dūnhuáng Findings – Resources in theMark-up and Digitization of Historical Texts at
University of Oslo, Sep. 28 to Oct. 3, 2009.
Wittern, Ch. (2010a). Mandoku – An Incubator
for Premodern Chinese Texts – or How to Get the
Text We Want: An Inquiry into the Ideal Workflow.
Digital Humanities 2010. Kings College London.
Wittern, Ch. (2010b). Rebirth of the Daozang
Jiyao – The never-ending Process of Creating a
Digital Edition. In Cultural Crossings: China andBeyond in the Medieval Period Conference – Digital
Projects in Asian Art and Humanities Workshop.
Charlottesville.

Burnard, L. and S. Bauman, eds (2008). TEI
P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding andInterchange. Oxford: TEI Consortium.

Wittern, Ch. (2010c). Some Remarks Concerning
Digital Editions of Premodern Chinese Texts. In:
International Conference New Directions in Textual
Scholarship. University of Saitama.

Esposito, M. (2009). The Daozang Jiyao Project:
Mutations of a Canon. Daoism: Religion, History
and Society 1: 95-153.

Notes

Esposito, M. (2011). The Daozang jiyao 道臧輯
要 as Receptacle to the Three Teachings in Qing
Daoism: Lay and Clerical Authorities Face to Face.
In Interactions between the Three Teachings. K.
Mugitani (ed.). Vol. II. Kyoto: Dokisha, pp. 431-69.
Robinson, P. (2009). Towards a Scholarly
Editing System for the Next Decades. In Sanskrit
Computational Linguistics: First and Second
International Symposia Rocquencourt, France,
October 29-31, 2007 Prov- idence, RI, USA, May
15-17, 2008. Revised Selected Papers. Springer
London: Springer, pp. 346-57.

424

1. The project was initiated and led by Monica Esposito(1962-2011), who’s sudden parting came as a shock to all
involved in the project. Like all outcomes of the project, thispresentation is dedicated to her memory.

Posters

Digital Humanities 2012

A Digital Approach toSound Symbolism inEnglish: Evidence from theHistorical Thesaurus
Alexander, Marcmarc.alexander@glasgow.ac.uk
University of Glasgow, UK

Kay, Christianchristian.kay@glasgow.ac.uk
University of Glasgow, UK

This poster examines the phenomenon of soundsymbolism, or phonaesthesia, in the history ofEnglish. Using digital humanities techniques applied
to the database of the Historical Thesaurus ofEnglish (Kay et al. 2009; hereafter abbreviatedto HT), it presents numerical evidence for the
existence of five particular sound-clusters whichcarry specific meanings in English, and contrasts
these with traditional analyses carried out manuallyin previous years by other scholars. The poster
presents some word-initial phonaestheme clusters
alongside examples of concepts realised by thatcluster, alongside figures showing how many words
in that conceptual category are phonaesthetically
influenced.

1. Phonaesthesia
The general topic under study is the claim that certain
sound-clusters in English convey independent
meanings, and that these clusters influence themeaning of those words that contain them (see,inter alia, Hinton et al. 1994; Kay & Wotherspoon
2002; Reay 1991, 2006). For example, the cluster<sw-> is often mentioned as occuring at the startof words indicating movement through air (swoop,
sweep, swoosh, swash, swat) in an imitative fashion,
meaning that new words starting with that cluster
will be affected by its meaning. As Michael Samuels
states, the ‘validity of a phonestheme is, in the first
instance, contextual only: if it fits the meaning of theword in which it occurs, it reinforces the meaning,and conversely, the more words in which this occurs,
the more its own meaning is strengthened’ (Samuels
1972: 46).
This phenomenon is commonly discussed in lexical
semantics and lexicography, and while there aretheoretical arguments for and against its strengthof effect in English, it is ripe for an empirical anddigital investigation. Previous studies have relied on
dictionary data, or on an analyst’s own introspection.

A new style of investigation has recently been madepossible, however, by the completion of the HT, fromwhich we take our data.

2. The Data
The HT, published in 2009, is the world’s
largest thesaurus and the most complete thesaurus
of English, arranging into hierarchical semantic
categories all 800,000 recorded meanings expressedin the language from Anglo-Saxon times to thepresent. These are put into very fine-grained
semantic categories, specifying precisely the word’s
sense alongside attestation dates for that meaning.
As an example, the word broadsword is recorded
as being a type of sword and so is within thatparticular category (a category which exists sevenlayers of hierarchy down into the HT taxonomy).
Moving upwards, all the words for swords, knives,
daggers, etc exist within the larger category of sidearms, itself within the category of a sharp weapon(adjacent to club/stick and other blunt weapons),
which is a sub-type of weapon, which is a form of
military equipment, used in the enactment of armed
hostility, which is a phenomenon which arises fromsociety, one of the three top-level categories of the
HT. All the recorded words in English are arrangedin this way, permitting a fine-grained look at therelationship between word form and meaning. This
makes the HT database ideal for a study of this type.

3. Methodology
The underlying HT database (see Kay & Chase 1987;
Wotherspoon 1992, 2010), held at the Universityof Glasgow, is therefore a massive computational
resource for analyzing the recorded words of English.
The present paper presents data derived from a
Python program, written by the authors, which
searches through the HT’s word forms and produces
data categorizing all word-initial consonant clusters
according to their HT concept category, alongwith some figures about the size of that category
and how many words it contains beginning witheach consonant cluster. A combination of statisticalfiltering and manual analysis then resulted in alarge set of English initial phonaesthemes; similar
work can be undertaken in future on word-final
phonaesthemes.
This set of data was then ranked in order of theputative strength of the phonaesthetic linkage (thatis, the statistical preponderance in categories of asignificant size). Five particular clusters were thenidentified as being of sufficient significance to be
likely candidates as phonaesthemes:<wr->, <gr->, <sl->, <st-> and <fl->.

427

Digital Humanities 2012

The poster goes on to give examples of eachthroughout time, alongside figures of how many
words make up the relevant semantic categories towhich the clusters belong. For example, the <wr->cluster is particularly associated with uncomfortable
movement. It consists of 48% of the 145 words inthe HT meaning a twisting movement (writhing,
wrenching, wresting, wringing, wreathing, wrying,
writher, wriggle, wrinkle, etc) and 15% of the
163 words meaning wrestling (including wrestling,
wraxling, wrestle, wristle, and the dialectal warsle).
It also appears in other related categories (13% ofanger and 13% of misery, with words related to wrathand wretchedness), and in a significant metaphoricalextension of the twisting sense above (15.1% of
distortion or perversion of meaning).

Kay, C., J. Roberts, M. Samuels, and I.
Wotherspoon (2009). Historical Thesaurus of the
Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP.

4. Conclusions

Wotherspoon, I. (2010). The Making of The
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English
Dictionary. In M. Adams (ed.), ‘Cunning passages,
contrived corridors’: Unexpected Essays in the
History of Lexicography. Monza: Polimetrica, pp.
271-287.

By providing evidence of the sort outlined above,
this poster describes data derived from applying
digital humanities techniques to a new dataset forthe study of English. It gives evidence which permits
an empirical approach to old questions in linguistic
theory, allowing us to move towards an analysisof phonaesthesia which focuses on what percentage
of a given concept is realised by words beginningwith a particular sound-cluster, and how this relates
to similar occurrences in neighbouring semantic
concepts.
Beyond the present poster, the diachronic dimensionof the HT also allows us to plan future DH
work examining the historical development of thesepatterns, and to link them to historical corpora– something which space does not allow on thisposter. Such further research in this area would
be able to use further datasets to address andinvestigate those instances across the history ofEnglish where phonaesthemes ‘grow from minor
coincidental identification between a few roots tomuch larger patterns’ (Samuels 1972: 47).

References
Hinton, L., J. Nichols, and J. J. Ohala, eds.
(1994). Sound Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP.
Kay, C., and T. J. P. Chase (1987). Constructing
a Thesaurus Database. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 2(3): 161-163.
Kay, C., and I. Wotherspoon (2002). Wreak,
wrack, rack, and (w)ruin: the History of Some
Confused Spellings. In T. Fanego, B. MendezNaya, and E. Seoane (eds.), Sounds, Words, Texts
and Change: Papers from 11 ICEHL. Amsterdam:
Benjamins, pp. 129-143.

428

Reay, I. E. (1991). A Lexical Analysis of Metaphor
and Phonaestheme. Ph.D. thesis: University ofGlasgow.
Reay, I. E. (2006). Sound symbolism. In K. Brown(ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.
Oxford: Elsevier, vol. 11, pp. 531–539.
Samuels, M. (1972). Linguistic
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Evolution.

Wotherspoon, I. (1992). Historical Thesaurus
Database Using Ingres. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 7(4): 218-225.

Digital Humanities 2012

Collaborative Video andImage Annotation
Arnold, Matthias

arnold@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de
Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global
Context’, Heidelberg University, Germany

Knab, Cornelia

knab@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de
Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global
Context’, Heidelberg University, Germany

Decker, Eric

decker@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de
Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global
Context’, Heidelberg University, Germany

Second, for digital still images a separate module
is being developed using the VRA core 4 XML
schema8. Besides storing images with metadata its
aim is to provide researchers with a set of usefultools to directly link the visual material with theirresearch. Important features for its users will be
the opportunity of collaborative metadata editing, aflexible system for sharing of resources, as well as
tools for annotation and comments based on OAC.
In addition, the module will allow to automaticallyextract embedded metadata on ingest via exif-tool. It
will also be possible to mark, annotate and link partsof images, to group images on virtual lighttables,
and to save and export image sequences (‘visual
itineraries’).
Two ongoing research projects will exemplify the useof the databases:
Example 1: Global Politics on Screen

The Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA)1 is
the Digital Humanities Section of Heidelberg
University’s Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe ina Global Context – Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural
Flows.2 It brings together a team of IT scientists,
software developers, and database architectswith international researchers and students. In
collaborative projects, the HRA aims to develop
an integrated digital humanities environment forinterdisciplinary studies of transcultural dynamics.
The core of the HRA research environment is
Tamboti, the central metadata framework3 which isused to store standards-based metadata information(e.g. MODS, VRA core 4, TEI, MADS) in an XML
database4. Researchers can access their resources
using a platform-independent browser interface
to share and collaboratively work on metadata. In
addition, an Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC)5
module for comments and research annotations isunder development. Flexible webservices and userfriendly interfaces for data input (using XForms) will
help to further accumulate resources for research.
This poster presentation provides two examplesof research projects focussing on visual resource
material.
First, the Video Annotation Database6 allows toannotate a film as a whole and to comment on
individual scenes by using the Public Access DigitalMedia Archive (pad.ma)7 video annotation software.
It offers different types of annotation: transcripts torecord the narration, descriptions to annotate scenes,
and keywords to add subjects, identify locations,etc. All textual input can be searched. In addition,
keywords may be geo-referenced and browsed or
searched in a map-interface.

As an example for empirical historical researchconcentrating on visual source material, the project
Global Politics on Screen – A Japanese Film on
the Lytton Commission in 1932 9 tests the potentialof video annotation tools by combining pad.ma
with models of historical film interpretation. In thisresearch based training project, a team of history
students and researchers centres on analysing andcommenting a silent Japanese propaganda film
about a crucial moment of world history – theJapanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 which led
the way to the Second World War. While the Leagueof Nations commission aimed at preventing further
military disputes in the ‘Far East’ the focus of the film
producers was to propagate their own interpretationof international politics. The analysis of the film is a
starting point to approach the complex international
diplomatic and economic relations of the early 1930s.
The project builds up a platform to explore the global
contexts and public representations of these critical
historical incidents from a new perspective.
Example 2: Priya Paul Collection
The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art 10contains
more than 4.200 illustrations from late 19th and20th century India. It is one of the finest collectionsof ephemera such as old posters, calendars,
postcards, commercial advertisements, textile labels
and cinema posters. In a collaborative endeavor with
Tasveerghar – A Digital Network of South Asian
Popular Visual Culture 11the collection was digitised
and is now being annotated by experts from history,
art history, visual and media anthropology, andethnology. The subststantial research metadata of
the collection is a showcase for the implementationof VRA Core 4 XML in the metadata framework
and a user-friendly VRA metadata editor is underdevelopment. Content analysis is closely connected429

Digital Humanities 2012

with the intense study of the material which alreadyresulted in fourteen research essays and extensive
work of annotation. With the new digital still
image module, Tamboti will serve as a platform tointegrate archive and metadata storage with scientificdiscussion and analysis within a single framework.

Matthias Arnold, Heidelberg Research Architecture,
Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global
Context”, Heidelberg University
Members
Global Politics on Screen:
Inci Bosnak, Sascha Herlings, Felix Nothdurft, Maya
Okuda, Julian Wettengel, Dulip Withanage, Matthias
GuthPriya Paul Collection:
Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Suboor Bakht, Gerhard
Schönfelder, Sridevi Padmahan, Simon Grüning,
Tony Buchwald, Johannes AlischProject term

Screenshot 1: Video Annotation Database - Editor

Global Politics on Screen: September 2010 –September 2012
Priya Paul Collection: January 2009 – September
2012
Funding
DFG - Cluster of Excellence “Asia-Europe in a Global
Context”, Heidelberg University
Cooperations
Cluster of Excellence “Asia-Europe in a Global
Context”, Heidelberg University;
History Department, Heidelberg University;
League of Nations Archive, UNOG Library, Geneva;

Screenshot 2: Image from the Priya Paul

Collection – Image Viewer (HeidICON 12)

Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR)
アジア歴史資料センター;

Coordination

LONSEA Project, Heidelberg University;

Global Politics on Screen:

Tasveerghar - A Digital Network of South Asian
Popular Visual Culture, Delhi

Prof. Dr. Madeleine Herren-Oesch, Cluster of
Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context”,
Heidelberg University;
Cornelia Knab, Cluster of Excellence "Asia andEurope in a Global Context”, Heidelberg University;
Eric Decker, Heidelberg Research Architecture,
Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global
Context”, Heidelberg University
Priya Paul Collection:
Prof. Dr. Christiane Brosius, Cluster of Excellence"Asia and Europe in a Global Context”, Heidelberg
University;
Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University
Yousuf Saeed, Tasveerghar, Delhi

430

Presentation
Cornelia Knab, Eric Decker, Matthias Arnold
Notes
1. Heidelberg Research Architecture, http://hra.uni-hd.de
2. Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’,
http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de
3. Tamboti metadata framework, http://tamboti.uni-hd.
de4. eXist-db open source database management system, http://
exist-db.org
5. Open Annotation Collaboration, http://www.openannota
tion.org
6. Video Annotation Database, http://vad.uni-hd.de
7. Public Access Digital Media Archive, http://pad.ma

Digital Humanities 2012

8. VRA Core 4 XML standard, http://www.loc.gov/standa
rds/vracore/
9. Global Politics on Screen, http://lytton-project.unihd.de
10. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, http://priyapau
lcollection.uni-hd.de/
11. Tasveerghar – A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual
Culture, http://tasveerghar.net/
12. HeidICON – Die Heidelberger Bilddatenbank, http://heid
icon.ub.uni-heidelberg.de

Le Système modulaire degestion de l’information
historique (SyMoGIH): une
plateforme collaborative
et cumulative de stockage
et d’exploitation del’information géohistorique
Beretta, Francesco

francesco.beretta@ish-lyon.cnrs.fr
Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes,
Université de Lyon, France

Vernus, Pierrepierre.vernus@ish-lyon.cnrs.fr
Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes,
Université de Lyon, France

Hours, Bernard

bernard.hours@univ-lyon3.fr
Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes,
Université de Lyon, France

Le but de ce poster est de présenter le Système
modulaire de gestion de l’information historique(SyMoGIH), un projet né en 2007 qui a développé
une méthodologie permettant la mise en placed’une plateforme collaborative et cumulative destockage et d’exploitation de l’information géohistorique (cf. http://larhra.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/Pole_Methodes/SyMoGIH_fr.php et http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00677658 .
Il s’agira en particulier de présenter la méthodede modélisation adoptée par le projet SyMoGIH,
méthode qui a permis la mise en place d’un systèmed’information collaboratif, ouvert à accueillir tout
type d’information géo-historique.
Le projet SyMoGIH est né de la volonté d’utiliser
les nouvelles technologies afin de mutualiser lesdonnées produites par les recherches individuelles
des historiens, données souvent perdues après lapublication des travaux qu’elles documentent, etaussi celles produites par des projets financéspar l’Agence nationale de la recherche française,dont deux étaient en cours à l’époque au sein
du Laboratoire de recherche historique RhôneAlpes (CNRS-Université de Lyon). L’apprentissage
du langage de modélisation ERD (entity-relationshipdiagrams) et la collaboration avec des collègues
professeurs d’informatique a permis de mettre enplace un système collectif d’alimentation de bases de431

Digital Humanities 2012

données. L’intégration d’un module de cartographie
et d’analyse spatiale pour prendre en compte ladimension spatiale des données historiques et lavolonté de disposer d’un système plus robuste ont
conduit à l’adoption du système de gestion de bases
de données (SGDB) PostgreSQL avec son extension
PostGIS.
Le but du projet n’est toutefois pas de produire un
nouveau logiciel mais de mettre à la disposition d’une
communauté d’utilisateurs une plateforme ouverteet évolutive permettant le stockage collaboratif
et cumulatif de l’information. Une trentained’utilisateurs et cinq projets collectifs sont hébergés
actuellement dans la base de données du projet.
Notre but est de mettre les outils digitaux au cœur dela recherche historique selon une démarche qui viseà élargir progressivemnent le nombre d’utilisateurs
et qui met l’accent sur la formation des étudiants :une dizaine de travaux de master ont abouti grâceà l’utilisation de la méthode SyMoGIH, quelques
doctorats sont en cours tandis que les enseignants etchercheurs du Laboratoire qui le souhaitent peuvent
utiliser la plateforme commune pour héberger leurs
propres données. Une charte d’utilisation, réglant
les droits et obligations des utilisateurs, permet degérer les questions délicates de la propriété et del’exploitation des données.
Le poster se propose de présenter les fondements
de la méthode de modélisation développée ausein du projet SyMoGIH, ainsi que les types
d’exploitation auxquels peuvent être soumises lesdonnées collectées. Seront évoquées questions
délicates que doit affronter l’historien souhaitantconstruire un système d’information utilisable poursa recherche personnelle mais en même temps ouvert
à un travail collaboratif : faut-il stocker des textes ou
des données extraites des textes ? Faut-il enregistrer
toutes les informations contenues dans un texte ou
seulement celles liées à la recherche en cours ?
Comment articuler la spécificité de la recherche
individuelle avec la mutualisation des données et leurréutilisation pour d’autres recherches ?
Le système d’information mis en place comprenddeux volets : l’un reproduit les informations
telles qu’elles se trouvent dans les documents ;l’autre construit, par un affinement progressif etpar le croisement des sources, des informations
telles qu’elles se présentaient effectivement dansle monde historique étudié. En termes de choix
technologiques, nous avons d’abord opté pour unsystème de bases de données relationnelles. Un
travail de recherche important a été conduit pendantdeux ans pour la mise en place d’un méta-modèle
ouvert permettant de produire une modélisation
documentée et perfectible de toute information géohistorique qu’on souhaite stocker. La mise en placede ce méta-modèle grâce à la modélisation ERD
432

sera présentée en détail, ainsi que la distinction
fondamentale introduite dans la construction desdonnées entre un niveau ‘objectif’, visant le stockagecollectif des informations, et un codage lié à laproblématique de recherche individuelle ou d’unprojet.
De plus, l’intégration de la dimension spatiale de larecherche a amené à la mise en place d’un gazetteer
permettant de recenser et de localiser tout type delieu ou de territoire, y compris dans son évolution
diachronique. Enfin, la conception du système a visé
une ouverture multidisciplinaire et multiculturelle,
permettant de stocker toute information sous forme
de texte typé par un code de langues selon la norme
ISO 639-3.
Cette approche utilisant un SGBD s’est
avérée particulièrement adaptée pour le volet‘reconstitution d’un monde historique’ mais elle a
montré ses limites pour ce qui concerne le stockage
du contenu d’une source. Depuis deux ans nous avonspar conséquent mis en chantier un couplage du SGBD
avec l’encodage des textes en xml selon le schéma
proposé par la Text encoding initiative (TEI), tout
en utilisan les identifiants des objets tels qu’ils ont
été définis dans la base de données comme attributs
du balisage. Ce système est particulièrement adapté
à l’encodage de textes qui sont destinés à une édition,
sous forme papier ou digitale.
En s’appuyant sur la modélisation spécifiqueà chaque information stockée, tout utilisateur
suffisamment formé au SQL peut extraire les
informations qui lui sont accessibles grâce à desrequêtes de base, voire produire de nouvelles
connaissances grâce à des requêtes avancées.
Les données ainsi produites sont exportées,habituellement sous format cvs, et sont ensuite
visualisées et exploitées dans les logiciels existantsde statistique, généalogie, analyse des réseaux,
SIG, etc. Des formations spécifiques à ces logicielssont dispensées régulièrement pour permettre auxétudiants et aux collègues d’exploiter les données
qu’ils ont collectées.
Concernant la publication des données, il est
possible de définir des populations d’objets propres
aux différents projets hébergés, par exemple une
population d’acteurs, ou d’institutions, dont on
souhaite publier un choix de caractéristiques sur
un site web, moyennant accord des ‘propriétaires’des informations publiées. Des sites web dédiés àchaque projet peuvent ainsi être mis en place àpartir de la base de données collective, ne publiant
qu’une portion limitée d’informations. Actuellement,
l’exemple le plus abouti est représenté par le projetde prosopographie du patronat français issu d’unfinancement de l’ANR ( http://www.patronsdef
rance.fr/ ). La méthode adoptée par SyMoGIH

Digital Humanities 2012

permet de valoriser les données produites au coursd’un projet financé de durée limitée, en les rendant
directement exploitables par les étudiants ou leschercheurs qui, en retour, continueront à alimenteret à enrichir les données même après la fin de lapériode de financement du projet.

Realigning Digital
Humanities Training: The
Praxis Program at the
Scholars’ Lab
Boggs, Jeremy

jkb2b@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Nowviskie, Bethany
bethany@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Gil, Alexander

colibri.alex@gmail.com
University of Virginia, USA

Johnson, Eric

ej9k@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Lestock, Brooke

bnl2ja@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Storti, Sarah

sas3ca@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Swafford, Joanna

jes8zv@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

Praxis Program Collaborators
praxis2011@collab.itc.virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

In September 2011, the Scholars’ Lab at
the University of Virginia Library began the
Praxis Program, an extra-curricular experiment at
realigning graduate methodological training withthe demands of the humanities in the digital age.
The Praxis Program funds six humanities graduate
students from a variety of disciplines to apprentice in
the Scholars’ Lab, receiving methodological training
and collaborating on a shared digital humanities
project for a full academic year. Our goal is to equipknowledge workers for emerging faculty positions oralternative academic careers at a moment in which
new questions can be asked and new systems built –and along the way to analyze the role of library- andcenter-based practicum programs in the larger sceneof digital humanities training.
This poster details the results of the pilot year of
the Praxis Program, and explores approaches fordeveloping and expanding the program.
433

Digital Humanities 2012

1. Background and Goals
The Praxis Program represents a continuation ofwhat John Unsworth (1999) dubbed ‘the library aslaboratory.’ Because the Praxis Program is centeredin a library-based digital humanities shop, thepossibilities for exploring iterative, interdisciplinary
processes in digital humanities training are greatly
enhanced. The program builds on five yearsof experience with 20 interdisciplinary Graduate
Fellows in a digital humanities fellowship programat the Scholars’ Lab. The staff involved in the
Praxis Program comes from a variety of humanities
backgrounds and library departments.

2. Approaches
Our goal is to address methodological training in
the humanities not just through workshops andcourses, but by involving graduate students in digitalprojects from the ground up. The primary task ofthe 2011–12 Praxis Fellows is to build Prism, a
web-based tool for ‘crowdsourcing interpretation’ of
texts and images. For Praxis, this means learning
by working with faculty, staff, and fellow students
as colleagues, with all that entails: paying attention
both to vision and detail; building facility with newtechniques and languages not just as an academic
exercise, but of necessity, and in the most pragmatic
framework imaginable; acquiring the softer skillsof collaboration (sadly, an undiscovered country inhumanities graduate education) and of leadership(that is, of credible expertise, self-governance, andeffective project management). All this also involves
learning to iterate and to compromise – and whento stop and ship. In fact, collaboration and collective
ownership of the work in Praxis Program is so
important, the group’s first task was to compose andpublish a project charter, influenced by the work of
Ruecker and Radzikowska (2004) and Siemens et al.
(2009).
The curriculum for the Praxis Program is evolving
and iterative, and draws on staff knowledge while
adapting to the changing needs of a project actually
in development. Over the course of the academic
year, the program will cover a variety of topics:
evaluating peer work in DH; programming andopen source software development; prototyping,
wireframing, and user experience design; HTMLand CSS; database design; project management; andbudget and grants management.

3. Results and Continued
Development
Because Praxis Program participants value publicly
sharing ongoing research, our project blog is highly434

active, and representative of both the successes andanxieties of open collaboration. By the end of thefirst year, the Praxis Program team will create andrelease a working version of Prism for public use andcritique, and work on publishing the results of theirresearch.
Recognizing that methodological training in thedigital humanities is often absent or catch-as-catchcan at the graduate level, we are using the Praxis
Program to experiment with an action-oriented
curriculum live and in public, hoping to attract local
allies as well as partners in labs and centers at otherinstitutions (which could, in future, work as nodes ina larger Praxis Program network).
Above all, we want to situate our contribution
to methodological training within a larger debate
about the changing demands of the humanities
in a digital age. To that end, we are partneringwith the Scholarly Communication Institute infostering conversation about methodological training
in the digital humanities with professional societies,
consortia of digital and traditional humanities
centers, and other library- and center-based
programs.

References
Gessner, G. C., E. J. Damon, J. Rutner,
and K. Tancheva (2011). Supporting Humanities
Doctoral Student Success: A Collaborative Project
between Cornell University Library and Columbia
University Libraries. CLIR Report, October 2011.
Available: http://www.clir.org/pubs/ruminatio
ns/02cornellcolumbia/report.html

Leon, S. Project Management for Humanists:
Preparing Future Primary Investigators. In B.
Nowviskie (ed.), #alt-academy. Available: http://
mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/pi
eces/project-management-humanists

Nowviskie, B. (2011). Where Credit is Due. May 31,
2011. Available: http://nowviskie.org/2011/whe
re-credit-is-due/

The Praxis Program. University of Virginia
Library’s Scholars’ Lab. Available: http://praxis.
scholarslab.org

Ramsay, St. Care of the Soul. October 8, 2012.
Available: http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2010/10/08/care-of-the-soul.html

Ruecker, S., and M. Radzikowska (2004).
The Iterative Design of a Project Charter forDigital Humanities 2012

Interdisciplinary Research. Available: http://mtro
yal.academia.edu/MilenaRadzikowska/Papers/
326958/The_Iterative_Design_of_a_Project_C
harter_for_Interdisciplinary_Research

Scholarly Communication Institute. NewModel Scholarly Communication: Road Map for
Change. Available: http://www.uvasci.org/curre
nt-institute/sci-9-report/

Siemens,L.,
etal.
(2009).
INKE
Administrative Structure, Omnibus Document.
Available: http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/
INKE/article/view/546/245

Unsworth, J. (1999). The Library as Laboratory.
Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American
Library Association, 1999. Available: http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/ala99.htm

Supporting the emerging
community of MEI: thecurrent landscape of tools
for note entry and digital
editingBohl, Benjamin W.

bohl@edirom.de
Universität Paderborn, Germany

Röwenstrunk, Danielroewenstrunk@edirom.de
Universität Paderborn, Germany

Viglianti, Raffaeleraffaele.viglianti@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

1. Introduction
The Music Encoding Initative (MEI), started asa ‘one man show’ at the University of Virginia.
Perry Roland first designed an XML based encoding
scheme for representing music notation according
to principles and concepts that the Text Encoding
Initiative was putting into practice for scholarly
text encoding (Kepper, 2010). This effort addressed
academic encoding approaches since the beginning,
thus attracting a group of scholars interested inbuilding a community around the MEI specification.
In 2007, the format underwent its first cooperative
improvements that added support for medieval
notation, editorial interventions, and alignment with
facsimile.
These personal initiatives prompted further
involvement and soon could be channeled into theformation of a MEI study group in 2009. Since
then, institutional support and public funding helped
improving MEI. A project funded by the NEH and
DFG led to the first community effort by making thefirst non-beta release of MEI publicly available in
May 2010 (Röwenstrunk 2010). To date, the MEI has
developed into an open and community-driven effort
involving a council, a technical team and a growinguser group.
This emerging community intends to improve
the involvement of musicology within the Digital
Humanities field. With this aim, some members havepreviously introduced examples of MEI usage to the
DH community (see Kepper 2010; Viglianti 2010).
Today, MEI’s users are mostly involved in projects
that employ the format and/or develop software to435

Digital Humanities 2012

support MEI use. This poster intends to demonstratesome of these efforts, particularly concerning thetool support for day-to-day work of the scholar
for entering music notation and metadata, creating
facsimile alignments and for the production of digital
editions.

2. Note Entry
Transcribing or entering music notation with acomputer is typically a more laborious task thantranscribing text; this is because, unlike letters,
music symbols themselves require complex codes
to be represented. Many machine-readable formats,such as Humdrum or Lilypond, rely on ASCII-based
structures which can be more or less intuitive to type.
However, the most common note entry is done withWYSIWYG score editors, which allow the transcriber
to enter the notation directly on a virtual score.
Note entry also lies at the heart of encoding music
documents with MEI; however, encoding music
notation in XML immediately poses a problemof overlapping hierarchies, because the score isorganized as a grid that represents temporalsequence horizontally (one event comes after theother, such as a sequence of notes) and temporal cooccurrence vertically (events occur at the same time,such as a chord on the piano). The general complexityof music codes and the unavoidable workarounds for
dealing with this condition makes hand-encoding astrenuous task.
Given these premises, it is evident that tools arenecessary to enter music notation into the MEI
format in a more intuitive manner. At this stage of
MEI development as a community, there are some
options available for simplifying note entry.
1. WYSIWYG score editors. In the past ten years,
MusicXML has had outstanding success as aninterchange format between different score editors.
As a consequence, most specialized software now
provide an export to MusicXML. The MEI provides
XSLT stylesheets to convert from MusicXML 1.0
and 2.0 to MEI, which makes it possible to usescore editors’ exports to be converted into MEI.
This, nonetheless, is not necessarily a straightforward process. Given the graphical, non-linear
organization of notation on the page, each score
editor can be more or less precise about the graphicalpositioning of symbols on the page. Symbols suchas directions, phrase marks, and dynamics are
particularly affected as they can be attached either
to a staff, a measure, or a specific event on the staff.
These differences are seemingly innocuous to thescore editor’s users because their rendition on thepage looks the same. However, when moving intoa semantic representation system such as MEI, theassociations of different symbols and their start/end
436

points matter. Notwithstanding these difficulties,
using score editors and MusicXML still simplifies
note entry in MEI. Some post-processing, however, isstill necessary.
2. MEI-specific score editors. As described above,
MEI has existed for more than ten years, but has
experienced a considerable community effort only
in more recent times. Amongst several uplifting
activities, a few focused on the creation of WYSIWYG
editors able to export directly into MEI. The TextGrid
component MEI Score Editor (MEISE) is the mostcomplete to date.1 Besides exporting notation directlyto MEI, it is designed to be able to represent editorialaspects supported by the format, such as variants andalternative readings.
3. XML editors. The first two solutions may besufficient for most encoding scenarios, especially if
MEISE grows to be more comprehensive and/or isfollowed by other open source efforts for creating
MEI exports for more common score editors. It is
possible to imagine, however, that MEI will be used
for deep-encoding projects, such as critical editions,diplomatic or genetic transcriptions, analyses, etc.
For such scenarios, it is debatable that a generic
tool would be able to cover all uses. Obtained asan heritage from Text Encoding Initiative, MEI’s
flexibility is both a blessing and a curse. It allows one
to use the format as a framework within which it ispossible to build specific encoding models throughcustomizations; at the same time, though, it makes
it impossible to build tools that can cater for all
possible declinations of the format.2 Nonetheless,tool development remains an essential componentof the MEI’s community efforts; particularly towards
building tools tailored to specific tasks or in theform of libraries for manipulating MEI documents.3
Those project that intend to use MEI at its fullpower, however, will eventually need to resort tothe use of XML editors. Editing the XML manuallyis doable with a little training, but requires someimagination to see the score through the code.
Alternatively, one could exploit many modern XML
editors’ visual support for text encoding. This is
typically done through CSS-based previews thatcan be edited in real-time. A similar scenario is
considerably harder to obtain with music notation;
however experimentation is underway.

3. Supporting editorial work
MEI as a format was – amongst other goals– initially intended to ‘represent the common
expressive features of traditional facsimile, critical,
and performance editions’,4 which opens the way formore and more critical edition projects to describe,preserve and publish their work with MEI.5 Becauseof the very small or even non existing support of score

Digital Humanities 2012

editors or renderers in the last years, most endeavors
to create and publish digital music editions havebeen based on facsimiles and texts. Other formats
could not bridge the gap, because of their limited
representation of textual phenomena especially inthe fields of editing and transcription.
With the latest possibilities for note entry and scorerendering, digital editions are going to reach ahigher level of quality. For example, searching andanalysing music editions would become possible,
similarly to what already happens in digital editionsof literature. Moreover, readability and usability
would be improved by selectively rendering scores inmodern or old notation or in different keys.
The Edirom project started in 2006 with theaim to provide tools for creating and presenting
historico-critical music editions. The project was
one of the main contributors in moving MEI to
a community-driven standard.6 Given the lack ofscore writers for MEI, the Edirom tools kept using
image based presentation techniques. But withemerging tools for MEI, more and more encodedmusic is being included for different purposes.
Recent efforts include a score renderer by Thomas
Weber which uses the web standard SVG to enabledigital presentations with Edirom tools to show
ad hoc generated notation and allow interaction
with musical snippets like switching versions orhighlighting specific symbols. Eventually, editions
will no longer have to be constrained to providing one
single edited text for scholars;7 not every uncertainty
will have to be resolved; and equitable versions could
be presented simultaneously. Hence, the user might
have a closer look at the underlying editorial work(see Bohl, Kepper & Röwenstrunk 2011).
In order to provide these functionality and levelof knowledge, one needs a detailed encodingof music documents as described above, and aconsiderable amount of interlinking. Such data may
then be used in the Edirom Editor for creating
digital music editions. The Editor, for example,
provides: a) mechanisms to link structural, musicalinformation (like a movement or measure) to regions
on facsimiles; b) functions for formally describing
relationships or differences between these music
documents. Some of the specific tasks in theworkflow of creating digital editions are handled
by specific tools outside or included within the
Edirom Editor; such as semi-automated recognitionof measure positions with Optical Music Recognition
techniques or describing the metadata of a document,
which is done with a included version of the Metadata
Editor and Repository for MEI Data (MerMEId) fromthe Danish Centre for Music Publication.8

References
Bohl, B. W., J. Kepper, and D. Röwenstrunk(2011). Perspektiven digitaler Editionen aus Sicht desEdirom-Projekts. Die Tonkust 5.
Dabbert, J., and J. Veit (2010). MEISE:
an editor for encoded/encoding music. TextGrid
Advisory Board Meeting, Detmold. Available
at http://https://www.textgrid.de/fileadmin/TextGrid/konferenzen_vortraege/fachbeirat_0710/meise.pdf (accessed November 2011).

Kepper,J.
(2010).
A
Data
Model
for
DigitalMusicology
andits
Current
State – The Music Encoding Initiative.
Digital Humanities 2010, London. Available
at http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-pro
gramme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-817.html(accessed November 2011).

Pierazzo, E. (2010). Editorial teamwork in a digital
environment: the edition of the correspondence of
Giacomo Puccini. Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie
10.
Röwenstrunk, D. (2010). Digital Music Notation
Data Model and Prototype Delivery System. Forum
Musikbibliothek 31.
Viglianti, R. 2010. Critical Editing of Musicin the Digital Medium: an Experiment in
MEI. Digital Humanities 2010, London. Available
at http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-pro
gramme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-819.html(accessed November 2011).
Notes

1. A first beta release of MEISE is to be made available by the endof 2011.
2. ‘[H]umanities data have a very high rate of variation [...], andeven when similarities do exist, the differences are importantenough to imply that designing tools able to cope with suchvariety would be a very demanding task’ (Pierazzo 2009).
3. See for example libmei http://ddmal.music.mcgill.ca/libmei
4. http://ddmal.music.mcgill.ca/libmei
5. The german projects OPERA ( http://www.opera.adwmai
nz.de/ ), Reger-Werkausgabe (RWA, http://www1.karls
ruhe.de/Kultur/Max-Reger-Institut/de/rwa.php )and Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe ( http://www.w
eber-gesamtausgabe.de ) are using the tools provided by
the Edirom project.
6. The project organized a conference Digitale Edition zwischen
Experiment und Standardisierung, 2007 in Paderborn(Germany), where Perry Roland was invited to present MEI.
Later, members of the project co-applied for funding fororganizing two more conferences where the MEI council wasconstituted (see Röwenstrunk 2010).
7. There will probably always be a normalized version of theedition for practical use.

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Digital Humanities 2012

8. http://www.kb.dk/en/kb/nb/mta/dcm/projekter/mermeid.html‘The Past Is Never Dead.
It’s Not Even Past’:
The Challenge of Data
Provenance in the eHumanities
Clark, Ashley M.

amclark4@illinois.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Holloway, Steven W.

hollowa2@illinois.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

1. Summary
The humanities as a discipline has traditionallyexhibited great care in documenting sources andestablishing authentic chains of object transmission.
Data provenance metadata, however, is rarely
curated in digital humanities projects, perhaps due tothe lack of interoperable standards for recording data
provenance. Recent efforts by the W3C ProvenanceWorking Group to create the PROV-DM (Provenance
Data Model) and PROV-ASN (Provenance Abstract
Syntax Notation) may answer the requirements ofthe e-humanist community for such a standard.
We examine the provenance capture capabilitiesof two e-humanities virtual research environments(VRE), TextGrid and Meandre, which also serveas test-beds for PROV-ASN assertions. PROV-ASN
provides an interlingua abstract enough to express
a common set of data provenance assertions forboth software environments. The data for theseassertions must be culled manually from various
directories and file-types in both TextGrid andMeandre. For data provenance metadata to become
as normative a feature of the digital humanities
as source provenance is for analog humanities, ehumanities developers need to aggregate provenancemetadata, equip it with intuitive visualizations, andrender it using interoperable standards capable oftranscending a particular VRE or software platform.

2. Data Provenance and the
Humanities
Like the source provenance of art and artifacts,‘data provenance’ depends upon records to establish
a chain of past events which provide context fora digital object at any point in time. However,data provenance traces not ownership changes to astatic document, but transformations to a version
438

Digital Humanities 2012of a dataset, which then produces further versions.
Records of data provenance might then include
information on authorship, the name and versionof software used to produce transformations, anddescriptions of the transformations themselves.
For over fifteen years, the legal, business, computerscience, e-science, and e-humanities communities
have developed data provenance requirements
specific to their disciplines, yet they share a needfor interoperable standards. To date, little publishedresearch in e-humanities explicitly focuses on data
provenance. Paradoxically, humanities scholarshipflourishes on traceable reference. Humanities
researchers traditionally perform close readingsof object relationships, which requires judgmentsof source trustworthiness, authority, conceptual
derivation, and class membership. It is a matterof concern, then, that the humanities, with its
native affinity for historical thinking, should finditself unable to migrate provenance documentation
methods into the digital realm.
If data provenance is to benefit the humanities, ehumanists must provide coherent metadata about
their computing environment, records of statetransformation, and file forensics no different thanthose entailed for e-science validation. Those whoview the datasets should also have access to complete
provenance information, ideally in human-readable
form aggregated as supplemental resources. For thisto occur, e-humanities researchers need tools which
can either generate such provenance information
automatically, or make it easy to manually gather
and output. Familiar commercial authoring tools,
such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop,
support actionable data provenance (rollbacks toearlier states via the ‘undo’ function), but provide
at best meager data provenance in the guise of
autonomous metadata, susceptible to extraction andpersistent storage. Because they cannot capture data
provenance at a high-enough level of abstraction,
open-source metadata streams for digital cameras(EXIF) and Adobe software (XMP), useful as they are,cannot serve the e-humanists’ need for interoperable
standards.

3. Provenance in e-Humanities
Computing Environments
This poster will compare structured provenancemetadata in two decidedly different e-humanities
computing environments, TextGrid 1.0 and Meandre
1.4.9. By staging an identical literary ‘experiment,’
these tools illustrate typical provenance-capture
shortfalls. This poster will also explore theadvantages of machine-actionable, interoperable
provenance metadata, using the W3C’s PROV-DM

standard as a basis for examining the current bedlamof e-humanities data provenance silos.

3.1. Meandre
The extensible Meandre software framework is aJava-based, open-source semantic web authoringand publishing tool with heavy emphasis on
linguistic annotation and text analytics. The tool
is intended to promote rapid software prototyping
within two graphical user interfaces, the Meandre
Infrastructure and Workbench. Meandre wasdeveloped by the Automated Learning Group,
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at
Urbana-Champaign, as part of an Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation-funded text-mining initiative sponsoredby the Software Environment for the Advancement of
Scholarly Research (SEASR).

Figure 1: Provenance information as represented in Meandre

3.2. TextGrid
The Eclipse-based software TextGrid, funded by the
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung’s DGrid initiative, represents an attempt to create an ehumanities VRE, consisting of both a ‘lab’ that runs
on local hardware, and a sophisticated repository
back-end fostering preservation, discovery andpublication. A set of purpose-made tools facilitate
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML markup of
documents and document-images in a collaborativeenvironment. TextGrid was designed for scholars
pursuing traditional philological studies, but isintended to serve musicologists, epigraphists,
linguists, and art historians.

Figure 2: Provenance information as represented in TextGrid

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Digital Humanities 2012

4. The W3C Provenance Data
Model
Meandre and TextGrid serve as production work
spaces, yet they fail to comprehensively logtransformations of information in accessible ways.
Though data provenance should be a requirement
for e-humanities tools, solutions to provenancecapture are a recent development. An emerging data
provenance model, PROV-DM/-ASN, offers a meansof capturing data provenance information at a level ofabstraction that is hardware- and software-agnostic.
For example, a passage from William Faulkner’s
Requiem for a Nun edited in both TextGrid andMeandre could be expressed with the same PROVASN assertions, despite radically different processing
architectures:

could be successfully re-run in Meandre and
TextGrid using the saved workflow or project,
respectively, but the full scope of the operating
parameters remains concealed within software.

5. Concluding Remarks
Our poster shows that two prominent e-humanities
VREs need considerable retooling to attain thebenefits of comprehensive provenance metadata.
Recent developments in provenance documentation
standards promise the exchange of datasets with acommon interlingua, facilitated descriptive analysis,
and easier understanding of experimental protocols.
Whether or not e-humanities developers adopt the
PROV-DM/-ASN standard, the need for a systematic
approach to data provenance-capture stands, as well
as best practices which will benefit not only the usersof e-humanities computing environments, but thelarger digital humanities community.
Acknowledgments
This project was supported by DCEP-H, an initiative
to extend the Data Curation Education Program tohumanities. DCEP-H is based at the Center for
Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship atand funded by IMLS Grant RE-05-08-0062-08.

References
Figure 3: Text transformations expressed
through PROV-ASN assertions

In order to assemble comparable provenancemetadata in TextGrid, it would be necessary,at a minimum, to manually open the five TEI
revision files and view their descriptive and technicalmetadata in separate windows. A similar task
in Meandre would require: saving five separate‘workflows’ corresponding to the revisions e1e5; viewing their associated documentation inboth Workbench and Infrastructure; and manuallyaccessing a variety of command-line log and server
files.
The
PROV-DM/-ASN
specification
makes
allowances for recording system-specific details,
such as software function names, component URIs,
firing sequence, time of execution, and othertechnical metadata necessary for describing theprocess workflow. Since the PROV-O (Provenance
Ontology) allows encoding in OWL2 web ontology
language, the markup is machine-readable. In
Meandre, assembling the data for the platformspecific provenance metadata would entail querying
specific projects with command-line file utilities.
Even then, some execution information would
not persist after closing the program. In the
TextGrid interface, a significant portion of execution
information is simply unavailable. The experiment
440

Belhajjame, K., J. Cheney, D. Garijo, T. Lebo,
S. Soiland-Reyes, and S. Zednik (2011). PROV
Ontology Model, W3C Working Draft 13 December
2011. http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-prov-o-2
0111213/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
Belhajjame, K., S. Cresswell, R. Golden,
P. Groth, G. Klyne, J. McCusker, and S.
Sahoo (2011). PROV Data Model and Abstract
Syntax Notation, W3C Working Draft 18 October
2011. http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-prov-dm20111018/

Chao-fan, D., W. Tao, Z. Peng-cheng, and F.
Yang-He (2010). A comparation of data provenancesystems based on processing. IEEE International
Conference on Intelligent Computing and Intelligent
Systems 3: 374-379. Institute of Electrical andElectronics Engineers. http://dx.doi.org/10.11
09/ICICISYS.2010.5658641

Freire, J., D. Koop, E. Santos, and C. T.
Silva (2008). Provenance for computational tasks: A
survey. Computing in Science & Engineering 10(3):11-21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2008.7
9Hasan, R., and M. Winslett (2009a).
Trustworthy history and provenance for
files
and
databases.
Ph.D.
thesis,Digital Humanities 2012

University
Champaign.

of

Illinoisat

Urbana-http://search.proquest.com/doc
view/304899850?accountid=14553(accessed 9

March 2012).

Küster, M., C. Ludwig, Y. Al-Hajj, and
T. Selig (2011). TextGrid provenance tools for
digital humanities ecosystems. Proceedings of the
5th IEEE International Conference on Digital
Ecosystems and Technologies 2011. Daejeon, Korea,
pp. 317-323. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/DEST.2
011.5936615 (accessed 9 March 2012).
Neuroth, H., ed. (n.d.). TextGrid: Home. http://
www.textgrid.de/en.html(accessed 9 March2012).
Moreau, L. (2009). The
provenance on the web.
(submitted)

The Social Edition:
Scholarly Editing AcrossCommunities
Crompton, Constanceccrompto@uvic.ca
University of Victoria, Canada

Siemens, Raymondsiemens@uvic.ca
University of Victoria, Canada

The Devonshire MS Editorial
Groupfoundations for
doi:10.1.1.155.784

Simmhan, Y. L., B. Plale, and D. Gannon(2005). A survey of data provenance in e-science.
SIGMOD Record 34(3), 31-36.
Software Environment for the Advancementof Scholarly Research. (2011). Meandre. http://
seasr.org/meandre (accessed 9 March 2012).

1. Introduction: Contexts forSocial Editing
The integration of social tools into the electronicscholarly edition pushes the boundaries of authority,
shifting power from a single editor, who shapes thereading of any given text, to a group of readers
comprising a community whose interpretations
themselves recast the edition form. This poster
outlines a method that brings scholarly bestpractice, open access methodology, and social media
technology to scholarly editing. As a test of themethod, we, the Devonshire MS Editorial Group,1
are leading the development of a social edition of
the Devonshire Manuscript, a multi-authored verse
miscellany compiled in the 1530s and early 1540s.
Through the production of both a fixed and evolving
edition of the text, we are exploring how social media
can be used to change the role of the scholarly editor
from the sole authority on the text to a facilitator
who brings traditional and citizen scholars into
collaboration through an ongoing editorial process.
The most conservative electronic scholarly editions
have used computation chiefly to ‘describe andexpress print-, visual-, and audio-based material intagged and searchable electronic form’ (Schriebman,
Siemens & Unsworth 2004: xxv), in many ways
mimicking interactive structures more suitable topossibilities of the print medium rather than thedigital one; this teleological, codex-based model sees
the editor as a single authority, a mediator between
the text and the reader, where the editorial entity
determines and shapes what is important to thereader, focuses the editorial and analytical lens, andultimately exerts immense control over how thereader can engage. Social media’s interactive online
spaces have produced new environments for textual
editing, ones which invite us to consider the best way

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to move beyond the codex model while preserving
qualitative assurance and facilitating community
engagement.

2. Materials for The Case Study:
The Devonshire MS
If we count all creative textual works – complete
poems, verse fragments and excerpts from longer
works, anagrams, and other ephemeral jottings– the Devonshire Manuscript consists of 194
items. In addition to 129 courtly verses by Sir
Thomas Wyatt, of which sixty six are unique tothe manuscript, and eleven poems by Geoffrey
Chaucer, the manuscript contains transcriptions of
the work of others and original works by prominent
figures from the Henrician court including Mary
Shelton, Lady Margaret Douglas, Mary (Howard)
Fitzroy, Lord Thomas Howard, Henry Howard and,perhaps, Queen Anne Boleyn (Southall 1964: 143).
The manuscript itself bears traces of the originalcontributors’ editorial process: besides writing
epistolary verse, contributors to the manuscriptinteracted with one another through editorial
annotation. These marginal responses are, at times,
quite personal in nature. They include responses that
evaluate the quality of certain lines, the crossing out
of one word and the insertion of another, or thewriting of textual remarks that seem to commenton real-world situations not necessarily noted in
the manuscript. Other aspects of the Devonshire
Manuscript – its multi-layered and multi-authoredcomposition, its early history and transmission, theways in which its contents engage with and comment
directly on contemporary political and social issues –
confirm the volume’s function as ‘a medium of social
intercourse’ (Love & Marotti 2002: 63).

3. The Case Study: Fixed andEvolving Editions
The Devonshire MS Editorial Group is modelingthe social editing process. We have produced afixed, authoritative version of the text, which has
undergone a thorough review by an international
advisory group of Early Modern and Renaissancescholars. This same text, complete with appendices,
glosses, commentary, and textual notes is now
available in http://www.bitly.com/DevonMS , aplatform which provides a flexible environment
for collaboration, contribution, and discussion bytraditional and citizen scholars. The Wikibook,which has already received promising attention
from Wikibooks’ existing editorial community, isaugmented with additional images of the manuscript,
witness transcriptions, an extensive bibliography,
and xml encoded transcriptions of the Devonshire
Manuscript – creating an online version that is both442

an edition and a research environment. The advisors
are currently providing a medial review which isneither as public at the Wikibook discussion pages
nor as private as anonymous peer review. They
are in conversation with one another over the fixedauthoritative edition and the evolving Wikibooks
edition in a social media space housed by Iter, afederated site located at the University of Toronto.
After six months online, the Wikibooks edition will
undergo a full comparison with the fixed edition.
Keeping the best of the Wikibooks additions, theDevonshire MS Editorial Group will incorporate theadvisory group’s suggestions, and will present atruly socially mediated edition of the Devonshire
Manuscript for publication with Iter and Medieval
and Renaissance Texts Society. Rather than aterminus, this edition will serve as a snapshot of theliving edition, one which represents the perpetual
process of scholarly editorial practice.

4. Reflection on Method andthe Significance of AnticipatedOutcomes
The public editing process for the social edition
has been designed to encourage communication
across editorial communities, while preserving thepeer review process. In addition to producing an
edition that allows for multiple editorial perspectives,
the Devonshire MS Editorial Group2 is modelinga social edition methodology. In the interest ofrefining the process and expounding on its utility forcollaborative editors in the Web 2.0 environment,
we are using a combination of methods to gather
data on the social edition building process. We
are conducting qualitative interviews with themembers of the advisory group to gather theirperspectives not only on the content of our evolving
and fixed editions, but also on issues of credit,
peer review, and collaborative editing in a social
media environment. In addition, we are conducting
surveys with self-identified members of the existing
Wikibooks editorial community. Finally, we are using
analytics to trace the movement of editors throughthe Wikibooks text, to determine which parts ofthe edition provoke the most discussion, attract themost attention, and lead to the most community
engagement.
Building on existing, expanding, and newly-emerging
communities of practice, we can harness the powerof specifically social tools, to ensure that thesocial edition text is fluid, agency is collective, andmany editors, rather than a single editor, shape
the interpretation of the text. The social edition
development process is, by its very nature, underconstant review. Relying on dynamic knowledge
building, and privileging process, this expansive

Digital Humanities 2012

method promises to bring together communities ofscholarly practice to build a new, social, edition.

References
Love, H., and A. Marotti (2002). Manuscript
Transmission and Circulation. In D. Loewensteinand J. Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge Historyof Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, pp. 55-80.
Remley, P. G. (1994). Mary Shelton and Her Tudor
Literary Milieu. In P. Herman (ed.), Rethinking theHenrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts andContexts. Urbana: U of Illinois P, pp. 40-77.
Schreibman, S., S. Siemens, and J. Unsworth(2004). The Digital Humanities and Humanities
Computing: An Introduction. In S. Schreibman, R.
Siemens, and J. Unsworth (eds), A Companion to
Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. xxiiixxvii.
Siemens, R., K. Armstrong, B. Bond, C.
Crompton, T. Dickson, J. Paquette, J.
Podracky, I. Weber, C. Leitch, M. Chernyk,
B. D. Hirsch, D. Powell, A. McLeod, A.
Arbuckle, S. Patterson, C. Gaudet, E. Haswell,
A. Ciula, D. Starza-Smith, J. Cummings with
M. Holmes, G. Newton, J. Gibson, P. Remley,
E. Kwakkel, and A. Shirkie (eds). A Social
Edition of the Devonshire MS (BL Ass 17,492).
http://www.bitly.com/DevonMS .
Southall, R. (1964). The Devonshire Manuscript
Collection of Early Tudor Poetry, 1532-41. Review
of English Studies: A Quarterly Journal of English
Literature and the English Language 15: 142-150.
Notes
1. In collaboration with The Devonshire MS Editorial Group:
Siemens, R., Armstrong, K., Bond, B., Crompton, C., Dickson,
T., Paquette, J., Podracky, J., Weber, I., Leitch C., Chernyk
M., Hirsch, B. D., Powell, D., McLeod, A., Arbuckle, A.,
Patterson, S., Gaudet, C., Haswell, E., Ciula, A., Starza-Smith,D., Cummings, J., with Holmes, M., Newton, G., Gibson, J.,
Remley, P., Kwakkel E. and Shirkie, A.
2. Siemens, R., Armstrong, K., Bond, B., Crompton, C., Dickson,
T., Paquette, J., Podracky, J., Weber, I., Leitch C., Chernyk
M., Hirsch, B. D., Powell, D., McLeod, A., Arbuckle, A.,
Patterson, S., Gaudet, C., Haswell, E., Ciula, A., Starza-Smith,D., Cummings, J., with Holmes, M., Newton, G., Gibson, J.,
Remley, P., Kwakkel E. and Shirkie, A.

Courting ‘The World’s
Wife’: Original Digital
Humanities Research in the
Undergraduate Classroom
Croxall, Brianb.croxall@gmail.com
Emory University, USA

What would it mean to turn a class of undergraduates– one of the most important emerging digital
humanities communities – loose on a text analysis
puzzle unintentionally created by England’s poetlaureate? This poster presentation will report on
the process, outcomes, successes, and failures of an
original research project for those just learning about
the possibilities of humanities computing.
Carol Ann Duffy was named the poet laureate ofBritain in May 2009, the first Scot, woman, andopenly gay person to hold this position. While
this choice signaled a desire for diversity andinclusiveness on the part of the crown, the mostimportant criterion for her selection was her poetry
itself. Tackling traditional themes of love alongwith less conventional ones such as sport, whatmost sets apart Duffy’s poetry from many of hercontemporaries is its style, which, on the occasionof her appointment, Sarah Lyall in The New YorkTimes described as ‘deceptively simple’ and which‘produce[s] accessible, often mischievous poems
dealing with the darkest turmoil and the lightest
minutiae of everyday life’ (Lyall 2009).
Perhaps Duffy’s style is best exemplified by her 1999
volume, The World’s Wife, in which she presents
short dramatic monologues from the women married
to famous men throughout history, mythology,
and literature. She presents the stories of ‘Mrs.
Darwin’, ‘Mrs. Sisyphus’, and ‘Mrs. Quasimodo’,
among others. Clever, humorous, and filled withpoems that even rhyme, The World’s Wife soldtremendously well and began to be used regularly
in classrooms. Yet critics felt that the collection
was of substantially different quality when comparedto her three previous, prize-winning collections. As
Jeanette Winterson reported in a profile on Duffy,
The World’s Wife prompted reactions that had critics‘ask[ing] questions about whether Duffy had lost herbalance. Had she stopped writing poetry and slipped
into verse?’ (Winterson).
While Duffy did not comment publicly on such
evaluations of her work, undergraduate students in
my Spring 2009 poetry class discovered evidence443

Digital Humanities 2012that she was aware of a difference between
The World’s Wife and those volumes that had
preceded it. While exploring her recently acquired
papers ( http://findingaids.library.emory.ed
u/documents/duffy834/ ) in Emory University’s
Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library(MARBL), the students found an undated letter from
Duffy to the publisher of her previous volumes.
She writes that she will be publishing The World’s
Wife with another press: ‘...this book is not a“normal” poetry collection by me – it’s closer topopular entertainment, if you like’ (Duffy). So while
Duffy later told Winterson that the question ofperceived differences in her volumes doesn’t concernher (Winterson), her letter makes it clear that she
perceives real differences prior to the publication of
The World’s Wife.
This discovery by my students in a 2009 became theseed for the capstone project in my current course,‘Introduction to Digital Humanities’ ( http://www.
briancroxall.net/dh ): we are testing Duffy’s own
words to see whether The World’s Wife truly does
differ from her ‘“normal” poetry collection[s].’ To thisend, we are reading The World’s Wife alongside her
previous volume, Mean Time (1993), which won boththe prestigious Forward Poetry Prize and Whitbread
Poetry Award. Initially, students wrote essays that
employed close reading to make an argument about
whether or not there are differences between the twovolumes. The class then turned to less traditionalmodes of analysis. Each student was assigned anumber of poems from each volume to transcribe,
preparatory for analysis in the suite of Voyant (http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur ), formerly Voyeur(Rockwell 2011), designed by Stéfan Sinclair andGeoffrey Rockwell. Students used different facetsof Voyant to explore possible shifts in Duffy’s
language between the two texts: word frequency,
the number of unique words, word collocation, andmore. With other tools, we tested the relative line
lengths between the volumes and the readability
scores of Duffy’s language. Students worked inteams on the different modules to understand andinterpret their results. The class also turned tothe archives and Duffy’s notebooks to determine(anecdotally) the rate of changes and corrections
between particular poems in the different volumes.
Finally, inspired by Stephen Ramsay’s argumentsthat ‘Digital Humanities is about building things’ andMark Sample’s suggestion that digital humanities
is ‘about sharing’, the students built interpretive
arguments about their findings and shared them via
the course website.
As mentioned, this poster reports on the processesof designing a digital humanities research project,
the process of making those findings public, and theexposure of undergraduates to some of the basic tools444

and methods of textual analysis. It incorporates not
only the results of textual analysis, but also feedback
from students about their experience learning new
tools and approaches, including a strong emphasison collaboration – a rarity in most humanities
coursework. The presentation continues the trend
to discuss the intersection of pedagogy and digital
humanities; multiple panels on this subject are
being convened at the 2012 Modern Language
Convention, for example, and the 2011 Digital
Humanities conference at Stanford featured posters
by Katherine D. Harris and Beth Bonsignore etal. on the subject (Croxall & Berens 2011; Harris
2011a, 2011b; Bonsignore 2011). This presentation inparticular builds on Harris’s work on the necessity ofuncertainty when designing opportunities for ‘ play ’by presenting students with a research assignment inwhich the outcomes are not yet predetermined by the
instructor (Harris 2011b).
While reporting on original text analysis research,
this presentation simultaneously examines how
undergraduates and pedagogy are important facets of
the increasingly diverse community of practice that isdigital humanities.

References
Bonsignore, B., et al. (2011). The Arcane Gallery
of Gadgetry: A Design Case Study of an Alternate
Reality Game. Digital Humanities 2011 Conference
Abstracts, pp. 281-283.
Croxall, B. (2011). Introduction to Digital
Humanities. http://www.briancroxall.net/dh(accessed 23 March 2012).
Croxall, B., and K. I. Berens (2011).
Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate
Classroom. http://www.briancroxall.net/buildingDH/ (accessed 23 March 2012).
Duffy, C. A. (1993). Mean Time. London: Anvil
Press Poetry.
Duffy, C. A. (1999). The World’s Wife. London:
Picador.
Duffy, C. A. (N.D.). Letter. Box 4, Folder 2. CarolAnn Duffy Papers. Manuscripts, Archives, and RareBook Library. Emory University, Atlanta.
Emory University (N.D.). Carol Ann Duffy Papers,
1985-2007. http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/
8z7md (accessed 23 March 2012).
Harris, K. D. (2011a). Acceptance of Pedagogy &DH MLA 2012. triproftri. (14 May 2011). http://triproftri.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/acceptan
ce-of-pedagogy-dh-mla-2012/(accessed 23

March 2012).

Digital Humanities 2012

Harris, K. D. (2011b). Pedagogy & Play: Revising
Learning through Digital Humanities. Digital
Humanities 2011 Conference Abstracts, pp. 319-321.
Lyall, S. (2009). After 341 Years, British Poet
Laureate Is a Woman. The New York Times (2May 2009). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/0
2/world/europe/02poet.html (accessed 23 March2012).
Ramsay,S.
(2011).
Who’s
In
and
Who’s
Out.
StephenRamsay(8Jan.
2011). http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/08/whos-in-and-whos-out.html (accessed 23 March2012).
Rockwell, G. (2011). Name Change. Hermeneuti.ca(19 Oct. 2011). http://hermeneuti.ca/node/212(accessed 23 March 2012).
Sample, M. (2011). The Digital Humanities is Not
About Building, It’s About Sharing. Sample Reality.
(25 May 2011). http://www.samplereality.com/2
011/05/25/the-digital-humanities-is-not-ab
out-building-its-about-sharing/ (accessed 23

March 2012).

Winterson, J. (N.D.). Carol Ann Duffy. Jeanette
Winterson. http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=350(accessed 23 March 2012).

The Academy’s Digital Storeof Knowledge
Czmiel, Alexanderczmiel@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences andHumanities, Germany

Jürgens, Marcojuergens@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences andHumanities, Germany

1. Introduction
The construction of the Digital Knowledge-Store
intends to collect and bundle all digital resourcesof the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciencesand Humanities (BBAW)1. It extends the existing
infrastructure for publishing Digital Humanities
knowledge resources in order to increase the visibilityof the Academy’s research activities in the World
Wide Web.
The BBAW is an institution with a long traditionin humanities research. It hosts various humanities
long-term projects, which also do research on textual
resources in many different languages from all over
the world and any historic period. These projects
generate research results that are also publisheddigitally and include a variety of different resource
types ranging from digital and interactive scholarly
editions over collections of databases and images
to multimedia content. These digital resources are
unique and contain high quality content, for example,
digital publications of medieval charters, ancient
inscriptions, stained glass studies, manuscripts andmuch more. The variety of research content and data
formats lead to the desire to build a centralized accesspoint to all digital resources of the BBAW.
During the last decade the BBAW was deeply
involved in the development of methods, tools,
publications and frameworks of digital media anddigital resources for scholars in the humanities. With
the foundation of the TELOTA2 (The Electronic
Life Of The Academy) working group ten years
ago, the Academy became an active part of theongoing research and development in the field ofDigital Humanities. The main tasks of TELOTA areto evaluate and discuss the possibilities that digitaltechnologies offer scholars working at the academy,
and to develop tools and digital resources in close
collaboration with the Academy’s numerous research445

Digital Humanities 2012

projects. Hence TELOTA is also responsible for thedevelopment of the Digital Knowledge-Store.
The proposed paper will present the Digital
Knowledge-Store of the Berlin-Brandenburg
Academy of Sciences and Humanities and show
possibilities and methods in the development of
an interdisciplinary virtual research environment
containing a high diversity of content, languages,
data formats and objects.

2. The Digital Knowledge Store of
the Academy
The work on the Digital Knowledge-Store wasstarted in 2009 by the TELOTA working groupof the Academy. During the current project phase,
which started in September 2011 and is funded forthree years by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft(German Research Foundation)3, it will be improved
with extended metadata for better interoperability,
a search component based on linguistic methods,
and an innovative dialog based user interface.
The Knowledge-Store aims to be an infrastructurethat offers an easy to use but powerful interface,machine readable APIs and web services fortranslating queries and analyzing multilingual texts.
By connecting the resources semantically withthe means of linguistic analysis, text mining andsemantic web techniques the infrastructure will
support interdisciplinary research in- and outside of
the Academy.

2.1. A dialog-based browsing throughthe Knowledge-StoreThe potential of the Knowledge-Store lies in its wayof dealing with the process of searching. One canthink of the interface as a way rather to interact
with the Knowledge-Store than just a query-answer
process. The dialog based retrieval interface, theKnowledge-Browser, is conceptually a completely
new development and tries to detach from traditional
search interfaces by developing entirely new finding
strategies. The Knowledge-Browser can be seen as atool that enables an interactive step-by-step processof computer aided information retrieval.
A possible scenario would be a researcher who has aquestion about a certain topic but who does not know
the BBAW project which could hold the answer. In
that case the Knowledge-Store is the tool to solve thisproblem. The scholar starts the search with a queryon a certain subject. In every following step he will
receive qualified links to resources which contain thequery term or conceptually related terms out of all
the Academy’s digital resources. With every further
step the scholar can browse a related term on thebasis of the received results in a different context.
446

As the resources will be linked semantically, every
step of the query process offers a new query context.
Hence the knowledge browsing is an interactive andmultilevel process, which makes implicit connections
between different internal and external resources
explicit.
Rather than just giving the user the possibility to
reduce the search results by filtering, as faceted
search interfaces do, it extends the result by offeringsemantic recommendations for data and documents
which were not present in the previous search results.
On the basis of these connections the user cansearch overall in projects and even external project
resources to find not only the desired answer but
the queried term in different contexts and meanings
which will lead to more meaningful connections
between the research contexts which were not visible
before.

2.2. Challenges and Solutions
The challenges result mainly from the heterogeneous
resources which are stored in the various repositories
and databases hosted by the BBAW. By defining
a metadata scheme for all the different resourcesin the Academy the Knowledge-Store will provide
a basis for the extraction of information by the
Knowledge-Browser and a connection to related
external projects. This supports interoperability
between research data of the BBAW and projects
such as Europeana4, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek5,
DARIAH6 or CLARIN7. The existing metadata isbased on the Metadata Object Description Schema(MODS)8. It provides the basic information forsearch criteria and the description of the resource.
For extending the metadata the Europeana Data
Model (EDM)9 will be used to allow sophisticatedconnections of various heterogeneous resources.
With extended metadata the Digital KnowledgeStore is prepared to provide linked open data to bepart of the Web of Data10.
On the level of linguistic analysis an important
problem to solve is that the multilingual textual
resources in a major part do not follow a normalized
orthography or a consistent language space. For
the written German language of the 19th century
the German Text Archive (DTA)11 and the Digitales
Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (DWDS)12
provide appropriate tools for an index based solution.
For ancient Greek and Latin texts a cooperation
with the Max Planck Institute for the History ofDigital Humanities 2012

Science13 is established to further the integration of
the Donatus / Hopper software package14. Donatus
is capable of handling texts in Greek and Latin as
well as Arabic, German, English, French an others.
These services are used for automated lemmatizationand stemming as well as text-mining. In combination
with Semantic Web technologies such as RDF15 and
RDFa16 or ontologies, this results in basic semantic
retrieval possibilities which enables the researcher
to gain new knowledge by a process of searching indifferent contexts of the resources.

flow for the integration of external infrastructure
projects into one single endpoint.

Additionally the Knowledge-Store aims to make all
digital textual resources of the Academy accessible
as full texts. Therefore it is important to build
up an index which is prepared for a search basedon linguistic methods, text mining and semantic
information retrieval. This index is prepared using
the aforementioned services for a search in corporaof different languages and in historic writings as well.
The index uses a Lucene17 / Solr18 – Frameworkin combination with XQuery and XSLT-scripts totransform XML-Data and to update the index.
Furthermore it is intended to integrate a tool whichallows querying the full text without backgroundknowledge of a certain language. This would bepossible by sending a query via REST to a translation
web service endpoint in order to receive a translated
search term. There are several possible translation
APIs available. Among those are the Microsoft
BING Translation API19 and the Google Translate
API20 which both provide a translation service that
automatically translates text from one language toanother.

Bellamy, C. (2010). What is eResearch in the Artsand Humanities. http://www.craigbellamy.net/

3. Future prospects
The Knowledge-Store will enable a new way ofquerying humanities resources. The combination of
the Academy’s resources, the Knowledge-Browser
and the development of information extraction tools
will lead to an infrastructure which allows to put
the knowledge of the Academy’s different projects
in different contexts. The Knowledge-Store will bebuild on open source technologies. On the sametime it will realize by these means an interoperable
infrastructure which can show new possibilities in
the usage of Digital Humanities techniques. It guides
the humanities scholar to new ways of thinking
about the projects contexts by interconnecting andintercontextualizing the research resources in the
BBAW. In developing a semantically interlinked baseof resources which is capable of gaining knowledge
by querying information in various contexts of the
Academy’s projects, the Knowledge-Store will serve
as a part of the realization of the Web of Data as wellas it can be an exemplary project to establish a work

A prototype version of the Knowledge-Store which
does not include the Knowledge-Browser can befound at http://www.bbaw.de/en/telota/resour
ces/dkb .
A much more developed interface will be available atconference time.

References

2010/04/07/what-is-eresearch-in-the-arts-a
nd-humanities/ (accessed 9 March 2012).

Brock, T. (2010). ReThinking Digital Social
Media for Digital Humanities and Community
Engagement. http://dirt.terrypbrock.com/?p=1116 (accessed 9 March 2012).
Carusi, A., and T. Reimer (2010). Virtual
Research Environment Collaborative LandscapeStudy. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/r
eports/2010/vrelandscapestudy.aspx (accessed
9 March 2012).
DINI(2009).
Informationsund
Kommunikationsstruktur der Zukunft. http://www.dini.de/fileadmin/docs/DINI_thesen.pdf(accessed 9 March 2012).

Dallmeier-Tiessen,
S.,
et
al.
(2009).
Positionspapier Forschungsdaten. Arbeitsgruppe
Elektronisches Publizieren. http://edoc.gfz-pot
sdam.de/gfz/get/13230/0/a271566a9d9f48030e
e78e01ceae7138/13230.pdf (accessed 9 March2012).

Davidson, C. N. (2008). The changing profession– Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions.
Publications of the Modern Language Association ofAmerica 123(3): 707-717.
De Virgilio, R. (2010). Semantic Web information
management: a model-based perspective. Springer.
Heath, T., and C. Bizer (2011). Linked Data:
Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. San
Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool.
Key Perspectives Ltd (2010). Data Dimensions.
Disciplinary Differences in Research Data Sharing,
Reuse and Long term Viability. http://www.era.l
ib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/3364/1/SCARP SYNTHESIS.pdf (accessed 9 March 2012).

Murray-Rust, P., et al. (2010). Panton Principles.
Principles for Open Data in Science. Open
Knowledge Foundation. http://pantonprinciples.org/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
447

Digital Humanities 2012

Neuroth,H.,etal. (2009). Virtuelle
Forschungsumgebungenfüre-Humanities.
Maßnahmen zur optimalen Unterstützung vonForschungsprozessen in den Geisteswissenschaften.
Bibliothek, Forschung und Praxis 33(2): 161-169.

Building a TEI Archiving,
Publishing, and Access
Service: The TAPAS Project

Rees, J. (2010). Recommendations for independentscholarly publication of data sets. Creative
Commons Working Paper. San Francisco.

Flanders, Julia

Sierman, B., B. Schmidt B., and J.
Ludwig (2009). Enhanced Publications: Linking
Publications and Research Data in Digital
Repositories. http://dare.uva.nl/document/150
723 (accessed 9 March 2012).

Hamlin, Scotthamlin_scott@wheatoncollege.edu
Library and Information Services, Wheaton College,
USA

Alvarado, RafaelNotes
1. http://www.bbaw.de/en/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
2. http://www.bbaw.de/en/telota2012).

Julia_Flanders@brown.edu
Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University,
USA(accessed 9 March

3. http://www.dfg.de/en/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
4. http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ (accessed 9 March2012).
5. http://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/(accessed 9 March 2012).

ontoligent@gmail.com
Humanities and Arts Network of Technological
Initiatives, University of Virginia, USA

Mylonas, Elli

Elli_Mylonas@brown.edu
Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University,USA

6. http://www.dariah.eu/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
7. http://www.clarin.eu/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
8. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/
March 2012).

(accessed 9

9. http://www.europeanaconnect.eu/news.php?area=
News&pag=48 (accessed 9 March 2012).
10. http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data(accessed 9 March 2012).
11. http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/March 2012).

(accessed 9

12. http://www.dwds.de/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
13. http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/March 2012).

(accessed 9

14. http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/don
atus (accessed 9 March 2012).
15. http://www.w3.org/RDF/ (accessed 9 March 2012).
16. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/(accessed 9 March 2012).
17. http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html(accessed 9 March 2012).
18. http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ (accessed 9 March2012).
19. http://www.microsofttranslator.com/tools/(accessed 9 March 2012).
20.http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/langua
ge/translate/overview.html (accessed 9 March 2012).

As the language of DH 2011’s ‘big tent’ suggests,
in recent years the profile of digital humanities
work has expanded to include many scholars andpractitioners who draw on a multitude of digitaltechnologies in research and educational contexts,
without assuming all the roles required to implement
these technologies. This new generation (thoughsome are ‘new’ only to digital matters) of digital
humanists are undertaking intellectually ambitious
work with digital methods and tools, but theirinterest does not necessarily arise from a strong
institutional history or infrastructure, or frompersonal expertise with digital methods. Rather,
they are practicing scholars who are increasingly
aware of the shifting stakes of technology for thehumanities, and who want to explore what may bepossible by working in a new way. As a result, theirambitions often outstrip what their own institutions
can support: the available infrastructure of digitalpublishing, archiving, data curation, and repository
services may be limited or absent. An individual
scholar can gain expertise and achieve interesting
results using the TEI Guidelines ( http://www.tei-c.org/ ) or GIS, but it is a slower and morechallenging process for a university to develop theinstitutional infrastructure to support that expertise,in the way that traditional libraries (for instance)
support traditional forms of humanities scholarship.
The TEI Archiving, Publication, and Access Service(TAPAS,
http://www.tapasproject.org/ ) is
aimed at addressing this gap, by providing repository448

Digital Humanities 2012and publication services for small TEI projects.
TAPAS began with a planning grant from the IMLS(TAPAS 2010), originally proposed by a group ofsmall liberal-arts institutions including Wheaton
College, Willamette University, Hamilton College,
Vassar College, Mount Holyoke College, and the
University of Puget Sound, and later joined byBrown University and the University of Virginia.
This planning group conducted an intensive study ofthe profile of needs, and developed a specification
for the TAPAS service. TAPAS is now operating
under a two-year IMLS National Leadership Grant
to Wheaton College and Brown University whichfunds the development of the service. TAPAS has
also received an NEH Digital Humanities Startup
Grant, led by Wheaton College and the University ofVirginia, which funds the development of the userinterface. Hosted at Brown University, the TAPAS
service will provide repository storage, data curation,and simple interfaces for data management andpublication. It will also provide an API through which
the TEI data can be accessed and remixed. The
service thus aims to fill a crucial niche, enabling botha new type of publication and a new model for how
scholarly publication is supported. All of these needs
are particularly urgent in the liberal-arts communitythat is the central focus of TAPAS, but they are alsostrongly evident in the humanities academy more
broadly, at a national and international level.
This project takes place within a landscape alreadywell populated with large-scale infrastructuralprojects (Hedges 2009), such as TextGrid ( http://
www.textgrid.de/ ), DARIAH ( http://www.dariah.eu/ ), CLARIN ( http://www.clarin.eu/external/ ), and the Canadian Writers Research
Collaboratory (CWRC, http://www.cwrc.ca/ ).
Projects of this kind must all confront a central
set of strategic concerns and design challenges,
including questions about how much uniformity
to impose upon the data, how to accommodate
variation, how to create interoperability layers
and tools that can operate meaningfully acrossmultiple data sets (DARIAH 2011a, DARIAH 2011b),and how to manage issues of sustainability (ofboth the data and the service itself). TAPAS is
distinctive within this landscape because of its focus
on a single form of data (TEI-encoded researchmaterials) and also because of its initial emphasis
on serving an underserved constituency (scholars
at smaller or under-resourced institutions) rather
than on providing an infrastructure that can operatecomprehensively. TAPAS is thus able to tackle thequestions above in a highly focused way.
The proposed poster will focus on several key areasof the TAPAS project that will be the focus of ourattention in the early phases of the project:

1. Architecture and system design. The TAPAS
service is built on a Fedora repository, and the userinteraction will be managed as a set of modular
layers using tools like Drupal. The design of theselayers needs to take into account information about
how scholars need to interact with the service foractivities such as:- creating new project records- uploading new data files, uploading revised
versions of existing data files- creating metadata for data files, updating themetadata for existing files- configuringoptionsfordissemination,
publication, and other modes of access anddiscovery, such as interface choices, stylesheets,
and information to be exposed via APIs.
The poster will provide a detailed look at
the internal architecture and the ways thatstandards like RDF and METS are used to organize
information and enable flexible deployment of
repository data.
2. TEI schema development and the challenge ofeclecticism. TAPAS plans to accept a broad rangeof TEI data, but will also need to identify different
classes of data that share specific properties, suchas genre or the presence of certain encoding
features, to determine what kinds of interface
tools will or will not be appropriate for a given
data set. TAPAS will also use various forms ofvalidation to help TAPAS contributors ensure theconsistency and quality of their data prior to
upload. The design and use of schemas used within
the TAPAS ecology – extending from training,
through data creation and management, to longterm data curation is complex and will be an
important focus of the project’s research. The
poster will provide a detailed view of the different
roles that schemas of various kinds will play in thisecology, and the principles guiding their design
and use.
3. Designing a hosted service. Although TAPAS wasprompted by the needs of individual scholars, its
implementation as a hosted service means thatit also plays an important aggregative role. TheTAPAS collection of TEI data has the potential not
only to serve as an important corpus of TEI data(of value, for instance, to those interested in thehistoriography of digital humanities, or in studying
how the TEI is used) but also to provide importantinter-project connections that may benefit theindividual TAPAS contributors and their readers.
In addition, designing TAPAS as a hosted service
raises a number of issues concerning long-term
data curation, rights, and the fiscal sustainabilityof the service itself. The poster will examine theseissues with a particular focus on:449

Digital Humanities 2012

- the membership and sustainability model for theservice- the handling of intellectual property rights- the design of cross-project tools for searching,
exploration, and visualization
4. User interface. Because TAPAS is intended tosupport scholars who – although they may be
expert users of TEI – are not necessarily experts
in working with repositories and XML publication,
the design of the user interface will be criticalin making the TAPAS service approachable. In
addition, because some users may be managing
very large numbers of files, the user interface
will need to provide productive, intuitive waysof visualizing one’s data from a management
standpoint as well as a publication standpoint.
Funding
This project is made possible by a grant from the U.S.
Institute of Museum and Library Services.

References
DARIAH (2011a). Technical Work: Conceptual
Modelling. DARIAH Work Package 8. http://www.
dariah.eu/index.php?option=com_content&vie
w=article&id=31&Itemid=35

DARIAH (2011b). Technical work: Technicalreference architecture. DARIAH Work Package
7. http://www.dariah.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=30&Itemid=34 .
TAPAS (2010). Roadmap. http://www.tapasproj

ect.org/roadmap

TextGrid (2010). Roadmap Integration Grid/
Repository. TextGrid, September 2010. http://www.textgrid.de/fileadmin/TextGrid/reports/Te
xtGrid_R121_v1.0.pdf .

Hedges, M. (2009). Grid-enabling Humanities
Datasets.
DigitalHumanities
Quarterly
3(2). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/v
ol/3/4/000078/000078.html

Author Consolidation
across European National
Bibliographies
Freire, Nuno

nfreire@gmail.com
The European Library, National Library of theNetherlands, The Netherlands

1. Introduction
The European Library holds several million
bibliographic records from the national libraries ofEurope. The National Bibliographies are one of themain bibliographic data sources in each country andare key for Digital Humanities scholars.
Their purpose is to list every publication in a country,
under the auspices of a national library or othergovernment agency. Depending on the country, allpublishers will need to send a copy of every publishedwork to the national legal deposit, or in othercountries, a national organisation will need to collect
all publications.
Given that the publisher domain is very
heterogeneous and that thousands of publishers
might exist in a country, National Bibliographies are
effectively the single point of reference with whichto comprehensively identify all the publications in acountry.
In Europe, National Bibliographies are typicallycreated and maintained by national libraries.
Whenever a book is published in a country, it
is recorded in the corresponding national librarycatalogue from where the national bibliography isderived.
Currently,
The
EuropeanLibraryholds
approximately 75 million bibliographic records in
its centralised repository. This number is constantly
increasing, as more national libraries’ catalogues
are included in the centralised repository. By theend of 2012 the total bibliographic universe of The
European Library is expected to be approximately
200 million records.
The centralisation of European bibliographic data in
The European Library is creating new possibilities
for the exploitation of this data, in order to improveexisting services, enable the development of newones, or provide a good setting for research.
The centralisation of the bibliographic data enables
the automatic linkage of the National Bibliographies

450

Digital Humanities 2012

across countries, through the use of data mining
technologies. Our ongoing work is focusing thelinkage of the main entities used to describe
bibliographic resources: persons, organizations,locations, historical periods, and subjects.
In this poster, we present the current status of ourwork on the consolidation of authors across the
National Bibliographies of Europe. When complete,
it will allow the exploration of an author’s work
across time and space in the European bibliographic
universe.

2. Problem Description
Entity resolution is the process of, given a
specific context, determining if two or morereferences correspond to the same entity. An
entity might have multiple different representations,and each representation might match thedescription of multiple objects (i.e., reference andreferent ambiguity). The variations found in thedescriptions may have multiple origins, such as
misspellings, typing errors, different conventions
for abbreviations, naming varying over time,heterogeneous data schemas, etc.

cataloguing rules comprise conventions for thesecases. Although this information is not always fully
structured, the common conventions used when
encoding the information allow it to be reliably
parsed automatically.

3. Approach
Our approach leverages two key aspects of the
National Bibliographies and consolidation work on
authors carried out by libraries.
The first aspect is that national libraries alreadyindividually perform a manual consolidation of
authors through their ongoing work to maintain
National Bibliographies.
The second aspect is that some European national
libraries actively work on the construction of
the Virtual International Authority File, or VIAF
(Bennett et al. 2006). VIAF is a joint project ofseveral national libraries from all continents. It hosts
a consolidated data set containing data that national
libraries have gathered for many years about theauthors of the bibliographic resources held at thelibraries. It is available as open data.

Entity resolution is a common problem to manydifferent research communities, although the term
used is not always the same. Common designations
include record linkage, record matching, mergepurge, data de-duplication, instance identification,
database hardening, name matching, reference
reconciliation, reference disambiguation, and object
consolidation (Elmagarmid et al. 2007; Dong et al.
2005).

Using VIAF, we can already consolidate the authors
across the VIAF participating countries and soon
we will exploit this resource to consolidate authorsin other countries. By extracting statistics aboutauthors consolidated in VIAF, from the National
Bibliographies of VIAF participants, we expect to beable to derive a probabilistic model that will allow us
to consolidate the authors from other countries notparticipating in VIAF.

Different communities have proposed several
techniques, but most frequently we find applicationsof algorithms from machine learning, artificial
intelligence and data mining (Elmagarmid et al.
2007).

The author consolidation system is being built
as an ETL (Extraction, Transformation andLoading) process, a typical approach for performing
consolidation of data in data warehouses.

Entity resolution is very dependent on the context.
The processes need to be adapted to the data that they
are being applied to, in order to achieve acceptable
results. Our work focuses on exploring the structuraland semantic richness of the bibliographic data, as itexists in the National Bibliographies.
In bibliographic records, references to persons arefound as authors or contributors of works, andsometimes as the subject of the work. The valueof these references being as complete as possible
is recognised by cataloguing rules, which indicatethat the references should contain not only thename of the person but also their birth and deathyears (ALA et al. 2002). However, these dates do
not always exist, as they are not always known
by the cataloguers. It is also often the case thatthese dates are approximations of real dates –The process starts with the preparation of datafor consolidation processing. This step comprises
tasks for selecting the relevant data from the
National Bibliographies that will be used to represent
an author during the consolidation process. The
following data about the authors is gathered at thelevel of each individual national bibliography:- Name;- Variant forms of the name;- Years of birth and death;- Known co-authors;- Known publishers;- Known titles of publications.
As is typical in ETL processes, the final decision tomatch two author references is made by reasoning on

451

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the similarity scores obtained by comparing the eachof the above data elements.
Based on previous research on this topic (Freire etal. 2008), we use the Jaro-Winkler similarity metric(Jaro 1989) for calculating the similarity between
names.
Comparison of remaining data fields is based on
the number of common values found in the tworecords versus the total number of available values.
For example, similarity of co-authors is given by the
number of common co-authors between two authors,and similar calculations for titles, and publishers.
This information is compared across National
Bibliographies to identify, for example, two authors
who can actually be considered to be the same.
The solution for reasoning on the outcome ofcomparisons will be based on supervised machinelearned model. It will process the comparison results
between two of the above records of the authors anddetermine the likelihood that the authors are thesame entity. Several machine learning techniques forclassification will be tested.
As ground truth, for building and testing the machinelearned model, we will use a data set extracted fromthe National Bibliographies of VIAF participants,
therefore removing the need for creating a manuallyannotated collection.

4. Conclusion
This poster presented the current status of our workon the consolidation of authors across the National
Bibliographies of Europe. When complete, it willallow the exploration of an author’s work across timeand space, in a much more comprehensive way thenis possible today.
We believe that this consolidation will provide
new opportunities for the creation of statistical
datasets, resulting from data analysis and mining of
bibliographic data. Although no concrete plans areready at this time, we expect these kinds of data sets
to emerge as a future result.
This work will also have impact in intellectual
property rights identification processes, such as
those of the ARROW project1 (Accessible Registries
of Rights Information and Orphan Works). In suchprocesses, the identification of all publications of awork by an author is essential, and can benefit fromthis consolidated author’s bibliographies.

References
ALA, CLA, CILIP (2002). Anglo-American
Cataloguing Rules: 2002 Revision.

452

Bennett, R., C. Hengel-Dittrich, E. O’Neill,
and B. B. Tillett (2006). VIAF (VirtualInternational Authority File): Linking Die Deutsche
Bibliothek and Library of Congress Name Authority
Files.
Dong, X., A. Halevy, and J. Madhavan (2005).
Reference reconciliation in complex information
spaces. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMOD
international Conference on Management of Data.
SIGMOD ’05. ACM: New York, NY, pp. 85-96.
Elmagarmid, A. K., P. G. Ipeirotis, and V.
S. Verykios (2007). Duplicate Record Detection:
A Survey. IEEE Transactions on knowledge
and data engineering 19(1): 1-16, DOI: 10.1109/
TKDE.2007.250581.
Freire, N., J. Borbinha, and B. Martins(2008). Consolidation of References to Persons
in Bibliographic Databases. ICADL 2008. The
11th International Conference on Asian Digital
Libraries, Universal and Ubiquitous Access toInformation.Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 256-265.
Jaro, M. A. (1989). Advances in record linking
methodology as applied to the 1985 census of Tampa
Florida. Journal of the American Statistical Society
64: 1183-1210.
Notes
1. 1. Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan
Works website: http://www.arrow-net.eu/

Digital Humanities 2012

Historical Events Versus
Information Contents –A Preliminary Analysis of
the National Geographic
Magazine
Fujimoto, Yu

yfujimoto@doshisha-bkj.net
Doshisha University, Japan
Figure 1: Conceptual schema for NGM research.

1. Introduction
In 2009, Nara University auctioned its full set of‘National Geographic Magazine (NGM)’, complete
back to its first release in 1888. In response to theevent, faculty and student devotees of the magazine
launched a small working group in June of 2011.
Although in the beginning the working group was
satisfied with simply browsing the magazines, as
discussion continued, members soon recognised
academic importance of the collection.
Since magazines are generally driven by the massinterests of their readerships in order to raise
their sales, shifting social conditions would become
clear by observing variation in themes and physicalinformation content over time in weekly or monthly
magazines. In the case of NGM, its readers are mainly
drawn from the intellectual classes, which can bethought to effect on global politics disproportionally,
and the magazine covered a vast range of cultural andnatural themes for more than 120 years.
Because NGM possesses all these characteristics,
the author predicts that social conditions since theend of 19th century would become clear throughappropriate analyses. Although the working group’s
goal is to identify position of ‘Japan’ in global society
from the 1890s to the 1950s as seen through NGM,
the author focuses on deepening understanding of
the magazine itself by analysing how it has changed
overtime. In this paper, the author reports on theshift in the physical amount of information over timeas the one of the preliminary analyses employing
mathematical methods.

2. The research material
NGM has appealed to people all over the world
since its first release in 1888 (Hubbard 1888),
and Japan has been the focus of an issue’s
main article more than 90 times since its first
appearance in 1894 (Stevens 1894). Some important
Japanese historical figures also commented on Japan
since then. Additionally, the magazine always took
a neutral stance, and even during World War
II, conditions in Japan were described objectively;
Japan was described as a strong rival to theUnited States rather than an evil state (Price 1942).
Many of photos and illustrations, which are also
important characteristics of the magazine, are further
significant for Japanology since a huge amountof important materials vanished in 1923 during thegreat earthquake in Tokyo, and again in 1945 during
the American firebombing of Tokyo.
Currently, the working group is planning the 3phases of research to analyse the ‘Japan’ describedin the magazine. The preliminary phase aims
to understand the magazine itself, the resource
acquisition phase archives various information
concerning the magazine, and the analytical phaseattempts to identify position of ‘Japan’ in global
society from the 1890s to the 1950s from new
standpoints. Overall, processes should be based on
informatics not to put Japanese feelings in historicalfacts.
In order to understand the position of ‘Japan’ inglobal society through studying NGM, first, thecharacteristics of the magazine itself should beclarified. Therefore, the author designed an entire
conceptual schema as a guide line for the project.
Figure 1 is the schema that the author draw at theoutset of this project. The following sections in thispaper reports the results of operations defined on the‘Magazine’ class and related classes highlighted in theschema. The author gave much attention to temporal
shift in the information content as reflected in ocular
information. Analysis of information content usedthe DVD version of the digital archive, published by453

Digital Humanities 2012

the National Geographic Society, which includes allof the articles since the first issue in 1888 (National
Geographic Society, 2010). Many devotees of themagazine enjoy the photographs and ’browse’ pages
rather than ’read’ articles, and the series of analyses
in this paper reflect this tendency.

Figure 2: Histogram and density plot of colour use

3. Analyses
Although file size would be an adequate index forthe amount of information, as well as the easiest
approach, the author chose to also analyse the use ofcolours and entropy of thumbnails in each volume.
The first processes consisted of randomly extracting
constant numbers of pixel-values 4,096 times fromeach page to justify the size of the thumbnails, andin parallel, counting the number of pages in eachvolumes. After those processes, Normalised Colour
Values (NCV) files, which consist of RGB values
in each volume, were created. The NCV files wereassigned a range of values from 0 to 767, and divided
into three frequencies: red values were assigned from0 to 255, green values were assigned from 256 to 511
and blue values were assigned from 512 to 767.
In this study, NCV files were programmaticallycreated for both full pages and cover pages, andshapes of the colour usage distribution of cover pages
in each volume were calculated. Changes in colour
were detected using Fourier Descriptors, in otherwords the coefficient numbers of Fourier Transformdefined as below:

Any curves are denoted as infinite summations of two
trigonometric function having coefficient of a andb (Fourier Series), and ordered earlier coefficientsreflect major changes (lower frequency component),
while ordered later coefficients reflect minor changes(higher frequency component) in the curve. Fourier
Descriptors are finite version of Fourier Series. In this454

study, Fourier Descriptors were derived from Fast
Fourier Transforms (FFT).
In contrast to the FFT, entropy was used to measurecomplexity of the magazine (Shannon 1948). Entropy
is denoted as below:

Here, H(x) is the average information content, the socalled entropy, of a series of random variable x, and p
denotes the probability mass function of x. Therefore,
p(xi) shows occurrence ratio of each luminance valueof RGB. b specifies the unit of entropy, and 2 (bit)was used in this study. Using entropy, information
content in each volume was described as composite
index of pages and colours. Finally, changing pointsof the shift in entropy were detected by Bayesian
Changing Point (BCP) method (Barry & Hartigan
1993).

Figure 3: Comparison with information
content and historical events

4. Results
The results of these analyses were compared tohistorical events and tenure of chief editors (Figure3). First, the shift in file sizes seemed to be related tohistorical events. The first peak was detected around1913 after which the curve of information content
was decreased until 1919. The curve fit neatly withthe duration of World War I. Afterwards, information
content rapidly increased until the Wall Street Crashof 1929, known as ‘Black Tuesday’, after which thecurve nosedived. During World War II, the curve
had small amplitude, and then the curve increased
moderately up to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The curve was in a gradual decline until the Vietnam
War ended. Although a peak was detected around
1979, the year of Iranian Revolution and Oil Crisis,
the curve has been stable since then.
Second, the shift of entropy seemed to be related tothe history of chief editors. The curve describing
entropyover time was unstable until around 1916

Digital Humanities 2012

(Figure 4). This unstable condition might reflect
many challenges of foundational periods. Indeed,
another analysis of colour distribution shape forcover pages shows

This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for
geographic research of Fukutake Science & Culture
Foundation (12-GEO-9).

References
Barry, D., and J. A. Hartigan (1993). A Bayesian
Analysis for Change Point Problems. Journal of
American Statistical Association 88(421): 309-319.

Figure 4: Changing point detection
by Bayesian Change Point(BCP)

Hubbard, G. G. (1888). Introductory Address by
the President. The National Geographic 1(1): 8-10.
National Geographic Society (2010). [DVD] The
Complete National Geographic: National Geographic
Society.
Price, W. (1942). Unknown Japan. The National
Geographic 82(2): 224-252.
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A Mathematical Theory ofCommunication. Bell System Technical Journal 27:
379-423, 623-656.
Stevens, D. W. (1894). Japan. The National
Geographic 4: 192-199.

Figure 5: Temporal shift of Fourier Descriptors

similar tendency; although the cover page of NGM
had no images at first, the illustrated cover pages
had began around 1910 (Figure 5). After 1916, BCP of
the shift of entropy was more stable than before, but
small peaks appeared near the years in which chief
editors changed.

5. Conclusion
The results derived from NCV analysis of the
NGM seems to show a relationship to historicaloccurrences. That is, that NGM represents theconditions of the global society in some way. The
results of any analyses should be more clear by
overlapping them with these curves. On the other
hand, the curves representing physical information
content might not fit well with economic curves.
Another question is, what does information content
actually represent?
The results of these analyses are only a partial
implementation of the schema I defined, and I would
prefer to refrain from discussing any historical eventswith these results, under current circumstances. Our
working group is currently collecting various kindsof materials, which may concerning NGM. As part ofour future research, the author is planning to conduct
text mining using the full text of the magazine, and tocompare it to the results of this study.
Acknowledgement455

Digital Humanities 2012

‘Tejiendo la Red HD’ – Acase study of building a DH
network in Mexico
Galina, Isabel

igalina@unam.mx
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico

Priani, Ernesto

epriani@gmail.com
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico

López, José

josemlv@msn.com
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico

Rivera, Eduardo

eduardo.rivera.sumano@gmail.com
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico

Cruz, Alejandro

alejandro_cruz_cervantes@hotmail.com
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico

1. Introduction
As has been noted previously (Borgman 2009;Friedlander 2009; Presner 2009) Digital Humanities(DH) is becoming an established field. However, oneof the remaining challenges is to locate and increase
collaboration with new emerging DH communities.
At the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
(UNAM) we are working on a) identifying key
scholars and projects; b) investigating key local
issues in the development of DH projects; c) raisingawareness of DH and d) consolidating a communityand linking with international DH. Previously wereported (Galina & Priani 2011) on the results from aseries of workshops aimed at developing a diagnosisof the DH landscape including the identification of
key challenges and issues for the development ofprojects in order to consolidate and promote DH in
the region. An important result of the workshops
was the initiative to form a DH community (Redde Humanidades Digitales – RedHD), first in
Mexico and then expanding to other Latin Americancountries. The aim of this poster is to present themulti-faceted approach to DH community buildingthat we are adopting. We will present and discuss thedifferent strategies we have employed and the main
challenges encountered. We hope that this model
will be useful for other emerging DH communities tobuild upon.

456

2. Development of the network
One of the first challenges was moving from aworkshop environment to establishing a network of
DH practitioners while still remaining a vibrant andparticipatory group. Although virtual communities
can be useful, if not managed appropriately they
run the risk of becoming an empty and lifelessvirtual space. Although all workshops participants
were enthusiastic about promoting DH, in practice
we feared that our different disciplines, geographicaldistance and personal workloads could lead to a
weakening of our initiative. Reingold (1993) defines
a virtual community as a situation in which ‘people
carry on public discussions long enough, with
sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal
relationships’. For this we needed to assure that
we had good communication channels to talk,organize and work with relevant people onparticular topics.
Therefore, one of the first issues was defining
who would form part of the network? Following
on from the workshops, where we used a very
ample definition of DH, we also wanted to makethe community as inclusive as possible. University
structures can be inflexible, rigid and hierarchical.
Many of our workshop participants were not formal
employees of the UNAM and we also had participantsfrom other institutions, as well as non academicorganizations. Many DH project participants are notestablished academic members and RedHD should
function in such a way as to incorporate this diversity.
The second step was to define specific objectives
with concrete goals in order to promote meaningfulcommunication of useful information between us.
We needed to develop a web based information
system that acted as a hub as well as providing
information and communication channels.
From the workshops we also defined the initial topics
that needed attention:
1. Information: about digital humanists, digital
resources and projects and relevant publications.
2. Formation of human resources: strategies,
guidelines, documentation and other activities
that promote the formation of human resources
required for the development of DH.
3. Project evaluation: necessary actions to generate
standards, policies and indicators in order topromote the validity of DH projects and lobbying
for the recognition of DH as a valid academic fieldof enquiry.
Information: Initially we defined three different
types of information that we wanted to provide
through our website: a database of DH practitioners,a catalogue of DH projects and a bibliography ofDigital Humanities 2012published DH results from a particular DH project.
The definition of appropriate XML metadata will be
described in more detail at a later date, but for the
moment it is important to mention that we wanted
the databases to work as a system of information withinterconnections. For example, for a DH scholar you
can also query all DH projects they have worked on
as well as the publications they have, and in the same
way a DH project will also list the relevant publicationand participants and so forth.
Formation: We found a very limited offer of DH
related courses and one of RedHD’s aims is to build
upon this. Initially, as means of promoting DH
in general, we are working on short introductory
type courses (for example, ‘Digital resources andthe Humanities’, ‘Introduction to TEI’). This work
is leading up to the design of a longer certificate/specialization course1 to be offered at the UNAM
beginning of 2012. The aim is that this program
will later be developed into a MA course. Human
resources can be formed through teaching, but we arealso working on the development of documentation,
guidelines, publications and other type of support
material in Spanish, as there is little available.
We published a special issue of Digital Humanities
for RDU, a UNAM peer-reviewed, general interest
journal (RDU 2011). We are also focusing on thesocial networking approach for both academic andnon-academic audiences. We are also planning a
local Digital Humanities conference, the first of its
type in the region, in Spring 2012.
Project evaluation: Another key element for thedevelopment of DH are the current difficulties
involved in the evaluation of research performanceof digital humanists as well as the impact and valueof DH projects as a research outcome in themselves.
One of reasons for this is that evaluation committees
do not necessarily have the tools or the know-how to
do so. RedHD aims to contribute towards recognition
by providing tools and guidelines to help out withthis task. This particular type of work requires a morein depth approach and so we have set up a working
group that includes face to face meetings. The
group is currently revising international available
guidelines and will work on developing material
not only in Spanish, but also adapted to our own
particular institutional and funding structures.

3. Discussion
The consolidation of RedHD has been a hugechallenge. Although money is a common problem
in Humanities, funding has been a particular ordeal
for us. The development of the website, which is thecore infrastructure for our network, has consequently
been slow. We depend heavily on student work.
Long term funding is an issue that we have not yet

addressed. In this sense, the registry of DH projects
in particular, is a concern. The discontinuation of
AHDS, Intute and similar DH resource discovery
systems is a negative sign. However, it also presents
an opportunity for us to learn from previous
initiatives and focus on different approaches to longterm sustainability. Initial ideas are linked to ourgrass root development and working in partnershipwith libraries (Galina 2011).
In terms of numbers the RedHD has grown little since
the workshops. We have not actively sought new
members in part due to the delays in the developmentof our website. The digital humanist registry databaseis fundamental to our growth as a community andthe system must be stable before we encourage newpartnerships. However, already there has been a lotof interest and once established we believe that thecommunity will grow rapidly.
We also want to focus on connecting with theinternational DH community from whom we have
had a lot of interest and support. Both DH11 andDH12 have made specific references to emerging
digital communities in their call for participation.
However, involvement is still low. This could be
due to a number of reasons. One is that we arestill building momentum. Another factor may belanguage, as English is the main discourse forpublication and participating in DH. It is possiblethat increased professionalization of the DH field will
result in more English speaking members. However,
we also we want to focus on Spanish documentationand projects as well. Organizing local, regional and
Latin American events will be vital part of our work.

4. Conclusions
There is still a lot of work to do towards consolidating
and more importantly maintaining RedHD. Ideallythe network will move from being based on
enthusiastic individuals to being incorporated into
institutional frameworks. Institutional recognition
and backing would support long term sustainability.
Ideally this network will promote the establishmentof DH centres, postgraduate courses, journals,
established working groups and other types ofacademic endeavor. RedHD for the moment works as
a proof of concept allowing us to advance towards thenext phases.

References
Borgman, C. (2009). The Digital Future is Now:
A Call to Action for the Humanities. DHQ: Digital
Humanities Quarterly 3(4).
Friedlander, A. (2008). Asking Research
Questions and Building a Research Agenda for
Digital Scholarship. In Working Together or457

Digital Humanities 2012

Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital
Scholarship http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf

Galina, I. (2011). El papel de las bibliotecas enlas Humanidades Digitales, 77th IFLA General
Conference and Assembly, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
13-18 August 2011 http://conference.ifla.org/
past/ifla77/104-russell-en.pdf

Galina, I., and E. Priani (2011). Is There Anybody
Out There? Discovering New DH Practitioners
in other Countries. Digital Humanities 2011,
Conference abstracts. Stanford 2011, pp. 135-138
Revista Digital Universitaria-RDU (2011).
Las Humanidades Digitales, Special Issue
12(7) http://www.revista.unam.mx/vol.12/num7

Adaptive Automatic
Gesture Stroke Detection
Gebre, Binyam Gebrekidan

binyamgebrekidan.gebre@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

Wittenburg, Peter

peter.wittenburg@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands/art68/index.html

1. Introduction

Rheingold, H. (1993).

Many gesture and sign language researchers
manually annotate video recordings to systematically
categorize, analyze and explain their observations.
The number and kinds of annotations are so diverseand unpredictable that any attempt at developing
non-adaptive automatic annotation systems is
usually less effective. The trend in the literature has
been to develop models that work for average users
and for average scenarios. This approach has threemain disadvantages. First, it is impossible to know
beforehand all the patterns that could be of interest to
all researchers. Second, it is practically impossible tofind enough training examples for all patterns. Third,
it is currently impossible to learn a model that isrobustly applicable across all video quality-recording
variations.

http://www.rheingold.
com/vc/book/intro.html The Virtual Community.

Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Presner, T., and C. Johanson (2009). The
Promise of Digital Humanities. UCLA.
Notes
1. Known as diplomado this type of academic course is highly
specialized and most cover a minimum of 120 hours.

To overcome the three problems and provide
practically useful solutions, this paper proposes acase-by-case user-controlled annotation model. The
main philosophy for this kind of model is that amodel designed to give the best average performancein a variety of scenarios is usually less accurate andless adaptable for a particular problem than a model
tailored to the characteristics of that problem. Thisapproach is also grounded in the ‘No Free Lunch’
theorems, which establish that for any algorithm, anyelevated performance over one class of problems isoffset by performance over another class (Wolpert &Macready 1997).
We apply our proposed solution to the problem
of gesture stroke detection. To be more precise,for gesture stroke detection to be more accurate
and more robust, we develop a model that takes
intuitive input from the user for a given video andthen we apply standard algorithms optimized to thecharacteristics of the video.

458

Digital Humanities 2012

2. Gesture stroke
Gesture stroke is the most important messagecarrying phase of the series of body movements that
constitute a gesture (or the phrases in a gesture).
The body movements usually include hand and facemovements. The relevant questions for automatic
stroke recognition are: a) what is a gesture? b) where
does a gesture start and end? c) what are the phasesin the gesture? d) which one is the stroke?
The literature does not give completely consistentanswers to the above questions (Kendon 1980, 1972;
Kita et al. 1998). However, the most prominent trend
is that a gesture unit consists of one or more gesturephrases, each consisting of optional preparation,
optional pre-stroke hold, obligatory stroke, optional
post-stroke hold and optional retraction (Kendon
1980). Figure 1 shows the different phases in a
gesture unit as outlined by Kendon.

Figure 1: Gesture phases (Kendon 1980, 1972)

For the purpose of this paper, a gesture phrase isclassified into two: strokes and non-strokes. The
non-stroke gesture phases include the absence of
movement, the preparation, the hold, the retraction
and any other body movements excluding thestrokes.

3. Methodology
Our approach to determining gesture strokes
involves four stages: a) detect face and hands forevery person b) track them c) extract features d)distinguish strokes from non-strokes.
Different algorithms are used to solve each stage. Two
features, corners and skin colors, are used to detectfaces and hands. These features have been selected
because they are usually stable from frame to frame
for a given video.
Corners are shown to be good features for tracking(Shi & Tomasi 1993). They have the property thatthey are different from their surrounding points.
A given point in a homogenous image cannot be
identified whether or not it has moved in thesubsequent frame. Similarly, a given point along anedge cannot be identified whether or not it has moved

along that edge. However, the movement of a corner
can conveniently be computed and identified, as it isnon-ambiguous in its identity. This makes it a good
feature for tracking.
For a given application, not all corners in a video
frame are equally important. For gesture analysis, theinteresting corners are the ones resulting from thebody parts, mainly from face and hands. In order
to filter out the corners irrelevant to body parts, wemask out corners that do not correspond to the skincolor model.
The skin color model is developed with the
involvement of the user. The user selects a
representative instance of the skin color in one of
the frames of the video, usually the first frame. And
then the system extracts color information from that
instance and finds all points in the frame where thematching of colors with the extracted color is high.
It is important to notice that the on-line selection of
the skin region avoids having to design a skin color
model for all human races. Off-line skin color model
design is as practically difficult as collecting picturesof all human skin colors and its use in the detection
for a particular skin color in a given video will be lessaccurate.
Given the corners from regions of the skin in thevideo, the tracking is done with the pyramidal
implementation of the Lucas-Kanade algorithms(Bouguet 1999; Bradski & Kaehler 2008). Values
extracted from the number of corners, clusters andtheir dynamics across frames (context) are fed intoa supervised learning algorithm with class labels 1
for frames inside a stroke and 0 for frames outside astroke. For the learning algorithm, we used support
vector machine with RBF kernel.

4. Experiment data
Various videos have been used to test the detectionof face, hands and their movements. Particularly, we
experimented with two videos, each of which consistsof two people of the same color: black and white skincolors. The resolution of the video with white people
is 320x240 and that of the other video with black
people is 1280x720. The higher the resolution, thebetter the detection quality.
For the supervised learning algorithm, we used astroke and non-stroke annotated video data of 36
seconds long. This is the same video referred to abovethat has two white people speaking and gesturing. It
has 914 frames, 847 of which are annotated. It has 19
strokes each ranging from 4 to 35 frames with mean
13.5 and standard deviation 6.5. It also has 40 nonstroke regions, which include moments of silence,
preparation, retraction and holds.

459

Digital Humanities 2012

All the videos for the reported experiments inthis paper have been taken from the MPI archive
http://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/imdi_browser/ .

Figure 4: A screen shot of a video with moving corners
shown in blue. The rectangle is the region selectedby the user as a model for the skin color (black)A screen shot of a video with moving corners
shown in blue. The rectangle is the region selectedby the user as a model for the skin color (white)

Figure 5: A scrren shot of a video showing detectedskin regions. Very white regions correspondto high probabilities for black skin regions

5. Results
Figure 3: A screen shot of a video showing detectedskin regions. Very white regions correspondto high probabilities for white skin regions

460

The accuracy of results for face and hands detection
based on initializations of regions of skin color
on one frame in the video and applied to thesubsequent frames in the same video shows that
this approach can be very effective in identifying thecorners belonging to the moving hands/face. Figures
2 through 5 show screen shots of the process and theresults for a chosen video frame.

Digital Humanities 2012

frames can be indicative of the presence of strokes,
the most meaningful phase of a gesture. In our
future research, we will continue to improve thestroke detection performance using more featuresand learning algorithms. We will also apply our
methodology to classify strokes according to their
meanings. Success of this methodology will haveimportant impact in human activity recognition fromvideo files.
Funding
Figure 6: Stroke detection performance
varaiation as training data size increases

The stroke/non-stroke classification results areshown in figure 6. The x-axis shows the training
data size, which is 75% of the dataset. The yaxis shows the performance of the classificationon test data, which is the remaining 25% of thedataset. As we vary the training data size, we geton average a slightly improving performance. The
average accuracy, precision and recall achieved are
61.51%, 54.67% and 52.89%. The F1 measure is53.26%. The average baseline (i.e. classifying every
frame as non-stroke) achieves 57.55% accuracy and
0% recall. The performance measures show that
there is a lot of room for improvement.
Evaluation for accuracy of frame boundaries forstrokes and non-strokes should not be as clear-cut as
we assumed in our experiments. One or two frame
misses or shifts are tolerable given that even humans
do not accurately mark the correct boundary, if any.
However, we did not consider that observation in ourevaluation results.

6. Conclusion
In this paper, we have put more emphasis on amore adaptive case-by-case annotation model basedon the idea that with a little more input fromusers and facilitated by more user-friendly interfaces,
annotation models can be more adaptive, moreaccurate and more robust (i.e. effectively deal withdigital diversity). We have tested our approachon problems of hands/face tracking and automatic
stroke detection.
We have noticed that building a skin color model
online for all human skin colors will not only makethe model more complex but also less accurate whenapplied on any particular video. However, a model
built online for a given video initialized by input fromthe user achieves higher performance at no more costthan the initialization.
The correct detection of the skin color in combination
with feature extraction algorithms can be used to
study human gestures. We have shown that uniquefeatures (i.e. corners) and their dynamics acrossThe research leading to these results has received
funding from the European Commissions 7th
Framework Program under grant agreement no238405 (CLARA). Special thanks go to Saskia van
Putten and Rebecca Defina for providing one of thevideos used in the experiments reported in this paper.

References
Adelson, E. H., C. H. Anderson, J. R. Bergen,
P. J. Burt, and J. M. Ogden (1984). Pyramidmethods in image processing. RCA engineer 29(6):33-41.
Bouguet J. Y. (1999). Pyramidal implementationof the lucas-kanade feature tracker: description of
the algorithm. Intel Corporation, Microprocessor
Research Labs, OpenCV Documents, 3.
Bradski, G., and A. Kaehler (2008). Learning
OpenCV: Computer vision with the OpenCV library.
O’Reilly Media.
Kendon, A. (1972). Some relationships between
body motion and speech. Studies in dyadic
communication 7:177.
Kendon, A. (1980). Gesticulation and speech: Two
aspects of the process of utterance. The relationshipof verbal and nonverbal communication 25:
207-227.
Kita, S., I. van Gijn, and H. van der Hulst(1998). Movement phases in signs and co-speech
gestures, and their transcription by human coders.
Gesture and sign language in human-computerinteraction, pp. 23-35.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures
reveal about thought. U of Chicago P.
Shi, J., and C. Tomasi (1993). Good features
to track. IEEE computer society conference on
computer vision and pattern recognition, pp.
593-600.
Wolpert, D. H., and W. G. Macready (1997).
No free lunch theorems for optimization. IEEE
transactions on evolutionary computation 1(1):67-82.
461

Digital Humanities 2012

Towards a Transnational
Multilingual Caribbean
Digital Humanities Lab

is regional as opposed to temporal. For the region,
the construction of a trans-national, polyglot peerreviewed aggregator would fascilitate the task of
discovery and collaboration between Caribbeanists
worldwide.

Gil, Alexander

2. Research & Development

alexgil@virginia.edu
University of Virginia, USA

The Caribbean, broadly understood, encompasses
an archipelago, vast continental regions and a
growing global diaspora. For Caribbeanists, thechallenge has always been to work in many languages
and across a dispersed archive. In recent years,
the Digital Library of the Caribbean (DLoC) has
lead a multi-institutional, multi-national effort todigitize archives dealing with the region. Prominent
Caribbean academic journals have begun their moveto digital formats. Many informal communities havebegun collaborating and engaging in debates insocial networks and personal blogs. In this poster,
I outline in more detail the current challenges andopportunities that the new technologies bring to theacademic life of the region. In particular, I address
the following question: What would a Caribbean
digital lab look like? Drawing from my experience
as a fellow of the Scholars’ Lab and NINES, I argue
that the Caribbean Digital Lab of the future must
be a combination of both. Despite the fact that thetask of digitization and aggregation of vulnerable
Caribbean archives remains the number one priority ,I argue that the region also needs an R&D agenda,
an educational component and an outreach arm indigital humanities.
The poster outlines the four components I see as
crucial for a future Caribbean DH Lab.

1. Aggregation
NINES and 18th Century Connect have recently
united under the banner of an umbrella organization,
ARC, which hopes to welcome many otherorganizations under its purview. The ARC model
provides a set of solutions to three problems in digitalscholarship: a) Bringing together specialized digitalprojects with traditional digital archives under one
rubric, one search box; b) Providing peer-review
credentials to digital formats; and c) Organizing thedigital research of sub-disciplines in the humanities.
A Caribbean Digital Humanities Lab (or series oflabs) could represent the work of Caribbean Studies
at the ARC table. One of the unique contributions ofa Caribbean NINES-like aggregator and digital peerreview operation woulb be the fact that the rulingmetaphor for the subject of study of Caribbeanists
462

Computer programming has the unique distinctionof allowing anyone with a computer, access to theinternet and time to become proficient at it andcontribute new technology to the world. While theresources required to digitize all archives in the
Caribbean will prove to be a major challenge for our
generation, developing new tools and digital projects
appropriate to the needs of the region can be within
the range of a trans-national digital humanities lab.
Research and Development has become a sine-quanone of contemporary digital humanities worldwide.
In order to be true contributors to the advancementof the humanities worldwide, a Caribbean DH Lab
must include an active team of developers anddesigners working on projects that are both pertinent
to the region and of universal application. Given thatthe archives of the region are made vulnerable formany reasons – political, economic, meteorological,
linguistic – I argue that the set of solutions thatoriginal digital projects born out of a Caribbean DH
Lab can offer could provide alternative perspectives
on problems familiar to peers in other regions. In
order to argue my point I will briefly talk about thetechnological challenges of two possible projects: a)A multi-lingual archive of plantation records; and b)
A geo-temporal project tracing the development of
creole languages in the region.

3. Educational Opportunities
A Caribbean DH Lab, as most of its peers, must be
attached to the educational mission of universities
in the region. In order to foster a culture of digital
humanities that can be sustained across generations,the lab must be able to provide opportunities for
emerging scholars to learn and practice digital
humanities at the highest order. Training in digital
humanities skills can also serve as a way for young
scholars in the region to diversify their portfolios andhelp them face the challenges of the global economiesof the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, I
will argue, the Caribbean DH Lab of the future mustsecure funding for pre-doctoral and post-doctoral
fellowships, organize speaker series and seminars
and involve emerging scholars in its projects directly.

4. Outreach
Although our networking technologies have madeit possible for us to collaborate in ways that wereDigital Humanities 2012

unimaginable before, many challenges persist for
multi-institutional and polyglot collaboration to takeplace. In this section I will delineate what thesechallenges are in three categories: funding, language
and politics. I offer a set of tentative solutions that
all coalesce around the idea of outreach. In order for
the Caribbean DH Lab to succeed, I will argue, it
must have a strong and well-informed outreach teamthat can help it get off the ground and sustain itself.
Because of the fragility of government funds in theregion, our lab must be able to negotiate effectively
with private and international sources. Because of thelanguage barriers the outreach team must be able tocommunicate effectively in the major languages of
the region.

NUScholar: Digital
Methods for Educating New
Humanities Scholars
Graff, Ann-Barbara
annbg@nipissingu.ca
Nipissing University, Canada

Lucas, Kristin

kristinl@nipissingu.ca
Nipissing University, Canada

Blustein, Jamesjamie@cs.dal.ca
Dalhousie University, Canada

Gibson, Robinragibson243@community.nipissingu.ca
Nipissing University, Canada

Woods, Sharon

sewoods397@community.nipissingu.ca
Nipissing University, Canada

NUScholar is an authoritative website andadaptive hypermedia learning environment where
undergraduates are introduced to the complex
processes of critical scholarly reading.
If Mark Bernstein is right that ‘The future ofserious writing will lie on the screen’ (Bernstein200): 2), then the future of serious reading is
also on the screen. In this SSHRC-funded projectcalled NUScholar, Drs. Ann-Barbara Graff andKristin Lucas (Nipissing University), Dr. James
Blustein (Dalhousie University), and student
research assistants Robin Gibson and Sharon
Woods (Nipissing University), are asking what
digital media can do to support the acquisitionof foundational academic skills, specifically active
reading, annotating and critical thinking. Our
objectives address the problems and practices ofscholarly readers.
We are operating from two principles: (1) The act ofreading is little understood. (2) Students have no idea
what we are asking them to do when we instruct themto ‘read this poem’.
The activity of reading is a highly complex cognitivetask, involving what Crowder and Wagner (1992:
4) describe as ‘three stupendous achievements’: thedevelopment of spoken language, written language,and literacy. Kneepkens and Zwaan (1994: 126)show that ‘In processing text, readers […] decodeletters, assign meaning to words, parse the syntactic
structure of the sentence, relate different words and463

Digital Humanities 2012sentences, construct a theme for the text and may
infer the objectives of the author. Readers attempt
to construct a coherent mental representation of
the text. In this process, they use their linguisticknowledge (knowledge of words, grammar), andtheir word knowledge (knowledge of what is possible
in reality, cultural knowledge, knowledge of thetheme).’ While empirical studies of the reading ofliterary texts are in their infancy (de Beaugrande1992), what is known is that reading is not simply
a matter of recall, but a ‘complex cognitive andaffective transaction involving text-based, readerbased, and situational factors’ (Goertz et al. 1993: 35).
For humanities’ scholars, the primary task is todetermine how meaning can be attributed to texts(Dixon et al. 1993). Literary texts pose particularchallenges as they rely on allusion, connotation as
well as denotation, verbal and situational irony,metaphor and other figurative tropes, and anawareness of etymology and historical possibility. As
Warwick observes, much digital humanities researchis involved in ‘Digitization projects [which] have
revolutionized our access to resources’ (Warwick
2004: 375). Beyond resources, there are 3-Dgraphical maps of Antony and Cleopatra, Flashanimations like ‘What is Print?’ etc., which speak
to the strengths of new media to visualize text in
new ways. Our work differs from and complements
such digitization projects because – avant la lettre
digital – we use new media to enable the teaching andlearning of core, traditional literary skills.

Drs. Graff, Lucas, and Blustein are developing an
authoritative website (NUScholar) that offers an
adaptive hypermedia learning environment wherestudents will be introduced to the processes ofcritical reading. The website, NUScholar (http://nuscholar.nipissingu.ca), includes instructional web
videos, animations designed to demystify the task ofclose reading of poetry and interviews with writers(http://ccareads.nipissingu.ca/); it will eventually
include an annotated and interactive catalogue ofverse, annotation tools, and an editable glossary; italso brings together many resources and potentiallypoints to other tools and projects. As an adaptive
hypermedia for education, the design allows for thetransfer of the burden to readers/scholars as they
proceed through the site. Eventually, scholars/users
will be able to import texts in a variety of common
formats (.rtf, .pdf, cut-and-paste), to use any of thesefeatures.
We seek to harness the power of digital media todemonstrate strategies of critical reading. The intent
is similar to the ‘writing in plain sight’ exercise at
Dalhousie University http://dalgrad.dal.ca/wh
ips/ ; where students watch someone complete awriting assignment “live” in order to demystify thenotion that lightning bolts and magic are involved inwriting to task or deadline and also Michael Wesch’s‘The Machine is Using Us’ (final version) http://
youtu.be/NLlGopyXT_g where students appreciate
the power of digital media to provide visualizationsof complex tasks.

NUScholar addresses what digital media can do tosupport the acquisition of close and active reading
skills and their cognate, annotation, in part bymodeling a number of strategies and also providing,in the case of annotation, an isomorph to effective
techniques used with paper (Blustein et al 2011:252-259).

References

As to the second point, we accept that students do
not have a reference for the task they are being asked
to perform, i.e., actively read a poem or prose text
to determine ‘how a text means’ in John Ciardi’s
phrase. Critical reading is a complex task that does
not have a single entry point nor only one path tosuccess. Because the acquisition of the requisite skills
is an open problem (in the cognitive sense), readersneed to acquire a wide variety of skills.

Bernstein, M. (2009). Into the Weeds. In M.
Bernstein and D. Greco (eds.), Reading Hypertext.
Watertown: Eastgate, pp. 1-13.

Moreover, as the material encountered becomes
more complex and as the expectations increase as one
advances through a degree, readers must test thoseskills upon which they have come to rely. NUScholar
uses adaptive hypermedia to assist students in their
distilling and acquisition of the skills. In brief, thisposter shows how we are designing the system tosupport traditional literary skill acquisition by using
an hypermedia platform.
464

de Beauregard, R. (1992). Readers Responding
to Literature: Coming to Grips with Reality. In E.
F. Narduccio (ed.), Reader Response to Literature:
The Empirical Dimension. New York: Mouton de
Gruyter, pp. 192-210.

Blustein, J., et al. (2011). Making Sense in the
Margins: A field study of annotation. International
Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital
Libraries (TPDL). Published September 7, 2011.
10.1007/978-3-642-24469-8_27.
Ciardi, J. (1959). How Does a Poem Mean? Boston:
Houghton/Mifflin.
Crowder, R. G., and R. K. Wagner (1992).
The Psychology of Reading: An Introduction, 2ndedition. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Dalhousie University. (2011). Writing in Plain
Site. http://dalgrad.dal.ca/whips . (accessed 24
January 2011).

Digital Humanities 2012

Dixon, P., et al. (1993). The Effects of Formal
Training on Literary Reception. Poetics 23: 471-487.
Goertz, E., et al. (1993). Imagery and Emotional
Response. Poetics 22: 35-49.
Kneepkens, E. W. E. M., and R. A. Zwaan(1993). Emotions and Literary Text Comprehension.
Poetics 23: 125-138.
MOMA(2001).

Whatis

Print.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/projects/2001/whatisaprint/flash.html . (accessed 24

January 2011).

Nipissing University (2012). Canada Council for
the Arts Reading Series. http://ccareads.nipiss
ingu.ca/ . (accessed 8 March 2012).
Warwick, C. (2004). Print Scholarship and Digital
Resources. In S. Schriebman et al. (eds.), A
Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Wesch, M. (2007). The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final
Version). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLl
GopyXT_g . (accessed 24 January 2011).

Latent Semantic Analysis
Tools Available for All
Digital Humanities Projects
in Project Bamboo
Hooper, Wallace Edd

whooper@indiana.edu
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Cowan, Will

wgcowan@indiana.edu
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Jiao, David

djaio@indiana.edu
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Walsh, John A.

jawalsh@indiana.edu
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project ( http://
www.chymistry.org/ ) added a new component to
its website that allows researchers and interested
readers to use the extensive results of its Latent
Semantic Analysis studies of Newton’s alchemical
manuscripts (NSF STS Project #0620868).
The new LSA web component on the Chymistry
website allows researchers to form their own
queries to discover correlated passages acrossthe published corpus. The component will return250-word or 1000-word passages which sharesignificant vocabulary from within a publishedcorpus of 62 manuscripts and over 450,000 wordsof seventeenth-century English, French, and Latin.
At the user’s request, the component will also
draw network graphs that visualize the structureof semantic relations among the passages in the
documents. These network graphs can be examined
in Network Workbench, which was developed at
the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Centerin Indiana University’s School of Library andInformation Science.
The new Chymistry LSA component will also allow
researchers to use regular expressions to form
queries to investigate the relationships between
words and draw concept maps as network graphs.
Unlike many Bayesian topic analysis techniques inwhich the words drop out in favor of topics (Blei et al.,2003), latent semantic analysis keeps the vocabulary
visible and available for direct text analysis.
The new LSA web component on the Chymistry
website currently provides results for the 62465

Digital Humanities 2012manuscripts that have been released in the Chymistry
Project’s digital edition. All 119 manuscripts and an
expanded LSA component will be released in 2012.
Walsh and Hooper presented initial results of this
LSA work with Newton’s alchemical papers and withthe poetry and literary criticism of Algernon Charles
Swinburne at DH 2011. New directions in theircollaboration include undertaking further LSA workthat combines the King James Version of Bible with
Swinburne’s corpus to detect patterns of influenceand identify Swinburne’s extensive borrowing of
language from the King James Bible. Similarly, we
intend to combine the Geneva bible with the corpus
of Newton’s theological and alchemical texts to detect
patterns of influence, allusion, and borrowing or
quoting in Newton’s texts.
Since that presentation, there has been considerable
interest in their LSA methods from other projects andindependent digital humanists.
The Digital Library Program at Indiana University
is a partner institution in Project Bamboo themission of which is to deliver a research environment
for humanities scholars and a corresponding
infrastructure for librarians and technologists
supporting humanities research. Cowan and Jiaoof the IU Digital Library Program have been
involved in current Project Bamboo activities. They
have worked on creating a digital humanities
research environment using the HubZero platform,a collaboration and research platform that was
originally created to serve research communities in
the natural sciences. Cowan and Jiao have built
several digital humanities tools such as a Java based
page-turning tool and a tool that provides topic
modeling analysis of textual contents. Hooper andWalsh from the Chymistry of Isaac Newton projectwith Cowan and Jiao, from the Digital Library
Program, will port the LSA algorithms into a tool on
HubZero.
Both the Chymistry Project and the Swinburne
Project are partners with the IU Digital Library
Program, which provides the technical infrastructure
for both projects. Cowan and Jiao raised thepossibility with Hooper and Walsh of modifying
the code they had developed for those projects andmaking it available as part of Project Bamboo.
Cowan, Jiao, and Hooper argue that every
humanities project will be interpreting and analyzing
entirely unique content and their public enduser websites will likewise have their own uniquedesign constraints. What needs to be provided is aframework that will allow each project to bring its
data sets to a processing interface and submit it,with the full and reasonable expectation that they will
receive standardized outputs that they can process
and exploit in their own design contexts.
466

The Chymistry and Swinburne projects use Perlscripts to extract data streams from TEI/XMLencoded documents, then process the streams in
MATLAB on a supercomputer at Indiana to produce
CSV data that is subsequently imported into MySQL
databases for use with their public websites.
Our collaboration, however, has decided to provide
tools that provide tools that accomplish just thenumerical processing step in MATLAB, so we ask
user projects to submit text data in simple text input
structures and we return wimple and well-defined
CSV data that can be exploited in any manner desiredfor end-user web interfaces or for further numericalor algorithmic processing.
The LSA analysis workflow in our MATLAB programs
contains several components: first the corpus is read
into the system and converted to a term/document
frequency matrix. Terms of very low frequency andof high frequency (user-defined stop words) areremoved. Secondly a TF/IDF (Term Frequency/
Inverse Document Frequency) matrix is calculated
based on the term/document frequency matrix. Then
we apply singular value decomposition (SVD) on
the TF/IDF matrix and create the matrices thatare used to calculate document distances as wellas term/document matrices, which are saved to
CSV files as the standard outputs and returned tousers. Several steps like the SVD calculation and the
distance matrix computations are computationallyexpensive and require high performance computing
resources. Therefore, the MATLAB-based workflow
is located and executed on a cluster of IBM servers
running Red Hat Linux at Indiana University. The
process is invoked and monitored by the HubZero
submit module. The technical details of the LSA
algorithms are thus hidden from the end users.
Digital humanities researchers can utilize our LSA
algorithm in their research without having to worry
about the supercomputing aspect. To use this service,
they only need to preprocess their corpus and provide
them in the simple format that the tool accepts, andpost-process the outputs of the algorithms such as
the document/document distances. We expect sucha tool would leverage the usage of the LSA algorithm
in the digital humanities research, and can serve asa model to expand the application of computingexpensive algorithms in digital humanities.

Digital Humanities 2012

Machine Learning for
Automatic Annotation ofReferences in DH scholarly
papersKim, Young-Min

youngminn.kim@gmail.com
University of Avignon, France- References contain some misspellings,- Entries may be ambiguous (for example, searchingfor papers from ‘Williams Patrick’ in Google
Scholar retrieve several papers: a) ‘Colonial
discourse [...]’ published in 1996, b) ‘Mariage
tsigane […]’ (gipsy wedding) published in 1984,c) ‘A randomized trial of group outpatient visits[…]: the Cooperative Health Care Clinic’ publishedin 1997; we can assume that they correspond todifferent authors with the same name),

Bellot, Patrice- Sometimes, one must refer to other referencesin order to complete them or else references aregrouped together,

Faath, Elodie- References may be located anywhere in papers: inthe body of the text, at the end of the paper and infootnotes.

patrice.bellot@lsis.org
Aix-Marseille University, France
elodie.faath@revues.org
CLEO, Centre for Open Electronic Publishing,FranceDacos, Marin

marin.dacos@revues.org
CLEO, Centre for Open Electronic Publishing,France1. Introduction
OpenEdition ( http://www.openedition.org ) is
composed of three different platforms dedicated toelectronic resources in the humanities and social
sciences, Revues.org (journal and book series),
Hypotheses.org (research notebooks and scholarly
blogs) and Calenda (social sciences calendar).
Revues.org is the oldest French platform of academic
online journals. It now offers more than 300 journals
available in all of the disciplines of the humanities
and social sciences. The online publication is madethrough the conversion of articles into XML TEI( http://www.tei-c.org ) format and then into
XHTML format and allows the viewing of the full text
in web browsers. The bibliographical parts of articles
on Revues.org are rather diverse and complicated.
One main reason of this complexity is the diversityof source disciplines that makes various styles inreference formatting:- References employ different journal stylesheets or
do not follow any stylesheet,- Labeling should be very precise: performance
should be close (or better) those of a ‘humanlabeler’. In case this could not be achieved, thesoftware should provide user with a confidence
score. The quality of a digital library depends
on the quality of metadata that allow field-based
search, citation analysis, cross-linking and so on,- References can be written in different languages,

2. Three new Training Corpora in
DH Fields
In order to prepare a data set for the constructionof a machine learning model (see below), which
automatically estimates reference fields, we adopted
a subset of TEI XML tags and annotated manually
three different corpora according to three difficultylevels:1. Corpus level 1: the references are at the end of
the article under a heading ”References”. Manual
identification and annotation are relatively simpler
than for the two next levels. Considering thediversity, 32 journals are randomly selected and 38
sample articles are taken. Total 715 bibliographic
references were identified and annotated.
2. Corpus level 2: the references are in notes andthey are less formulaic compared to the ones of the
corpus level 1. An important characteristic of the
corpus level 2 is that it contains link informations
between references. And because of the nature ofnote data, the corpus contains both bibliographicaland non-bibliographical notes. We selected 41
journals from a stratified selection and we
extracted 42 articles considering the diversity. We
observed 1147 bibliographical references that weremanually annotated and 385 non-bibliographicalnotes, which did not need any manual annotation.
3. Corpus level 3: the references are in the body ofarticles. The identification and annotation are themost complicated. Even finding the beginning andend of bibliographic parts in a note is difficult. For
example, we may accept a phrase citing a book title
as reference even if its author is not found near by
but in footnote. We selected 42 articles considering
different properties of implicit reference in the
body of the articles. From these selected articles,
we identified and annotated 1043 references.

467

Digital Humanities 2012

The following table shows some examples fromthese three corpora. In total, we annotated3290 bibliographical references by using the tagspresented on Table 1.

sequential data. By definition, a discriminative model
maximizes the conditional distribution of output
given input features. So, any factors dependent only
on input are not considered as modeling factors,
instead they are treated as constant factors to output(Sutton & McCallum 2011). This aspect derives a
key characteristic of CRFs, the ability to include a
lot of input features in modeling. The conditional
distribution of a linear-chain CRF for a set oflabel y given an input x is written as follows. The
multiplication of all these conditional probabilities
for input data is maximized during the iterative
learning process.

Table 1: Tags for annotating references

3. Machine Learning for
Annotation
Most of the free softwares available on the Internet
process pre-identified references against a set ofpredefined patterns. For example, cb2bib (http://
www.molspaces.com/cb2bib/) recognizes reference
styles of the publications of the American Chemical
Society and of Science Direct but does not work onother styles without a costly adaptation. Some othersoftwares employ machine learning and numericalapproaches by opposite to symbolic ones that requirea large set of rules that are very hard to manage
and that are not language independent. Day et al.
(2005) cite the works of a) C.L. Giles et al. for
the CiteSeer system (computer science literature)that achieves a 80% accuracy for author detection
and 40% accuracy for page numbers (1997-1999),b) Seymore et al. that employ Hidden Markov
Models (HMM) that learn generative models over
input sequence and labeled sequence pairs to
extract fields for the headers of computer sciencepapers, c) Peng et al. that use Conditional Random
Fields (CRF) (Lafferty et al. 2001) for labeling andextracting fields from research paper headers andcitations. Other approaches employ discriminativelytrained classifiers (such SVM classifiers). Compared
to HMM and SVM, CRF obtained better tagging
performance (Peng & McCallum 2006). Some papers
propose methods to disambiguate author citations(Han & Wu 2005; Torvik & Smalheiser 2009) or
geographical identifiers (Volz et al. 2007). These‘state of the art’ approaches seem to achieve goodresults but they proceed on limited size collectionsof scientific research papers only and they do notresolve all the difficulties we identified above. We
choose Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) as method
to tackle our problem of bibliographic references
annotation on DH data (Kim et al. 2011). It is a type ofmachine learning technique applied to the labeling of468

4. Experiments
We separately learn a CRF model for each corpus.
Until now, we have conducted various experimentswith the first and second corpora for the automatic
annotation of reference fields. The standard on theeffective local features and appropriate reference
field labels are established during the constructionof CRF model on the first corpus. This standard
is equally applied to the second corpus but in thistime, another automated process is necessary for theselection of target notes that include bibliographicalinformation. Another machine learning technique,Support Vector Machine (Joachims 1999) is used
for this note classification and we propose a
new method, which mixes input, local and globalfeatures to well classify notes into bibliographicalor non-bibliographical categories. The new feature
generation method works well in terms of bothclassification accuracy and reference annotation
accuracy. The features we selected for CRF are listed
in Table 2.

Table 2: Features employed for automatic annotation

A remarkable point is that we separately recognize
authors and even their surname and forename.
In traditional approaches, different authors in areference are annotated as a field. Compared to theDigital Humanities 2012

scientific research reference data used in the workof Peng and McCallum (2006), our corpus level 1
is much more diverse in terms of bibliographicalreference formats. However, we have obtained a
successful result in overall accuracy (90%) especiallyon surname, forename and title fields (92%, 90%, and
86% of precision respectively). They are somewhat
less than the previous work (95% overall accuracy)
but considering the difficulty of our corpus, current
result is very encouraging.
The notes in the corpus level 2 are more difficult
to treat and had not been studied in the previous
works to the best of our knowledge. With our preselection process using a Support Vector Machine(SVM) classifier was effective to finally increase theautomatic annotation result for corpus level 2. For
the comparison, we constructed another CRF modelon all notes without classification. Consequently,
the CRF model learned with the classified notes
using our approach outperforms the other model,
especially on recall of three important fields,
surname, forename, and title as in the following table.
Bold character in the following table means that thecorresponding model outperforms in the field witha statistical significance test (see http://bilbo.hy
potheses.org http://bilbo.hypotheses.org for more
information).

Table 3

5. Conclusion
We have constructed three different corpora ofbibliographical reference in DH field. Then we haveconducted a number of experiments to establish thestandards of processing on the corpora. From thebasic experiments on the first and second corpora,we continue to refine the automatic annotation
via different techniques. Especially we develop an
efficient methodology to incorporate incomplete
external resources such as proper noun list toa CRF model. According to a trial experiment,
the incorporation enhances automatic annotation
performance on proper noun fields with corpus level
1. We will try the same method on the second
corpus. Given that the annotation accuracies were
not so high with the second corpus, we expect amore significance improvement. The integration of
the note classification and annotation steps into a
process is also expected to improve the efficiencyof learning process. One of most important partwill be the treatment of corpus level 3. We are

now developing several approaches to deal with this
corpus.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Google Grant for
Digital Humanities in 2011; and the French Agency
for Scientific Research under CAAS project [ANR2010 CORD 001 02].

References
Day, M.-Y., T.-H. Tsai, C.-L. Sung, C.-W. Lee,S. H. Wu, C. S. Ong, and W. L. Hsu (2005).
A knowledge-based approach to citation extraction.
Information Reuse and Integration. IRI -2005 IEEE
International Conference, pp. 50-55.
Han, H., W. Xu, H. Zha, and C. Lee Giles(2005). A Hierarchical Naive Bayes Mixture Modelfor Name Disambiguation in Author Citations.
Proceedings of SAC’05, ACM.
Joachims, T. (1999). Making large-scale support
vector machine learning practical. Cambridge: MIT
Press, pp. 169-184.
Kim, Y.-M., P. Bellot, E. Faath, and M. Dacos(2011). Automatic annotation of bibliographicalreference in digital humanities books, articles andblogs. Proceedings of the CIKM 2011 BooksOnline11
Workshop.
Lafferty, J., A. McCallum, and F. Pereira(2001). Conditional Random Fields: Probabilistic
Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence
Data. International Conf. on Machine Learning(ICML’01).
Peng, F., and A. McCallum (2006).
Information extraction from research papers using
conditional random fields. Information Processing &Management 42(4): 963-979.
Torvik, V. I., and N. R. Smalheiser (2009).
Author Name Disambiguation in MEDLINE. ACM
Transaction on Knowledge Discovering in Data
3(3).
Volz, R., J. Kleb, and W. Mueller(2007). Towards ontology-based disambiguation ofgeographical identifiers. WWW int. conf., Canada.
Sutton, C., and A. McCallum (2011).
An introduction to conditional random fields.
Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning.
To appear.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.4088(accessed 25 March 2012).

469

Digital Humanities 2012

An Ontology-Based
Iterative Text Processing
Strategy for Detecting andRecognizing Characters inFolktales
Koleva, Nikolina

nikolina.koleva@dfki.de
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence,
DFKI, Germany

Declerck, Thierrydeclerck@dfki.de
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence,
DFKI, Germany

Krieger, Hans-Ulrichkrieger@dfki.de
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence,
DFKI, Germany

1. Introduction
Detecting and marking consistently through afolktale the participants that are playing a rolein the story can help a lot in assigning in an
automatic fashion the typical functions to characters,
as those are for example described by (Propp 1968),
and we equally expect that the Proppian narrative
functions can also be better automatically detected
and marked-up in text, if an accurate recognition of
the main participants in the story has been performed
beforehand. (Lendvai et al. 2010) addresses the issueof semi-automatically assigning Proppian charactersand action types to text segments mainly on the baseof linguistic analysis.
In this poster/demo article, we describe acomplementary approach, which relies first ona knowledge base, in the form of an ontology
formalizing family relationships, which is getting
populated by iterative applications of the ontology
components to a linguistically annotated tale,whereas different natural language expressions
referring to an unique character are marked in theiteratively updated knowledge base using the OWL1
‘sameAs’ property2. We developed a detailed family
ontology3, which is for the time being embedded in asmall folktale ontology that describes the world of the‘Magical Swan Geese’ tale4. The class hierarchy of thisontology is displayed in Figure 1, in the Appendix.
The current focus on the family ontology is guided
by the fact that family relationships play a central
470

role in many tales. Modeling other participants intales is much more difficult, since their behavior very
often do not correspond to the ‘normal’ entities (sofor example a speaking ‘river of milk’, which acts as a‘helper’ in the tale). Nevertheless our approach allows
detecting also such entities as characters.

2. Knowledge-based Reference
Resolution
A problematic issue in processing folktales is thedetection and corresponding annotation of coreferring expressions in text. Folktales are particularin this respect, since people (or characters) are
relatively rarely mentioned by name, but areprevalently introduced by their function ("theKing"), family status (‘the father’) or their mere
existence (‘there lived a woman’). This phenomenon,
together with very vague contextual spatio-temporaldescriptions in text, makes the recognition of coreferring expressions on the basis of mere linguisticfeatures quite cumbersome. This is a reason why wedeveloped the family ontology, in order to support
knowledge-based reference resolution of entities
detected in text. On the basis of this semantic
resource one can store as a specific individual in
the knowledge base each entity of the tales that has
been associated with a particular biological or family
status.
For the purpose of the knowledge-based reference
resolution, we equipped the class hierarchy witha set of inference rules, which are acting in acomplementary fashion to the Protégé built-in Pellet
reasoner5. The rules ensure that instances of theclasses Man and Woman are encoded as instancesof the class Parents, and therefore are identicalto instances of the classes Father and Mother incase enough evidence about the marital or biologicalstatus is given by the text. Different instances of theclass Children are at the same time instances of
the class Siblings, using similar heuristics as for theclass Parents, so that family relationships extracted
from text can be completed by the inference rules,
and made available for the incremental analysis of
the text.
Every class and relation encoded in the ontology
is associated with a label in natural language(in four languages: English, German, Russian andBulgarian)6. The labels serve as the interface between
the ontology and the text processing system, which isin our case the NooJ platform (Siberztein 2003).

Digital Humanities 2012

3. A first Iteration of Text
Processing: Annotation ofNominal Phrases
We process with NooJ the whole tale and markespecially all nominal phrases (NPs), being simple(‘The mother’), coordinated (‘a old man and a old
woman’) or recursive (‘a river of milk flowing inbanks of pudding’) NPs7.
Our textual analysis is further specifying if an NP is
indefinite or definite on the basis of the determiners
used (‘a woman’ – indefinite – vs ‘the mother’– definite –), at least for languages using thiskind of determiners, like English, German, etc.8
A specific property of indefinite nominal phrases
as introducing discourse referents has been widely
discussed in the field of computational semantics
and (von Heusinger 2000) is giving a good overview
of the past discussions. In the special case of tales(Herman 2000) is providing for examples supporting
this view on indefinite nominal phrases, relatingthem to the introduction of characters of tales. Our
actual work with NooJ is implementing some of theviews described in the work of Herman. The first stepof our iterative approach to text analysis is resulting
in the linguistic annotation of the folktale in terms ofindefinite and definite NPs.

4. A second Iteration: Storingcore Elements of indefinite NPs
as candidate Characters in the
Knowledge Base
The next iteration is dealing then with the applicationof the knowledge base to the indefinite NPs in the
text. The main elements of the indefinite NPs – thenouns – are extracted and compared with the labelsof the classes in the ontology. So the noun ‘daughter’within an indefinite NP in the tale is matching thelabel of the class Daughter of the family ontology. As
a consequence, this noun is stored in the knowledge
base as a potential character of the tale and gets theID ‘ch3’ (since before this the program has identified‘man’ and ‘wife’ as the first potential charactersoccurring in the text), marking it as an individual of
the class Daughter. This procedure is applied to all
indefinite NPs occurring in the tale.

5. A third Iteration: Applying
Inference Rules to the stored
candidate Characters‘ch3’ (‘daughter’) is being automatically encoded in
the ontology as an instance of the classes Girl andSister, while the relationships to the brother isalso automatically inferred. These inferences can be
draw also du to the fact that after the first iteration,
it appeared that the tale is mentioning only one
young female person and only one young person.
This iteration offers thus also a kind of consolidationof the results of the preceding ontology population
procedure.

6. A fourth Iteration: Merging thestored Characters with the core
Elements of definite NPs
In Figure 2 in the Appendix, the reader can see that
our approach manage to map the ‘ch3’ (resulting
from the indefinite NP ‘their daughter’) withoccurrences of the string ‘girl’ and ‘sister’ occurringin definite NPs elsewhere in the text. This step is forsure benefiting from the results of the application of
the inference rules described in Section 4. We apply
further a filtering procedure: candidate charactersthat are mentioned only once in the text (not being
matched to the content of definite NPs, for example,
or not being involved as agent in an event) aredeleted from the knowledge base. On this basis we
can eliminate the string ‘a handkerchief’ from the listof potential characters (as an indefinite NPs), but wecan keep the string ‘an apple tree’ and consolidate thecore element ‘apple tree’ as a character of the tale,since it occurs also in the context of a definite NP, and
it is involved in an agentive action (speaking).

7. Conclusion
We demonstrate the potential benefits of the
combined use of an ontology, inference rules andtextual analysis for identifying characters in therelatively small (and closed) world of a folktale. While
first results of our on-going work are promising, we
still have to apply the approach to more tales, in otherlanguages, and to evaluate our approach. We plan touse for this purpose the UMIREC Corpus9.
Acknowledgements
The work reported in this paper has been partly
supported by the R&D project ‘Monnet’, which is
co-funded by the European Union under Grant No.
248458.
Appendix

We apply then the inference rules described abovein Section 2 to the candidate characters stored in
the knowledge base. Just to give a simple example:
471

Digital Humanities 2012

Figure 2: The knowledge base after round4: ‘ch3’ (Daughter)has been associated (Same individuals) with occurences of‘girl’ and ‘sister’, as those has been identified in the phrases
numbered 12, 21, 35, 85 and 91 in ur NooJ XML annotation

References
Geist, L. (2008). Specificity as referential
anchoring: evidence from Russian. Proceedings of
SuB12, Oslo: ILOS 2008, 151-164.
Herman, D. (2000). Pragmatic constraints
on narrative processing: Actants and anaphoraresolution in a corpus of North Carolina ghost stories.
Journal of Pragmatics 32(7): 959-1001.
Lendvai, P., T. Váradi, S. Darányi, and T.
Declerck (2010). Assignment of Character andAction Types in Folk Tales. Proceedings of the NooJ
2010 Conference.

Figure 1: Screen shot of the Ontology

McCrae, J., L. Aguado-de-Cea, P. Buitelaar,
P. Cimiano, T. Declerck, A. Gomez-Perez, J.
Gracia, L. Hollink, E. Montiel-Ponsoda, and
D. Spohr (2012). Interchanging lexical resources on
the Semantic Web. Journal on Language Resources
and Evaluation (in Press).
Propp, V. J. (1968). Morphology of the folktale.
Austin: U of Texas P.
Silberztein, M. (2003). Nooj Manual. http://www.nooj4nlp.net .
Thompson, S. (1955). Motif-index of folkliterature: A classification of narrative elements
in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, medievalromances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, andlocal legends. Revised and enlarged edition.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955-58
Tuffield, M. M., D. E. Millard, and N.
R. Shadbolt (2006). Ontological Approaches to472

Digital Humanities 2012

Modelling Narrative. 2nd AKT DTA Symposium,
January 2006, AKT, Aberdeen University.
Uther, H.-J. (2004). The Types of International
Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography.
Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith
Thompson. FF Communications no. 284-286.
Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004.
Zöllner-Weber, A. (2008). Noctua literaria : acomputer-aided approach for the formal descriptionof literary characters using an ontology. Ph.D.
Thesis, Bielefeld University.
Notes

Integrated multilingual
access to diverse Japanesehumanities digital archives
by dynamically linking data
Kuyama, Takeo

is017080@ed.ritsumei.ac.jp
Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Batjargal, Biligsaikhanbiligsaikhan@gmail.com
Ritsumeikan University, Japan

1. OWL (Web Ontology Language) is a formal representation
language, which is nowadays widely used for describing
ontologies. OWL is a W3C standard. See http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/Tutorials for introdu
ction material .

Kimura, Fuminori

2. The ‘owl:sameAs’ property used in OWL knowledge bases
offers a formal way for stating that various expressions(represented by various URIs) are referring to an identicalperson (or entity).

amaeda@is.ritsumei.ac.jp
Ritsumeikan University, Japan

3. The ontology has been encoded using the Protégé editor:
http://protege.stanford.edu
4. An online English version of this Russian tale is available
at: http://www.fdi.ucm.es/profesor/fpeinado/projects/kiids/apps/protopropp/swan-geese.html .
We are currently extending the coverage of the ontology,
behind its family relationships component, integrating forexample elements belonging to the description of characters ofnarratives, as those are in detail described in (Zöllner-Weber2008).
5. We use this reasoner since it is incorporated in the Protégé
ontology editor, which we selected for designing our ontology.
More details about Pellet are given at: http://clarkparsia.com/pellet/
6. The availability of the ontology class labels in 4 languages
is reflecting our additional aim in providing for multilingual
ontology resources for ontology-based text mining or
information extraction procedures applied to folktales invarious languages. In this our effort is complementary to
two use cases (on the financial domain and eGovernment)
defined in the European R&D project ‘Monnet’ (Multilingual
Ontologies for Networked Ontologies, see www.monnetproject.eu (www.monnet-project.eu) ).
7. It is important to note that in the actual version of the system
only referential expressions are considered. In a next version,
the reference resolution work will be extended to all kind of
pronominal expressions.
8. For languages not having determiners in their set of categories,
like Russian, we are investigating the detection of otherlinguistic features that can mark indefiniteness, as those aredescribed for example in (Geist 2008).
9. See http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/57507 .

fkimura@is.ritsumei.ac.jp
Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Maeda, Akira

1. Introcuction
This poster provides a summary of our ongoingproject for providing integrated access to Japanesemultiple digital libraries, archives, and museums.
The main goal to construct a federated access system
for Japanese humanities databases, which searches
multiple databases in parallel and provides onthe-fly integration of the results, has required thesystem to deal with heterogeneous metadata schemas
in various formats. Aggregation and integration of
the retrieved results in English and Japanese arecomplicated if a search needs to be performed frommultilingual sources. Ukiyo-e, Japanese traditional
woodblock printing, is known worldwide as one of
the fine arts of the Edo period (1603-1868). Many
museums and organizations in Japan as well as inwestern countries hold numerous Ukiyo-e prints intheir collections. As a result of worldwide digitization
over the last decade, many cultural institutions
including libraries, archives, and museums started
to expose digitized images of Ukiyo-e prints on theInternet. How to find the necessary information
effectively from multiple databases is becoming anessential issue for users. In other words, users needan efficient way of searching multiple databases,
especially when it is getting more difficult to know
which museum has a particular Ukiyo-e print.
Thus, federated search of multiple Ukiyo-e databases
scattered around the world is a feature expectedby humanities researchers of Japanese culture. This
poster proposes a method of integrated multilingual473

Digital Humanities 2012

access to heterogeneous Ukiyo-e databases for
improving the search efficiency.

2. Related research
In LODAC (Linked Open Data for Academia)
Museum, which is a part of Lod.ac project, Kamura etal. (2011) aimed to connect Japanese museums using
Linked Open Data (LOD). The LODAC Museum has
an online system1, which can search and browse
various data of Japanese museums in Japanese using
the concept of Linked Data2. In a similar research of
the eCultura project, Cornejo et al. (2010) introduced
a set of services and applications to access andintegrate diverse web-based contents of the cultural
domain.

Figure 1: Conceptual architecture of afederated searching system for Ukiyo-e prints

However, we propose a different approach, which
has the following three differentiations. First,
instead of collecting data from each database, wecreate links from the search results dynamically.
Second, we access not only Japanese databases but
multilingual databases from all over the world. Third
differentiation is to use authority data for listing
related items. We apply our approach to the federated
search system for Ukiyo-e databases that we aredeveloping.

3. Proposed approach
3.1. Federated searching system
We are developing a prototype federated searchingsystem for Ukiyo-e prints, which retrieves multiple
and heterogeneous back-end databases (Batjargal etal. 2011). In the proposed system, remote databases
can be searched and retrieved simultaneously via thefederated search protocols such as Search/Retrieve
Web service (SRW), Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU),
etc. SRU servers return a result set represented in
XML, when a search request is received. In addition,
web databases are accessible using ‘web/screenscraping’ techniques that process a list of search
results by reading and extracting data from HTML. At
present, our proposed system is capable of retrieving
the collections of the Library of Congress (approx.
2,740 Ukiyo-e prints), the National Diet Library(NDL) of Japan (approx. 10,000 Ukiyo-e prints),
the British Museum (approx. 15,000 Ukiyo-e prints),
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (approx. 57,000
Ukiyo-e prints), the Victoria and Albert Museum(approx. 38,000 Ukiyo-e prints), and the Ukiyo-e
database of the Art Research Center of Ritsumeikan
University (approx. 12,500 Ukiyo-e prints). Figure
1 shows the conceptual architecture of the existingfederated searching system for Ukiyo-e databases.
Figure 2 shows the screenshot of sample search
results.
474

Figure 2: Sample search results

3.2. Utilizing Linked Data
This section discusses our achievements that utilize
Linked Data to providing integrated access tomultilingual Ukiyo-e prints from all over the world.
Linked Data is a paradigm of constructing structured
data, which can be read automatically by computers.
Linked Data consists of the interlinked data sets, e.g.
have relationships between resources. Each resourceis identified by a unique URI (Uniform Resource
Identifier), and represented in RDF (Resource
Description Framework) format. RDF is a data
model, in which any resource can be represented
by a set of property and value pairs that makestatements about that resource. There are threereasons of using Linked Data in our approach.
Firstly, Linked Data could be used to link related
data in various databases. Taking advantages ofa simple model of RDF, we could create various
links by combining various RDF data. Secondly,
besides linking related data, Linked Data could

Digital Humanities 2012enable accessing to diverse databases easily. Prior
to Linked Data, users were usually accessing eachdatabase one-by-one. However, by using the linksof related data, users would be able to access torelated data in multiple databases with less trouble.
Thirdly, Linked Data could help users to discoversome further relationships between individual data.
We utilize the name authorities and subject headings
of NDL of Japan, i.e., Web NDL Authorities3, forobtaining data in RDF. In Web NDL Authorities,name authorities and subject headings can besearched via SPARQL (Simple Protocol and RDF
Query Language), which is an RDF query language
for searching and manipulating data in RDF format.
An authority data for a heading (e.g. personalname, subject, etc.) contains aliases and synonymsof the heading, and information showing thereason for being selected as the heading. In our
approach, we use the authority data for identifying
a particular person from different representationsof the personal name in different databases. The
subject heading also distinguishes words that havesame representations but different meanings. In
an example of authority data as shown in Figure
3, the heading ‘Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616’
has three different representations in Japanese. An
authority data of NDL of Japan contains personalnames, family names, corporate names, place names,
uniform titles, and general subjects for a certain
heading. At present, we utilize only personal names
and general subjects in our approach.

(5). In general, the user will be able to access to otherdata easily by using the authority data of the aliases.

Figure 4: Outline of the proposed system

For instance, as shown in Figure 5, if a user
searches using a query ‘Hiroshige Utagawa’, thenour system finds the aliases ‘Hiroshige Ando’ and‘Hiroshige Ichiryusai’ by using an authority data of‘Hiroshige Utagawa’. Using the aliases of ‘Hiroshige
Utagawa’ (e.g. ‘Hiroshige Ando’ and ‘Hiroshige
Ichiryusai’) our system will show further results.

Figure 5: An example of integrated accessFigure 3: An example of an authority data

3.3. The proposed approach in action
In this section, we explain about the proposedsystem that aims to realize integrated multilingual
access to Ukiyo-e prints in the world. Outline ofthe proposed system is shown in Figure 4. At first,
in the step ‘Search (1)’, our system acquires thesearch results when a user performs a search in afederated searching system. Then in the step ‘Select(2)’, the system extracts the appropriate authority
data for a certain record. In the step (3), the systemfinds the variants or aliases for that authority data
by using SPARQL. After that, the system searches
diverse databases by using the variants or aliases
as queries. Finally, the system shows the refined
retrieved results (4) with the links for further search

Furthermore, some authority data in Web NDL
Authorities has a link to Library of Congress Subject
Heading (LCSH). Therefore our system can also
provide cross-language access between Japanese andEnglish as shown in Figure 6. Using a link from NDL
Subject Headings (NDLSH), the proposed system
can generate further links. In this way, users will
be able to access to more records with ‘Hashirae’,‘Pillar Prints’ and ‘Ukiyo-e’ for a given query input‘ukiyo-e’ by generating the links for ‘Ukiyoe’ by using
LCSH. Even if the user has no knowledge about theterm ‘Hashirae’, he or she can access them easily andefficiently.

Figure 6: An example of multilingual
access using Subject Headings475

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4. Evaluation of the system
In this section, we discuss our preliminary evaluationof the proposed system. In order to evaluate theusefulness of the system, we calculated the accuracyof the aliases obtained by the proposed system bymanually checking whether the records retrieved
using the aliases are actually about the same person
as the original query (Figure 7). Table 1 shows theresults of 6,923 retrieved records for several Ukiyo-e
painters. The proposed system achieved the accuracy
rate of 99.89% for the aliases of Ukiyo-e painters withfull names. The accuracy rate drops to 89.91% for thealiases that consist of either first name or last name of
Ukiyo-e painters, because of increased ambiguity inshort strings. The overall accuracy rate was 95.45%,
which should be enough for most purposes.

Figure 7: Evaluation process of the proposed system
Type of alias

Number of the Number of the Accuracy rate
records
records of thesame person

Full name

3,840

3,836

0.9989Either firstname or last
name

3,083

2,772

0.8991

Total

6,923

6,608

0.9545

Table 1: The results of the evaluation

5. Summary
In this poster, we proposed a technique using Linked
Data in order to realize multilingual integrated accessto multiple digital archives. One of the uniquefeatures of our proposed approach is that we utilize
authority data to deal with the problem of different
representation of data in different databases, aswell as to generate cross-language links between
databases. We believe such a system will help users
to find new knowledge, and will also facilitate new
directions in humanities research. Our future work
include extending our system to other humanities
digital archives, and user evaluation of the prototype
system.
Funding
This work was supported in part by MEXT
Grant-in-Aid for Strategic Formation of Research
Infrastructure for Private University ‘Sharing of
Research Resources by Digitization and Utilizationof Art and Cultural Materials’ [Grant Number:
S0991041].
476

Reference
Batjargal, B., F. Kimura, and A. Maeda (2011).
Metadata-related Challenges for Realizing Federated
Searching System for Japanese Humanities
Databases. Proceedings of the 11th International
Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata
Applications. The Hague, Netherlands, September
2011, pp.80-85.
Kamura, T., F. Kato, I. Ohmukai, H. Takeda,
T. Takahashi, and H. Ueda (2011). Study
support and integration of cultural information
resources with Linked Data. Proceedings of theSecond International Conference on Culture andComputing. Kyoto, Japan, October 2011, pp. 177-178.
Cornejo, C. M., I. Ruiz-Rube, and J. M.
Dodero (2010). eCultura, a semantically-enrichedweb-based approach to manage cultural content.
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conferenceon Information Reuse and Integration, IRI 2010. Las
Vegas, NV, August 2010, pp. 126-131.
Notes
1. http://lod.ac/
2. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.htm
l http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
3. http://id.ndl.go.jp/auth/ndla

Digital Humanities 2012

Linguistic concepts
described with Media Query
Language for automatedannotation
Lenkiewicz, Anna

anna.lenkiewicz@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

detect certain human behavior in a recording andannotate it automatically. However, usage of thoserecognizers is rather complex and their output
is limited to detecting occurrences of predefined
events without assigning any semantics. They also
work independently from one another delivering
annotations according to their specification, likefor example hand movement or specific speechcharacteristics, which later need to be manually
analyzed by the researchers in order to find any
dependencies between different features.

Lis, Magdalena

Magdalena@hum.ku.dk
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Lenkiewicz, Przemyslaw

przemek.lenkiewicz@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

1. Introduction
Human spoken communication is multimodal,
i.e. it encompasses both speech and gesture.
Acoustic properties of voice, body movements, facial
expression, etc. are an inherent and meaningful partof spoken interaction; they can provide attitudinal,
grammatical and semantic information. In the
recent years interest in audio-visual corpora has
been rising rapidly as they enable investigationof different communicative modalities and provide
more holistic view on communication (Kipp et al.
2009). Moreover, for some languages such corpora
are the only available resource, as is the case forendangered languages for which no written resources
exist.
However, annotation of audio-video corpora isenormously time-consuming. For example, toannotate gestures researchers need to view thevideo-recordings multiple times frame-by-frame orin slow motion. It can take up to 100 hours tomanually annotate one hour of the recording (Aueret al. 2010). This leads to a shortage of largescale annotated corpora which hampers analysis andmakes generalizations impossible. There is a need forautomatic annotation tools which will make working
with multimodal corpora more efficient and enablecommunication researchers to focus more on theanalysis of data than on the annotation of material.
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
and two Fraunhofer Institutes are working
together on developing advanced audio andvideo processing algorithms, called recognizers(Lenkiewicz et al. 2011), which are able to

Figure 1: The general structure of the Media Query Language

The core of the work described in this paper is thedevelopment of a MQL, which can take advantageof the capabilities of the recognizers and allow
expressing complex linguistic concepts in an intuitive
manner.

2. Media Query Language
In the current phase of development general
structure of the language is defined (Figure 1).
The language contains three integrated components:
patterns, actions and libraries.

2.1. Patterns
As a first step in media annotation using MQL
human behavior would be decomposed to a single
meaningful movement, gesture or speech element
and saved for future reuse in form of a pattern
as presented in Level 1 of Figure 1. A pattern forthe purpose of this work is defined as a templateor model, which can be used to save elements ofhuman behavior decoded from media file under ameaningful name. It is the primary element createdusing MQL and it is the base for future action
creation. Pattern provides a sort of architectural
outline that may be reused in order to speed up the
annotation process by applying search-by-example.
As a first step in pattern creation the corpora will beanalyzed by recognizers and by a researcher using
477

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specifically for this purpose designed active device
application, which simplifies new pattern creation
by marking interesting parts of a recording andincluding them in the MQL code (Figure 2). All
solutions will be integrated with ELAN (Brugman &Russel 2004) a professional tool for the creation ofcomplex annotations on video and audio resources.

Figure 2: Example of pattern creation using active
device as input collector. A to B – start and end point
for hand movement. Red square – field determining
tolerance in pattern matching in future search

The MQL language will be programmed in order to
execute specific recognizers, depending on the natureof the request from the user and using recognizers’
specification. The output of the recognizers will
be collected and joined in sets of characteristic
human behaviors, like for example when, which
and how a given hand is moving, including
information about direction (left, right, up, down)
and speed. At the same time another recognizer candeliver information about speech characterization,
like utterance boundaries, word separation or
pitch contour. Recognizers will be therefore used
to retrieve numerical description of the features
mentioned above. The language will serve as a tool,
which helps to convert the code received from therecognizers into patterns expressing human behavior
in a language similar to natural. An example of a codefragment describing a pattern in MQL is presented in
Figure 3.

2.2. Libraries
In order to simplify the feature annotation process
and assure that already created patterns can bereused, each pattern created by the user needs tobe added to a pattern library. Meaningful name anddescription needs to be given. MQL allows users toname the patterns and actions in a not imposed way.
Formulation of the query is also free, as long as it will
be in conformity with the language syntax and will
include keywords and pattern names. An example ofsuch library can be a set of patterns describing hand
movement patterns like hands overlapping, hands
rising, one hand movement with specific speed, etc.
It is assumed that a pattern library will be dedicatedto single actions occurrences. Moreover, it is planned
that the system would inform the user whenevera currently created pattern already exists under
different name and in which place of the hierarchy.
The main goal of this functionality is the creation ofwell-developed pattern libraries, which in the future
can limit the need for new pattern creation. With
proper libraries available for the end-users a lot of
media annotation work can be carried out using only
already existing patterns. Prototype of such a libraryis shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Example of a library defined in MQL code

2.3. Actions
The second level of the language will be dedicated toaction creation and file annotation. It is called theexecuting phase of programming with MQL. On thislevel the user will be able to combine patterns into
actions.

Figure 3: Example of a pattern defined in MQL code

478

Action in MQL is defined as a set of predefinedpatterns (human movements, gestures or speechelements) composed together. Advancement of asingle pattern to an action is also possible. Actions
may be composed of patterns that may require
execution of more than one recognizer in order todetect features of interest. An example of a MQL codefragment describing an action is presented in Figure5.

Digital Humanities 2012

References

Figure 5: Example of an action defined in MQL code

A good example to illustrate the concept of action isannotation of utterance type. In signaling whether
an utterance is a statement, a question or acommand, different communicative behaviors (e.g.
both speech prosodic cues and face expression) canwork together. With MQL researchers will be able
to aggregate such acoustic and gestural patterns
together and save them in the form of an action
in an action library according to the same rules
as apply to pattern library creation. Thanks to thissolution the decision about event classification into
specific human behavior and creation of annotation
can be taken by researchers rather than an automatic
system. Work of the recognizers can be limited todetecting audio and body movement as detailed as
possible.

3. Conclusions and future work
Thanks to the proposed MQL solution, together withthe recognizers, the major problem of researchers,
which is the time needed to manually annotate
data, will decrease significantly. The expertise of theresearchers will be used better by transferring theirfocus from highly laborious basic feature annotation
to adding meaning to retrieved data and semantics to
MQL language components.

Auer, E., P. Wittenburg, H. Sloetjes, O.
Schreer, S. Masneri, D. Schneider, and S.
Tschöpel (2010). Automatic annotation of media
field recordings. In C. Sporleder and K. Zervanou(eds.), Proceedings of the ECAI 2010 Workshop on
Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social
Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH 2010). Lisbon:
University de Lisbon, pp. 31-34.
Brugman, H., and A. Russel (2004). Annotating
multi-media / multimodal resources with ELAN
Proceedings of 4th International Conference on
Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004).
Lisbon, pp. 2065-2068.
Kipp, M., J.-C. Martin,P. Paggio, and F.
K. J. Heylen, ed. (2009). Multimodal Corpora:
From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems andApplications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
5509. London: Springer.
Lenkiewicz, P., P. Wittenburg, O. Schreer, S.
Masneri, D. Schneider, and S. Tschöpel (2011).
Application of audio and video processing methods
for language research. Proceedings of the conference
Supporting Digital Humanities 2011 (SDH 2011),
Copenhagen, Denmark, November 17-18, 2011.

Using MQL in the annotation process is going tosignificantly change the way in which the annotation
work is carried out and how it can be reused. Using
common ways to describe meaningful features andcreating reusable libraries will contribute to creationof the interoperability standards.
The feedback on the current version of MQL
received from researchers is encouraging. Flexibility
and sufficient expressiveness of complex linguistic
concepts is seen as a great advantage.
In the future work the problems of semantic
gap coverage and interoperability standards will
be tackled thanks to the possibility of expressing
complex linguistic concepts using MQL.
Acknowledgment
The research leading to these results has received
funding from the European Commission’s 7th
Framework Program under grant agreement n°
238405 (CLARA).

479

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Virtual Reproduction ofGion Festival Yamahoko
ParadeLi, Liang

liliang@fc.ritsumei.ac.jp
Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Choi, Woong

wchoi@ice.gunma-ct.ac.jp
Gunma National College of Technology, Japan

acoustics of the floats, crews, and spectators, withina virtual platform of ‘Virtual Kyoto’ (Yano et al.
2007). In current step, four well-known floats (Funehoko, Naginata-hoko, Kanko-hoko, and Kitakannonyama) out of thirty-two floats were included in thisvirtual parade. We also reproduced the motion of fourtypes of crews of Fune-hoko (Hikikata, Ondotori,
Kurumakata, Hayashikata) using motion capture
technique. This work contributes to the research ofdigital museum and provides a platform that allows
the users to virtually experience the atmosphere of
Yamahoko Parade in Kyoto Gion Festival.

Nishiura, Takanobu

2. Virtual Yamahoko Parade

Yano, Keiji

We construct the virtual Yamahoko Parade using
Vizard software. Vizard enables us to integrate andrender CG models, animations, and sounds in a
virtual space with real time interaction (Figure 1).

nishiura@is.ritsumei.ac.jp
Ritsumeikan University, Japan
yano@lt.ritsumei.ac.jp
Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Hachimura, Kozaburohachimura@media.ritsumei.ac.jp
Ritsumeikan University, Japan

1. Introduction
Originated from Heian period (794-1185), Gion
Festival, which has been registered in the list of‘Intangible Heritage of Humanity’ by UNESCO, is
one of the most famous festivals in Japan. Every
year on July 17, the festival culminates in a paradeof yamahoko, floats known as ‘moving museums’
because of their elaborate decorations with centuriesold tapestries, and wooden and metal ornaments.
The festival is held by the Yasaka Shrine whose
parishioners parade 32 floats to represents eachself-governing parish. Approximately 150 thousands
spectators from all around the world gather to see theparade every year.
With the development of computer graphics andvirtual reality technologies, extensive researches
have been carried out on digital cultural heritage.
For decades, tangible cultural heritage contents
including historical crafts, archaeological sites, andhistorical buildings have been digitally archived.
Recently, digital archiving the intangible culture
heritage contents, such as traditional festivals
and behaviors of participants in cultural events
have attracted more and more attention (Gandy
et al. 2005; Magnenat-Thalmann et al. 2007;
Papagiannakis et al. 2007).
In this research, we try to virtually reproduce
Yamahoko Parade in Kyoto Gion Festival. We
generated a content that combines motion and
480

Figure 1: Construction of virtual Yamahoko Parade

Virtual Kyoto
A model of Shijo Street, one of the city’s main streets,
is reconstructed as the Virtual Kyoto platform forthe virtual Yamahoko Parade. Based on MAP CUBE
data, the textures of street and building models in
Virtual Kyoto are made by capturing photos of thereal objects. The model of Shijo Street is transformed
into VRML format and imported to Vizard (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Shijo Street in Virtual Kyoto

Crowd Simulation of Spectators

Digital Humanities 2012

Crowd simulation of spectators is an importantelement for regenerating the atmosphere of theevent. In this work, we arranged about 730 characterson both sides of Shijo Street in Virtual Kyoto (Figure
3).

control the float’s directions; and Hayashikata whoplay instruments on the platform of the float.
We created CG models of the crews using 3ds max
and transformed them into Cal3D format to import
to Vizard (Figure 5). The textures of their costumes
were obtained from the real costumes.

Figure 3: Crowd simulation of spectators

Three types of character models have been created:high polygon (about 8600 polygons), medium
polygon (about 2800 polygons) and low polygon(about 1100 polygons) to build the real time virtual
Yamahoko Parade. To make the crowd with realistic
behavior, we add basic motions of talking, listening,
shouting, and clapping hands to the models.

Figure 5: CG models of Fune-hoko crews

Furthermore, since character animation of thesecrews is crucial for regenerating realistic movementsof the parade, we use motion capture technique toreproduce the unique motions of the crews (Figure
6).

CG Floats of Yamahoko Parade
Four CG floats of Naginata-hoko, Kanko-hoko, Funehoko, and Kitakannon-yama were included in thisvirtual parade (Figure 4).

Figure 4: CG models of floats

The models have been created by laser-scanningdetailed miniatures of the real floats, as well as
surveying the floats’ drawings. The textures of thefloats are made by capturing photos of the floats
during the festival.
Models and Animations of Parade Crews
The Virtual Parade includes four kinds of paradecrews: Hikikata who pull the float; Ondotori who
lead the parade with Japanese fans; Kurumakata who

Figure 6: Motion capture of Fune-hoko crews

Acoustics of the Parade
We recorded the music of the parade played withthe traditional instruments of drum, flute and bellby using multi-point measurement technique (Figure7). Besides that, we also captured the sounds ofambient noise made by the floats, crews, and crowds.

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The collected sounds were integrated and imported
to Vizard.

Figure 9: Screenshots of Virtual Yamahoko Parade

Figure 7: Recording acoustics

Demonstration of Virtual Yamahoko Parade
The virtual Yamahoko Parade can be operated in
3D with high fidelity sounds using an immersive
virtual environment system (Figure 8). Users caninteractively control the viewing position and angle inthe virtual world at real time with a gamepad. Sample
screenshots captured under 2D mode are illustrated
in Figure 9.

Our future works include improving crowd
simulation by making more realistic crowd behaviors
and creating more Japanese character models;enriching the movements of the floats and the crews;
adding more float models to the virtual parade.
Furthermore, we are trying to build a virtual
Yamahoko Parade experiencing system by which
the users can also experience the vibration as
they are riding on the virtual float. We collected
the acceleration data of the float with acceleration
sensors during the real parade and experimentally
reproduced the vibration using a vibration platform.
An immersive system which integrates interactive CG
animation, high fidelity sound, and realistic vibrationis under construction.
Fundings
This research has been partially supported by the
Digital Museum Project in the Ministry of Education,
Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan.
The authors thank the Gion Festival Fune-hoko
Preservation Association for the collaboration.

References
Figure 8: Virtual Yamahoko Paradein an im-mersive virtual environment

3. Conclusion and Future Works
We virtually reproduced an intangible cultural
material of Yamahoko Parade using 3D computer
graphics and virtual reality technologies. We received
positive feedbacks from the visitors in several
exhibitions during which we demonstrated thevirtual Yamahoko Parade.

Gandy, M., S. Robertson, W. Price,and J.
Bailey (2005). The Design of a
Performance Simulation System for Virtual Reality.
In Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction
International 2005 . Las Vegas.
Magnenat-Thalmann, N., N. Foni, G.
Papagiannakis, and N. Cadi-Yazli (2007). RealTime Animation and Illumination in Ancient Roman
Sites. The International Journal of Virtual Reality
6(1): 11-24.
Papagiannakis, G., and N. MagnenatThalmann (2007). Mobile Augmented Heritage:
Enabling Human Life in Ancient Pompeii. The
International Journal of Architectural Computing 2:395-415.

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Yano, K., T. Nakaya, and Y. Isoda (2007).
Virtual Kyoto: Exploring the Past, Present and Futureof Kyoto. Kyoto: Nakanishiya.

Complex entity
management through
EATS: the case of the
Gascon Rolls Project
Litta Modignani Picozzi, Eleonora
eleonora.litta@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Norrish, Jamie

jamie@artefact.org.nz
King’s College London, UK

Monteiro Vieira, Jose Migueljose.m.vieira@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Managing entities like people, places and subjects
across a large corpus of textual documents canbe complicated. While the TEI guidelines offer asound basis for the encoding of a great variety
of textual material, there does not seem to be a
general agreement on how to manage informationthat goes beyond the text, like entity information andrelationships between entities.
At the Department of Digital Humanities atKing’s College London, past solutions for entity
management have included the implementation of
the following:- Simple XML authority files that contain basic
information about all the entities in the corpus;- EAC files, where a file is created for each entity andlinked from the texts using IDs;
- Bespoke databases, that are very tied to a specificproject and are not designed to be reusable;- RDF/OWL ontologies.1
But all of these seemed either to be too simplisticand hard to maintain, or too complicated for therequirements we had in the Gascon Rolls project.2
In this abstract we will demonstrate how wesuccessfully applied the entity management tool
EATS (Entity Authority Tool Set),3 in the context
of this project, to successfully manage entity
information.
The Gascon Rolls Project (1317-1468) is an
AHRC-funded collaborative venture between the
Universities of Oxford and Liverpool, and theDepartment of Digital Humanities at King’s College,
London. It began in October 2008, and is due to end
in December 2011.
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The main aim is to make the unpublished records ofthe English Government of the Duchy of Aquitaine(1154-1453)4 available to everyone, both in electronic
and printed forms.
The corpus of the Gascon Rolls consists of one
hundred and twelve rolls containing up to 67
membranes each containing enrolments by the
English royal Chancery of letters, writs, mandates,
confirmations, inspeximuses, and other documents
issued by, and in the name of, the Plantagenet andLancastrian king-dukes for their Gascon lands andsubjects. The rolls contain a large set of information
about people and places, in particular, that need to be
harvested in order to offer sophisticated indexes andadvanced search functions which can give a different
research experience to the scholar approaching theonline resource. At the time of writing there are 4381
people entities and 2842 place entities in EATS, andthere is no issue with having many thousands more.
By comparison, the EATS installation at the New
Zealand Electronic Text Centre contains almost ahundred thousand entities, drawn from thousands ofelectronic texts.5
The open access online resource offers imagesof all the unpublished Gascon Rolls (1317-1468),
an edition, in calendar (summary) form, indexesof person, places and subjects mentioned, andadvanced search features.
The calendar editing framework is based largely on
what has been previously developed,6 7 for the Fine
Rolls of Henry III project.8 It uses a customised
subset of the TEI P5 guidelines;9 these have been
adapted to suit the particular needs of the structuralvariety presented by the Gascon Rolls.
Calendars are encoded directly in XML. Information
is captured about structure (rolls, membranes,
entries, openers and closers), dates, people and theiroffices, places and subjects.
This allows the creation of a number of displays,
in both electronic and printed formats, and forms
a basis for the construction of indexes and searchfacilities.
Information about people and their offices, places
and subjects are encoded in-line, extracted fromthe text using a custom-built oXygen XML Editor
plugin,10 and added to EATS, where each entity isgiven a unique identifier (URI).

Figure 1: Graphic display of the Gascon Rolls editorial framework

EATS is a web application for recording, editing,using and displaying authority information about
entities.11 It is designed to allow multiple authorities
to each maintain their own independent data, while
operating on a common base so that information
about the same entity is all in one place. It can beaccessed by multiple users simultaneously, allowing
the research team members to work independently
and collaboratively at the same time.
By using a central entity management system
to capture information about people, places andsubjects mentioned in the rolls, it is possible to tracka single entity throughout all the rolls and establish
relationships between the entities.
Relationships, along with the variant names ofentities, are crucial elements in entity management,
since they are not amenable to discovery throughsimple search interfaces. The Gascon Rolls project
harvests relationships from two sources: those
explicitly created in EATS by the researchers, andthose that can be inferred from TEI markup within
the texts. The former encompasses information thatis not present in the text, or which is not boundedby time or circumstance; for example, familial
relationships. The latter derives from nested namemarkup, for example specifying that a person is froma particular place.
The publishing framework created at the Department
of Digital Humanities at King’s College London,
xMod,12 generates the output for the different
calendar reading views and for the single entity pages
which are the basis for online and printed indexes.
The editorial framework and the entity management
system together form a flexible structure that can bereapplied for the online and printed publication ofother historical sources of the same nature.
One of the advantages of using EATS, as opposed tothe other entity management possibilities mentioned
above, is the possibility to access EATS directly fromthe XML editor, by using the plugin, which reduces
the time it would take to add or edit information,compared to having to use a separate tool. Another484

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advantage is that, due to EATS being a database atits core, the information that it stores can easily be
exported into other formats as desired, such as RDF/
OWL and Topic Maps serialisations.
Further, since the EATS installation is not tightly
coupled to the other components of the Gascon Rolls
project - that is, it does not reference them, but isonly referenced – its information can be easily reusedin other projects. Indeed, such projects could use
the same installation and add their own information
about entities, without causing any changes to theinformation used by the Gascon Rolls project. Data
can be shared without being intermingled.

11. Stevenson, A., and J. Norrish (2008). Topic Maps and Entity
Authority Records: An Effective Cyber Infrastructure for Digtal
Humanities. Paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2008
conference. Oulu, Finland, June 25-29, 2008.
12. http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/xmod/

There are some downsides to the current version
of EATS, however. When adding more complex
information about an entity, like relationships, theusers found it complicated to use at first. It is noteasy to add some rich information, like tertiary
relationships (Person A related to Person B in PlaceC), although this was never a problem in our case.
It is not possible to define entity type hierarchies;
for instance County can’t be declared as a subtype ofPlace. Such a facility would be extremely useful whentrying to classify entities and to create an overview of
the total number of entities of an overarching type.
The approach taken to entity management in the
Gascon Rolls project has so far served it well, and iswell suited to similar undertakings.
Notes
1. Ciula, A., P. Spence, and M. Vieira (2008). Expressing complex
associations in the medieval historical documents: the HenryIII Fine Rolls Project. Journal of the Association for Literaty
and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers
and the Humanities 23( 3).
2. http://www.gasconrolls.org/
3. http://www.gasconrolls.org/
4. The Gascon Rolls (Rotuli Vasconie - C61 class in the UK
National Archives) relate to the English Government of the
Duchy of Aquitaine (1154-1453) and include information on the
Hundred Years War, concluding in 1453 with the end of theAnglo-Gascon union.
5. http://www.nzetc.org/
and http://authority.nzetc.org/
6. Ciula, A. (2006). Searching the Fine Rolls: A Demonstration of
the Electronic Version. Paper presented at the International
Medieval Congress 2006, University of Leeds, July 10-13.
7. Spence, P. (2006). The Henry III Fine Rolls Project.Digital
Humanities 2006. The First ADHO International Conference:
Conference Abstracts. Universite Paris-Sorbonne.
8. http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/
9. TEI Consortium (2007). TEI P5 Guidelines. http://www.tei-c.org/ .
10. http://code.google.com/p/eats/#EATS_oXygen_Pl
ugin

485

Digital Humanities 2012

TextGrid Repository– Supporting the Data
Curation Needs of
Humanities Researchers
Lohmeier, Felix

lohmeier@sub.uni-goettingen.de
Goettingen State and University Library, Germany

Veentjer, Ubbo

veentjer@sub.uni-goettingen.de
Goettingen State and University Library, Germany

Smith, Kathleen M.

smith@sub.uni-goettingen.de
Goettingen State and University Library, Germany

Söring, Sibylle

soering@sub.uni-goettingen.de
Goettingen State and University Library, Germany

This poster will show how the TextGrid Repository
assists researchers in the curation of their data andhow they can make the data available with TextGrid
tools to foster scientific re-use. The increasing
importance of digitally-aided research methods hascaused exponential growth in the creation of researchdata. New research methods and collaborative waysof using data sets require sophisticated research
infrastructures to support researchers in the Digital
Humanities and to enable the re-use of existing data.
Data curation must be included in the planning stage
as a fundamental requirement for all projects dealing
with sustainable data. Therefore, this poster will
present an overview of the technical infrastructure
and the applicability of the TextGrid Repository forhumanities researchers.
The TextGrid Virtual Research Environment (VRE),
funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education
and Research, provides tools, data and services in
one integrated interface and supports the longterm archiving and management of research data.
It provides a platform for researchers in the Artsand Humanities to curate their data that reflects
universally-recognized best practices and standards.
TextGrid consists of two main components: the
TextGrid Laboratory (TextGridLab), the entry
point to the VRE, and the TextGrid Repository(TextGridRep), a long-term humanities data archive.
To preserve and maintain research data andensure its long-term viability, current research
practices in all stages of the research lifecycle
must be supported. Therefore, the TextGridLab
provides common functionalities in a sustainable486

environment to facilitate the re-use of data, services,and tools, and the TextGridRep enables researchers
to publish and share their data in a way that
supports long-term availability and re-usability.
Rather than acquiring the technical knowledge
necessary for data curation themselves, researchers
can make use of services and guidelines for longterm data accessibility and sustainability during theinitial planning stages of their projects through the
TextGrid VRE.
After five years of research and development,
TextGrid released a stable, operational version 1.0 in
July 2011 and will release a version 2.0 in May 2012.1
The value of this project is demonstrated by thefact that there are already eight long-term researchgroups actively using the TextGrid virtual research
environment for the creation of scholarly editions,for the analysis of humanities research data, as abasis for the development of project-specific tools for
specialized analysis and visualization, and for longterm digital archiving and facilitating world-wideaccess to research data for the scientific community.
(In addition to these established research projects, as
of February 2012 there were concrete requests from18 additional research groups about how TextGrid
can be integrated into their projects.) These projects
deal with large amounts of humanities data that
require specialized tools to reflect individualized
requirements. To name a few examples:- The project Blumenbach-Online (State andUniversity Library, Göttingen) is producing an
online resource providing access to the writingsand collections of the German physician andanthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach(1752-1840), in addition to secondary literature
resources.2- The project ‘Hybrid-Edition von Theodor Fontanes
Notizbüchern’ (University of Göttingen) is creatinga critical annotated edition of 67 notebooks fromthe German writer Theodor Fontane (1819-1898).3- The Virtuelles Skriptorium St. Matthias(University of Trier / City Library Trier /Technical University Darmstadt) is developing avirtual reconstruction of the medieval manuscript
collection of St. Matthias.4- The Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach iscreating an online edition of the letters ofErnst Kantorowicz, a german-jewish historian(1895-1963).5
These projects create significant amounts of data
during the research process that require curation.
This poster will show how the TextGridRep assists
researchers in the curation of their data and inensuring persistent access to data with TextGrid tools
to support scientific re-use.

Digital Humanities 2012

The first section of the poster will give an overview of
the technical functionalities and infrastructure of the
TextGridRep, which has been fully operational since
July 2011. The TextGridRep provides a repository
infrastructure based on grid technology. Researchers
can decide how and with whom their data will beshared by using the detailed rights management
module. Findings and research data can be publisheddirectly from the TextGridLab in the repository
via a publishing process that guides researchers
in preparing the data for long-term accessibility.
The middleware consists of various components forhandling files in the data grid, rights management
in a role-based access control-enabled database,metadata in an XML database, and relations in
a Resource Description Framework (RDF) triple
store. On a basic level, TextGrid will offer bitstream
preservation with redundant grid storage and tapebackup for 10 years (as recommended in theguidelines of the German Research Foundation).6
TextGrid developed its own metadata schema,
especially suitable for digital editions, that supports
different layers in its object model (item, work,
edition, and collection).
When researchers publish their research data via
the TextGridLab in the repository, the metadata
provided will be automatically validated. The systemvalidates against the TextGrid object model andchecks if obligatory metadata fields like rights ownerand license are well defined. In the next step,
persistent identifiers are allocated by using a reliablehandle service that is provided by the center for
scientific data processing in Göttingen, GWDG,
which is a main developing partner in the European
Persistent Identifier Consortium and functions as
the computer centre for the Max Planck Society.
As part of the publishing process, the data will befrozen and moved to a storage cluster used for longterm preservation. If researchers want to update
their data, they can copy it to their workspace,correct or further annotate the data, and publish
the data as a new revision that is linked to the oldrevision. Both revisions will be available but thenewer one will be more prominent in search results.
The grid storage for the humanities and all connectedresources are maintained together with those fromthe other academic disciplines at the common Grid
Resource Centre in Göttingen (which has allotted 275
terabytes for the humanities).
The second section of the poster will show how
researchers can make their data available with
the TextGrid Repository. There are currently threedifferent ways for research groups to enable access totheir data in the repository:1) All published data is available via the TextGridRep
portal, which is already in place. It enables rapid
searching with both simple and advanced searchcapabilities, in addition to the option of browsing
repository content, across public research data with
fulltext and metadata indexes.7 Complex editions canbe browsed according to the TextGrid object model(see above) and predefined XSLT stylesheets provide
HTML representations of TEI documents. Links
between texts and images, such as those createdin the TextGridLab interface, will be displayed in asynoptical view in a future version of the portal.
2) Research groups who create a digital edition often
want to present their data in their own portal withspecific graphics, labels, and predefined browse andsearch options. Therefore, an open REST interface
for individual portal solutions is provided so that
research groups may provide specific elaborated
access to their research collections with common
technologies like Javascript, CSS, HTML.
3) Research groups who want to provide complex
customized visualizations and complex projectspecific search queries for their digital editions often
use their own database for their project that is notconnected to any long-term archiving solutions. We
are developing a straightforward and easy way tosync the data stored in the TextGridRep (for longterm access) with a project-specific XML database(for the project-specific representation of the digital
edition). A prototype is already in place that enables
users to publish data from the TextGridRep to any
eXist database with drag & drop functionality. Users
can continuously test the representation of their XML
data (e.g., TEI-formatted) in their own environment
while they are still working on the digital edition with
TextGrid. This allows research projects to annotate
their data and develop the representation with XSLTand XQuery scripts at the same time. They can alsoeasily publish new revisions of their data throughTextGrid in the TextGridRep as well as in theirown environments. TextGrid will provide a TextGridspecific XQuery-module for the eXist XML database
via the newly announced eXist AppRepository.8
Users who install this module will be able toenhance their eXist environment to interface with
the TextGrid metadata schema. To provide an outof-the-box solution for the representation of a digital
edition, TextGrid collaborates with the TELOTA
working group at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academyof Science and Humanities to use their publishingframework Scalable Architecture for Digital Editions(SADE).9
XML technologies like XQuery and XSLT support the
representation of digital editions using a common
standard that promotes long-term reusability of andreliable access to research data. Therefore TextGrid
facilitates the publication of digital editions in waysthat are both easy to use and encourage the use of
established best practices.

487

Digital Humanities 2012

TextGrid maintains a strong network with otherprofessional associations and eHumanities centres
as well as with research infrastructure initatives
and projects both nationally (DARIAH-DE,10
eAqua,11 D-Spin12) and internationally (DARIAHEU,13 CLARIN,14 Bamboo15) with the aim tosupport the establishment of a comprehensive overall
research infrastructure for the eHumanities.
Funding
The initial funding phase by the German Federal
Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) lasted
from February 2006 to May 2009 (BMBF reference
number 07TG01A-H). The second funding phase
covered the period from 1 June 2009 to 31 May 2012
(BMBF reference number: 01UG0901A).
Notes
1. TextGrid v1.0: http://www.textgrid.de/1-0.html
2. Blumenbach-Online: http://www.blumenbach-online.
de3. Hybrid-Edition von Theodor Fontanes Notizbüchern:
http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/303691.html
4. Virtuelles Skriptorium St. Matthias: http://kompetenzzen
trum.uni-trier.de/projekte/kernprojekte/virtu
elles-skriptorium
5. Edition Ernst H. Kantorowicz: http://www.dla-marbach.
de/dla/entwicklung/projekte/edition_ernst_h_k
antorowicz/index.html
6. Proposals
forSafeguarding
Good
Scientific
Practice: http://www.dfg.de/download/pdf/foerder
ung/rechtliche_rahmenbedingungen/gute_wissens
chaftliche_praxis/self_regulation_98.pdf
7. TextGridRep Portal: http://www.textgridrep.de
8. eXist AppRepository: http://atomic.exist-db.org/bl
ogs/eXist/AppRepository
9. Scalable Architecture for Digital Editions (SADE): http://www.bbaw.de/telota/sade10. DARIAH-DE: http://de.dariah.eu
11. eAqua: http://www.eaqua.net
12. D-Spin: http://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de
13. DARIAH-EU: http://www.dariah.eu
14. CLARIN: http://www.clarin.eu
15. Bamboo: http://www.projectbamboo.org

488

RIgeo.net – A Lab for
Spatial Exploration ofHistorical Data
Loos, Lukas

L.Loos@stud.uni-heidelberg.de
University of Heidelberg, Insitute of Geography,
GIScience, Germany

Zipf, Alexanderalexander.zipf@geog.uni-heidelberg.de
University of Heidelberg, Insitute of Geography,
GIScience, Germany

1. Introduction
Transcultural (historical) research necessitates theintegration of both macro and micro levels of
research and analysis and emphasizes the dynamic
and interactive character of its research objects
in their historical and geographical dimension(‘How Histories make Geographies’ and vice versa).
(Appadurai 2011; Döring et al. 2009; White 2010;
Knowles et al. 2008; Owens 2007).
The interdisciplinary, interconnected HGIS-projects
located in Heidelberg share a common vision:
They facilitate research in the humanities by
e.g. (semi-)automatic, it-enhanced processing of
information, by adding modes of spatial search inheterogeneous data, by supporting visualization ofpatterns formed by spatio-temporal data or mash
up of data from different sources of a different
kind. Thereby they ultimately foster the researcher toformulate new questions and theses and eventuallyfind some answers by experimenting in a sortof ‘humanities lab’. Only close collaboration ofgeographers, historians and computer scientists canensure that new digital tools and methodologies do
not stay outside the framework of everyday scientificwork in the humanities.
In the RIgeo.net project historians and geographers
are working together in order to gain the fullpotential of the analytical capabilities of (historical)
geographic information systems ((H)GIS) for
historians. The aim of the project is the developmentof an – ultimately globally connected – infrastructure
for the spatio-temporal analysis of historical sources.
The combination of historical and geographicaldata as a part of a ‘GIS-toolbox’ provides akind of ‘laboratory’ to analyze, recombine anddisaggregate (mapped) information encoded inhistorical evidence, here: the abstracts of the Regesta
Imperii1 (hereinafter: RI) combined with a spatial

Digital Humanities 2012perspective and e.g. rearranged with uploaded
findings of the RI researchers.

exact day (16.3.1217) to the notion of a year (1217)
without any further information. (Hill 2006).

2. Data basis

4. Implementation

As a starting point for the development of the
project we use the online available and in theEuropean context extremely relevant data base RI
and cooperate with the team of researchers of
the RI, namely Prof. Dr. Paul-Joachim Heinig.
The RI are an inventory of 125,000 mostly
German abstracts of documents of all ‘German’
Emperors from Charlemagne to Maximilian I.
The comprehensive data of the RI provides fora continuous evaluation on the technical andcontent level. With a view to sustainability andutility maximization the implemented procedures aredesigned to be applicable for other similar data sets.

As a first approach we implemented a system thatconsists of an extract transform and load pipeline(ETL) and a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database with asimple star-schema (see Figure 1). In the dimension
tables we store place names, person names, dates
and geographic coordinates. Places and dates of issue
are being extracted from the XML documents of the
RI through Xpath/XQuery queries and stored in the
database. In the next step we deploy the GeoTWAIN2
and Nominatim3 web services to geocode the place
names. From this we calculate an average traveling
distance to derive probable whereabouts of unknown
places or places that do not exist anymore. Thisnarrows down the area for a manual search andadditionally allows to disambiguate and geocode
cases where more than one result was received fromthe web services.

3. Project Objective
The objective is the development of spatio-temporal
thesauri of places and to geocode the places of issueof the documents and the places mentioned in the
documents. One objective is hereby is to assist in the
research on itinerant kingdoms.
A central question is how to visualize (un-)certainty.
One should bear in mind the universal
warning that ‘all visualizations of information
areabstractions,which
provideusefulapproximations of the real world. […] Visualizations
reduces the cognitive weight on the analyst or learnerwhen the quantity of information, both quantitativeand qualitative, is great, a problem is complex, andalternative solutions are numerous and surpass thecapabilities of human reason’ (Owens 2007).
Depending on the source material there are different
challenges to be met to allow the user to judge on the
degree of confidence of the visualized data (and thus
avoid the danger of representing a higher precision
than is justified by the historical resource).

Figure 1: Workflow and system implementation(Source: compiled by the author)

The main difficulties are:5. Future Work- Accuracy and precision of the spatial information:
The location isn’t just one clearly defined place,but e.g. an diffuse area, a vague offset from a
named place (‘near Heidelberg’) and uncertain due
to the credibility of the source itself (e.g. a forged
medieval document). (Hill 2006).

One focus of future work lies in the field oftext mining and Geographic Information Retrieval(Feldman 2007; Leidner 2007). It can be assumed
that the language used in the documents correlates
highly with the age of the documents. The systemallows to automatically annotate the place names
and person names mentioned in the documents
through the connection of the different datasetsof the RI. The annotated documents can be usedas training and test data which can be applied
for a supervised machine learning approach inorder to find regularities in the documents. Dueto the sequential properties of the data, a dynamic
Bayesian model such as state-of-the-art Hidden- Accuracy and precision of the resolution of thetemporal ranges: the ‘temporal footprint’: thebeginning and ending dates are always of a certain
fuzziness. The resolution of the dates found inhistorical sources varies widely, e.g. the RI on
when Friedrich II. stayed in a place varies from an

489

Digital Humanities 2012

Markov Models (Baum 1966) or Conditional Random
Fields (Lafferty 2001) will be considered for learning.

References
Appadurai,
A.
(2011).
How
Histories
make
Geographies.
Transcultural
Studies
1. http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/transcultural/article/view/6129(accessed 28.10.2011).

Baum, L. E., and T. Petrie (1966). Statisticalinference for probabilistic functions of finite statemarkov chains. The Annals of Mathematical
Statistics 37(6): 1554-1563.
Döring, J., and T. Thielmann, eds. (2009).
Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den
Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. 2nd ed. Bielefeld:
Transcript.
Feldman, R. (2007). The text mining handbook– advanced approaches in analyzing unstructured
data. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Hill, L. L. (2006). Georeferencing: The Geographic
Associations of Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 85-88.
Knowles, A. K., A. Hillier, and R. Balstad(2008). Conclusion: An Agenda for Historical GIS.
In: A. K. Knowles and A. Hillier (eds.), Placing
History. How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are
Changing Historical Scholarship. Redlands, CA.:ESRI Press, pp. 267-274.
Lafferty, J., A. McCallum, and F. Pereira(2001). Conditional ramdom fields: Probabilistic
models for segmentation and labeling sequence data.
ICML, Proceedings of International Conference on
Machine Learning, pp. 282-289.
Leidner, J. (2007). Toponym Resolution in Text:
Annotation, Evaluation and Applications of Spatial
Grounding of Place Names. Ph.D thesis, School ofInformatics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Owens, J. B. (2007). Toward a GeographicallyIntegrated, Connected World History: Employing
Geographic Information Systems (GIS). History
Compass 5(6): 2014-2040.
White,
R.
(2010).
Whatis
SpatialHistory?
SpatialHistoryLab:
Working
paper. http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatia
lhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29(accessed 29.12.2011).

Notes
1. http://www.regesta-imperii.de
20.01.2012).

(accessed

2. http://geotwain.uni-hd.de (accessed 01.11.2011).

490

3. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim(accessed 01.11.2011). (accessed 01.11.2011).

Digital Humanities 2012

Automatic Topic Hierarchy
Generation Using Wordnet

1. Methodology

Monteiro Vieira, Jose Migueljose.m.vieira@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London, UK

Brey, Gerhard †dh@brey.org.uk
Independent Researcher, UK

In order to make full use of the rich content of large
text collections various finding aids are needed. Onevery effective way of accessing this kind of collection
is via a subject taxonomy or a topic hierarchy.
Most subject classification techniques (Sebastiani2002) are based on supervised methods and need asubstantial amount of training data that are used by
the various machine-learning algorithms on which
they are based. In many cases this constitutes asignificant problem if the resources to create thesetraining data are not available.
Unsupervised methods such as clustering
algorithms, though not requiring the same resourcesin data preparation as machine-learning based
methods, need considerable attention after thetechniques have been applied in order to make theclusters meaningful to users. The use of existing
powerful tools such as the semantic tagger developedat Lancaster University1 avoids these problems,
providing semantic tags for each document, but often
these semantic tags are very general and therefore
not ideal for a user who searches for more concrete
subject terms.
The aim of the research described here is theautomatic generation of a topic hierarchy, using
WordNet (Miller 1995; Fellbaum 1998) as the basis
for a faceted browse interface, with a collection of
19th-century periodical texts as the test corpus.
Our research was motivated by the Castanet
algorithm, a technique developed by Marti Hearst
and Emilia Stoica (Stoica 2004, 2007] toautomatically generate metadata topic hierarchies.
Castanet was developed and successfully applied toshort descriptions of documents. In our research we
attempt to adapt and extend the Castanet algorithm
so that it can be applied to the text of the actual
documents for the many collections for which no
abstracts or summaries are available. It should
also be a viable alternative to the other techniques
mentioned above.

Figure 1: Algorithm Workflow

The algorithm for the automatic generation of the
topic hierarchy is implemented using Python with the
NLTK,2 Networkx3 and PyGraphviz4 modules. It has
three main processes:
1. Data preparation: data needs to be prepared so thatthe information contained within the texts is moreeasily accessible (Pyle 1999).
2. Target term extraction: select terms that areconsidered relevant to classify each text.
3. Topic tree generation: build the tree using thetarget terms.

2. Data Preparation
The first process in the algorithm, data preparation,is also the most important in any text mining
application. Data preparation leads to understanding
the data and ensures that the processes that follow
will be able to get the most out of the data. The datapreparation process has three main steps:
1. Tokenise each of the texts in the corpus.
2. Remove stop words from the list of tokens.
3. Remove unknown tokens from the list by using
regular expressions and by doing lookups in
WordNet’s lemma dictionary. This also has thebeneficial effect of removing words that are badly
OCRed. Because WordNet is the basis for our topic
hierarchy we regard words that not appear in its
lexical database as irrelevant.

3. Target Term Extraction
Of all the words left in the texts after the datapreparation, the algorithm only uses a subset of the491

Digital Humanities 2012

most relevant terms to create the topic tree. To selectthe target terms:

parents with just one child and the height of the tree
varies across its different paths.

1. Select only the ones that are nouns by performing
lookups in WordNet.
2. Compute TF.IDF (Term Frequency x Inverse
Document Frequency) (Manning 1999) for eachone of the nouns. There are many ways to computeterm relevance. Initially we tested the algorithms
described in Castanet, information gain (Mitchell1997) and term distribution [Sanderson 1999], butthey did not produce good results for our texts
as the target terms were not meaningful enough.
Therefore, we decided to use TF.IDF to select thetarget terms as this was a more straightforward
approach and the results we were getting weremore relevant.
3. Select the fifteen highest scoring terms and merge
them all into a unique list of target terms.

4. Topic Tree Generation
The list of target terms constitutes the input for the
topic tree generation process:Figure 2: Communication full tree

In the following image we can see how the treecompression works. The grey nodes will be removed
because they have fewer than two children, and theblack nodes will be removed because their names
appear within the parent node.

1. Using WordNet generate a hypernym path for eachof the target terms.
2. Using the hypernym paths construct a tree by
joining all the paths.
3. And finally, because the hypernym path lengths arevaried and to make the tree more usable/readable
the tree is compressed. To compress the tree:
1. Starting from the leaves, recursively eliminate aparent that has less than two children, unless theparent is the root node.
2. Eliminate child nodes whose name appears within
the parent’s node.
3. Eliminate selected top-level nodes, because they
denote very general categories and have a verybroad meaning.

5. Examples

Figure 3: Topic tree compression

After the grey and black nodes are removed we get
the compressed version of the tree. This tree is not as
deep, therefore making it easier to navigate and use
from a faceted browsing point of view.

Consider the following hypernym paths for thenouns:
1. writings:
communication.n.02,
written_communication.n.01,
writing.n.02,
sacred_text.n.01, hagiographa.n.01.
2. charter:
communication.n.02,
written_communication.n.01,
writing.n.02,
document.n.01, charter.n.01.
3. criticism: communication.n.02,
disapproval.n.02, criticism.n.01.

message.n.02,

This following image shows the previous hypernym
paths combined to create a topic tree. There are many
492

Figure 4: Communication compressed tree

Digital Humanities 2012

6. Results and Future Work
The text collection used to test the techniques triedin our research is a digital edition of a 19th century
periodical, the English Women’s Journal (EWJ).
The EWJ is one sub-collection of the NineteenthCentury Serials Edition (NCSE),5 a digital edition of
6 newspapers and periodicals from the nineteenth
century. Although the smallest collection within
NCSE it was still large and varied enough to serve asa test corpus for our research. EWJ was publishedmonthly between 1858 and 1864. It was edited
and written by women and treated mainly literary,
political and social contents. The collection is madeup of 78 issues containing a total of 7964 articles.
The main reason to choose the EWJ collection as ourtest corpus was that of the 6 periodicals containedin NCSE it is the one with the best OCR quality.
Nevertheless the OCR quality of the EWJ was still aproblem we had to contend with.
Our test corpus is composed of 1359 texts, with aminimum of 300 characters each, containing about
3.5 million words in total. The list of target terms
has 8013 unique terms, when selecting the top fifteen
target terms per text. The resulting topic tree has
18234 nodes and after compression it is roughly 50%
smaller.
Of the samples we evaluated, over 90% of the topics
are relevant, i.e. they clearly illustrate what thearticles are about and the topic hierarchy adequately
relates to the content of the articles. The results were
evaluated by selecting a sample of 20 articles andgenerating the topic hierarchy for them. After readingeach of these articles we compared its contents withthe terms in the topic hierarchy, and counted therelevant terms for each one of them.

classified in WordNet as the Abu Nidal Organization,
which did not exist in the 19th century.
Another source of problems was the erroneous
disambiguation of tokens with multiple meanings in
WordNet. An example of this is the word ‘drama’,
from the sentence above. It was output in the topic
hierarchy as referring to a theatrical play rather thanin its figurative sense as a turbulent event.
Future work could explore better ways how to deal
with bad OCR. We also plan to enhance topic
disambiguation; this could be achieved by analysing
the domains of the topics in the hypernym paths
before deciding which one to add to the topic tree.
Faceted browsing interfaces based on topic
hierarchies are easy and intuitive to navigate(Morville 2006), and as our results demonstrate,
topic hierarchies as generated by our approach form
an appropriate basis for this type of data navigation.
We are confident that our approach can successfully
be applied to other corpora and should yield evenbetter results if there are no OCR issues to contend
with. And since WordNet is available in several
languages,6 it should also be possible to apply ourapproach to corpora in other languages.

References
EWJ 1858. English Women’s Journal, 1 April 1858,
pp. 73-79.
Fellbaum, Ch., ed. (1998). WordNet: An
Electronic Lexical Database. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Manning, Ch. D. (1999). Term frequency x
inverse document frequency. In Ch. D. Manning,
P. Raghavan, and H. Introduction to Information
Retrieval. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 116-123.
Miller, G. E. (1995). WordNet: A Lexical Databasefor English. Communications of the ACM 38(11):39-41.
Mitchell, T. 1997. Machine Learning. New York:
McGraw Hill, pp. 57-60.

Figure 5: Topic hierarchy for an article about FlorenceNightingale and the Crimean war [EWJ 1858]

Even though we consider that the algorithm produces
good and promising results, we identified problems
that mainly relate to the nature of our corpus. Despite
our best efforts to filter out mis-OCRed portionsof text, it was unavoidable that some misleading
tokens remained. This sometimes led to strange
results in the topic tree. For example, the partial text
‘Another act in the great European drama’ from theoriginal article was OCRed into ‘Ano , ther act in thegreat European drama’. The word ‘Ano’, which was
not filtered out in the data preparation process, isMorville, P., and L. Rosenfeld (2006).
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.
Sebastopol: O’Reilly, pp. 221-227.
Pyle, D. (1999). Data Preparation for Data Mining.
San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, chapter
3.
Sanderson, M., and B. Croft (1999). Deriving
concept hierarchies from text. Proceedings of the
22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference
on Research and Development in Information
Retrieval 1999, pp. 206-213.

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Sebastiani, F. (2002). Machine Learning in
Automated Text Categorization. ACM Computing
Surveys 34(1): 1-47.
Stoica, E., and A. H. Marti (2004). Nearlyautomated metadata hierarchy creation. Proceedingsof HLT-NAACL 2004: Short Papers, Boston, Mass.,
pp. 117-120.
Stoica, E., A. H. Marti, and M. Richardson(2007). Automating Creation of Hierarchical Faceted
Metadata Structures. Proceedings of NAACL/HLT
2007, Rochester, NY, April, pp. 244-251.
Notes
1. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/
2. http://www.nltk.org/
3. http://networkx.lanl.gov/
4. http://networkx.lanl.gov/pygraphviz/
5. http://www.ncse.ac.uk/
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet#Other_languages

Hypotheses.org, une
infrastructure pour lesDigital Humanities
Muscinesi, Frédériquefrederique.muscinesi@revues.org
Cleo, France

Hypotheses.org, at http://hypotheses.org/ , isa French-based platform hosting academic researchnotebooks, or research blogs, for the use andconsultation by researchers, students and research
assistants working in the humanities and social
sciences. Hypotheses.org now hosts over 330
research blogs, the work of 600 bloggers who havepublished over 20,000 posts. Created by Cléo, theCentre for Open Electronic Publishing, in 2008,
Hypotheses.org is devoted to an unorthodox strandof the digital humanities: academic blogging. It is oneof the three platforms included in the OpenEdition
program.
At the Digital Humanities 2012 event, we shall beoffering a detailed account of how Hypotheses.org
works and inviting visitors and interested parties tobrowse and use the platform. Hypotheses.org is an
online platform and is totally adapted to collective
and individual presentations. Our data will also be
explained in posters.

1. Academic blogging
Objectives
Academic blogging is a very direct means ofcommunication for academic communities. It
also provides a focus for collective exchange,
collaboration and construction enabling researchers,
research teams, librarians, academic communication
assistants, etc, to promote their work.
Hypotheses.org connects with the tradition ofacademic correspondence, offering a new space foracademic writing and enabling wider distribution of
results and research processes.
Humanities and Social Sciences Research Blogging
While not the sole academic blogging platform
available, it does have a major role to play inhumanities and social science blogging, as academic
blogging is usually confined to the sciences.
In HSS, the blogging field is more limited, so
Hypotheses.org has been able to develop in European
countries due to the following factors: in France,
platformthe
http://culturevisuelle.org/
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Digital Humanities 2012is limited to specialised visual research blogs.
In Germany, there is no umbrella platform for
HSS blogs. And in Spain, the Madri+d platform
hosts research blogs with no distinction between
disciplines.
Furthermore, while there are many research bloggers
in HSS, their blogs feature on non-specialist
platforms and have little visibility, and the numerous
existing university platforms offer their services
solely to their own researchers.

2. Research, community,
technology
Hypotheses.org is an academic tool
The platform has a number of qualities toreinforce its academic credentials. Firstly there is
its academic committee, composed of researchersand professionals, which defines the platform’s
directions, accepts or refuses applications andsupports the Hypotheses.org team in its promotion
and communication activities. The catalogue offers
a documentary classification of blogs with a stable
editorial project. Hypotheses.org is also committed
to creating long lasting digital research sources andfocuses special attention on maintaining long-lastingurls while making research blogs readily accessible toall. The platform features specific technical functions
such as bibliographical management, the insertionof footnotes, the integration of a Library Thing
library and the importation of word documents,
in particular. These characteristics have enabled
Hypotheses.org’s research blogs to be included in
the Ebsco Atoz catalogue in May 2011, and in
Isidore in September 2011. Recently they received
ISSN classifications from the ISSN France centre.
All of which means that Hypotheses.org is a quality
academic platform, attracting a specialist readership.
Hypotheses.org is a community
The hypotheses.org bloggers’ community has aseries of tools at its disposal: training sessions,documentation, a discussion list, La Maison desCarnets collating editorial recommendations,
technical updates, the latest news, a contact form anda dedicated email address. One person is in chargeof running the blog and helping the community.
The Hypotheses.org community is an important
attraction for independent academic bloggers whowish to take part in discussions.
Hypotheses.org is a technical platform
The platform uses the free WORDPRESS.ORG
blogging software. Every new blogger receives a
blank blog created on the Hypotheses.org platform.
The platform aggregates the various blogs and forms
one point of access for visitors, while the blog itself

provides another. The blogger has total control over
how the blog is presented – on her/his own editorial
project and on how contributors are managed,
etc. – and can request modifications or technicaladjustments from the Hypotheses.org team. New
functions are sometimes developed internally; newtemplates are regularly made available; and thesoftware is frequently updated. Hypotheses.org
enables people with no special technical skills
to manage a research notebook with innovative
functions which is permanently improving.
Hypotheses.org, as an infrastructure, supports
research, encourages involvement by academic
communities in the digital humanities andcontributes to the visibility of research in progress.

3. Development and practices
More readers and bloggers = new practices
Between 2008 and 2011, Hypotheses.org developed
impressively in terms of quantity and quality: on the
one hand, the number of new blogs, published posts
and visits increased by 40% from 2010 to 2011, a signthat http://hypotheses.org/ hypotheses.org has
a huge appeal among readers and bloggers alike; on
the other hand, technical developments, which havepartially evolved from bloggers’ requests, have givenrise to, or been accompanied by, new practices.
Case studies
Hypotheses.org can effectively be considered andused as a tool for academic construction, asa support for academic information and as an
online discussion space integrated into the broader
digital humanities ecosystem. A typology of researchnotebooks (focussing on seminars, excavations,research programs, etc.) and publication practices(concerned with simplification, publishing sources,
research complements, etc.) through case studies
and a typology of notebook profiles shows avariety of practices. Furthermore, the tools at thecommunity’s disposal create relationships between
bloggers, as well as between bloggers and theHypotheses.org team. The community is jointly
responsible for the initiation and development of
discussions, new projects, improvements, technicalchanges and the introduction of new bloggers.
The relationship between individual blogs and thecollective platform means that a wide variety of
projects can be developed and expressed, while
the main characteristics of Hypotheses.org, as an
academic infrastructure based on a community, also
make up its character, the way it functions and theway it grows.
A fast-developing international academic blogging
platform

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Digital Humanities 2012

The many practices hosted on Hypotheses.org
create a very unique academic space and revealthat academic blogging is genuinely taking rootin the French HSS community. The latest trends
indicate that Hypotheses.org is outgrowing its
linguistic origins and reaching out to Germanspeaking academic communities (with the creationof http://de.hypotheses.org/ ), and Spanishspeaking academic communities (with the creationof
http://es.hypotheses.org/ ), as well as
Portuguese and English speaking communities,
among others. As an academic publication andinformation space, it has been receiving increasing
amounts of visitors and is gradually becoming a relay
for online media dealing with general information.
Hypotheses.org is thus an infrastructure exclusively
dedicated to research which contributes to the
expansion of the Digital Humanities through bothcreation and visibility. Its positive development
shows that academic blogging is an expanding field, aplace where digital academic communities can build,develop diverse practices and create tools which
respond to the special requirements of their bloggers.
References
OpenEdition sites
Hypotheses.org: http://hypotheses.org
de.hypotheses.org: http://de.hypotheses.org/
es.hypotheses.org: http://es.hypotheses.org/
Hypotheses.org catalogue: http://www.openedition.org/catalogue-notebooks

La maison des carnets: http://maisondescarnets.hypotheses.org

OpenEdition: http://openedition.org
Cléo: http://cleo.cnrs.fr/
Platforms for scientific blogging
Culture visuelle: http://culturevisuelle.org/
Madri+d: http://www.madrimasd.org/blogs/
Academic platforms
Harward University: http://blogs.law.harvard.
edu/

Université Paris 5: http://carnets.parisdescart
es.fr/

Universidad de Salamanca: http://diarium.usal.
es/

496

References
Blanchard, A. (2008). Ce que le blog apporte à larecherche. La science, la cité. http://www.webcita
tion.org/5iUAxXVIH (accessed 21 March 2012).
Dacos, M., P. Mounier (2009). Sciences etsociété en interaction sur Internet. Communication& langages 159: 123-135.
Dacos, M., P. Mounier (2011). Les carnets derecherches en ligne, espace d'une conversation
scientifique décentrée. In C. Jacob (ed.), Lieux deSavoir, 2. Les mains de l’intellect, Paris: Albin
Michel.
Gunthert, A. (2008). Why blog? Actualités de laRecherche en histoire visuelle. http://www.webcit
ation.org/5iT16xsza (accessed 21 March 2012).
Koenig, M. (2011). Une blogosphère à fort
potentiel : petit tour des blogs d’histoire
germanophones. Digital Humanities à l’IHA.
http://dhiha.hypotheses.org/425 .

Digital Humanities 2012

TXSTEP – an integrated
XML-based scripting
language for scholarly text
data processing
Ott, Wilhelm

wilhelm.ott@uni-tuebingen.de
Universität Tübingen, Germany

Ott, Tobias

ott@hdm-stuttgart.de
Stuttgart Media University, Germany

Gasperlin, Oliver

oliver.gasperlin@pagina-tuebingen.depagina GmbH publication technologies, Germany

1. Introduction
With TXSTEP, we present and put up to discussion
the prototype of a new, powerful XML-based tool
for scholarly research in the text-based humanities.
Its architecture is based on more than 40 years ofexperience in supporting humanities projects at the
University of Tübingen and beyond.
The purpose of TXSTEP is not to provide anothertoolbox containing ready-made solutions for predefined problems. Of course, tools like these are
adequate for many purposes; but we see no urgency
to add a further one to the existing packages of thiskind.
In fact, TXSTEP has been designed as a highperforming scripting environment for the serious
humanities scholar and other professionals in text
data processing who face problems not easily solvable
by XSLT or other means. TXSTEP gives themcomplete control over every detail of the dataprocessing part of their projects.

2. Humanities software: basic
requirements
Software for serious humanities research has to havecertain basic qualities:- it must be easy to handle, so that the scholar who
is an expert in his field, but not in programming orcomputer science, can use it safely;- it must be flexible enough to be adapted tothe special requirements of each project, be it aphilological analysis of a text or the preparation ofa critical editon;- it should support not only single phases of a
project, but all its stages and steps, including(for an editorial project) first transcription of thesources and collation of the transcribed texts,
evaluation of the variant readings, constitution of
the edition text and the critical apparatus, up to(and even beyond) the preparation of the final
publication of text, apparatuses, and indexes.
TXSTEP tries to take into account thesesomewhat contradicting requirements by defining
the fundamental operations necessary for theprocessing of textual data, and by providing aseparate program module for each of these basic
functions, which can be used without any knowledgeof conventional programming or scripting languages.

3. The solution: 1. Modularity
These modules may be combined almost arbitrarily:
each module reads from and writes to a single basic
file structure. This allows to combine these modules
like Unix filters in arbitrary ways.
Where necessary, the single modules can be adaptedto special requirements by the user, who may change
default parameters (e.g. for providing a sort key fora non-latin alphabet) or provide additional ones (e.g.
for the omission of the definite article in the sort key
for titles in bibliographic records).
However limited the scope of the single modules
may be, the flexibility of their combination can beillustrated by the fact that, for example, there is no
dedicated program for generating an alphabeticalword list. For this purpose the user has to combine
the module for text decomposition (for which hehas to provide the parameters defining the single
elements and the sort keys), the SORT module,
and the module which reduces identical or partially
identical records contained in the sorted file tosingle index entries, and adds – when required –informations like frequency counts and/or references
to the source text.
The modules provided by TXSTEP include:- collation of different versions of a text; output ofthe differences in a synoptic list (for eye inspection)and for automatic processing in a file showing anappropriate structure;- text correction and enhancement not only byan interactive editor, but also in batch mode,e.g. by means of correction instructions prepared
beforehand (by manual transcription, or byprogram, e.g. the collation module);- decomposing texts into elements (e.g. word forms)
according to rules provided by the user;

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Digital Humanities 2012

- building logical entities (e.g. bibliographic records)
consisting of more than one element or line of text;- sorting such elements or entities according to thesort keys provided by the preparatory modules,
accounting also for non-latin alphabetical rules
and other sorting criteria;- preparing indexes by generating entries from thesorted elements;- transforming textual data by selecting records orelements, by replacing strings or text parts, byrearranging, complementing or abbreviating text
parts;- integrating external information into a file bymeans of acronyms;- updating crossreferences;- converting textual data from TUSTEP files into fileformats used by other systems (e.g. for statisticalanalysis or for electronic publication) and viceversa.
As the output of any one of these modules may serve
as input to any other module, the range of research
problems for which this system may be helpful isquite wide.

4. The solution: 2. XML interface
to an established text processing
and analysis suite
In fact, TUSTEP, the Tübingen System of Text
Processig tools, has been developed in the past 40
years along these lines. It has been and still is
successfully used for many humanities projects in theGerman speaking part of the world, as may be detectby visiting www.tustep.org.
But, since TUSTEP’s syntax is proprietary, notintuitive and supposed to be difficult to learn,users tend to help themselves with other – often
less effective – tools or less specific programming
languages.
TXSTEP gives an answer to this situation by
providing a user-friendly XML-syntax, allowing
beginners and advanced programmers to utilize
the whole scope of TUSTEP services in a modern,established scripting environment. The benefits are
obvious: support of an open standard, widespreaddissemination, programming in every XML-editor,
syntax highlighting, code completion and intelligible
APIs. Moreover, TXSTEP is aided by the fact that
there is no need to change the program’s actual core.
TUSTEP itself is open source, as TXSTEP is soongoing to be as well.

498

5. The TXSTEP prototype
Development of TXSTEP began in 2009, when
Tobias Ott, research associate and lecturer at the‘Stuttgart Media University’ and CEO of pagina
GmbH (a service provider for publishing houses) firstcame up with the idea to build an XML interface tothe syntax of TUSTEP commands. This would all at
once remove most of the barriers usually preventing
people from using TUSTEP:- it would offer an up-to-date established syntax,- it would allow to draft TUSTEP scripts using thesame XML-editor as when writing XSLT or other
XML based scripts,- it would let you enjoy the typical benefitsof working with an XML editor, like content
completion, highlighting, showing annotations,and, of course, verifying your code,- it would offer – to a certain degree – a self teachingenvironment by commenting on the scope of every
step,- it would avoid many syntactical errors, evencompared to the original TUSTEP scripting
environment.
In the meantime, this idea resulted in a prototype of
TXSTEP which we plan to demonstrate in more detailduring the poster session. The prototype alreadycontains the most important features of all themodules of TUSTEP listed above.
Not contained in TXSTEP is TUSTEPs typesetting
module, which has been designed to meet theambitious layout demands of publications inhumanities research, including those needed by
critical editions. The user may however use it in theoriginal TUSTEP environment for publishing in print
the results gained by TXSTEP, or he may even include
it – in original TUSTEP syntax – into his TXSTEP
scripts.
One of the features of TXSTEP is it’s capability toprocess almost all forms of textual data, whether thisbeing XML-data or plain text files. Therefore, even if
textual data have to be processed in the first place inorder to gain, for example, TEI-data or to enhance themarkup of insufficiently tagged XML data, TXSTEP
is at it’s place.
The proposed demo is based on the mentioned
prototype and shows the achieved state of ourwork in progress. The demonstration of TXSTEPs
functionality will include tasks which can not easily
be performed by existing XML tools.

Digital Humanities 2012

Exploring
ProsopographicalResources Through Novel
Tools and Visualizations: aPreliminary Investigation
Pasin, Michele

michele.pasin@kcl.ac.uk
Department of Digital Humanities, UK

Structured Prosopography provides a formal model
for representing prosopography: a branch of
historical research that traditionally has focusedon the identification of people that appear inhistorical sources (Verboven et al. 2007). Thanks tocomputing technologies, structured prosopography
has succeeded in providing historians with a mean
to enhance their scholarly work and make itavailable worldwide to a variety of academic and non
academic users. Since the 1990s, KCL’s Department
of Digital Humanities (DDH) has been involvedin the development of structured prosopographicaldatabases, and has had direct involvement in
Prosopographies of the Byzantine World (PBE and
PBW)1, Anglo-Saxon England (PASE)2, Medieval
Scotland (PoMS)3 and now more generally northern
Britain (BoB).4
Pre-digital print prosopographies presented its
materials as narrative articles about the individuals
it contains. Structured prosopography instead takes
a more database-oriented approach as it focuses on
isolating information fragments (usually, in textualform) that are relevant to the task of describing thelife-events of a particular person. As a result, it ispossible to quickly recollect such results in manifold
ways using the logical query languages databasesystems make available.
In particular, DDH has been involved in thedevelopment of a general ‘factoid-oriented’ model ofstructure that although downplaying or eliminating
narratives about people, has to a large extent served
the needs of these various projects quite well.
The structure formally identifies obvious items ofinterest: Persons and Sources, and extends to related
things like Offices or Places. In our prosopographicalmodel the Factoid is a central idea and represents
the spot in a primary source where something is said
about one or more persons. In other words, it links
people to the information about them via spots inprimary sources that assert that information (Bradley& Short 2003).

In general, it is fair to say that the issue ofrepresenting prosopographical data to the purposeof building large and efficient knowledge bases is
no longer a critical problem for digital humanities
research to tackle. Thanks to more than twenty
years of research in this niche-area, a number oftechnical approaches such as the factoid one justmentioned have been discussed extensively and thus
can facilitate enormously the initial design andconstruction of a structured back-end for a digitalprosopographical project.
For that regards instead the visual rendering andfinal presentation of the contents of a prosopography,
the amount of existing research is considerably
smaller5. In fact it is quite common to present datausing a classic database-centric approach: the tabularformat. This approach normally boils down to abibliographical-record-like table containing all theinformation available about a specific person: his/herrecorded appellations and life dates, plus of course
a variable number of rows that refer to the excepts
that describe that person in the primary or secondary
sources examined. We can see an example of thisclassic visualization approach in Fig. 1 (the example
can be found online at http://www.poms.ac.uk/db/record/person/251/ ).

Figure 1: A typical prosopographical record in tabular format

The tabular format has the advantage of offering a
wealth of information in a clean and well-organizedinterface, thus simplifying the task of finding what
we are looking for during a search. However, by
combining all the information in a single view, thisapproach also hides some of the key dimensions usedby historians in order to make sense of the materials
at hand. For example, such dimensions could bederiving from a spatio-historical, genealogical or
socio-political consideration of the data.
In other words, we acknowledged that although thetabular format succeeds in creating a comprehensive
and condensed version of the information relevant
for a search, it would also be interesting to examine if
we could present the same data in a more piecemeal499

Digital Humanities 2012

fashion, according to predefined pathways or viewson the dataset that aim at making explicit some of thecoherence principles of the historical discourse.
We believe that this kind of approach could bedesirable for both non-expert users (e.g., learners)– who could simultaneously access the data and geta feeling for the meaningful relations among them– and for experts alike (e.g., academic scholars) –who could be facilitated in the process of analyzing
data within predefined dimensions, so to highlightpatterns of interest that would be otherwise hard to
spot.
With these ideas in mind we started to investigate
the creation of innovative methods for presenting
prosopographical data to users. For the moment
these experiments have been developed in thecontext of a single prosopography, the ‘Paradox ofMedieval Scotland’, but we reckon that they could be
easily generalizable to other projects too, due to theintrinsic similarity of the approaches we used.
In particular, we have classified these exploratory
tools into three broad categories:
1. Visualizations that focus on specific aspectsof the dataset. In this group we have forexample visualizations of people that focus on thehistorical dimension (such as timelines, or viewsof people’s longevity – as in Fig. 2 below) or thegeographical one (e.g., through maps). Also, we
can have visualizations that aim at representing
the importance of a person in the context of thedatabase i.e., in terms of how often that person iscited. Other visualization approaches such as tag
clouds seem to be very relevant in this context too,as they can be customized so to contain visual cues(e.g., through size or color) that give users a quick
overview of the data (Bateman et al. 2008).
2. Digital storytelling systems. With this term werefer to the class of interactive applications aiming
at letting users explore the database contents ina more incremental manner, following a storyinspired approach that reflects the key coherence
principles of a discipline (Mullholland et al. 2004;
Lawrence et al. 2010). For example, the ‘friend-ofa-friend’ exploratory tool (Fig. 3) lets you inspect
the available connections between one person andthe other people he or she was involved with(obviously, based on the information available inthe database). This procedure may lead to deadends - for we are looking at a less-known person,
e.g., a peasant – or it may take you to the discovery
of unanticipated relations among people. Thisapproach can be further elaborated so to pivot
around specific social relationships (e.g., witnesses
in medieval transactions), to the point that thepath a user takes become analogue to the unfolding500

of a story only partly commanded by the computer(Murray 1997).
3. Game-like interactive systems. This group ofinteractive applications are a direct evolution of
the digital storytelling systems just introduced(point b), with the difference that a series of userfeedback mechanisms are put into place with theaim of pushing users to engage more actively withthe system (e.g., by rewarding certain decisions
they make). These approaches are normally more
relevant in the context of a classroom, where it
is important to provoke students with challenging
and mind-stimulating activities (Wolff et al. 2004).
The experiments can be accessed online at http://
www.poms.ac.uk/db/labs/ ; we invite the reader
to try them out so to better develop a criticalunderstanding of their potential usefulness.
Although we are still in a very early stage inthe development of such exploratory interfaces, we
already had a number of enthusiastic early reviews
from project partners and work colleagues. As aresult of this initial response, and from the evolutionof our thinking around these issues, we are currently
refining some of these tools and also developing
other and more specialized ones. For example, aninteresting aspect we would like to explore further
concerns the potential applicability of the approaches
herewith presented within other prosopographicalscenarios, such as the ones focusing on ancientand modern history. Furthermore, in order togain more empirical evidence on the potential
usefulness of these tools for historians, a more formal
user-evaluation session involving both high-school
students and academic scholars is being planned.
At the conference we intend to present a
preliminary analysis of these results, together witha practical demonstration of the most successful
prosopographical exploratory tools we developed.

Figure 2: Explorative tool based on people’s life-lengths.
Each dot represents a year in the lifeline of a person.

Digital Humanities 2012

3. http://www.poms.ac.uk/
4. http://www.breakingofbritain.ac.uk/
5. The Berkeley Prosopography Services toolkit ( http://berkeleyprosopography.org/ ) is one of the very few
enterprises that aim explicitly at the investigation of alternativevisualization mechanisms in digital prosopography. Howeverat the time of writing the results of this research have not been
made available yet.

Figure 3. Explorative tool based on the social connections
among people. Each indented level (top to bottom)
represents a step in the ‘friend-of-a-friend’ chain.

References
Bateman, S., C. Gutwin, and M. Nacenta(2008). Seeing things in the clouds: the effect ofvisual features on tag cloud selections. In HT ’08:
Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference onHypertext and hypermedia. New York, NY, pp.
193-202.
Bradley, J., and H. Short (2003). Texts
into databases: The Evolving Field of New-style
Prosopography. ACH/ALLC conference, Athens,
Georgia.
Lawrence, K. F., et al. (2010). Scanning Between
the Lines: The Search for the Semantic Story. Panel
Session in Digital Humanities 2010.
Mullholland, P., T. Collins, and Z. Zdrahal(2004). Story Fountain: intelligent support forstory research and exploration. In 9th International
Conference on Intelligent User Interface.
Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck. MIT
Press.
Verboven, K., M. Carlier, and J. Dumolyn(2007). A Short Manual to the Art of Prosopography.
In K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (ed.), Prosopography
Approaches and Applications A Handbook.
University of Oxford, Linacre College Unit for
Prosopographical Research.
Wolff, A., P. Mullholland, and Z. Zdrahal(2004). Scene-driver: a narrative-driven gamearchitecture reusing broadcast animation content. In
ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advancesin computer entertainment technology.
Notes
1. http://www.pbw.kcl.ac.uk/
2. http://www.pase.ac.uk/index.html

501

Digital Humanities 2012

Heterogeneity andMultilingualism vs.
Usability – Challenges of
the Database User Interface‘Archiv-Editor’
Plutte, Christophplutte@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences andHumanities, Germany

1. Starting point
The Archiv-Editor1 is a multilingual desktop program
created for working with prosopographical data
and the Personal Data Repository (PDR), a serverclient database system developed since 2009 by
the DFG-Project Personal Data Repository2 at
the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences andHumanities (BBAW). Further development of theArchiv-Editor has become part of the DARIAHDE initiative for digital infrastructure in 2011.
The aim of the Person Data Repository is toprovide a decentralized software system for research
institutions, universities, archives, and libraries thatallows combined access to biographic informationfrom different data pools. It is especially designed
to meet the requirements at the BBAW where divers
research projects in Humanities collect personal
data throughout their work. This data gatheredfrom different research perspectives according todifferent research questions is usually stored incompletely different formats ranging from text
documents to relational databases and can hardly
be maintained after the research project has
finished. Since 2009, the Person Data Repository has
provided a productive solution for storing, searchingand exchanging person data including long term
maintenance and tools such as the Archiv-Editor forworking on the data and collecting new data.
The development of the PDR and the ArchivEditor are based on the experiences that have been
made at the BBAW since 2007 with a first versionof the Archiv-Editor originally developed for thehistorical research project Preußen als Kulturstaat
investigating archival materials (Czmiel & Holtz2007). Concepts and approaches that had proved to
be useful were generalized and implemented to bethoroughly customizable and extendable.

502

2. Challenges
The requirements of the starting point produce
three main challenges for the data model and thearchitecture of the PDR and the Archiv-Editor.
However, the Archiv-Editor’s interface design must
to ensure usability over a complex data model
because on the user side no special software
knowledge can be presupposed. At the beginning of
the PDR project evaluations of repository softwareand prosopographical databases were made (Körner,
Plutte, Roeder & Walkowski 2010) that led to thedecision to construct a new system and a new data
entry interface rather than extending any existing
software. Although this was an expensive approachthe experiences with the first version of the ArchivEditor were very promising and a redevelopment of
the software could lead to a perfectly well fitting
program, and this was proven to be true.
Enfolding the Heterogeneity of Data
Personal data from different research and editing
projects at the BBAW are not only provided indifferent formats and have to be transformed into
the PDR data model (Körner 2010), but come fromdivergent research perspectives and are semanticallyheterogeneous: The PDR integrates by means oftransformation and the Archiv-Editor data from
historians, musicologists, linguists, and philologists.
The scientific cultures and disciplines at the BBAW
and the kind of personal data and perspectives forwhich it is gathered differ very much. The PDR has
therefore chosen to use a very open data model basedon XML that does not narrow the type of information
stored but allows the retention of any kind ofstatement about persons which can then be classified
according to customizable semantic, time and spatial
dimensions (Walkowski 2009). The approach does
not define a person as single data record, but rather ascompilation of all statements concerning that person.
Thus, it is possible to display complementing as wellas contradicting statements in parallel, which meets
one of the basic challenges of biographic research. To
enable a very deep classification of proper names andnotions, words can be marked with a TEI3 compatible
and fully customizable mark-up. Thus a very highlevel of atomization and complexity is implemented.
To ensure interoperability with other data storestransformation scripts are developed that allow theexport of personal data into other standards such as
TEI person description.
Multilingualism
Already in 2009 when the PDR started to develpe therepository software it began a cooperation with the
Rom based German-French-Italian musicologicalproject MUSICI4 (Roeder & Plutte 2010a). Therefore

Digital Humanities 2012

the Archiv-Editor was not only required to betranslated into Italian, French and English but theclassification schemas itself had to be designed tobe language independent. Researchers in Rom want
to classify their data in Italian but the data should
be semantically compatible with those personal datacollected at the BBAW in Berlin.
Usability
The complex data model of the PDR is diametrically
opposed to the usability of the Archiv-Editor. The
first step to usability was to encapsulate the XML –users do not see or edit XML. Since early 2011 when
productive work with the Archiv-Editor began it has
become clear that it is not enough to encapsulate
XML: Research projects demanded to narrow thedata entry fields and to enhance user guidance. In
contrast to the – greatly appreciated – complexity
and openness of the PDR data model a familiar
database interface such as a formula with certain
fields (Name, Profession etc.) was desired – asdesktop program for offline work as well as an online
version for web access.

3. Approaches to these challenges
Modularity
To combine theses divergent requirements theArchiv-Editor is designed modular. The Eclipse
Rich Client Platform5 was chosen because of it’s
extensibility and because it allows individual plugins
for individual project requirements. While the
PDR provides a solution to combine heterogeneous
data und different research perspectives througha complex data model, the Archiv-Editor provides
several general solutions plus individual adaption
without cutting back the interoperability andexchangeability of the data.

The lite version of the Archiv-Editor simplifies
the appearance of the editor and provides only
the very necessary functionality to make it easy
for researchers to get started with the editor.
The complex data model is represented in fully
customizable formulas with user guidance in order tomake the editor look as familiar as a simple database,although the openness of the data model is always inclose reach through one click.

The advanced version of the Archiv-Editor contains
all the functionality of the lite version and provides
editors to fully edit all aspects of the data model.
Besides the simple search different levels of advanced
search are available as well as options for grouping
and filtering statements. Furthermore, tools fordatacleaning and automated PID (e.g. PND6, VIAF7,
LCCN8) search are included.

One Archiv-Editor = 3 different Editors
Currently two desktop versions of the Archiv-Editor
are provided and an online version will be publishedin 2012 porting both versions to the web.
Archiv-Editor RAP is the online version of the ArchivEditor and includes both the advanced version
and the lite version. It uses the Eclipse Rich Ajax
Platform9 Architecture to port the RCP Application
to the web and hold most of the desktop functionality
for working from anywhere and without priorinstallation. The Archiv-Editor RAP will be publishedin summer 2012.
Language
schemes

independentclassification

Semantic classifications and ontologies are hardly
language independent and notions and proper names
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Digital Humanities 2012

do not retain exactly the same definition, connotationand discriminatory power when translated intoanother language. Furthermore, the mapping ofclassification systems is very problematic (vanOssenbruggen, Hildebrand & de Boer 2011). In orderto ensure interoperability between classifications
in different languages used in different projects(e.g. in Rom and Berlin) without having tomap categories afterwards the Archiv-Editor and
the PDR use a hierarchical classification system.
Superordinate concepts and ordinate concepts
such as ‘personName’, ‘placeName’, ‘profession’,‘intellectual profession’, ‘musical profession’ arepredefined using unique English terms and aretranslated for presentation in all interfaces toproject specific languages. Subordinate concepts
such as ‘violinist’, ‘violinista’ or ‘cantate’ can be
added according to project specific requirements
without prior standardization. Thus classifications
in different languages can be compared on highand mid-level terms without any mapping efforts.
Although the classification system is thus not
thoroughly standardized and internationalized it
combines both the need for interoperability andthe openness to easily manageable project specificextensions. Even if subordinate concepts such as‘violinist’ and ‘violinista’ can not directly be mapped
they can be identified as subcategories of thesame language independent superordinate concept‘musical profession’.

References
Czmiel, A., and B. Holtz (2007). Quellenarbeit
im Projekt ‘Preußen als Kulturstaat’ – Strukturierte
Informationserfassung mit dem ‘Archiv-Editor’.
Beiträge der Tagung .hist 2006 – Geschichte im
Netz: Praxis, Chancen, Visionen. vol 10, part vol. I.
Körner,F.
(2010).
Datenarchäologie
und Datenaufbereitung, digiversity, September
30. http://digiversity.net/2010/datenarchae
ologie/ .
Körner, F., C. Plutte, T. Roeder, and N.O. Walkowski (2010). Software-Evaluation fürein Personendaten-Repositorium. Research Paper,
Berlin. <urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-opus-15111>
Neumann, G., F. Körner, T. Roeder, and N.-O.
Walkowski (2010). Personendaten-Repositorium(PDR): Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften. Jahrbuch 2010, Berlin, pp.
320-326.
Plutte, C. (2011). Archiv-Editor – Software for
Personal Data. In S. Gradmann, F. Borri, C. Meghini,and H. Schuldt (2011). Research and Advanced
Technology for Digital Libraries, Berlin: Springer,
pp. 446-448.

504

Roeder, T., and C. Plutte (2010a). Un repositorio
per i musici stranieri nell’Italia dal 1650 al 1750.
Concezione del database del progetto ANR/DFG:
Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom, January 27.
Roeder, T., and C. Plutte (2010b). Die
MUSICI-Datenbank. Personendaten-Repositorium
und Archiv-Editor: Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft
für Musikforschung, Deutsches Historisches Institut
in Rom und Ècole Française de Rome, November
04–05.
Roeder, T. (2009). Kooperationsmöglichkeiten
mit dem Personendaten-Repositorium der BBAW:<urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-opus-9231>
Schattkowsky, M., and F. Metasch (2008).
Biografische Lexika im Internet. Thelem, Dresden.
Van Ossenbruggen, J., M. Hildebrand, and V.
de Boer (2011). Interactiv Vocabulary Alignment. In
S. Gradmann, F. Borri, C. Meghini, and H. Schuldt(2011). Research and Advanced Technology for
Digital Libraries, Berlin: Springer, pp. 296-307.
Walkowski, N.-O. (2009). Zur Problematik derStrukturierung und Abbildung von Personendaten
in digitalen Systemen: <urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4opus-9221>
Walkowski,
N.-O. (2011). Das Konzept
einer polysemischen Datenbank und seine
Konkretisierung im Personendaten-Repositorium
der BBAW. In G. Braungart, P. Gendolla, and F.
Jannidis (2011). Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie –online.
Notes
1. http://pdr.bbaw.de/software
2. http://pdr.bbaw.de/english
3. http://www.tei-c.org
4. http://www.musici.eu
5. http://wiki.eclipse.org/Rich_Client_Platform
6. http://www.d-nb.de/standardisierung/normdatei
en/pnd.htm
7. http://viaf.org/
8. http://www.loc.gov/marc/lccn_structure.html
9. http://www.eclipse.org/rap

Digital Humanities 2012

Medievalists’ Use of Digital
Resources, 2002 and 2012
Porter, Dot

dot.porter@gmail.com
Indiana University, USA

1. Introduction
The field of medieval studies has a long andestablished history of scholarship assisted bytechnology. The first person who we now call a digital
humanist was a medievalist, Fr. Roberto Busa, whoin the 1940s first conceived of the Index Thomisticus,
a complete lemmatization of the works of SaintThomas Aquinas, which was developed through the1970s with the collaboration of IBM. Today there
are dozens of digital resources aimed at medievalists:
online collections of digitized manuscript images,
full- text databases, online scholarly editions, andsecondary sources such as books and journals.
Much attention is paid to medievalists who actively
contribute to the design and implementation ofdigital resources but relatively little attention is paid
to ‘regular’ or ‘traditional’ medievalists who use
these resources for their own research (for example,
the Digital Medievalist Community of Practice is acommunity for medievalists who build resources,
not medievalists who use resources). On the other
hand there has been a fair amount of work doneon the use of digital resources by other scholars in
the humanities (see for example the series of studies
by Diane Harley on the use of digital resources byhumanities scholars) but very little specifically about
medievalists. The only study of the use of digital
resources by medievalists that I have found thus far in
my literature search is my own master’s paper, cited
below, which was undertaken in 2002 and is thus
quite bit out of date.

2. BackgroundIn 2002 as part of my MSLS degree work I undertooka research project entitled ‘Medievalists’ Use of
Electronic Resources,’ which surveyed a selectedgroup of medievalists on faculty at universities
across the US on their use of and attitudes towards
electronic resources ( http://ils.unc.edu/MSpa
pers/2807.pdf ). The survey asked faculty how
they preferred to access various different types ofresources (journals, translations, facsimiles, etc.) andattempted to gauge preferences for using digital
resources across the community (junior faculty vs.
chaired faculty, preferences in different fields, etc.).

Much has changed since 2002. Google Books
was first introduced in 2004. ACLS released its
final report on Cyberinfrastructure, ‘Our Cultural
Commonwealth’ in 2006. The NEH, which had longsupported digital projects, awarded the first Digital
Humanities Start-Up Grants in 2007, and founded
the Office of Digital Humanities in 2008. In medieval
studies, more and more digital resources are released
every year, there is an established community of‘Digital Medievalists’, and the International Congress
on Medieval Studies has had a steady growth in
the number and profile of presentations and eventson issues relating to digitization. Digital projects inthe medieval studies are ubiquitous. Are they beingused?
Now is the perfect time to return to this project,
to undertake the survey again, and to see just how(or if) attitudes and use have changed over the pastnine years. Looking forward, this research can help
resource developers design projects to best serve
their audiences and can help librarians understandhow scholars assess and use digital resources.

3. The Study
In September 2011 I distributed two parallel surveys,
one ‘open’ and one ‘closed’. Both surveys include
the same questions; the surveys are very similar
but not identical to the 2002 survey. Updates madeinclude asking about use of electronic books andclarifying some of the other questions with input
from librarians and both digital and non-digitalmedievalist colleagues. The closed survey was sent
to a selected group of 100 faculty drawn frominstitutions listed in the CARA database at the
Medieval Academy of America (this is the same
approach taken for the 2002 survey and will allow fora close study between the findings between the twogroups). The open survey was distributed publicly,
and announcements sent out to listservs, to myfriends on Facebook, and posted to my network on
Twitter. This project will compare findings from theopen survey both with both the survey from 2002 andthe closed survey from this year.
I will be taking research leave in December 2011
and January 2012 in order to undertake analysisof the survey data and to draft initial researchfindings for presentation and publication. I will be
publishing several articles on this research, aimed
at several distinct audiences, including medievalists,
digital medievalists, academic librarians, the digital
libraries community, and he digital humanities
community. By July 2012 I will have completed alldata analysis and I will have a least one article
submitted. The poster session would give me theopportunity to present the findings to a digital
humanities audience.

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References
Harley, D., et al. Final Report: Assessing the
Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication:
An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs
in Seven Disciplines. CSHE 1.10 (January 2010)(URL: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=351 )Porter, D. C. Medievalists’ Use of Electronic
Resources: The Results of a National Survey ofFaculty Members in Medieval Studies. UNC Chapel
Hill (December 2002) (URL: http://ils.unc.edu/MSpapers/2807.pdf )Cross-cultural Approaches
to Digital Humanities– Funding and
Implementation
Rhody, Jason

jrhody@neh.gov
National Endowment for the Humanities, USA

Kümmel, Christophchristoph.kuemmel@dfg.de
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany

Effinger, Maria

Effinger@ub.uni-heidelberg.de
Heidelberg University Library, Germany

Freedman, Richard
rfreedma@haverford.edu
Haverford College, USA

Magier, Daviddmagier@princeton.edu
Princeton University, USA

Förtsch, Reinhard

foertsch@uni-koeln.de
Universität zu Köln, Cologne Digital Archaeology
Laboratory, Germany

Beginning in 2008, DFG and NEH provided jointfunding through a bilateral program in digital
humanities, a program that was based in part on
the previous year’s similar opportunity offered by the
NEH and the Joint Information Systems Committee(JISC) in the United Kingdom. Such collaboration
between US and European humanities fundingorganizations was inspired, in part, by the Report
on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social
Sciences, commissioned by ACLS, which charged
that such entities ‘should work together to promotecollaboration and skills development – throughconferences, workshops, and/or grant programs– for the creation, management, preservation,and presentation of reusable digital collections,objects, and products’ (5). Equally influential
was the assertion that ‘defining and building
cyberinfrastructure should be a collaborative
undertaking [...] designed to foster and support
collaboration across disciplinary and geographicalboundaries [...] to bring new perspectives to bear on
the exploration of the cultural record’ (28). Within
the spirit of these charges, funding organizations
increasingly believed that a call for increased
international collaboration should be supported byefforts to collaborate with each other; in short, they506

Digital Humanities 2012

should not demand a model that they were unable toemulate.

wider issues concerning the German art market
beyond traditional provenance research.

This poster session will highlight work fromdigital humanities projects funded through theseinternational collaboration efforts. Staff from US
and German funding agencies will be present todiscuss the challenges and opportunities to be foundin international collaboration, with input solicitedfrom the projects themselves. The discussion will
cover the organizational and financial side ofinternational cooperation as well as issues ofcompatibility with regards to content. What is goodpractice in starting new projects in an international
environment? What challenges have to be met
getting different, established infrastructures to work
together smoothly? How can different approaches
be combined in a fruitful manner? How canfunding organizations allow for flexible collaboration
between institutions (including their own) often
bound by complex administrative requirements?
Why is it important to build infrastructure within
an international context? What are successful
strategies in combining infrastructure development
and humanities research? Finally, what are the next
steps for generating successful – even ad-hoc, fluid– international collaborations as part of the natural
workflow in digital humanities production?

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) reveals thechallenges and opportunities in developing andimplementing standards while participating withina coalition of users for international projects. MEI,
supported by two grants through the DFG/NEH
Bilateral Digital Humanities program, developed an
extensive XML DTD that allows for rich tagging ofnotated scores, which are mostly commonly available
only as image files. By encoding music scores,
scholars can carry out the same kinds of operations
that are commonly performed on electronic textual
sources, such as compiling musical corpora, datainterchange, and comparative analysis. This project
began as a collaboration between the Universityof Virginia and the University Paderborn, and has
transitioned into a prototype gathering exemplar
projects involving dozens of scholars, librarians, anduniversities crossing interdisciplinary and nationalboundaries. Dr. Freedman co-directs the NEHsupported ‘Les Livres De Chansons Nouvelles
De Nicolas Duchemin,’ a digital facsimile project
centered on a dozen sets of Renaissance music books,
which also serves as an exemplar project for MEI;
Dr. Freedman also is a member of the MEI advisoryboard.

Brett Bobley, Jason Rhody (both of the
National Endowment for the Humanities in the
United States) and Christoph Kümmel (Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft e.V., DFG, in Germany) will
be available to discuss strategies, surprises, andchallenges in developing the collaborative framework
for the bilateral grant programs. Four projects
funded through this process will be emphasized,with each representing a different type of digital
humanities project that have unique institutionaland disciplinary approaches to bilateral cooperative
efforts.

The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Initiative(YMDI) is a collaborative project between Princeton
University Library and the Freie Universität,
Berlin. David Magier (Princeton University)
reports on international cooperation in recovering
cultural heritage materials and their subsequent
incorporation into research libraries. The private
manuscript libraries of Yemen comprise one of theworld’s largest and most important collections ofArabic manuscripts. Collectively, these 6,000 private
libraries possess some 50,000 codices, many ofwhich are unique, recording a rich cultural legacyof Arabic and Islamic literature from the eighth
century to the present. Because Yemen is relatively
remote from the central lands of Islam, it haspreserved many extremely rare sources, including
some of the earliest extant Qur’an fragments andtheological tracts, and works of great importancefor the study of classical Islam, Arabic literature,science, and history. In recent years, however,Yemen’s private libraries have suffered great losses,
in part due to sectarian extremists; over 10,000
manuscripts, including several entire libraries, havebeen destroyed. YMDI is working with a local
foundation in Yemen in order to address this criticalsituation by devoting itself to the digital reproductionof these private collections.

The
German
Sales
Project:
Art
Works,
Art
Markets,
andCulturalPolicy(Dr.
Maria Effinger, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg/
Heidelberg University Library) allows conversation
about
opportunities
forsharedexpertise
across cultural boundaries. A partnership with
the Kunstbibliothek – Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin, the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, theForschungsstelle ‘Entartete Kunst’ at the Universität
Hamburg, and the Getty Research Institute, theproject team is locating auction catalogs that record
art transactions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
between 1930 and 1945. By documenting anddigitizing thousands of catalogs in Europe and theUnited States and producing a database of theserecords that will form part of the Getty ProvenanceIndex, they will ultimately allow scholars to explore

The Hellespont Project, a collaboration between theGerman Archaeological Institute (DAI) and Tufts
University, combined and expanded the collections
507

Digital Humanities 2012of two of the oldest and most established digitalprojects in Classical Studies – Arachne and Perseus– in order to work toward a single comprehensive
digital library about the ancient world. Dr.
Reinhard Förtsch of the Cologne Digital Archaeology
Laboratory offers commentary on the challenges
and cooperative models in building interoperable
resources across international boundaries.

CWRC-Writer: An InBrowser XML Editor

In addition to these topics (sharing expertise;building
standards
andgarneringusers;
international cooperation in recovering cultural
heritage; and interoperability), Bobley, Rhody andKümmel will be available for broader discussion
about the future of international infrastructure
for digital humanities, data-driven approaches,
the rich entanglement of research methods with
infrastructure development, and the rationale ofbilateral and multilateral approaches in funding andresearch.

Brown, Susan

The following participants will be available during
the poster session:- Brett Bobley, Director, Office of Digital
Humanities, National Endowment for the
Humanities- Christoph Kümmel, Program Officer, ScientificLibrary Services and Information Systems,
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft- Jason Rhody, Senior Program Officer, Office ofDigital Humanities, National Endowment for the
Humanities- The following participants contributed to theposter session:- Dr. Maria Effinger, Universitätsbibliothek
Heidelberg(Heidelberg
University
Library), German Sales Project- Professor Dr. Reinhard Förtsch, Universität
zu
Köln,
CologneDigitalArchaeology
Laboratory, Hellespont Project- Richard Freedman, Haverford College, Music
Encoding Initiative & Les Livres De Chansons
Nouvelles De Nicolas Duchemin- David Magier, Associate University LibrarianforCollection
Development,
Princeton
University,Yemen
Manuscript
Digitization
Initiative

Rockwell, Geoffrey

geoffrey.rockwell@ualberta.ca
Department of Philosophy and Humanities
Computing, University of Alberta, Canada
sibrown@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta and University of Guelph,
CanadaChartrand, James

jc.chartrand@gmail.com
Open Sky Solutions, Canada

Hesemeier, Susans.hesemeier@ualberta.ca
University of Alberta, Canada

1. Introduction
The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory(CWRC) has developed an in-browser text
markup editor called CWRC-Writer for use bycollaborative scholarly editing projects. This poster
will demonstrate the editor and discuss the namedentity annotation features that use stand-off RDF fortext annotation. The combination of the poster anddemonstration will:- Introduce CWRC-Writer so that attendees can try
it on their own,
- Show the hybrid markup model that combines intext XML and stand-off RDF, and- Explain the agile development process followed
and recruit testers.
We deliberately propose this as a poster for two
reasons. First, we want to provide an opportunity
for attendees to try CWRC-Writer. Second, we want
to recruit a larger circle of individuals and projects
willing to test it with real editing needs.1

2. CWRC-Writer
CWRC-Writer is an open-source scholarly editor thatis undergoing extensive testing and real-world use inscholarly editing projects. CWRC-writer has or will
have the following features:

508

Digital Humanities 2012

TinyMCE, a javascript editor using jQuery to extend
functionality.4

4. Agile Development Process

Figure 1: Screen shot of CWRCWriter showing the tagging options- Close-to-WYSIWYG editing and enrichmentof scholarly texts with meaningful visual
representations of markup- Ability to add named entity annotations to texts- Ability to combine TEI markup for the text andstand-off RDF for named entities- Ability to export using ‘weavers’ that recombine
the plain text, the TEI, and the RDF into different
forms (including an embedded TEI-compliant
XML)- Documented code to allow editorial projects toincorporate CWRC-Writer into their environments

3. Background to CWRC-Writer
The Mashing Texts project, which was funded by theSocial Science and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, developed a prototype text collection andediting environment (called JiTR) that included aJava Web Start XML editor built on Eclipse by OpenSky Solutions.2 The idea was to test the viabilityof an easy-to-use editor that could be launchedfrom a web-based collections manager with the textthat the user wanted to edit. This meant that users
would not have to buy and install a complicatededitor. Simultaneously, Open Sky Solutions had
been developing a similar XML editor for the
Russell Letters project led by Dr. Nicholas Griffin at
McMaster University.2 While these editors worked,
the time they took to load via the Internet was too
long, and developments in browser-based JavaScript
editors made it feasible to re-implement the editor as
something easy to use in the browser itself.
CWRC, which is funded by the Canada Foundation
for Innovation to develop a collaborative editing
and publishing environment, is therefore developing
an in-browser editor dubbed CWRC-Writer.3 CWRC
has built the first usable version of the editor andis working on a second version for the Spring of
2012. The development is led by James Chartrandof Open Sky Solutions. CWRC-Writer is based on

This project uses an agile development model todevelop the editor in close consultation with CWRC
partner projects and member projects. As part of
the JiTR project, we developed personas and usage
scenarios for those personas. CWRC, once funded,then developed specific use case scenarios for the
XML editor with wireframes showing how it might belaunched (from an editorial environment) and how
it might look. Now we are developing this editor in
iterations with input from partner projects that use
it in their editing or born-digital writing. With thepartners we follow an agile process that involves:
1. Presenting prototypes to the partners withsuggestions of what we want tested and where weneed suggestions. Susan Hesemeier manages thisprocess.
2. Summarizing the feedback and prioritizing thenext features to be developed. Dr. Rockwell and Dr.
Brown do the prioritizing in consultation with thedeveloper.
3. Responding to queries as Open Sky Solutions
develops the next iteration of the prototype.
4. Initial testing of the prototype by a researcher toaddress any obvious bugs so as not to waste partnertime.
5. Presenting it back again to the partner participants
to be used with their texts. Back to 1.
Each iteration takes about a month and we havecompleted three. Partner projects are committed toiterative development and have research assistants to
help with testing in context.

5. Partner Projects
The partner projects for the first iterations include:
Orlando Project: This ongoing collaborative
experiment in digital women’s literary history has
since 1995 involved more than 100 people, manyjunior scholars, in using a custom semantic tagset
based structurally on the TEI but specific to literary
history. Orlando’s flagship publication appeared in
2006: Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles
is an on-line cultural history generated from the lives
and works of over 1200 writers. Orlando continues to
produce new materials.
Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Projects: Theinternational Editing Modernism in Canada projectis producing scholarly print and digital editionsof texts by modernist Canadian authors. Through509

Digital Humanities 2012

partnerships with several university libraries,
University of Alberta Press and CWRC, the EMiC
group at the University of Alberta, led by Dr. Paul
Hjartarson, is producing digital and print editionsof the literary manuscripts of Wilfred and Sheila
Watson, who rank among the best late modernist
writers in Canada.
Russell Letters Project: Philosopher and social
critic Bertrand Russell was one of the twentiethcentury’s great letter writers and a highly prolificone. His letters are a hugely important resource forphilosophers and historians and anyone interested
in twentieth-century culture and politics. The
Collected Letters of Bertrand Russell project, led
by Dr. Nicholas Griffin, is digitizing, transcribing,annotating and indexing more than 40,000 lettersfrom the Russell Archives to create an on-line
electronic edition.
Canada’s Early Women Writers Project: Despite theprominence of star authors like Margaret Atwood,
little is known of most of Canada’s earlier women
writers. This project updates and expands a biobibliographical database of 470 Canadian women
writers housed at Simon Fraser University. The
enlarged semantically-tagged version (of well over1000 names) will include all notable Englishlanguage writers active before 1950 who lived in or
wrote about Canada.

6. Named Entity Annotation
One of the issues flagged early on was thatmany CWRC partner projects wanted sophisticatedannotation for names, places, titles, organization
names, dates, citations, and events, as well as
great freedom for personal annotation, including
overlapping annotations. There is also a desire forinteroperability across projects, the coordination of
authority lists for these entities, and the ability toharvest some annotations.
The solution is to provide an editing tool thatuses a custom in-memory javascript data structure,that can export structural markup that conforms toschemas such as the TEI and Orlando ones, alongwith Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) RDF
for deeper semantic annotation (using controlled
authority lists and vocabulary) of references topeople, places, events, organizations, bibliographic
material, and dates. CWRC-Writer thus supports
creation of structural XML and the RDF in a
WYSIWYG environment (WYSIWYG in that the
annotations are displayed in the editor as theymight appear in the public interface). The formattingof the text within the editor relieves the user ofthe complexity of interacting directly with RDF
formats and even with angle brackets, though bothcan be viewed on demand and edited by those510

comfortable with code. There is also provision
for exporting enhanced text either as structural
markup combined with representations of entities as(potentially overlapping) RDF or, for those who opt
for hierarchical markup, entirely as nested tags. The
poster will present this in detail with examples.

7. Authority List Management andLookupCWRC-Writer provides forms to look up or constructannotations for people, places, events, organizations,
dates, and bibliographic references. The annotations
are applied much like formatting is applied in a
WYSIWYG editor: the end user highlights the text
to be annotated, then clicks on an icon to trigger
the annotation lookup or edit form. We are now
developing an API so that CWRC-Writer can retrieve
a list of recommended entities to present to theuser for selection and nominate new entities forinclusion. This is a first step towards a systemthat can manage people, places, organizations andother entities centrally across multiple projects. In
the first instance, this will work with entity datafrom several CWRC pilot projects and be developed
collaboratively with the Watsons project, but we areworking towards use of Cool URIs so that CWRC
entities can be exposed as and interact with otherlinked open data.
CWRC’s decision to design an editor that can beused without a full understanding of markup or
RDF will undoubtedly be controversial, but wefeel such an editor is needed by projects thatbring on collaborators for specific tasks who areuninterested in the deeper technology, just as
the accessibility of a web-based editor will be
useful to many digital projects for light editing,correction, enhancement, and annotation of dynamic
collections. We welcome the opportunity to engage
in this debate by demonstrating the CWRC-Writer tointerested members of the DH community.

References
CKEditor: http://ckeditor.com/
Collected Letters of Bertrand Russell project:
http://russell.mcmaster.ca/brletters.htm

Cool URIs: http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/
CWRC:
Canadian
Writing
Research
Collaboratory: http://www.cwrc.ca/
CWRC-Writer: http://www.cwrc.ca/cwrcwriter

JiTR (Mashing Texts) project: http://tada.m
cmaster.ca/Main/MashTexts

Digital Humanities 2012

jQuery: http://jquery.com
Open Annotation Collaboration: http://www.

openannotation.org/

Open Sky Solutions: http://www.openskysolutio
ns.ca/

ORE, a component of the Open Archives
Initiative: http://www.openarchives.org/ore/
Orlando Project: http://www.ualberta.ca/orl
ando and http://orlando.cambridge.org

The Musici Database
Roeder, Torsten

roeder@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Germany

Plutte, Christophplutte@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Germany

TEI Lite: http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/C
ustomization/Lite/

TinyMCE: http://www.tinymce.com/
Notes
1. For current information and to contact us visit the current
CWRC-Writer site: http://www.cwrc.ca/cwrcwriter
2. See http://russell.mcmaster.ca/brletters.htm
3. See http://cwrc.ca
4. For TinyMCE see http://www.tinymce.com/ . For jQuerysee http://jquery.com .

1. About the Project
The Musici Database is a research platform that
focuses on European musicians who migrated to Italyin the 17th and 18th century. It supports the workof the international research group Musici,1 whose
main interest is to compare the cultural impacts andthe social roles of foreign musicians in the cities
of Rome, Naples and Venice. As the sources onthat historical period are dispersed over a numberof archives, the researchers decided to share theirdata on a common platform. For the duration of the
project, the Musici Database serves as a research
infrastructure, which is intended to be published at
the end of the project. The database will contain
information on approximately 1,000 persons.
Database Architecture
The database uses an existing repository architecturethat provides a broad support of typical research
workflows, which can be configured individually.
This architecture is known as the Person Data
Repository (PDR).2 The aim is to create amusicological database that is fed with data by
a number of researchers, and is also capable ofinteroperating with other data sources (see Roeder2009). As the quantity of accessible historical data
can be critical for the results of the project, it is amain interest to find collaboration partners whose
interest is to share research data, helping to enrich
the information available to the researchers. The
work is facilitated by the client software Archive
Editor, which is a substantial element of the PDR.

2. An Approach to Digital
Musicology
The configuration of the Musici Database revealed
some data constellations that are typical for thefield of digital musicology. Further specialties were
accounted for by the focus on migrant biographies.
An approach to this was presented by Roeder and
Plutte (2010a).
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Digital Humanities 2012

Notation and Performance
The focus on music requires some special
information types to be taken into consideration.
Usually, music needs to be represented on two
different levels: the musical performance, which
can be described as the event when one or moremusicians produce music; and the composition,
usually written in musical notation, which makes it
easier to remember and reproduce musical ideas ofhigher complexity.
Both these forms of musical representation are of
relevance for the study of musical biographies. While
the written representation is well-preserved in thearchives, the performative representation did notexist before the 1860s and can only be reconstructedby coeval descriptions and historical performance
practice. As the analysis of musical performance canserve as a key to the social role of music, while theanalysis of written music offers insights into creation
processes, musical ideas and inspirations, the Musici
Database records descriptions of musical events andinstruments as well as the various creation levels ofcompositions from draft to print.
Musical Biographies
Since the project takes biographies of musicians
and composers into consideration and compares
personal motivations and ethnic backgrounds tosocial roles they had abroad, a basic question is
how musicians integrated their personal backgroundand their expertise in a foreign structure. Minority
cultures existed in most Italian cities, thus givingmusicians an opportunity to adapt to a familiar local
structure and to the individual musical scene of thecity. Many musicians did not only work in the fieldof music, and in some cases, the migrant musicians’
language skills supported second careers in otherareas.
The Musici database was prepared to record personal
background data and personal relationships as wellas itineraries, residences and various occupations;the vocabulary was configured with a broad range ofmusical professions.
Quantity of Traces
A major challenge of the historical period of
1650-1750 and of the research subject of the Musici
project is the relatively little quantity of sources,
compared to the 19th and 20th century. Most
musicians did not leave many traces on theiritineraries, and the available information is more
fragmentary. When a person has been identified
as musician, sometimes it is not possible to findout his or her name. The Musici Database supports
the combination of research data, which helps to

512

identify identical persons by logical comparison of
the available information.
Collated Names
Another essential problem is the lack of officiallyaccepted proper names. The German musician
Heinrich Schütz was known as Enrico Sagittario
in Italy; the settlement of Aachen was known as
Aquisgrana; the region of Sachsen was known as
Sassonia. Much depended on the language andthe cultural background of the writer. The Musici
Database collocates various noun forms of the same
entity and maintains the original form.
This also meets the requirements of the multilingual
research group, where Italian, German and French
are the principal languages, and of the final
publication of the database, which is also intended to
be internationally accessible.

3. The Musici Data Repository
The PDR architecture, which is used for the Musici
Database, provides an environment that allows
researchers to store, edit and share information on
historical persons. It serves as a platform for bothresearch and publication, and it functions as an
infrastructure that is able to interoperate with otherdata sources.
A Data Model for Historical Persons
The PDR data model is centered on informationsnippets, which can be connected to corresponding
persons and sources. An information snippet
contains information on one or more persons,usually one descriptive phrase or a quotation froma source (described in MODS). All information canbe marked-up with proper names, keywords anddates.3 It is possible to configure the mark-up
vocabulary in different languages, while original text
and a language-independent standard form can be
maintained.
Adapting the Data Model for Musicians
The PDR data model has proven its capability tomeet most of the requirements for the musicologicalresearch, as it is well suited to describe both events,
seen as information that is connected to all involved
persons, and compositions, seen as source objects(see Roeder & Plutte 2010b). However, for the future
it might be of interest to extend the data model byother types than persons, in order to describe also
places, events and relics in more detail.

4. Project Workflow
Client Software

Digital Humanities 2012

Archive Editor, the client software, is available fordifferent platforms and facilitates the process ofdata ingestion.4 It is based on Eclipse RCP, whichallows extensibility and customization through plugins.5 For the multilingual Musici project, localization
packages were developed for German, English,
French and Italian (presented by Roeder & Plutte
2010b).

It is desired to connect the Musici Data Repository
to other repositories and databases to exchange data.
Contacts have been maintained with French andGerman musical database projects. The repository
can exchange data through RDF and is prepared to
be integrated in the Linked Open Data network.

Adapted Vocabulary for Musicological Research

The results of the Musici Database are twofold.
Firstly, an infrastructure for musicological research
was created by configuring the PDR system. It
became clear that international projects require
some special services which probably would nothave appeared in a monolingual project. Secondly,
a semantically rich database was created, which byits flexible vocabulary allows for structured searches
and various forms of visualizations, configurable tocorrespond directly to specific research questions of
the project. It is planned to publish all data together
with the research results at the end of the project inDecember 2012.

To meet the requirements of musicological research,a vast vocabulary of some hundred semantic tags
from musical and social history was developed
before the researchers started the data ingestion.
This project vocabulary was developed by the
researchers with Archive Editor. In addition, anumber of special source types were defined by
the researchers, facilitating the source recording ofarchive documents like diaries, letters, contracts,bills, drafts, compositions, and etcetera.
Linking to other Resources

5. Outcome

Archive Editor allows connecting and uniting datafrom different projects. The PDR data model utilizes
standard identifiers defined by national libraries(PND, ICCU, BNF, LCCN). Data sets bearing
the same identifiers can be united by choice.
This improves the interrelation of directly andsemantically connected personal data inside theMusici Database as well as among other person datarepositories or other data sources using the same
identifiers and standards.
Data Conversion
During the first phase of the project, a small quantityof data (about 150 musicians) that had alreadybeen collected had to be converted to the PDR
data format. The project vocabulary was used toenrich the semantic layer of the data. Additionally,some services provided by PDR, like date andplace identification tools, were applied during theautomatic conversion.6
Database
Standard visualization methods for the repository
data are available through the PDR basic
infrastructure, although other visualizations need to
be developed to meet the interests of the project.
These are chronological and geographical views ofitineraries and settlements of musicians, as well associal network views of musicians and other socialgroups, such as clerics or merchants. This could also
be achieved collaboratively with other musicologicalprojects.
Interoperation

Figure 1: The Musici Database

References
Körner, F. (2010). Datenarchäologie undDatenaufbereitung. digiversity, September 30,
2010, http://digiversity.net/2010/datenarchaeologie/ .
513

Digital Humanities 2012

Plutte, Ch. (2011). Archiv-Editor – Software for
Personal Data, TPDL Conference, September 26-28,
2011.
Roeder, T. (2009). Kooperationsmöglichkeiten
mit dem Personendaten-Repositorium der BBAW.
Berlin: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-opus-9231 (urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-opus-9231)
Roeder, T., and Ch. Plutte (2010a). Un
repositorio per i musici stranieri nell‘Italia dal
1650 al 1750. Concezione del database del progetto
ANR/DFG. Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom,January 27, 2010.
Roeder, T., and Ch. Plutte (2010b). Die
MUSICI-Datenbank. Personendaten-Repositorium
undArchiv-Editor.
Jahrestagung
derGesellschaft für Musikforschung, Deutsches
Historisches Institut in Rom und Ècole
FrançaisedeRome,
November
04–05,
2010, http://www.gfm-dhi-rom2010.de/programm/hauptsymposien/hauptsymposium-iii/#Abstr
actPlutte

Walkowski, N.-O. (2009). Zur Problematik
derStrukturierungundAbbildungvonPersonendaten in digitalen Systemen. Berlin: BerlinBrandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften,
2009, urn:nbn:de:kobv:b4-opus-9221
zur Nieden, G. (2010). Musici. Poster-Präsentation
auf dem Workshop ‘Personen – Daten –Repositorien’. Berlin, September 27-29, 2009,http://pdr.bbaw.de/workshop/poster/musici
Notes
1. Musici. Europäische Musiker in Venedig, Rom und Neapel(1650-1750). Musik, nationale Identität und kultureller
Austausch. http://www.dhi-roma.it/musici.html
2. Personendaten-Repositorium, developed by the Telota
initiative of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of sciences andHumanities. http://pdr.bbaw.de
3. The approach of this data model is precisely described in
Walkowski (2009)
4. Archive Editor is available for Windows, Mac OS
and Linux.
http://pdr.bbaw.de/software http://
pdr.bbaw.de/software
5. The software includes a complex help system and a software
update mechanism (Plutte 2011). It was extended by a searchinterface that connects directly to various online researchservices. Scenarios to integrate the Archive Editor into otherresearch environments through plug-ins are currently being
examined.
6. The methodolocigal approach for data conversion was
described by Körner (2010).

514

The TEICHI Framework:
Bringing TEI Lite to Drupal
Schöch, Christof

christof.schoech@uni-wuerzburg.de
University of Würzburg, Germany

Achler, Stefan

stefan.achler@gmx.de
University of Kassel, Germany

This contribution presents the TEICHI Framework,a light-weight set of modules for the Drupal content
management system serving to display, search anddownload electronic documents encoded according
to the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for
TEI Lite (Burnard & Sperberg-McQueen 2006).
This publishing framework was developed jointly byhumanities scholars at the University of Würzburgand computer scientists at the University of Kassel
in Germany. To showcase the various features andconcrete usability of the framework, we present a
poster as well as a tool demo.
In comparison to other available solutions for the
publication of electronic scholarly editions, suchas the combination of an eXist database witha Fedora Commons repository or the Scalable
Architecture for Digital Editions (SADE), thefocus of the TEICHI Framework is clearly to
be a lightweight, low-resource, and easy-to-use
solution. Instead of competing directly with morecomprehensive but also more demanding solutions,
the TEICHI Framework focuses on low technicalbarriers and optimal usability (see Pape, Schöch& Wegner 2012). The overall feature set of the
TEICHI Framework focuses on the requirementsof humanities scholars working on straightforward,
small-scale digital edition projects and the needs ofteachers of electronic textual editing. It allows boththese target groups to set up a complete web-based
digital scholarly edition with minimal resources andtechnical support and see the results of their or theirstudents’ work online in a timely manner.
Currently, the TEICHI framework consists of four
modules, one each for displaying documents, forsearching them, for downloading them, and forbrowsing associated digital facsimiles. The modular
approach means that not all of the modules need
to be installed for the others to function, andadditional modules may be added in the future.
In addition, any digital edition published with the
TEICHI Framework can take advantage of thefull website infrastructure and community support
Drupal provides, including useful features such as

Digital Humanities 2012

revision history for each page or fine-grained users’rights management and optional extensions such as
blog or forum modules.

made available for download; finally, the TEI Image
Viewer’s control panel is defined as a block which canbe moved to any block region on the website.

At the core of the framework is the TEI Content
module, which lets editors upload TEI documents
via the Drupal GUI, order them in a hierarchicalstructure, and modify them online. The module
stores XML/TEI documents in the Drupal databaseand displays them through an XSL transformation
and a CSS stylesheet using Drupal’s content filter
mechanism. The default stylesheet included withthe module provides specific support for many of
the features that are part of the TEI Lite (P5) set ofelements: author and editor notes are displayed in
the right sidebar and scribal corrections and editorial
emendations are catered for. A toggle mechanism
allows for the display of two alternative readings via
the ‘choice’ mechanism. There is currently no support
for the use of encoded names, dates and places in an
index.

The poster will indicate the features each of
the modules provides to the overall publishingframework and visualize how each of them isembedded into the Drupal environment from atechnical point of view. The tool demo will showcase
both the frontend and the backend of the framework:
the ways in which readers/users can interact with
an electronic scholarly edition supported by theframework will be shown based on one projectusing the TEICHI framework, the digital edition of
Bérardier de Bataut’s Essai sur le récit (Bérardier deBataut 2010). A local installation will be able to show
how easy it is to perform some of the typical tasksof editors/administrators of an electronic edition
using the TEICHI framework, such as installingthe modules in a Drupal environment, adding,organizing and modifying XML/TEI files, changing
some basic settings and associating digital facsimiles
to the transcriptions.

There are several additional modules for theframework. The TEI Download module allows
downloading various renderings of TEI-encoded
documents. The editor/administrator can choose
which of the downloading options should be available
to the user for each document: EPUB files for ebook
readers, plain text files for use with basic analysis
tools, and XML/TEI files for more advanced analysis.
There are various additional user-side options fordownloading: either one of the alternative readings
can be chosen, editor notes can be included or
excluded, and several pages can be downloaded as
one large file or as separate files. The TEI Image
Viewer module allows to associate the displayedtexts with their corresponding digital facsimiles. This
module is based on Seadragon Ajax, a JavaScript
library for interactively viewing high resolution
images. It lets the user call up any given digital
facsimile, scroll through the available facsimiles,and zoom in and move around in each of them.
The TEI Search module, which is still experimental,
adds some basic TEI-aware search functions to theframework, allowing the users of the edition tolimit their search in ways, for instance, to exclude
results from editor notes, to only include resultsfrom quotes, or to restrict the search to one of
two alternative transcriptions distinguished by the‘choice’ mechanism. A basic TEI Editor module is indevelopment.
All modules are fully integrated into Drupal’s
administrative graphical user interface, allowing theeditor or administrator to adjust various settings
online. For instance, many settings of the TEIContent module, such as color schemes and button
texts can be modified with a few clicks; also, theTEI Download module lets the administrator selectmetadata fields and a cover image for the EPUB files

References
Bérardier de Bataut, F.-J. (2010). Essai sur lerécit, ou entretiens sur la manière de raconter[1776], digital edition ed. by Ch. Schöch http://www.berardier.org .
Burnard, L., and M. Sperberg-McQueen, eds.
(2006). TEI Lite: Encoding for Interchange. Text
Encoding http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/t
ei-p5-exemplars/html/teilite .
Pape, S., Ch. Schöch, and L. Wegner (2012).
TEICHI and the Tools Paradox. Journal of the Text
Encoding Initiative 2 http://jtei.revues.org/432 ; DOI: 10.4000/jtei.432.
SoftwareDrupal. http://www.drupal.org .
eXist-db. http://exist.sourceforge.net .
Fedora Commons Repository. http://www.fedora-commons.org .
ScalableArchitecturefor
DigitalEditions(SADE). http://www.bbaw.de/telota/projekte/
digitale-editionen/sade/sade-1. .
The TEICHI Framework. http://www.teichi.org .
Seadragon Ajax. http://gallery.expression.mic
rosoft.com/SeadragonAjax .

515

Digital Humanities 2012

What Has Digital Curation
Got to Do With Digital
Humanities?
Schreibman, Susan

susan.schreibman@gmail.com
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

McCadden, Katiet Theresa
katietmccadden@gmail.com
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Coyle, Barry

barrypcoyle@gmail.com
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

The preservation and curation of digital objects
begins at the time of the creation. Life-cycle
management involves a wide variety of tasks andskills, from applying appropriate metadata to issuesof access and reuse, transformation and migration.
(What is Digital Curation?)
For the vast majority of humanities scholars, curation
has been the preserve of librarians, archivists, andmuseum curators. But the increasing involvementof humanities scholars in the creation of digital
objects, from the creation of texts encoded in TEI,
to the development of large datasets suitable fordatamining, to the creation of audio/video corpora,puts a new onus on humanities scholars to create
durable data.
In a survey of a majority of the MA degrees
awarded in digital humanities,1 none offered acourse/module that specifically focused on curation/
preservation. More than one of University College
London’s courses/modules, as well as one at the
National University of Ireland, Maynooth (‘Creating
Digital Humanities Artefacts’) and Trinity College
Dublin (‘Theory and Practice of Digital Humanities’)contains elements of digital curation within modules
with a wider pedagogic focus.
Equally, much shorter-term training in the digital
humanities often overlooks digital curation as anarea of core curriculum. Yet, as digital humanists
increasingly find themselves working in positions
from alt-ac roles within a wide variety of memory
institutions, to the creators of digital objects aspart of a more traditional scholarly profile, wemight do well to consider integrating digital curation
more centrally in the curriculum. This gap in
educational/training courses is being investigated bya pan-European project, Digital Curator Vocational
Education Europe (DigCurV). DigCurV is a project516

funded by the European Commission’s Leonardo
da Vinci Lifelong Learning programme to establish
a curriculum framework for vocational training indigital curation, http://www.digcur-education.org/ ; with participants in Ireland, the UK, Germany,
Italy, and Lithuania.
In order to inform development of the framework,
DigCurV has been carrying out a variety of activities
in the library, museum, archive and cultural heritage
sector. Two surveys have been conducted, the first
focused on training or competence centres to gather
information about training opportunities, while thesecond examined the training needs of practitioners.
Focus groups took place in Autumn 2011 in Germany,
Ireland, Italy, Lithuania and the United Kingdom inorder to learn more about the skills and competences
required of those working (in the broadest terms) indigital curation.
Through research carried out by DigCurV, it
has become clear that many of the skills andcore competences required of people working indigital curation/preservation map well onto areas
traditionally covered in digital humanities degree/
training courses. Preliminary DigCurV findings
enrich and expand our thinking about whatcompetences are considered core to a digital
humanities curriculum. For example, training on
how to promote websites using social media anddigital marketing strategies emerged as an importantpart of the digital lifecycle management process.
Many of the technical skills required, such as
proficiency in XML and TEI and a knowledge andunderstanding of standards, best practice and thelatest technologies, also proved to be a sharedcompetences. Project management skills play animportant role in this field as people dealing withdigital objects often find themselves influencing
attitudes about technology and encouraging digital
activities to be seen as core institutional activities.
DigCurV found that many of the skills and corecompetences requiring training are not strictly inthe realm of ‘digital curation’ (ie object creation andpreservation), but also deal with the managementof objects within an institution, social media savvy,
ability to manage organisational change, and crossdisciplinary communication skills. These findings
should also expand our ideas of what digital
humanities training/education is.
Thus the curriculum framework being developed
by DigCurV might also be useful within a digital
humanities context. Due to the high degree ofinterdisciplinarity between digital curation anddigital humanities, a case can be made for moreemphasis on digital curation in digital humanities
curricula. This poster will explore recent findings ofthe DigCurV network in light of the DH curricula.

Digital Humanities 2012

References
Bermès, E., and L. Fauduet (2011). The Human
Face of Digital Preservation: Organizational andStaff Challenges, and Initiatives at the Bibliothèquenationale de France. The International Journal of
Digital Curation 6(1) , http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/175

Fino-Radin,B.
(2011).
Keepingit
Online, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/au
g/5/keeping-it-online/ .
Fulton, B., P. Botticelli, and J. Bradley (2011).
DigIn: A Hands-on Approach to a Digital Curation
Curriculum for Professional Development. Journalof Education for Library and Information Science
52(2).

(2009), http://www.lulu.com/product/paperbac
k/proceedings-of-digccurr2009-digital-curation-practice-promise-and-prospects/499481
9‘What is Digital Curation?’ Digital Curation
Centre. http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/what-digital-curation
Notes
1. King’s College London, University College London, Trinity
College Dublin, National University of Ireland, Maynooth,
University of Alberta, Loyola University.

Hank, C., and J. Davidson (2009). International
Data Curation Education Action (IDEA) Working
Group: A Report from the Second Workshop of the
IDEA. D-Lib Magazine. 15(3/4) http://dlib.org/
dlib/march09/hank/03hank.html ,K.
(2011).
When
Data
Kraus,
Disappears.
New
York
Times
SundayReview, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/o

pinion/sunday/when-data-disappears.html?_r=3&ref=opinion

Lee, Ch. A, H. R. Tibbo, and J. C. Schaefer(2007). Defining What Digital Curations Do andWhat They Need to Know: The Digcurr Project. ACM
Digital Library. Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEE-CS
Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Long, C. (2011). Developing and Implementing a
Master of Archival Studies Program: A Collaborative
Effort of a State University, a State Archive, andthe National Archives and Records Administration.
Journal of Education for Library and Information
Science 52(2).
Spiro,
L. (2011). Knowing and Doing:
UnderstandingtheDigitalHumanities
Curriculum.
Paper
presented
at
the
DH
2011.
See
blogpostforfurther
information: http://digitalscholarship.wordp
ress.com/2011/06/20/making-sense-of-134-dh-syllabi-dh-2011-presentation/

Stanton, J. M. Y. Kim, M. Oakleaf, R. D.
Lankes, P. Gandel, D. Cogburn, and E. D.
Liddy (2011). Education for eScience Professionals:
Job Analysis, Curriculum Guidance, and Program
Considerations. Journal of Education for Library
and Information Science 52(2).
Tibbo, H. R., C. Hank, Ch. A. Lee, and R.
Clemens, eds. (2009). Digital Curation: Practice,
Promise & Prospects. Proceedings for DigCurr2

517

Digital Humanities 2012

Orbis Latinus Online (OLO)
Schultes, Kilian Peter

kilian.schultes@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de
Heidelberg University, Germany

Geissler, Stefan

stefan.geissler@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de
Heidelberg University, Germany

Transcultural (historical) research necessitates theintegration of both macro and micro levels of
research and analysis and emphasizes the dynamic
and interactive character of its research objects
in their historical and geographical dimension(‘How Histories make Geographies’ and viceversa).1The interdisciplinary, interconnected HGISprojects located in Heidelberg share a common
vision: They facilitate research in the humanities
by e.g. (semi-)automatic, it-enhanced processing of
information, by adding modes of spatial search inheterogeneous data, by supporting visualization ofpatterns formed by spatio-temporal data or a mash
up of data from different sources of a different
kind. Thereby they ultimately foster the researcher toformulate new questions and theses and eventuallyfind some answers by experimenting in a sortof ‘humanities lab’. Only close collaboration ofgeographers, historians and computer scientists canensure that new digital tools and methodologies do
not stay outside the framework of everyday scientificwork in the humanities.
The online gazetteer ‘Orbis Latinus Online’ (OLO)
is in its contents based on the three-volume, 1972
edition of the Latin-German-dictionary of the same
name (‘Großausgabe’)2 and published as a data basein cooperation with the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
Munich (BSB).3The project contributes to theongoing interdisciplinary Heidelberg HGIS-projects
RIgeo.net and uses the geocoder GeoTWAIN, whichis part of the Heidelberg Research Architecture(HRA, Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia-Europe in a Global
Context’), in addition to further funding mentioned
above. The OLO has currently reached beta-status
and will be made accessible to the public in 2012.
The OLO provides coordinates to every Latin
place name listed in the Orbis Latinus4, additional
contextual information missing in the print version
as well as links between the entries and different
cross-references. The user can, for instance, search
for latin place names or their modern equivalents byusing a multilanguage webfrontend (php/mySQL).
The place names are stored in a PostgreSQL db to
use the advanced GIS-functionality of PostGIS. The

518

original print version provided by the Münchener
Digitalisierungszentrum (MDZ) is linked and theplace is shown on Google Maps (later: Open StreetMap) to give the user the opportunity to verify theentry. A web service based on XML-RPC is currently
tested. Due to copyright restrictions, this involves
as by now just the BSB and RIgeo.net. The basic
gazetteer services are accompanied by a kind of ‘geowiki’ which provides commentaries and alternatives
to the shown locations or the assignment of the Latin
place names to the modern ones (or vice versa). The
backend of the OLO consists of several parts such as atool for parsing the ocr-results and ‘cutting them up’according to the needs of the relational data base, auser management as well as a versioning system.
At first sight, it seems to be a quite simple
and one-off task to provide the coordinates, but
the design of the database proved not to bewithout challenges, – a discussion of which willbe the main topic of our poster. The first semiautomated georeferencing of the places added fromthe print version was made via Google Maps. Most
geocoders like Google Maps provide satisfactory
results merely for the main settlements, since
Google Maps provides just the coordinates of the‘most important’ place. This can but must notnecessarily be the searched location (e.g. a town
like ‘Neustadt’ exists more than 50 times in theworld). Therefore besides establishing a connection
to additional gazetteers and georeferencingservices with advanced structured information, acollaborative multi-user-environment with rightsmanagement to add, correct and comment on theentries was needed.
Registered users can now provide alternative modern
day place names and/or coordinates and commenton their choice, the level of probable historicalcorrectness of their entries/of their entry, thetime span for which their equivalent is valid
and on the sources they have used. The search
option for alternative/additional coordinates uses
the functionality of a web based tool of the HRA called
GeoTWAIN.5 Among other options, it offers a quick
visual search for coordinates including plausibility
checks. During its interview-like search, a rangeof all coordinates is presented to the user, all ofthem fitting to given place names worldwide in all
languages based on the search in different gazetteers(UTF-8), especially including the Getty Thesaurus of
Geographical Names (TGN, which was licensed by
the HRA).
To prevent vandalism and obvious incorrect data,
new entries will be reviewed by the editors. The
new coordinates or place names submitted arepresented parallel to the older ones, open for rates
and comments by fellow users. The entries on the
results page are arranged according to their rating.

Digital Humanities 2012

Contributors are shown by full name (if they wantto), so that credits can be assigned to individual
researches (and maybe the context of research theyused the OLO for).
Together with GeoTWAIN and RIgeo.net the OLO
is one of the various interconnected services ofa virtual research environment, the ‘gis-toolbox’,envisioned and realized by the Heidelberg HGISresearch which is being developed with the aim toprovide researchers with a set of databases and tools,e.g. to facilitate the analysis/mapping/combining ofitineraries of medieval nobility and thereby define
the spatial dimension of power and control beyond
simplified linear boundary lines.

Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA) Cluster
Asia-Europe in a Global Context, History
Department - Universität Heidelberg
Project presented by Stefan Geißler/Dr. Kilian
Schultes

Project coordination
Dr. Kilian Schultes, Stefan Geißler, Jun Zhu: History
Department, Heidelberg University in cooperation
with Prof. Dr. Bernd Schneidmüller
Project members
Konrad Berner, Arina Chithavong, Matthäus Feigk,
Philipp Franck, Anuschka Gäng, Peter Gietz, Timo
Holste, Lukas Loos and Thomas Seitz
Project financing
Mostly a private initiative, Heidelberg University,
Cluster Asia-Europe in a Global Context; Prof.
Dr. Bernd Schneidmüller, History Department,
Heidelberg University & RIgeo.net, “Frontier”project, Heidelberg University (Prof. Dr. Alexander
Zipf/Dr. Kilian Schultes in cooperation with Prof. Dr.
Paul-Joachim Heinig, Akademie der Wissenschaften
Mainz, Deutsche Kommission für die Bearbeitung
der Regesta Imperii)

Figure 1

Project cooperations

Figure 2

References
Appadurai,A.
make Geographies.

(2011).
How
Histories
Transcultural Studies 1.

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Available from: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelbe
rg.de/ojs/index.php/transcultural/article/
view/6129 . [Accessed 22 Jan 2011].

Döring, J., and T. Thielmann, eds. (2009).
Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den
Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. 2nd ed. Bielefeld:
Transcript.
Graesse, J. G. T., F. Benedict, and H. Plechl,
eds. (1972). Lexikon lateinischer geographischer
Namen des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit:
Großausgabe, bearbeitet und herausgegeben vonHelmut Plechl unter Mitarbeit von SophieCharlotte Plechl, 3 vols. Braunschweig: Klinkhardt &Biermann.
Knowles, A. K., A. Hillier, and R. Balstad(2008). Conclusion: An Agenda for Historical GIS. In
A. K. Knowles and A. Hillier (eds.), Placing History.
How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing
Historical Scholarship. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press,
pp. 267-274.
Owens, J. B. (2007). Toward a GeographicallyIntegrated, Connected World History: Employing
Geographic Information Systems (GIS). History
Compass 5(6): 2014-2040.
White, R. (2010). What is Spatial History?
Spatial History Lab: Working paper [online] (Feb.).
Available from: http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29[Accessed 29 Dec 2010].
Notes

1. Döring et al. 2009; White 2010; Appadurai 2011; see also
Knowles et al. 2008 and Owens 2007
2. Graesse et al. 1972. The less extensive one-volume edition from1909 is online since 2000 as a text-only-html-website and has
attracted some 370.000 visits: http://www.columbia.ed
u/acis/ets/Graesse/contents.html [Accessed 12 Feb
2012].
3. The BSB is the owner of the online publication rights.
The pdf-version of the 1972-Orbis Latinus is published
here: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0005/bsb00050912/images/index.html [Accessed 12
Jan 2011]
4. Currently 140.000 Latin place names and 40.000 modern
place names.
5. http://geotwain.uni-hd.de [Accessed 24.3.2012].

520

Semantically connecting
text fragments – Text-TextLink-Editor
Selig, Thomas

selig@ztt.fh-worms.de
Fachhochschule Worms, Germany

Küster, Marc W.

kuester@fh-worms.de
Fachhochschule Worms, Germany

Conner, Eric Sean

conner@fh-worms.de
Fachhochschule Worms, Germany

Text-Text-Link-Editor (TTLE) is a tool designed toallow researchers to link arbitrary text fragments
across document boundaries. The tool’s architecture
was developed with the goal of creating a generic,easy to use tool that can support various disciplinesof text research, e.g. for annotating texts or to present
an original text together with its translation.
TTLE is developed as part of the TextGrid project
and will be integrated in the TextGridLab. Being
part of TextGridLab allows TTLE to benefit from theadvantages TextGrid offers like user management,
storage, search tool and metadata.
The authors are currently not aware of existing tools
with a similar set of functionalities as those planned
for TTLE. They do, however, closely collaborate in
the development with Centre for e-Research (CeRch)at King’s College London, to maximize synergy. They
would also be interested in learning about possible
other work on similar tools currently ongoing.
Due to scholars usually having different accessprivileges to various documents they want to workwith, TTLE will offer three ways to select text
fragments, depending on the accessibility of thesource document. If the source document is writable
for the user, corresponding tags to mark start and endof a selection will be inserted into the document. If
a document is immutable for all users, a documentoffset for start and end of the selection will becalculated, this also allows the selection of any text
fragment.

Digital Humanities 2012

Figure 1

Documents that are read only to the TTLE-user
but are writable for other users are more difficult
to handle. If tags in such documents have unique
identifiers, those can be targeted as selection for
TTLE. If no unique identifiers are available or do notmatch the selector’s needs a copy of the document
can be created for the TTLE-user. This selection
mechanism still requires TTLE to validate all links
on a regular basis, as any writable document can bechanged and so can be linked text fragments. TTLE
will therefore keep hash sums of all text fragmentsthat are referenced by links and inform the user ofany changes.
Any number of text fragments can be linked together.
These links can be either free form or can be assigned
specific types. These link types are pre-defined andbelong to a specific person, who can share thesetypes with selected projects. The personalization oflink types automatically hides all link types createdby other people. This will prevent the user frombeing confused by hundreds of similar link types.
Also, this concept enables working groups to use thesame link types without requiring everyone to create
their own set. Text can be added to every link. As
free form link types do not define any specifications,only a single text block can be added to each linkof type free form. Pre-defined link types instead cancarry an XML schema fragment, which then has tovalidate against the text attached to any link of thatspecific type. Due to the nature of TextGrid as a
distributed, collaborative system all link types are
stored in a centralized triple-store and are exposedto the web through open interfaces. Additionally, thisonline storage makes it very easy to assigned groupsof link types to specific projects the owner wants
to share them with. For future stages of the projectan enhancement for handling link types is foreseen.
Plans are: grouping link types together, handing overlink type groups to other people and making link
type groups publicly available to form a text linking
community. These future plans will be kept in mind
while implementing the current stage.
As mentioned earlier, any text fragments can belinked together. But additionally other targets canbe included in a link as well. One possible target
is an external URI. This allows to reference sources
not directly accessible to TTLE. But additionally thisallows to include non text objects into links, forexample references to persons, e.g. using their FOAF
( http://www.foaf-project.org/ ) or dbpedia (http://dbpedia.org/ ) identifiers. Identical URIs
are treated as identical objects by TTLE. Anotherpossible target for a link is another link. This allows
grouping links and commenting link groups. For
example you can create multiple links in multiple
versions of a document showing that part a isfollowed by part b and then create a link referring
all the links of all the documents showing that parta always comes before part b except in document
version x. Links to a single target are also possible,
offering an easy way to comment text passages whenusing the free form link type.
All links created will be stored in a specific link
document. This document is a TEI compliant XML
file. Each link target will be represented there
together with a locator specifying the selected text
depending on the chosen selection method (seeabove). Also information about the link type andthe additional data required by the link type will
be stored in this file. To be more useful to working
groups, information about the user who created alink and the user who last changed a link will also
be stored here. To ensure easy access to linked data,
the links stored in a TTLE-file will be sortable by link
types and target documents.

Figure 2

To work with linked texts, TTLE will offer different
views, always directly comparing two documents in
two viewports. If more than two documents form alink, each of these documents can easily be selected
and made visible in one of the two viewports. At alater stage of the project plans are to use a customly
defined XSL-transformation to even more adapt thedisplayed data to the needs of the researcher.
TTLE is developed with open interfaces in mind. One
such interface enables other applications to propose
links for specific documents. To demonstrate this, aseparate webservice will also be implemented, whichscans specified documents for similar text fragments
and returns a link proposal to TTLE offering to link
the text passages found to be similar.

521

Digital Humanities 2012

Several prototypic implementations have beencreated to aid the selection of the best suitedtechnology for this project. A web based solution
has been found to be best fit. This web application
will be integrated into TextGridLab using the Eclipse
browser component, combining the utilization of
all existing TextGrid tools, with the rendering
capabilities of modern browsers and ease ofmaintenance of a web deployable application. Basic
functionality is currently implemented and a working
prototype of the application is expected for May 2012.
Plans to enhance TTLE even further after May 2012
have already been made. The following features wereidentified as particularly important and, subject tofunding, are foreseen to be implemented starting
June 2012:
1. Scientists often present the results of their researchon their own web portal. To easily integrate the
TTLE-results stored in TextGrid into these portals,
an API which allows external applications to
directly access links and the linked text fragments
would be useful. This can either be done by exportfunctionality within the TextGridLab or by offeringa web service interface to access the data stored in
the Grid.
2. Map like visualization of all linked documents ina project can give a good overview of the wholeproject, while displaying all documents of a specificlink type can offer a very good view of a document’s
development. Both types of visualization would be
important to be supported in TTLE.
3. Predefined link types are an essential element of
TTLE. Having a comfortable editor for managing
these link types would be helpful. Importantfunctionality would be: grouping link types
together, offering link types and type groups toother people, making link types and type groups
publicly available, allowing modifications to link
types which are in use and transforming specificlink types into others.

The Melesina Trench
Project: Markup
Vocabularies, Poetics, andUndergraduate Pedagogy
Singer, Kateksinger@mtholyoke.edu
Mount Holyoke College, USA

If we take seriously Stephen Ramsey’s call toarms at the 2010 MLA that Digital Humanities
means making something, then it behooves us toteach coding – or other ‘back end’ digital skills– early and often. While many practitioners arefocused on creating new courses teaching coding andtheory, another important pedagogical approach is
to consider how digital ‘poesis’, or making, mightchange the standard classroom experience. This
poster presents some experiments with teaching TEI
encoding to upper-level undergraduates at a liberalarts college, specifically in a seminar on women’s
poetics in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries.
As part of an upper-level undergraduate seminarat Mount Holyoke College, my students set aboutbuilding a TEI digital edition of Melesina Trench’s
long poem ‘Laura’s Dream; or the Moonlanders,’
perhaps the first science fiction text written by awoman in Britain. Since so much of the republicationand dissemination of women’s texts from this period
occurred through electronic editions and digitalscholarship, it seems only right to discuss the ‘radianttextuality’ of these materials.1 One can only properly
historicize the last thirty years of research in thisfield by discussing the ways in which digital encoding
has aided and abetted our current thinking about
the history and materiality of women’s poetics.
While many digital sites were originally built forscholars, it seemed time to consider what kinds ofcoding and interfaces might work best for students.
Most importantly, in a course designed to thinkcarefully about poetic literary terms, TEI seemed likea wonderful way to teach hands-on close reading.
Perhaps one of the most interesting and importantskills TEI can teach is to help our students becomereflective about the various kinds of vocabularies they
use to describe texts.
After spending the first few weeks discussing thebenefits and problems of several digital editions of
women writers, students were taught a series of
exercises to learn the basics of encoding. During
a two-hour workshop, they were introduced to
TEI, especially the difference between html as aformatting language and XML as a descriptive or522

Digital Humanities 2012

analytical one. Rather than starting students withthe document’s header, they were given a guided
tour through it, but spent their time learning thegrammar and syntax of line groups and lines, persons
and places, figurative strings, and the elements of
CSS stylesheets. Students placed in small groups
then had a month to tag fifty lines, with the helpof a student mentor during lab hours. They wereencouraged to use creativity by picking out threeor four tropes (figures that repeated throughout thepassage). They coded these using seg@ana – thesegment element for isolating an arbitrary segmentof test of their choice and the @ana type to signal
an analytical interpretation of their choice. Finally,
students color-coded their mark-up using a CSS
stylesheet to visualize their own encoding trends.
Two groups of students doubled up on each sectionof the poem, so that the class could compare twodifferent methods of markup.
In a reflection submitted along with their
XML documents, they were asked to describe
any especially noteworthy analytical experiencesfrom tagging, any limitations (or frustrations)encountered, and asked to propose possible
additions to our tag set. While students readily
understood tagging hierarchies, they had a difficult
time distinguishing between those proper nouns
reserved for <persName> and <placeName> andmore generic or figurative people and places,
including personifications (e.g., Terror or the Moon).
This became an excellent topic for discussion,
particularly of Romantic-era poems where real andillusive places tend to intermix. The ambiguity of theseg@ana tagging was likewise initially nebulous to
students, but it eventually encouraged them to define
what types of repeated figurative language spoke tothem, labeling the @ana field (<seg ana=“??”>) witha signifier of their choosing. For example, one groupsummarized their process this way: ‘The first theme
we chose was “decay,” but we had difficulty deciding
if that also meant “dirt-related” imagery. We wereunable to include as many words as we had initiallywanted, so we revised our choices for tags. “Decay”
became “morbidity” […] “dirty” became its own tag,and evolved first to “earthy” and then to “earth” so
we could include all organic imagery.’ There werealso some interesting pleas for more refined tags. One
group desired an element for inanimate objects, toparallel the tags for places and people, but almost
all groups wanted more granular tags for impliedmeanings of metaphors and for controversial anddebatable topics.
At least three interlocking outcomes suggest how
helpful teaching TEI to upper-level undergraduatesmight be – despite the time-intensive nature ofincluding such a technology in an English seminar.
Students not only produced multi-layered, associatedobservations based on multiple tropes color-coded
through a single passage, but they were also quitereflective about the relationship between various
elements and figurative trends. In one group’s
reflection, for example, the trope of ‘religion isalways within a line that is also tagged foremotion or male dominance.’ In larger discussionof this observation, two groups of students had
a particularly important debate about the genderdifferences between ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ withina lunar voyage poem, where the main female
character Laura dreams that she goes to the moonand falls in love with one of its inhabitants. (SeeFigures 1 and 2 below.)
Second, and perhaps more important, TEI enabledstudents to undermine and find vocabularies forformal elements employed by women writers otherthan the classical rhetoric of figures of speech
and figures of thought that still dominate poetic
vocabulary in the academy today. Since even themost virtuosic women poets were autodidacts andnot classically trained in English public schools,
it remains to be seen how some of their more
complex formal experimentation can be satisfactorily
categorized by such rhetorical figures and forms.
TEI – with its ambiguous and flexible vocabulary
for poetry – actually allowed students to find larger,
more amorphous terms for more organic formal
choices in Trench’s poem. By codifying their own
vocabularies to isolate and name tropes, students
began to consider terminology as descriptive andcase-based rather than prescriptive and universal.
For example, students decided that the long, multilined blocks Trench used in her poems were neither
stichic or strophic in quality, but either both orneither. They tended either to decide that the term‘line group’ gave them more leeway to describe how
her units of verse operated or to suggest they neededa new term. This kind of interpretive creativity would
not have occurred to them without the problem oftrying to figure out TEI’s standards.
Third, the limitations and possibilities of bothclassical terminology and TEI raised questions
about the politics or the ideological traces inboth types of categorical vocabularies. Having‘rediscovered’ women writers in the past twenty
years, many Romanticists and Victorianists are now
beginning to more closely assess women’s formal
experimentation, considering how genre and forms
carry with them histories and ideologies.2 While
TEI provides both the allure of extensibility, it also
provoked particular kinds of observations based on
its categories. For example, when discussing the<persName> and <placeName> elements, students
felt pressured to locate nameable people and places
within the poem and within Trench’s prose writings
that we read. They wondered whether the emphasis

523

Digital Humanities 2012

on person- and place-ographies place a premium on
women’s connections to other famous figures andplaces (such as London or Bath), occluding Trench’s
poetic tactics of omitting concrete places while
forging intersubjectivities between the ‘moonlanders’and Laura. They worried that the emphasis on people
and places – even imaginary – already framed theirways of looking at a poem for its connections to
notable, concrete, and often masculine realities.
These are just a few of the ways in which the TEI
terms, culled from many different disciplines, aided
a reflective study of poetics and categorical language
for younger learners. It likewise provided them withthe opportunity to think about creating a scholarly
edition by students and for students based on theirreading and interpretive inquiries.

hand column, the color-coding is as follows: green=place;yellow=”male dominance”; lavender=”religion”; plum=”feeling”

References
Blackwell, Ch., and Th. R. Martin (2009).
Technology, Collaboration, and Undergraduate
Research. Digital Humanities Quarterly 3(1).
Accessed February 27, 2011. http://digitalhuman
ities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000024/000024.html .
Buzzetti, D., and J. McGann (2006). Critical
Editing in a Digital Horizon. In L. Burnard,
K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, and J. Unsworth (2006).
Electronic Textual Editing. New York: The Modern
Language Association of America, pp. 53-73.
Curran, St. (2010). Women Readers, Women
Writers. The Cambridge Companion to British
Romanticism. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP.
Digital Humanities Questions and Answers.
do
TEI
with
students,
for
‘Can
you
close reading?’ Association for Computing
in the Humanities. Accessed February 27,
2011. http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/
topic/tei-encoding-for-close-reading .
Fairer, D. (2009). Organising Poetry: The
Coleridge Circle, 1790-1798. New York: Oxford UP.
Flanders, J. (2006). The Women Writers
Project: A Digital Anthology. In L. Burnard, K.
O’Brien O’Keeffe, and J. Unsworth. Electronic
Textual Editing. New York: The Modern Language
Association of America, pp. 138-149.

Figures 1 and 2: Two groups’ TEI-encoded markups of thesame two stanzas, with figurative tropes and place names

Fraistat, N., and St. Jones (2006). The Poemand the Network: Editing Poetry Electronically. In
L. Burnard, K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, and J. Unsworth(2006). Electronic Textual Editing. New York:
The Modern Language Association of America, pp.
105-121.
McGann, J. (2004). Marking Texts in Many
Dimensions. A Companion to Digital Humanities.
Eds. R. Siemens, S. Schreibman, and J. Unsworth.
Malden, MA: Blackwell. Accessed February 28,
2011. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9
781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-3-4&toc.dept
h=1&toc.id=ss1-3-4&brand=default .

Piez, W. (2010). Towards Hermeneutic Markup.
Digital Humanities 2010 Conference, King’s College
London. Accessed February 28, 2011. http://www.
piez.org/wendell/papers/dh2010/index.html .
Figure 3: The browser view of figures 1 (left) and 2(right), using CSS stylesheets. In the left-hand column,
green=place; mint green=place with a proper name(<placeName>); red=”ascension”; pink=”spherical”;
light blue=”spiritual”; purple=”vision.” In the right-

524

Project Tango. University of Virginia. Accessed
February 26, 2011. http://uvatango.wordpress.c
om/2010/08/28/introducing-project-tango-2/.

Digital Humanities 2012

Rudy, J. (2009). Electric Meters: VictorianPhysiological Poetics. Athens, Ohio: Ohio State UP.
Notes
1. See, for example, Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality andJulia Flander’s comments on assembling an archive of women’s
writing in ‘The Women Writers Project: A Digital Anthology.’
2. This so-called ‘new formalism’ can be seen in monographson poetry including, to name just a few, Jason Rudy’s
Electric Measures, David Fairer’s Organising Poetry or the
recent British Women’s Writing Conference panel on ‘Formal
Curiosities.’

Digital Edition of CarlMaria von Weber’sCollected Works
Stadler, Peter

stadler@weber-gesamtausgabe.de
Universität Paderborn, Germany

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) was a german
composer who is nowadays mainly known for hisbest selling opera Der Freischütz although he hascomposed more than 150 works (ranging from operas
to piano pieces) in total and has been of substantial
influence on the history of musical compositionin the whole 19th century. Next to his musicalŒuvre he wrote several articles for music journals
and even sketched a novel which unfortunately
remained unfinished. Additionally to these works
intended for the public the Carl-Maria-von-WeberGesamtausgabe (WeGA)1 aims at publishing Weber’s
private correspondence and diaries as well until
Weber’s 200th anniversary in 2026. The WeGA wasgenuinely a ‘traditional’ scholarly project funded by
the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities
but has turned during the last years more and more
into a ‘modern’ digital editions’ venture both in thefield of musical and text edition. The proposed poster
should illustrate the current state of developmentof the text edition and it’s framework and someenvisioned future perspectives:

1. TEI based markup of every typeof text
Every primary (e.g. diary entry, letter, article)
as well as every secondary textual object (e.g.
prosopographies, commentaries, descriptions ofworks) are encoded in conformance with the current
TEI P5 guidelines (additionally the encoding of
metadata for musical works follows the guidelinesof the Music Encoding Initative2). Schemata havebeen developed and documented for every type oftext making use of TEI’s meta language ODD. The
overall encoding focus – besides the textual features– lies on the markup of persons, places, works androles (e.g. in an opera or play).
These files (currently > 15.000) are stored in asubversion system and then exported to an eXist
production database for online presentation and toanother eXist development database for internal
work.

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2. Web application
The website of the WeGA which presents the edition
to the user is driven by the native XML databaseeXist.The TEI files are the raw data that aretransformed on-the-fly to XHTML for convenient
reading while, for a maximum of transparency, they
are still accessible in raw XML format through a
dedicated tab. A third view on the text is facilitatedby the digital facsimile which is presented if not
restricted by copyright issues.
The extensive markup (and identification) of
persons, places, works and roles in the TEI data
allows for a dense linkage between these objects inthe web application; additionally, for every such linka preview tooltip with the most relevant informationis generated to avoid unnecessary page exits.
Further incorporated website standards are a searchfunction and faceted filtering.
One of our main concerns is to present not only the
textual data but also to provide the documentationof encoding practice and the necessary schemata,along with examples, to keep record of the makingof the edition and to provide stimuli for envisagedcorrespondence editions, especially in the field ofmusicology.

3. Relations
The web application mimics the look of current social
network sites and centers around persons and theirsocial networks. These networks (the contacts of agiven person) are computed through the available
correspondence and are presented in a separate
frame on every person’s ‘homepage’. (Two persons A
and B are connected if there is some correspondencematerial in our corpus that was sent from Person A
to B or vice versa.) It is a future goal to elaborate
on relations of arbitrary objects and to computeand visualize their distance (e.g. by which nodes
are Carl Maria von Weber and Mozart’s Zauberflöte
connected?)

4. Linked data and web services
The WeGA tries to develop tools and views not
only for a ‘reader’ (who is close reading the
texts) but also for ‘clients’ who want to accessthe (raw) data by automatable tasks. Furthermore
do we try to incorporate authority files to allow
for automated linkage with other repositories. An
already established example of Linked Data is
the PND beacon3 that connects prosopographic
information about a given person from different
sources. The information from these sources (e.g.
Wikipedia or the German Biographic Dictionaries)526

are then directly embedded in our web application via
according tabs or simply listed as web links.
A future goal is to provide a well documented API toallow for machine interaction with our data.
Notes
1. http://www.weber-gesamtausgabe.de
2. http://www.music-encoding.org
3. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PND/BEACON

Digital Humanities 2012

Data sharing, virtual
collaboration, and textual
analysis: Working on‘Women Writers In History’tool, as individual researchers and as interconnected
projects, creating means for textual and comparative
analysis of texts (primary and secondary texts)
written in different languages.
Our poster will present:

van Dijk, Suzan

1. the WomenWriters database, which is currently
being developed into a broader Research
Environment (plans for development will be
included),

Hoogenboom, Hilde

2. an example of the types of sources we use todevelop large-scale approaches that encourage theserendipitous finding of connections between women
authors, works, and countries through readers

Sanz, Amelia

as well as two examples of the projects, which will beinterconnected to the database (in its next version):suzan.van.dijk@huygens.knaw.nl
Huygens ING - Royal Dutch Academy of Arts andSciences, The Netherlands
Hilde.Hoogenboom@asu.edu
Arizona State University, USA

amsanz@filol.ucm.es
Complutense University Madrid, Spain

Bergenmar, Jenny

jenny.bergenmar@lit.gu.se
University of Göteborg, Sweden

Olsson, Leif-Jöran

leif-joran.olsson@svenska.gu.se
University of Göteborg, Sweden

1. Introduction
The European COST Action IS 0901 (‘Women
Writers In History’; 2009-2013; http://www.wom
enwriters.nl ) will present, through this poster,different aspects of its current activities. Theseaim at the constitution of a Europe wide (andbeyond…) network of researchers, who plan tocollectively rewrite European literary history: to give
women their due place in transnational literary
historiography before 1900, from the Medieval
period up to the early 20th century.
Current ways of studying women’s writing, bycountry or even individual author, do not do justice
to women’s contribution to the literary field. Recent
publications show that women played importantparts as authors, readers, and intermediaries,
particularly on the international level: many wereallowed to learn languages, and turned theirexpertise into the profession of translator.
This active female participation needs to be studied
more broadly, without treating each woman as an
exceptional case. Therefore the project has developed
a digital research infrastructure, the WomenWriters
database ( http://www.databasewomenwriters.nl), in which the project members have the possibilityof sharing their research data (inevitably relevant toeach of them), collaborating together in the same

3. a project concerning one individual author: theSwedish Selma Lagerlöf, and4. an annotating project presently developed andtested for future use in establishing connections
between texts, and formulating the significant
relationships existing between them.

2. Adapting the Structure to the
Research Questions (Suzan van
Dijk)
The WomenWriters database allows researchers togenerate new knowledge about women’s impact on
their contemporary or early readers: we proceed bylarge-scale data entry about their works’ reception,
without focusing on particular authors. This is how
serendipitous findings are provoked: by including
information either about authors we did not know as
yet, or about reception we would not have been awareof or looking at. The tool currently contains over
20.000 manually processed reception data, which
prepare an important empirical basis for research inEuropean women’s literary history. We will graduallycomplement (or even: replace?) manual processing
by technological solutions, and collaboration withother online projects.
One of the challenges is in the way of handling theactivities of these authors starting from the reception
side. Characteristic of the WomenWriters database(present form) is that it is not just composed of thetwo ‘classical’ entities: Author and Work. A third
one has been added: the Reader. This structurematerializes Todorov’s scheme, putting in between
writer and reader the imaginary world created by
the one and to be ‘constructed’ in the other’s head(Todorov 1980). From our point of view a book/text
only gets historical relevance by having been read –this is why we added, next to the Author-Work, theWork-Reader connection.
527

Digital Humanities 2012

This symmetrical structure however fails to do
justice to the real dynamics of ongoing literarycommunication: receivers can become senders, even
without profiling themselves as intermediaries ortranslators. Which leads to a view of literarycommunication as being a series of texts generatingeach other through the intervention of a reader
turned writer. A new data model has been presented
doing justice to this, allowing at the same timeinterconnectivity with related projects.

3. Data Sharing (Hilde
Hoogenboom)
In this project, we use different kinds of largescale sources that contain information about
these authors’ early reception, and provide thedata we work on. They include bio-bibliographic
compilations of European women writers, compiled
after the example of Boccaccio’s Famous Women(1361-75) as the databases of their time. Thisgenre spread across Europe, to become an on-goingtransnational phenomenon that exists today as biobibliographic dictionaries and databases. Recording
the traces of women and works, some of whom seemto have left no other mark in literary history, andare part of what Margaret Cohen refers to as the‘great unread’ (1999), they have taken many forms
over the centuries. Compilers rely on, disagree with,and often simply borrow their predecessors’ work.
Together with other sources, this material allows us
to understand and describe the presence of women
authors (as a category, or taken individually) overthe centuries both using numbers and studying thetropes by which these women are represented. Someof these compilations are available online, whichfacilitates their use for this kind of analysis.
WomenWriters is the only transnational databaseof women writers that brings together the whole
spectrum of sources for literary markets andliterary fields of small and large nations, and canbe considered as the ultimate bio-bibliographicalcompilation.

4. Comparative Textual Analysis(Jenny Bergenmar, Leif-Jöran
Olsson)Arguments for investing resources in digital scholarly
editions are often based upon the cultural dignityof the authorship (Shillingsburg 2004). For Selma
Lagerlöf (first woman to win the Nobel Prize for
Literature), this is above any doubt. But scholarly
editions that focus on single, canonized authorships
represent the author in splendid isolation. On theother hand, for WomenWriters it is important toinclude as many data as possible on the production528

and reception of those authors who may have beenrole models for writers all over Europe – in particular
as these data already exist in digital form and areinterconnectible.
The Selma Lagerlöf Archive aims to create sucha broader (gender) historical context that includes
the intensive contacts within networks of European
translators and writers that were important for
Lagerlöf’s success in Europe. These can in particular
be traced thanks to our participation in the COSTWWIH Action, which has facilitated, and willcontinue to do so, the discovery of unknown
connections between European women and Lagerlöf.
Standardizing the different entities data will allow,
by way of micro services currently developed,
exchanging information on these levels.
Here, we benefit from work carried out in COST
Action ‘Interedition’ (Joris van Zundert et al.), where
the SLA also participated, and where Juxta andCollateX have been developed, to explore patterns
in the reception of women writers by critics, andwhether they correspond to specific themes in theliterary texts. The same method may be used tocollate texts by different female authors as a shortcut
to discovering common topics. The advantage ofthis method is, again, that researchers don’t haveto know beforehand what to search for: unexpectedsimilarities may appear, that researchers might nothave imagined.

5. Sharing Annotations (Amelia
Sanz)
Within this COST-WWIH Action, we are proceeding
toward a next version of the WomenWriters
database, to make it available for other applications
and usable outside its original application in such a
way that different communities of scholars can ask
questions from the same sets of data. Complutense
University teams are now testing @Note, anannotation tool capable of supporting collaborative
work on texts, using women’s European reception asa case study.
They are developing an innovative annotation
method, which will be used in our project for
specifying and formulating significant relationships
between the texts we are studying. They can be
annotated using a shared annotation schema; adding
new terms and relationships to the schema as they
are required during the annotation process; making
it possible for authorized users to edit and to
restructure the schema.
As a concrete example, we will present the outcomeof an experience of collaborative annotation of the
Spanish translation of Mme de Graffigny’s famousnovel Lettres d’une péruvienne (1747): Cartas deDigital Humanities 2012

una peruana (1792, 1823) by María Romero, bothtranslations available in Google Books and Hathi
Trust, and included in the http://neww.huygens.k

naw.nl/receptions?fromreceptionsearch=1&so
rt=upper%28authors_works.name%29&page=1&se
archtoggle=on&workauthor=Graffigny&worktit
le=&receptionauthor=&receptiontitle=&recep
tionyear=&references=&per_page=20&x=17&y=2
4 .

References
Cohen, M. (1999). The sentimental education of thenovel. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Shillingsburg, P. (2004). Hagiolatry, CulturalEngineering, Monument Building, and Other
Functions of Scholarly Editing. In R. Mondiano, L.
F. Searle, and P. Shillingsburg (eds.), Voice, Text,
Hypertext. Emerging Practices in Textual Studies.
Seattle, Washington: U of Washington P.
Todorov, T. (1980). La lecture comme construction.
In Poétique de la prose. Paris: Seuil.

Storage Infrastructure of
the Virtual Scriptorium St.
Matthias
Vanscheidt, Philipp
pvanscheidt@uni-trier.de
University of Trier, Germany

Rapp, Andrea

rapp@linglit.tu-darmstadt.deDarmstadt University of Technology, Germany

Tonne, Danahdanah.tonne@kit.edu
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

1. DARIAHDARIAH aims to support and enhance digitallyenabled research across the arts and humanities
and builds and maintains a research infrastructure
for the wider digital humanities community. The
project is based on national contributions whereat
this paper emerges from the German part DARIAHDE (DARIAH-EU 2012; DARIAH-DE 2012). In orderto develop adequate strategies it is necessary toorientate on existing projects in the humanities.
For this reason contact was established with the‘Virtual Scriptorium St. Matthias’. Interdisciplinary
collaboration like this can work both ways: genuine
questions of research within humanities regarding
duration and change of cultural and medial identities
can get new impulses and possibilities throughthe representation of analog artifacts in the digital
medium and projects in the humanities can learn todefine their technical requirements in a more precise
way to get fit and proper solutions.

2. Virtual Scriptorium
St. Matthias
The ‘Virtual Scriptorium St. Matthias’ will bean online edition with images of more than
450 medieval codices, mostly written between theeighth and sixteenth century, and a database withinformation from several manuscript catalogues.
Although the supply of the library was dislocatedin the time of secularisation most codices remainedin the Public Library of Trier and in the libraryof the Episcopalian Seminary Trier (Becker 1996:
101-103). The latest catalogue of the codices used
for the reconstruction can be found in Becker (1996:
66-71, 105-234). The project wants to enable the user
to analyse a codex from any place at any time but also529

Digital Humanities 2012

to present the codices as an ensemble of medieval
writing and reading culture and as an institutionof scholarship and knowledge (Embach et al. 2001:
492).
The project is coordinated by the Public Libraryand Archive of Trier and the Center for Digital
Humanities at the University of Trier. It is supportedby the German Research Foundation and realised incooperation with many institutions all over the worldthat now possess manuscripts from the library andscriptorium of the Benedictine abbey St. Eucharius /St. Matthias in Trier. The digitised content will
not only be shown on the project homepage but
also on the portals of the TextGrid Repository and
Manuscripta mediaevalia (Virtuelles Skriptorium
St. Matthias 2011-2012; TextGrid Repository n.d.;Manuscripta Mediaevalia n.d.)and is responsible for the further replications to
all remaining locations. With these procedures theactual number of copies depends on the numberof attached locations but at least three copies areprovided at every time. Although the ingest processdescribed is handled locally, data can be ingested
worldwide using the web. For a huge amount of data
it is possible to take advantage of a local storage
server and connect it to the storage and replication
system. Similar procedures can be taken into accountfor the access as the data is either accessed via web or
via a local copy of the data which was replicated fromKarlsruhe to the specific location. The replication
process itself and the data integrity checks have tobe provided by a software for storage virtualisation
which is needed because several servers have to be
dealt with and which offers the opportunity to extend
the system as needed by the users of the ‘Virtual
Scriptorium’ by attaching additional servers.

Figure 1: Proposed architecture

3. Supporting Storage
Infrastructure
Requirements for a Storage Infrastructure
Analysing the current digitisation and access processin Trier several requirements can be formulated
to design an architecture fitting to the ‘Virtual
Scriptorium St. Matthias’. Due to the distributed
manuscripts data ingest and access to the storage
resource should be possible worldwide. The images
ingested should be replicated and their integrity
should be checked regularly to ensure a reliable, longterm storage.
Proposed Architecture
To support the ‘Virtual Scriptorium’ an architecturewith different locations is proposed as shown infigure 1. The images are produced and ingested into
the system in Trier. An automatic replication places
a copy in the local data center to ensure the web
view currently offered. Another replication processtransfers the data to Karlsruhe, where it is securely
stored inside the Large Scale Data Facility (Stotzka
et al. 2011). Karlsruhe is the coordinating data center
530

Figure 2: Implementation of the first iRods zone

Implementation
Although different software solutions aretheoretically possible to realise the architecture,
iRODS with its overall flexible structure seems
to provide the most convenient mechanisms todeal with the humanistic research data of the‘Virtual Scriptorium St. Matthias’ (iRods 2012). In
this implementation two iRODS zones are used
to realise a distributed, reliable storage resource.

Digital Humanities 2012

The responsibilities for data inside a zone and forthe replications needed are clearly assigned to thisspecific zone. Additionally the overall performance isimproved by using two data bases.
The data is ingested into the ‘DARIAH-Trier’ zone
(figure 2) using the iRODS Explorer or the commandline tool iCommands with the iRODS specific transfer
protocol. The replication to the local data center inTrier resp. to Karlsruhe, which are located outside‘DARIAH-Trier’, is realised with iRODS rules which
are triggered by a data ingest and then activate shell
scripts to replicate via scp resp. iCommands.
The replication inside the second zone ‘DARIAHMUSE’ (figure 3) is also realised with iRODS rules,
which copy new data to every server of the zone
and synchronises the servers attached. Mean transfer
rates of 9 MB/s (30 MB/s, 11 MB/s) could beachieved in the first transfers between Karlsruhe
and Trier (Trier and local data center Trier, Trierand Karlsruhe). Access to both zones is possibleusing various iRODS clients. Additionally to themechanisms described bit preservation services are
executed. An MD5 checksum is computed while
uploading a file, stored inside the iRODS systemand checked while downloading a file. In Karlsruhe
the checksum is recomputed once a month and acorrupted file is replaced with a valid copy if thevalues mismatch.

possible for the humanistic researcher. The ‘Virtual
Scriptorium St. Matthias’ provides a large amountof files which have to be stored. This issue is faced
by using a scalable data management system and bybuilding a distributed system to increase efficiency
and reliability. As humanistic researchers rather
think in centuries than in years, the system provided
has to be longterm available and sustainable. By
integration of the implementation to the DARIAH
infrastructure this demand is approached but acomprehensive solution is still under research.
Additionally, the architecture has a generic design
to be able to provide a storage resource for otherhumanistic projects as well. This feature is necessary
for the infrastructure the DARIAH project aims tobuild. The implementation described is therefore abasic but nevertheless fundamental component as it
ensures preservation on bit level and is a basis forfurther on-going developments.
Fundings
This work has been supported by DARIAH-DE whichis partially funded by the German Federal Ministryof Education and Research (BMBF) under the D-Grid
initiative by agreement 01UG1110A-M.
The work has also been supported by the KIT startup
budget for the ‘Build-up of an Experimental Research
Data Repository (e-Repos)’.

References
Becker, P. (1996). Die Benediktinerabtei
St. Eucharius – St. Matthias vor Trier. Berlin, New
York: de Gruyter.
DARIAH-DE (2012). Available from: http://www.de.dariah.eu (Accessed 16 March 2012).
DARIAH-EU (2012). Available from: http://www.dariah.eu (Accessed 16 March 2012).

Figure 3: Implementation of the second iRODS zone

4. Discussion
An initial implementation was realised with thelocations Trier and Karlsruhe and will be extended
in the near future. Up to now several codices weresuccessfully ingested and replicated. Because of thehumanistic context of this implementation several
challenges had to be dealt with. Most of the features
are highly automated to be as easy to use as

Embach, M., C. Moulin, and A. Rapp(2011). Die mittelalterliche Bibliothek als digitaler
Wissensraum. Zur virtuellen Rekonstruktion derAbteibibliothek von Trier-St. Matthias. In R.
Plate, and M. Schubert (eds,), Mittelhochdeutsch.
Beiträge zur Überlieferung, Sprache und Literatur.
Festschrift für Kurt Gärtner zum 75. Geburtstag.
Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, pp. 486-497.
iRods (2012). Available from: http://https://www.irods.org/ (Accessed 16 March 2012).
Manuscripta mediaevalia (n.d.) Available
from: http://www.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de/ . (Accessed 16 March 2012).
Stotzka, R., V. Hartmann, T. Jejkal, M.
Sutter, J. van Wezel, M. Hardt, A. Garcia,
R. Kupsch, and S. Bourov (2011). Perspective531

Digital Humanities 2012of the Large Scale Data Facility (LSDF) Supporting
Nuclear Fusion Applications. Proceedings of the 19thEuromicro International Conference on Parallel,
Distributed, and Network-Based Processing (PDP),
Ayia Napa: IEEE Press, pp. 373-379.
TextGrid
Repository(n.d.)
Available
from: http://www.textgridrep.de/ . (Accessed
16 March 2012).
Virtuelles Skriptorium St. Matthias 2011-2012.
Available from: http://www.stmatthias.uni-tri
er.de (Accessed 16 March 2012).

Digital Emblematics –Enabling Humanities
Research of a Popular Early
Modern Genre
Wade, Mara R.

mwade@illinois.edu
Society for Emblem Studies/University of Illinois,
USA

Stäcker, Thomas

staecker@hab.de
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany

Stein, Regine

r.stein@fotomarburg.de
Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Germany

Brandhorst, Hans
jpjbrand@xs4all.nl
arkyves, The Netherlands

Graham, David

david.graham@concordia.ca
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Emblematica Online offers a rewarding site for
exploration of the seismic shifts in digital humanities
from 1.0 to 2.0,1 while providing perspectives on
how Emblems 3.0 can also contribute to Digital
Humanities 3.0. Emblem studies are large enoughto offer a significant corpus for study, yet smallenough to present a finite overview. As a historicalfield of endeavor – emblems are a Renaissance textimage genre that informed all aspects of early modern
literary and material culture – it offers a uniqueperspective on key questions of digital humanities at
2.0.
The international scholars who cooperate as
the OpenEmblem research group have createda vibrant model for humanistic collaborative
research, culminating in the international project‘Emblematica Online,’2 including the OpenEmblem
portal for emblem studies.3 The digital emblem
projects at Glasgow,4 Utrecht,5 Urbana (Illinois),6
Wolfenbüttel,7 Munich,8 La Coruña (Spain),9 andelsewhere serve the needs of an international
community of scholars. The long-term success ofworking with a consortium has ensured that theirresearch is not preserved in a digital silo, butaccessible to a greater range of future projects.
Emblematica Online and its OpenEmblem Portal
allows for new levels of research surpassing

532

Digital Humanities 2012that which was previously available in emblem
scholarship:
1.

Quantity – access to more than 700 fully
digitized rare works

2.

Quantity – access to more than 70,000
individual emblems

3.

Quality – extremely rich metadata
approximately 15,000 emblems

4.

federated searching across multiple projects at
geographically widespread locations at the book
level

5.

federated searching across multiple projects at
geographically widespread locations at the levelof the individual emblem

6.

emblem motto database

7.

Iconclass notations with associated hierarchies

8.

Iconclass notation with multilingual thesaurus

9.

An emblem exchange format, or emblem
schema, taking advantage of namespaces such as
TEI and SKOS

for

10. High quality digitization suitable for rigorous
scholarly research needs
11. Multiple access routes to the book and to theemblem
12. Sustainable links at the sub-object level
13. Multiple levels of granularity
14. Worldwide uniqueemblem level

emblemidentifiersat

15. Linking book identifiers and emblem identifiers
16. a prototype emblem registry providing
persistent identifiers by means of a handle
service
The OpenEmblem portal has moved from generic
digitization to customized, sophisticated digitizationof a complex Renaissance genre consistent withhigh scholarly demands. The design and scope ofEmblems 2.0 makes these Renaissance resources
more interesting to a wide range of scholars who
study the Renaissance from diverse and divergent
perspectives.
While the current researchers for Emblematica
Online have gained experience in creating standard
formats for automated metadata exchange,10 digital
philology,11 and portal creation,12 through theuse of authorities and controlled vocabularies of
their metadata, they have indicated relationships
among resources, making this work extensible in
the future. The Iconclass notations and labels
reflect a hierarchy, while the OpenEmblem Portal
simultaneously anchors the very rich metadata to

the original repositories. We can search at different
levels of granularity across integrated corpora andvisualize and present whole and part relationships ina meaningful way.
The panelists, all of whom have committed to the
DH 2012 conference in Hamburg, will present thefollowing aspects of humanities based research in thedigital medium:
Mara R. Wade traces the culmination of the researchthrough Emblems 2.0 and introduces as its key
feature unique emblem identifiers. In addition to
helping us present the whole-part relationship, theunique identifier reflects the forward vision of
the emblem community to anticipate a time when
researchers can include annotation functions suchas ‘identical with’ or ‘similar to’ in textual andpictorial research. It creates an authoritative basis
for expanding the portal for book emblems to thematerial culture of early modern Europe, enabling
the future study of art forms where emblems featureprominently. The unique identifier is a significant
scholarly step in emblem scholarship and shows how
community driven research serves larger scholarly
communities as well.
Thomas Stäcker demonstrates how the project sets
digital emblematics to work, focusing on practicalissues of sharing, and the distribution and mining ofemblem metadata and data. Future digital emblem
research, in particular, and digital humanities, ingeneral, must achieve more integrated systems
grouping resources together, making them available
through uniformly designed graphical interfaces
and allowing searches on standardized fields
and vocabulary. Emblematica Online established
a common format for indexing digital emblem
material. Staecker emphasizes 1) the development of
a particular XML-schema with a separate emblem
namespace based on standards such as TEI, METS
MODS, and SKOS; 2) how data originating fromdifferent international projects are shared anddistributed, e.g. via OAI; and 3) how emblems andtheirs parts may be reliably identified and quoted
by persistent identifier by means of a central handle
service at the University of Illinois.
Two papers focus on image indexing and its broadpotential for the digital humanities.
Regine Stein demonstrates how the issuing of aunique identifier at the level of the individual emblem
opens emblem studies up for cross-domain researchand discusses the Linked Data approach. She argues
that the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (ISO21127, CIDOC-CRM) provides the ‘semantic glue’
necessary to mediate between different sources ofcultural heritage information and thus provides themechanism to open emblem metadata to crossdomain research from both the text and the image
533

Digital Humanities 2012

research communities, including material culture,such as prints, paintings, illuminated manuscripts,
and even architectural ornament. Based on theemblem schema, it is worth exploring a Linked Data
implementation using the CIDOC-CRM. Because
we aim also for maximum compliance to widelyused authorities and controlled vocabularies suchas Iconclass, Emblematica Online can offer a bestpractice case in terms of linking different sources
instead of building data silos.
Hans Brandhorst presents the advantages of
Iconclass as a shared vocabulary tool demonstratingthat it has a vital role to play in making visual
information accessible and retrievable. ‘Meaning’ is
not an intrinsic quality of a picture, and cannot
be detected with image recognition techniques(alone). Non-trivial subject retrieval of visual sources
is impossible without rich textual metadata. A
classification as a tool for the production of metadata
can only survive in the distributed environment of
the internet if it functions as a flexible, central
webservice, and if the user community itself cancorrect, edit and expand the vocabulary. He discusses
Iconclass 1) as a data production tool; 2) a shared
vocabulary tool, open to community editing; 3) asan information retrieval tool; and 4) as Linked Open
Data in SKOS/RDF and JSON representations. He
ends with a discussion of arkyves as a mixed businessmodel to sustain Iconclass development.
David Graham outlines Emblems 3.0. It can beargued that our earliest efforts were primarily
aimed at gaining individual access to digital datathat minimally replicates the books comprising our
corpus, and in particular at creating ways to digitize,
store, and display visual content. The second phase
was about making collaborative access possible byensuring interoperability and independence fromparticular vendors and platforms. It now seems clearthat the third phase will have as its primary focus thegoal 1) of massively, pervasively, and permanently
interconnecting huge amounts of textual and visual
data and metadata in multiple forms, contexts,
and purposes, 2) of integrating materials froma wide diversity of sources, and 3) of enabling
collaboration and interaction – both among scholars
and between the scholarly and lay communities – onan unprecedented scale.
In the spirit of the emblem itself with its visual andtextual components, Emblem 3.0 will be interactive
and collaborative; it will extend to emblems inmaterial culture. Emblem 3.0 will open up heretofore
unanticipated qualitative research questions basedon well curated and designed quantitative digital
resources.

534

Notes
1. The Digital Humanities Manifesto (2009) maintains ‘Digital
Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent
practices that explore a universe in which: a) print is no longer
the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge
is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds itself
absorbed into new, multimedia configurations; and b) digital
tools, techniques, and media have altered the production anddissemination of knowledge in the arts, human and social
sciences.’ http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/
2. This is a bilaterally funded initiative of the University of Illinois
and the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB), Wolfenbüttel.
http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu
3. http://www.germanic.illinois.edu/news/emblem
4. http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk
5. http://emblems.let.uu.nl/index.html
6. http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu/
7. http://www.hab.de/forschung/projekte/emblemat
ica.htm
8. http://mdz1.bib-bvb.de/~emblem/
9. http://rosalia.dc.fi.udc.es/emblematica/
10. http://www.hab.de/bibliothek/wdb/emblematica/
regelwerk.htm
11. See the link to the Spanish project (fn 9) for the link to DEBOW,‘Digitized Emblem Books on the Web,’ a regularly updated listof digital emblem books.
12. ThePortalwillbelaunched
in
April
2012.
Presently
book
level
data
can
be
searched
here: http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu/
Browse/Books/DigitizedBooksByTitle

Digital Humanities 2012

DTAQ – Quality Assurance
in a Large Corpus ofHistorical Texts
Wiegand, Frankwiegand@bbaw.de
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie derWissenschaften, Germany

1. Project
The DFG-funded project Deutsches Textarchiv(German Text Archive, DTA1) started in 2007 andis located at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie
der Wissenschaften (Berlin-Brandenburg Academyof Sciences and Humanities, BBAW2). Its goal is todigitize a large cross-section of German texts from
1650 to 1900. The DTA presents almost exclusively
the first editions of the respective works. Currently
there are more than 700 texts available (i. e. 500
million characters), most of them transcribed by nonnative speakers using the double keying method.
The DTA provides linguistic applications for its
corpus, i. e. serialization of tokens, lemmatization,lemma-based and phonetic search, and rewrite rules
for historic spelling variation.

to illegible text or text written in foreign scripts
like hebrew, greek, runic, etc.) sometimes require
specialized background knowledge, so we createdvarious assorted tools to aid users in finding
potentially problematic spots in our texts, and to helptranscribers to obtain better and faster results.
In addition, DTA provides an interface DTAE3 forthe integration of external text transcriptions alongwith the corresponding images and metadata. Thesetranscriptions should be encoded in XML/TEI using
the DTA ‘base format’4
Quality assurance (QA) also has to take into accountother levels of error prone representations and tasks,
namely metadata, XML/TEI annotation, HTMLpresentation (and other media), and the robustnessof workflow. DTAQ is our QA system dealing withall these potential errors: They need to be reported,
stored and fixed.

3. DTA Quality Assurance
DTAQ5 is a browser-based tool to find, categorize,
and correct various kinds of errors. Using a simple
authentication system combined with a fine-grained
access control system, new users can easily be added
to our QA system. The GUI of our tool is highly
customizable, so we can offer diverse views of oursource images, transcriptions, and presentations.

Each text in the DTA is encoded using the XML/
TEI-P5 format. The markup describes text structures(headlines, paragraphs, speakers, poem lines, index
items, etc.), as well as the physical layout of the text
down to the position of each character on a page.

2. Problem Statement
Even though our corpus of historic text exhibits
very good quality, many errors still occur in thetranscription, in the markup, or even on the level ofpresentation. Due to the heterogeneity of the corpus,
e. g. in terms of text genres (novels, prose, scientificessays, linguistic reference works, cookbooks, etc.)
there is a strong demand for a collaborative, easy touse quality assurance environment.
As of October 2011, the corpus consists of more than
260,000 pages (half a billion characters), several
gigabytes of XML. Even though our digitization
providers assure an accuracy rate of 99.95 %, manyerrors remain undetected, not to mention problems
in the presentation layer of the DTA or workflow
mistakes.
There are many kinds of possible errors in ourtranscribed texts: transcription errors (e. g. due

Figure 1: DTAQ: parallel view ofimage and rendered transcription

Our linguistic tools (CAB, 6 PoS-tagging) areintegrated into this environment, not only to checktheir performance for errors, but also to provide
alternate views of our texts. To avoid unnecessary
repetitions in proofreading, users can mark pages
as proofread. Using this technique, we are also able
to provide several quality levels of our pages orbooks. All tickets and proofread pages are stored in a
database, thus DTAQ provides in-depth analysis andvisualisation of the accuracy of the DTA corpus.

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Digital Humanities 2012

The backend of DTAQ is built upon many open
source packages, using Perl as a glue language. The
system runs on Catalyst 7, connects to a PostgreSQL
database via the DBIx::Class ORM and builds its web
pages with Template Toolkit. The frontend makes
heavy use of jQuery and Highcharts JS to create avery interactive and responsive user interface.
Our XML/TEI files are automatically split up into
individual pages and stored in a git 8 repository.
The development of DTAQ itself also occurs within a
distributed git repository.

4. Poster and tool demonstration
Our poster will show the DTAQ workflow patterns,
along with a live demonstration showing the various
views, tools, and powerful features of the quality
assurance platform.

References
Geyken, A., et al. (2011). Das Deutsche Textarchiv:
Vom historischen Korpus zum aktiven Archiv. In
S. Schomburg, C. Leggewie, H. Lobin, and C.
Puschmann (eds.), Digitale Wissenschaft. Standund Entwicklung digital vernetzter Forschung in
Deutschland, 20./21. September 2010. Beiträge derTagung. 2., ergänzte Fassung. Köln: HBZ, pp.
157-161.
Jurish, B. (2010). More than Words: Using Token
Context to Improve Canonicalization of Historical
German. Journal for Language Technology andComputational Linguistics (JLCL) 25(1).
Jurish, B. (2012). Finite-state Canonicalization
Techniques for Historical German. PhD thesis,
Universität Potsdam 2012 (urn:nbn:de:kobv:517opus-55789).
Unsworth, J. (2011). Computational Work with
Very Large Text Collections. Interoperability,
Sustainability, and the TEI. Journal of the Text
Encoding Initiative 1 ( http://jtei.revues.org/2
15 , 2011-08-29).
Notes
1. Deutsches Textarchiv (German Text Archive): http://www.
deutschestextarchiv.de/ .
2. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie
http://www.bbaw.de/ .

derWissenschaften:

3. DTAE (DTA Extensions): http://www.deutschestextar
chiv.de/dtae .
4. DTAB (DTA "base format"): http://www.deutschestext
archiv.de/doku/basisformat .
5. DTAQ (DTA Quality Assurance): http://www.deutschest
extarchiv.de/dtaq .

536

6. For each text, DTAQ provides a transformation to a normalised
modern spelling form using the Cascaded Analysis Broker CAB,
cf. Jurish:2010 + Jurish:2012.
7. Catalyst MVC Framework, written in Perl: http://www.cat
alystframework.org/ .
8. git, a distributed version control system written by Linus
Torvalds et al.: http://git-scm.com/

Digital Humanities 2012

The Digital Averroes
Research Environment –Semantic Relations in the
Editorial Sciences

work and thought went into the user interfaces,
supported by experiments with different types offront ends and different types of users – how should aphilologist be able to interface with the semantic data
providing the glue between the documents? Howshould inference engines be used on the data? How
will an editor use the manuscripts?

Willems, Florian

Performance is also in issue in highly interconnected
data like that. We will show our backend solution
for storage and maintenance of semantic data as
well as the implementation of the inference engines.
A completely new XML back end, XELETOR, wasprogrammed to serve the sheer amount of XML data
in reasonable time. User management and the historyof a given triplet is also an issue.

f.willems@uni-koeln.de
University of Cologne, Germany

Gärtner, Mattias

gaertner@informatik.uni-koeln.de
University of Cologne, Germany

The Digital Averroes Research Environment aims
to provide structured access to the complete oevreof Abū l-Walīd Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rušd,
better known under his latin name Averroes,
including scans of thousands of manuscripts,
chunked full texts as interim editions of all his
works and a comprehensive bibliography of primaryand secondary sources. The primary data format
is XML as TEI P5, but the complex tradition of
Averroes’s body of works necessitates a higher
level of abstraction than TEI is able to provide.
Consequently, this high level abstraction should pave
the way for crosswalks to lower level formats, as
FRBRoo and such like will become more and morecommon.
Averroes himself wrote mostly in Arabic, but nearly
all of his works were translated into Hebrew
and Latin. As was the case with many medieval
manusccripts, scribes often edited the texts they were
copying, and, in the case of Averroes, numerous
translations were crafted. Sometimes texts weretranslated from the Arabic original into for example
Hebrew, and then, after generations translated backinto Arabic. This creates a very inconsistent but very
challenging tradition of the works of Averroes. Manyof Averroes’s texts also have quite a few witnesses,
often numbering in the hundreds, where the TEI
doesn’t provide a satisfactory mean to manage
that many manuscripts. Semantic interconnectionof XML/TEI data to knowledge bases encoded insemantic web technologies may be a solution to thatproblem.
To this end, the connections between manuscripts,
translations, abstract works and traditions haveto be modeled as semantic data. Compatibility
considerations led to an abstraction of the Europeana
Data Model EDM, done in OWL-DL. A possible
implementation of the DARE semantic model in
CIDOC-CRM is also in the making with the
integration of WissKI into our environment. Much

Another challenge is posed by the inherent writing
direction of Arabic and Hebrew script. Inputting
XML in right-to-left script is tricky, but what about
RDF triplets? The on-screen input methods haveto be carefully chosen to facilitate bidirectional
input. The problem of displaying said information
is solved by the DARE, because intelligent usage of
CSS- and XSLT properties provides easy display ofbidirectional texts.
By using a given standard and giving much thought
to interfaces and usability, DARE will have one of
the first semantic representations of the complex
tradition of one of medieval philosophy’s foremost
commentator.
These central questions concerning especially theusability of the interface on the semantic data shallbe presented as a demo. Two computers will allow
interested parties to try DARE and its semantic
technologies out.
All our technology is available as free and open source
code.
Funding
This work is supported
Forschungsgesellschaft.

by

the

Deutsche

References
Hissette,
R.
(2010). Averroes Latinus.
Commentum
MediumSuper
LibrumPraedicamentorum
Aristotelis.
Translation
Wilhelmo De Luna Adscripta, ed. by R. Hissette,
Arabic-Latin apparatus with notes by A. Bertolacci,
glossaries by Hissette & Bertolacci and with † L.J.
Bataillon (Averrois Opera. Series B. Averroes latinus
11). Leuven 2010.
Wirmer, D. (2008). Averroes, Über denIntellekt. Auszüge aus seinen drei Kommentaren
zu Aristoteles’ De anima. Arabisch – Lateinisch– Deutsch, herausgegeben, übersetzt, eingeleitet
537

Digital Humanities 2012

und mit Anmerkungen versehen von David Wirmer(Herders Bibliothek der Philosophie des Mittelalters15). Freiburg 2008.
http://dare.uni-koeln.de/
http://wiss-ki.eu/
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/xeletor/

AV Processing ineHumanities – a paradigm
shift
Wittenburg, Peter

peter.wittenburg@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

Lenkiewicz, Przemyslaw

przemek.lenkiewicz@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
NetherlandsAuer, Erikerik.auer@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

Lenkiewicz, Anna

anna.lenkiewicz@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

Gebre, Binyam Gebrekidan

binyamgebrekidan.gebre@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

Drude, Sebastiansebastian.drude@mpi.nl
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands

1. Introduction
Speech research saw a dramatic change in paradigm
in the 90-ies. While earlier the discussion was
dominated by a phoneticians’ approach who knew
about phenomena in the speech signal, the situation
completely changed after stochastic machinery
such as Hidden Markov Models [1] and Artificial
Neural Networks [2] had been introduced. Speechprocessing was now dominated by a purely
mathematic approach that basically ignored all
existing knowledge about the speech production
process and the perception mechanisms. The key was
now to construct a large enough training set thatwould allow identifying the many free parameters ofsuch stochastic engines. In case that the training set
is representative and the annotations of the training
sets are widely ‘correct’ we could assume to get asatisfyingly functioning recognizer. While the successof knowledge-based systems such as Hearsay II [3]was limited, the statistically based approach led

538

Digital Humanities 2012

to great improvements in recognition rates and toindustrial applications.
However, most humanities and social science
research does not deal with proper signals thatallow to apply neither the purely statistical nor
the rule-based approach. Speech is spoken innatural situations embedded in noise, it is widely
spontaneous, often one has to deal with muchvariation for which we lack advanced models and theexisting corpora are small. Thus there is no chance toapply holistic speech recognizers that take a speech
signal and would produce a useful transcription.
The situation for moving image processing (video)
is even worse, since we do not have an accepted
target – researchers target annotations are mostly
semantic functions that are associated with gestures,
mimics and other body motions, which are verymuch dependent on cultures, situations and otherparameters. Only for sign languages we can consider
a situation comparable to oral speech, since we cancorrelate between a stream of video observations anda target transcription. However, sign languages use
various information channels, which are easy to becomprehended by the human eye, but difficult toprocess by machinery.
This situation is not satisfying since we see thatthe gap between the amount of material that has
been recorded by researchers and the amount ofmaterial that is available for research purposes
gets larger since the available time for creating
annotations did not change substantially despite newand more efficient annotation software such as ELAN[4]. Thus in psycholinguistics and in many otherhumanities disciplines dealing with natural scenes a
new ‘paradigm shift’ was required.

2. Interactive Recognition
Paradigm
This new paradigm is based on four equallyimportant pillars:- training many statistic recognizers on small
phenomena and improve robustness, i.e. widelyreducing the complexity of the phenomena to berecognized- including interactive learning methods- providing a highly efficient usability frameworkthat brings researchers back into an active role
- make the existing and partly complex audio/video
recognition technology available to the researchers
For data streams in the humanities we cannot assume
that there is one recognizer that does it all. What
researchers want is to have the possibility to traina recognizer to detect a specific hand movement

or a specific intonation contour for example. These
recognizers will then create probabilistic annotations
at a specific tier. All these detectors are adding
annotations ending in a complex lattice. The typeof approach to realize a recognizer depends verymuch on the type of pattern to be detected. A
cascaded recognizer, a recognizer that makes use ofannotations of earlier ones, could be rule-based orbased on statistics.
Interactive learning methods need to be
implemented to allow the researcher to quickly
improve the representation of a specific pattern
including its variation. First, a single sample might besufficient. Supervised learning techniques might help
to improve the annotation accuracy to acceptablevalues after a few iterations.

Figure 1: Three layers of annotation representing three steps ofthe automated analysis. First layer is the result of the uniform
document segmentation, second layer is the division into
speech/no-speech parts, third layer recognizes different speakers
in the recording. All the steps have been performed automaticallyAll recognizers will create erroneous annotations, i.e.
we need a framework that allows users to quickly
scan annotation patterns and correct them. Here wecan build on the ELAN annotation tool and TROVA
search tool that have already been optimized over theyears.
One of the basic assumptions of such an approachis that there are many recognizers available to theresearcher. Although there exists a lot of partly
complex technology in the specialist labs, it is notaccessible yet. A change of culture is required tomake such technology accessible, as is currently
being worked out by CLARIN1. A standardized
mechanism for invocation is required to allow
starting such recognizers and to interact with them.
The positive WebLicht2 experience motivates us tocontinue extending the Service Oriented Architecture
to audio/video services.
This new paradigm is shifting complexity to theannotation lattice. From many discussions withresearchers we can expect that the method canwork, since researchers are mostly not interested
in ‘complete’ annotations, but they are interested
in certain specific phenomena. For these kind of539

Digital Humanities 2012selected annotations the interactive paradigm seems
to be appropriate. In addition, we have seen in
first experiments that the researchers will become
engaged again, since they are not confronted witha trained machine where they do not know what
the values stored in the many parameters mean.
Now they can use the patterns to be looked at andthe annotation created as part of their theorization
process.

Accurate motion analysis allows distinguishing
between different types of video content and it canbe used to segment a video in order to select only
the parts, which are relevant for the researchers.
For each frame in the video a motion vector map
is computed using the Hybrid Recursive Matching(HRM) algorithm [6].
A skin-color detection algorithm [7] can be used
to identify seed points where the hands andheads regions most likely occur. The resulting
regions, where heads and hands are identified, areapproximated by an ellipse for each video frame(Figure 2). After the hands and head have beenlabeled, the recognizer can detect strokes, gesturesand relation between hands and head (Figure 3).

Figure 2: Left – a video frame with skin color pixels marked
and histograms of those in two dimensions, X and Y. Right –example of ellipses approximating the skin areas in given image

3. The AVATecH Approach
The AVATecH project [5], started in 2009 asa joint work between MPI, IAIS3 and HHI4
experts, is working along the Interactive Recognition
Paradigm. A number of audio/video recognizers
have been implemented and integrated, the usability
framework ELAN has been improved and a method
for remote invocation has been established that canbe extended to a Web Services scenario.
Audio Detectors
One of the recognizers provides a fine-granularsegmentation of the audio stream into homogeneous
segments allowing the user to control the granularity
of segmentation. Another recognizer is able to label
audio segments containing human speech, regardlessof the language of the recording.
Alanguage-independent
speakerclustering
recognizer is able to find segments spoken by thesame person within a given recording (Figure 1).
A pitch contour detector can allow researchers tographically specify pitch contours and search forsimilar patterns. The detector can tag segments
in audio recordings and annotate with pitch andintensity properties such as for example minimum,
maximum, initial or final f0 frequency, or volume.
Video Detectors
A shot and sub-shot recognizer is able to detect
shots of similar video content and label them. All
further algorithms rely on the results of this shot/cut
detection.

540

Figure 3: Results of the Hands and Head Tracking recognizer.
On the video file the positions of hands and head aremarked for every frame of the video. The annotations
created are fully automated and include the time ranges
in which left and right hand movement occurs, when thehands join and when there is an overlap of hand and face

User interaction
In close collaboration with the experimenting
researchers the ELAN tool has been adapted to
become a powerful framework to invoke the various
detectors via an API described in XML and to search
for annotation patterns and to manipulate them.

4. Conclusions
Automatic audio and video processing of naturalscenes is a tough task and the project team from
MPI, IAIS and HHI worked hard on the 4 pillars
mentioned beforehand. A first number of about 10
recognizers can be used; the ELAN tool has been
extended to a comfortable research environment
and a mechanism supporting the required complex
interaction between the ELAN (and finally the user)
and the recognizers has been developed. The firstexperiments with researchers working on real scenes

Digital Humanities 2012

has shown efficiency gains of about 70% only forthe segmentation case which is very promising for
speeding up the annotation work. In the realmof CLARIN we will collaborate with more of thetechnology providers in the specialist labs to tune
their algorithms so that they can be integrated in thisnew interactive paradigm.

References[1] Rabiner, L., and B. Juang (1986). An
introduction to hidden Markov models. ASSPMagazine, IEEE 3(1): 4-16.
[2] Hopfield, J. J. (1988). Artificial neuralnetworks. Circuits and Devices Magazine, IEEE
4(5): 3-10.
[3] Erman, L. D., et al. (1980). The HearsayII Speech-Understanding System: Integrating
Knowledge to Resolve Uncertainty. ACM Comput.
Surv. 12(2): 213-253.
[4] Wittenburg, P., et al. (2006). Elan: aprofessional framework for multimodality research.
In Proceedings of Language Resources and
Evaluation Conference (LREC 2006.)[5] Auer, E., P. Wittenburg, H. Sloetjes,
O. Schreer, S. Masneri, D. Schneider, and
S. Tschöpel (2010). Automatic annotation ofmedia field recordings. In ECAI 2010 Workshop
on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage,
Social Sciences, and Humanities 2010: University of
Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 31-34.
[6] Atzpadin, N., P. Kauff, and O. Schreer(2004). Stereo analysis by hybrid recursive matchingfor real-time immersive video conferencing.
Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE
Transactions 14(3): 321-334.
[7] Terrillon, J. C., et al. (2000). Comparative
performance of different skin chrominance models
and chrominance spaces for the automatic detectionof human faces in color images. In Automatic
Face and Gesture Recognition, 2000. Proceedings.
Fourth IEEE International Conference.
Notes
1. www.clarin.eu (www.clarin.eu)
2. weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de (weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebi
ngen.de)3. www.iais.fraunhofer.de (www.iais.fraunhofer.de)
4. www.hhi.fraunhofer.de (www.hhi.fraunhofer.de)541

Digital Humanities 2012

Index of Authors
Achler, Stefan ..................................... 514
Agugiaro, Giorgio ............................... 365
Akdag Salah, Alkim Almila ................... 79
Albrezzi, Francesca ............................. 342
Alessio, Piccioli ................................... 221
Alexander, Marc .......................... 82, 427
Almas, Bridget .................................... 105
Alonso Garcia, Nuria ............................ 84
Alvarado, Rafael ................................. 448
Andresen, Jens ..................................... 22
Andrews, Tara Lee ............................... 85
Antonio, Lamarra ............................... 221
Arazy, Ofer ........................................... 88
Armaselu, Florentina ............................ 91
Armstrong, Helen ............................... 148
Arnold, Kerstin ..................................... 70
Arnold, Matthias ................................ 429
Auer, Erik ........................................... 538
Auvil, Loretta ............................. 158, 397
Baca, Murtha ...................................... 342
Baechler, Micheal ................................. 94
Bärenfänger, Maja ................................ 97
Barker, Elton ........................................ 99
Barner-Rasmussen, Michael .............. 102
Batjargal, Biligsaikhan ....................... 473
Bauman, Syd ................................. 33, 52
Bański, Piotr ......................................... 52
Beaulieu, Marie-Claire ........................ 105
Beavan, David ..................................... 107
Beer, Ruth .......................................... 109
Beißwenger, Michael .......................... 259
Bellamy, Craig ..................................... 111
Bellot, Patrice ..................................... 467
Bennett, Bradford ............................... 413
Benzon, Bill ........................................ 268
Beretta, Francesco .............................. 431
Bergenmar, Jenny ...................... 113, 527
Berry, David M. ................................... 151
Bestmann, Oliver ............................... 288
Binder, Frank ....................................... 97
Bingenheimer, Marcus ............... 115, 230

Blake, Catherine ................................. 273
Blandford, Ann ..................................... 35
Blanke, Tobias ..................................... 117
Blustein, James .................................. 463
Bod, Rens ............................................. 57
Bode, Katherine .................................. 119
Bodenhamer, David .............................. 41
Boggs, Jeremy ........................... 299, 433
Bohl, Benjamin W. ............................. 435
Bol, Peter Kees ..................................... 43
Boot, Peter .......................................... 121
Bradley, Adam James ......................... 123
Bradley, John ...................................... 124
Brandhorst, Hans ............................... 532
Brey, Gerhard † .................................. 491
Brock, Anne ........................................ 126
Brockmann, Christian ........................... 15
Broeder, Daan ..................................... 169
Brown, Susan ..................... 35, 324, 508
Brown, Travis ....................................... 64
Brughmans, Tom ................................ 129
Brüning, Gerrit .................................... 131
Brunner, Annelen ............................... 135
Bryant, Michael ................................... 117
Büchler, Marco ................................... 137
Bunke, Horst ........................................ 94
Burch, Thomas ................................... 375
Burnard, Lou ........................................ 52
Burrows, Toby Nicolas ........................ 139
Buzzetti, Dino ..................................... 142
Capitanu, Boris .......................... 158, 397
Caplan, Alison ...................................... 84
Carusi, Annamaria .............................. 221
Chan, Peter ........................................ 208
Chartrand, James ............................... 508
Chaturvedi, Manish ............................ 148
Cheesman, Tom ................................... 151
Chen, Howard ..................................... 154
Choi, Woong ...................................... 480
Chong, Dazhi ....................................... 155
Chun, Su .............................................. 88
Clark, Ashley M. ................................. 438
Clavaud, Florence ................................. 72
Clement, Tanya ............................ 72, 158
543

Digital Humanities 2012

Cocciolo, Anthony .............................. 322
Conner, Eric Sean .............................. 520
Coppage, Samuel ................................ 155
Coulter, Kimberly ............................... 206
Cowan, Will ........................................ 465
Coyle, Barry ........................................ 516
Cristina, Marras .................................. 221
Crombez, Thomas .............................. 249
Crompton, Constance ......................... 441
Croxall, Brian ..................................... 443
Cruz, Alejandro .................................. 456
Crymble, Adam H. .............................. 162
Cummings, James ................................ 52
Czmiel, Alexander .............................. 445
Dacos, Marin ...................................... 467
Daelemans, Walter ............................. 249
Darányi, Sándor .................................. 163
Day, Shawn .......................................... 22
De Wilde, Max ..................................... 28
Decker, Eric ........................................ 429
Declerck, Thierry ....................... 163, 470
Della Costa, Dave ............................... 190
Dershowitz, Nachum .......................... 264
Dobrin, Lise M. ................................... 167
Dobson, Teresa ..................................... 35
Douglass, Jeremy ................................. 79
Drude, Sebastian ....................... 169, 538
Duke-Williams, Oliver William ........... 173
Dunn, Stuart ....................................... 176
Earhart, Amy ...................................... 179
Eckart, Thomas ................................... 137
Eder, Maciej ................................. 16, 181
Effinger, Maria ................................... 506
Ehrmann, Alison ................................. 151
Eide, Øyvind ................................ 18, 185
Ell, Basil ............................................. 359
Ell, Paul ................................................ 41
Elmaz, Orhan ..................................... 188
Ermakova, Maria ................................ 259
Ermolaev, Natalia ............................... 392
Faath, Elodie ...................................... 467
Faisal, Sarah ......................................... 35
Fendt, Kurt E. ..................................... 190
Fiorentino, Carlos ................................. 35
544

Fiormonte, Domenico .......................... 72
Fischer, Andreas .................................. 94
Flanagan, Kevin ................................... 151
Flanders, Julia ................................... 448
Fong, Grace .......................................... 43
Förtsch, Reinhard .............................. 506
Fraistat, Neil ....................................... 331
Franchi, Stefano ................................. 192
Freedman, Richard ............................ 506
Freire, Nuno ....................................... 450
Frizzera, Luciano ......................... 35, 324
Fujimoto, Yu ....................................... 453
Físseni, Bernhard ................................. 57
Gaiffe, Bertrand .................................... 52
Galina, Isabel ..................................... 456
Gan, Yu ............................................... 375
Gannod, Gerald .................................. 148
Gärtner, Mattias ................................. 537
Gasperlin, Oliver ................................ 497
Gayoso-Cabada, Joaquin .................... 195
Gebre, Binyam Gebrekidan ....... 458, 538
Gedzelman, Séverine .......................... 198
Geissler, Stefan ................................... 518
Geyken, Alexander ...................... 54, 259
Giacometti, Alejandro ................... 35, 88
Gibson, Robin .................................... 463
Gil, Alexander ........................... 433, 462
Girardi, Gabrio ................................... 365
Gius, Evelyn ......................................... 24
Gloning, Thomas .................................. 54
Glorieux, Frédéric .............................. 202
Goel, Ankita ........................................ 158
Goicoechea-de-Jorge, Maria ............... 195
Good, Jeff ........................................... 280
Gooding, Paul Matthew ..................... 204
Graf von Hardenberg, Wilko .............. 206
Graff, Ann-Barbara ............................ 463
Graham, David ................................... 532
Graham, Wayne ................................. 299
Grassi, Marco ..................................... 303
Gray, Steven ....................................... 348
Gregory, Ian .......................................... 41
Gu, Xiangyi ......................................... 155
Hachimura, Kozaburo ........................ 480

Digital Humanities 2012

Hallam, Julia ........................................ 41
Hamlin, Scott ..................................... 448
Hammarström, Harald ...................... 296
Hangal, Sudheendra .......................... 208
Harris, Trevor ....................................... 41
Hedges, Mark ...................................... 176
Heer, Jeffrey ...................................... 208
Heller, Brooke ...................................... 35
Henrich, Verena ................................. 126
Henzel, Katrin ..................................... 131
Herzog, Rainer ................................... 288
Hesemeier, Susan .............................. 508
Hettel, Jacqueline .............................. 308
Heydel, Magda .................................... 212
Hinrichs, Erhard ......................... 20, 126
Hirvonen, Ville .................................... 215
Hodgson, Eric ..................................... 148
Holloway, Steven W. .......................... 438
Hoogenboom, Hilde ........................... 527
Hooper, Wallace Edd ......................... 465
Hoover, David ............................. 33, 218
Hope, Jonathan ................................... 151
Hours, Bernard ................................... 431
Hrachovec, Herbert ............................ 221
Hsiang, Jieh ................................ 43, 224
Hsieh, Cheng-en .................................. 115
Hu, Jiajia ............................................ 228
Hudson Smith, Andrew ..................... 348
Huentelmann, Raphael ....................... 221
Hung, Jen-Jou ........................... 115, 230
Hyvönen, Eero ..................................... 22
Ilovan, Mihaela ..................................... 35
Ingold, Rolf .......................................... 94
INKE Research Group ........................ 324
Innocenti, Perla .................................. 232
Isaksen, Leif ......................... 22, 99, 236
Ivanovs, Aleksandrs ........................... 405
Iwata, Yoshimi ................................... 239
Jankowski, Nicholas ........................... 394
Jiao, David ......................................... 465
Jockers, Matthew ............................... 242
Johnson, Eric ..................................... 433
Jolivet, Vincent .................................. 202
Jordanous, Anna ................................. 176

Juola, Patrick ..................................... 245
Jürgens, Marco ................................... 445
Katelnikoff, Joel ................................. 247
Kautonen, Heli Johanna ..................... 215
Kay, Christian ..................................... 427
Kelley, Wyn ........................................ 190
Kestemont, Mike ................................ 249
Ketzan, Erik ........................................ 252
Kim, Young-Min ................................. 467
Kimura, Fuminori .............................. 473
Klein, Lauren Frederica ..................... 254
Knab, Cornelia ................................... 429
Koleva, Nikolina ................................. 470
Kong, Jung-Wei ................................. 224
Krieger, Hans-Ulrich .......................... 470
Kristel, Conny ...................................... 117
Kruse, Sebastian ................................. 137
Kümmel, Christoph ............................ 506
Küster, Marc W. ........................ 375, 520
Kuyama, Takeo ................................... 473
Kwok, Jieli ......................................... 230
Lam, Monica S. .................................. 208
Laramee, Robert S. .............................. 151
Lawrence, Faith .................................. 176
Lay, Marie Hélène .............................. 256
Lee, Sangmi ........................................ 313
Lemnitzer, Lothar .............................. 259
Lendvai, Piroska ................................. 163
Lenkiewicz, Anna ....................... 477, 538
Lenkiewicz, Przemyslaw ............ 477, 538
Lestock, Brooke .................................. 433
Levy, Noga .......................................... 264
León, Carlos .......................................... 57
Li, Liang ............................................. 480
Lis, Magdalena ................................... 477
Litta Modignani Picozzi, Eleonora ..... 483
Littauer, Richard ................................ 268
Little, Hannah .................................... 268
Liu, Jyi-Shane .................................... 270
Lohmeier, Felix .................................. 486
Longaker, Rachel ................................ 342
Loos, Lukas ........................................ 488
Lou, Burnard ...................................... 221
Löwe, Benedikt ..................................... 57
545

Digital Humanities 2012

Lucas, Kristin ..................................... 463
Lucic, Ana ........................................... 273
Luyckx, Kim ....................................... 249
López, José ......................................... 456
MacEachern, Alan .............................. 162
Macé, Caroline ..................................... 85
Maeda, Akira ...................................... 473
Magier, David ..................................... 506
Mäkelä, Eetu ........................................ 22
Maly, Kurt ........................................... 155
Mandell, Laura ................................... 148
Manovich, Lev ...................................... 79
Marse, Alex ......................................... 313
Marttila, Ville ..................................... 396
Mavillard, Antonio Jiménez ............... 306
McCadden, Katiet Theresa .................. 516
McClure, David .................................. 299
Meister, Jan Christoph ......................... 24
Michura, Piotr ...................................... 35
Middell, Gregor .................................. 418
Miller, Ben .......................................... 313
Mimno, David ...................................... 64
Monroe, Megan .................................. 158
Monteiro Vieira, Jose Miguel ..... 483, 491
Moran, Steven .................................... 276
Morbidoni, Christian ......................... 303
Moulin, Claudine ........................... 9, 375
Muller, A. Charles ................................. 61
Muscinesi, Frédérique ........................ 494
Myers, Tom ............................... 280, 283
Mylonas, Elli ...................................... 448
Měchura, Michal Boleslav .................. 278
Nagasaki, Kiyonori ............................... 61
Naji, Nada ............................................ 94
Nakhimovsky, Alexander .......... 280, 283
Nathan, David John ........................... 286
Nelson, Brent ....................................... 35
Nelson, Robert K. ................................. 64
Neumann, Bernd ................................ 288
Neuroth, Heike .................................... 20
Nishiura, Takanobu ........................... 480
Noecker Jr., John ............................... 292
Nordhoff, Sebastian ........................... 296
Norrish, Jamie ................................... 483
546

Nowviskie, Bethany ................... 299, 433
Nucci, Michele ................................... 303
Nuñez, Camelia Gianina .................... 306
Olsson, Leif-Jöran ...................... 113, 527
Opas-Hänninen, Lisa Lena ................ 308
Ore, Christian-Emil .............................. 18
Ott, Tobias .......................................... 497
Ott, Wilhelm ....................................... 497
O’Halloran, Kieran Anthony ............... 310
Pablo-Nuñez, Luis .............................. 195
Park, Tae Hong ................................... 313
Pasin, Michele .................................... 499
Peng, Sheng-Yang .............................. 270
Petris, Marco ........................................ 24
Piazza, Francesco ............................... 303
Pichler, Alois .............................. 221, 318
Pierazzo, Elena ..................................... 72
Piez, Wendell ........................................ 33
Pigney, Stephen .................................. 124
Pitti, Daniel .......................................... 70
Pleyer, Michael ................................... 268
Plutte, Christoph ........................ 502, 511
Porter, Dot ......................................... 505
Pravida, Dietmar ........................ 131, 418
Praxis Program Collaborators ............ 433
Priani, Ernesto ................................... 456
Prokic, Jelena ..................................... 276
Pytlik-Zillig, Brian .............................. 327
Rabina, Debbie L. ............................... 322
Radzikowska, Milena ................... 35, 324
Rahtz, Sebastian ............................ 18, 52
Ramsay, Stephen ................................ 327
Rapp, Andrea ............................. 375, 529
Rees, Gethin Powell ........................... 329
Rehbein, Malte ..................................... 72
Remondino, Fabio .............................. 365
Reside, Doug .............................. 331, 333
Rhody, Jason ...................................... 506
Richards, John ................................... 232
Richards-Rissetto, Heather ................ 365
Ridge, Mia ................................... 25, 335
Ritsema van Eck, Marianne Petra ...... 336
Rittberger, Marc ................................. 359
Rivera, Eduardo ................................. 456

Digital Humanities 2012

Roberts, Sean ..................................... 268
Rochester, Eric ................................... 299
Rockwell, Geoffrey.......................................
..................... 26, 35, 72, 324, 339, 508
Rodriguez, Omar .................................. 88
Rodríguez, Nuria ................................ 342
Roe, Glenn H. ..................................... 345
Roeder, Torsten ................................... 511
Romary, Laurent .................................. 52
Ross, Claire Stephanie ....................... 348
Roueche, Charlotte ............................. 176
Roued-Cunliffe, Henriette .................. 351
Röwenstrunk, Daniel .......................... 435
Rudman, Joseph ................................. 353
Ruecker, Stan ....................... 35, 88, 324
Ruiz, Cesar .......................................... 195
Ryan, Michael .................................... 292
Rybicki, Jan ................................. 16, 212
Sahle, Patrick ........................................ 72
Salah, Albert Ali ................................... 79
Sancho-Caparrini, Fernando .............. 385
Sanz, Amelia ....................................... 527
Sanz-Cabrerizo, Amelia ...................... 195
Sarasa-Cabezuelo, Antonio ................. 195
Savoy, Jacques ..................................... 94
Sayers, Jentery ................................... 357
Scharnhorst, Andrea .......................... 394
Scheel, Julian ..................................... 288
Schindler, Christoph .......................... 359
Schnöpf, Markus ................................ 362
Schöch, Christof .................................. 514
Schomaker, Lambert .......................... 336
Schreibman, Susan ...................... 72, 516
Schüch, Lena ........................................ 24
Schultes, Kilian Peter ......................... 518
Schwartz, Robert .................................. 41
Schwarz, Roland ................................. 375
Schwerin, Jennifer von ....................... 365
Selig, Thomas ..................................... 520
Sellers, Jordan .................................... 397
Seppänen, Tapio ................................ 308
Sharma, Narayan P. ........................... 368
Shaw, Ryan Benjamin ........................ 370
Shimoda, Masahiro ............................... 11

Shrestha, Ayush .................................. 313
Siemens, Lynne .................................. 373
Siemens, Raymond .................... 373, 441
Sierra-Rodriguez, Jose-Luis ............... 195
Sievers, Martin ................................... 375
Simon, Agnès ....................................... 70
Simon, Rainer ...................................... 99
Sinclair, Stéfan ............... 26, 35, 72, 339
Singer, Kate ........................................ 522
Smith, Kathleen M. ............................ 486
Smithies, James Dakin ...................... 380
Solth, Arved ....................................... 288
Sondheim, Daniel ................................. 35
Söring, Sibylle .................................... 486
Speck, Reto .......................................... 117
Stäcker, Thomas .......................... 54, 532
Stadler, Peter ...................................... 525
Stalnaker, Rommie L. ......................... 413
Stein, Regine ...................................... 532
Stokes, Peter ............................. 264, 382
Storrer, Angelika ................................ 259
Storti, Sarah ....................................... 433
Suhr, Carla Maria ............................... 396
Sung, Allan ......................................... 224
Suárez, Juan-Luis ............................... 385
Swafford, Joanna ............................... 433
Tabata, Tomoji ................................... 388
Takahashi, Koichi ................................. 61
Tasovac, Toma ................................... 392
Tatum, Clifford ................................... 394
Tcheng, David ..................................... 158
Terras, Melissa .......................... 204, 348
Thaller, Manfred ................... 27, 72, 142
The ARTFL Project ............................. 345
The Devonshire MS Editorial Group ... 441
Thiel, Stephan ..................................... 151
Toljamo, Tuomo ................................. 308
Tomabechi, Toru .................................. 61
Tonne, Danah ..................................... 529
Trilsbeek, Paul .................................... 169
Tupman, Charlotte .............................. 176
Turkel, William J. ............................... 162
Turner, Jonathan ................................ 313
Tyrkkö, Jukka Jyrki Juhani ............... 396
547

Digital Humanities 2012

Underwood, Ted ................................. 397
van Dalen-Oskam, Karina ... 33, 400, 402
van Dijk, Suzan ................................... 527
van Hooland, Seth ................................ 28
van Zundert, Joris Job ...... 331, 400, 402
Vanscheidt, Philipp ............................ 529
Varfolomeyev, Aleksey ....................... 405
Veentjer, Ubbo ................................... 486
Verborgh, Ruben .................................. 28
Vernus, Pierre ..................................... 431
Vershbow, Ben .................................... 331
Versley, Yannick ................................. 126
Viglianti, Raffaele ............................... 435
Vitali, Stefano ....................................... 70
Wade, Mara R. ................................... 532
Wakelnig, Elvira ................................. 176
Wallman, Jeff ....................................... 61
Walsh, John A. ................................... 465
Wang, Ning ........................................ 228
Wangchuk, Dorji ............................ 15, 61
Warwick, Claire .................. 35, 204, 348
Welger-Barboza, Corinne ................... 407
Wenzel, Claudia .................................. 411
Wieber, Sabine ................................... 232
Wiegand, Frank .................................. 535
Wiesner, Susan L. ............................... 413
Willems, Florian ................................. 537
Williams, David-Antoine .................... 415
Windsor, Jennifer ................................. 35
Winters, James .................................. 268
Wissenbach, Moritz ............................ 418
Wittenburg, Peter ............... 20, 458, 538
Wittern, Christian .............................. 422
Wolf, Lior ........................................... 264
Woods, Sharon ................................... 463
Wu, Harris .......................................... 155
Yano, Keiji .......................................... 480
Zancarini, Jean-Claude ....................... 198
Zhang, Jia ........................................... 190
Zhang, Lu ............................................. 88
Zhao, Geng .......................................... 151
Zipf, Alexander .................................. 488
Zöllner-Weber, Amélie ....................... 318
Zubair, Mohammad ............................ 155
548