Originally published in: Digital Humanities 2014. Conference Abstracts, EPFL - UNIL,Lausanne, Switzerland, 8-12 July 2014. - Lausanne: EPFL/UNIL, 2014. Pp. 95-98.

Uncertain about Uncertainty:Different ways of processing
fuzziness in digital humanities data
Binder, Frank

Universität Gießen, Germany

Entrup, Bastian

Universität Gießen, Germany

Schiller, Ines

Universität Gießen, Germany

Lobin, Henning

Universität Gießen, Germany

1 Introduction
Publikationsserver des Instituts fü r Deutsche Sprache
URN: http://nbn-resoh’ing.de/um:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-76383

The GeoBib project is constructing a georeferenced online
bibliography of early Holocaust and camp literature publishedbetween 1933 and 1949 (Entrup et al. 2013a). Our immediateobjectives include identifying the texts of interest in the firstplace, composing abstracts for them, researching their history,
and annotating relevant places and times. Relations between
persons, texts, and places will be visualized using digital maps
and GIS software as an integral part of the resulting GeoBib
information portal.
The combination of diverse data from varying sources
not only enriches our knowledge of these otherwise mostly
forgotten texts; it also confronts us with vague, uncertain oreven conflicting information. This situation yields challenges
for all researchers involved - historians, literary scholars,
geographers and computer scientists alike. While the project
operates at the intersection of historical and literary studies,
the involved computer scientists are in charge of providing
a working environment (Entrup et al. 2013b) and processing
the collected information in a way that is formalized yetcapable of dealing with inevitable vagueness, uncertainty andcontradictions. In this paper we focus on the problems andopportunities of encoding and processing fuzzy data.

2 The uncertainty about uncertainty: How to modeland represent it
The data collected in our project concerns such different
entities as texts, persons and places and is compiled fromdifferent sources and different scholarly perspectives. The
project is entirely interdisciplinary: besides literary scholars
and historians, also geographers and computer scientists areinvolved. Students and researchers from literary and historicalstudies are our target audience for whom the resulting online
platform shall provide an attractive research tool. Hence, thecollected data does not only lie in the intersection of researchinterests of these fields, but extends to the sum of theseinterests. The platform is supposed to help answer questions
that arise in the field of literature, e.g. finding texts concernedwith certain places in a given time period, but also to support
historians in finding possible eye witness reports of the crimesof Nazi Germany. Accordingly, information of various kinds
is collected with the intention of supporting such diverse use
cases. The different scholarly perspectives also determine theamount and kind of data we collect, and their information needs
can hardly be covered by a single formalism or predefined
ontology. We need a flexible yet coherent formalization that is
adaptable to our objectives.
Our workflow and approach to collecting data is one of divide
etimpera: Instead of proposing one format that does it all, wedistinguish between different kinds of information dependingon the entities concerned. Information collected on the authorsof the holocaust texts and relevant places is stored in a user
friendly MediaWiki system, while information on these texts isstored in TEI/XML files. Both systems are interconnected andgeographical references are integrated as well (cf. Entrup et al.
2013b). The resulting information portal will be backed by anobject-relational database.

2.1 Persons and places: Capturing FUZZY
information in a Wiki System
Within the field of prosopography the combination of different,
possibly contradicting sources is a well-known problem. Pasinand Bradley (2013) offered insights on how such alternative
views on historical events could be described using an
underlying ontology. Software libraries intended to support
processing of prosopographic data are also being developed(e.g. Barabucci and Zingoni, 2013). The GeoBib project collects
information and short biographies of authors - a task thatbears resemblance to prosopographic research. Many of thoseauthors only published one text. Researching their personal
information often leads to ambiguous results, such as different
names used, differing information on birth or death dates aswell as other personal data.
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We extended the MediaWiki system that we use to collectinformation on persons and places with a set of templates that
help to ensure that such information is added in a coherent way,while allowing the data to be vague or apparently contradictory.
The Wiki allows the editors to add uncertain information into
proposed fields, so that, for instance, different names canbe added to one person. Furthermore, the short biographicaltexts we compose for most of the authors can be used tocommunicate dissent between different sources.

2.2 TEI/XML: Encoding uncertainty in literaryannotations
Literary texts, and as such especially autobiographies andmemoires, are not collections of historical facts arranged in
an exact chronology. Especially the early Holocaust texts
are emotionalizing (cf. Feuchert, 2012, Hickethier 1986) and“conveying the experience made with the National Socialist
terror system in a literary, or better, literarised way” (Feuchert,2012, p. 218). But even apparently factual accounts ofevents carry a certain degree of vagueness, which leads
both historians and literary scholars to interesting researchquestions, and poses a challenge for data modeling anddatabase design.
Vagueness already occurs when collecting formal metadata.
For each holocaust text under consideration we try to identify
the first published edition. Yet looking at some more widely
known texts of that era, we find multiple editions that differ
in such basic information as publisher, year of publication,
editor, or even the title. Such phenomena are familiar to
those concerned with bibliographic information. Special careis required when formalizing such inconsistent data. In ourcollection of TEI/XML files, every single edition is represented
by one XML file. These files contain the bibliographic
information in the TEI header, and they are linked to thecorresponding other editions.
TEI provides the @cert attribute for indicating (un)certainty
of information given in an XML node. While this strategy allows
us to indicate possible vagueness in a machine-readable way,
we also need to find ways of communicating this uncertainty
to the human user of our information portal. For that purpose,
uncertainty regarding the plot or the history of reception of aliterary work is captured in literary annotations, i.e. running text,
which is an effective and straight-forward way of communicating
uncertainty to human readers. In this context, we also allow
adding <note> elements to be used by our editors for supplying
small texts that will be presented to the user describing thekind of uncertainty involved (cf. Bradley and Short, 2005). The
combined use of both elements allows conveying uncertainty to
the human user while keeping it encoded in a machine-readable(or machine-traceable) way.

2.3 Modeling Uncertainty in a Database
The GeoBib information portal will rest on a PostgreSQL
database (Scherbaum 2009) [4], where we use object relations
for the description of certainty and note elements. Our firstexample represents a person (see Figure 1a). There are threedifferent names associated with the entity: a birth name, thename after her wedding, and a pseudonym.

Fig. 4: Work entity and related certainty field "pub_date"Fig. 1: Exemplary database entries for a person : a) person entity model

personid : 1firstname : Netty
lastname : Radvänyi
Fig. 2: Exemplary database entries for a person : b) simplified perso
objectAs shown in Fig. 2, the table includes the object ID, thetable name, the relevant column name, and the alternativecontent. Each dataset may contain a certainty attribute and/ora note. The certainty field is defined, in accordance with TEI,
as either {high, medium, low, unknown} and the note field is atext that will be presented to the user and is meant to explain
the uncertainty[6]. In the example above (Fig. 2) a year ofpublication is given but its certainty is marked as “low”. Such
relations can be added for every field of every entity in thedatabase.

3 Discussion and Outlook: Surely more uncertainty
We have just presented our approach of encoding uncertainty
in our database. Such information can be used, for instance,
to rank search results or to increase recall on certain queries
and parameter settings. But we still see more challenges
ahead: The encoded uncertainty has to be communicatedeffectively to the human user. Accordingly, the visualization ofuncertainty, and especially the presentation of search results
based on uncertain or divergent information will be among
our next concerns. A similar problem of visualizing uncertainty
arises in the forthcoming georeferencing and geotagging:
Literary texts are no geographical maps. They constitutethemselves in their geographical space but might encode
this information in a way hard to decipher (cf. Reuschel et al.,2013). Fictional place names can sometimes be identified withactual places on a map, but sometimes it is impossible to do
so. Geographical locations may be referred to by metaphors,old or forgotten names, local identifiers or nicknames. Suchinformal references frequently remain geographically imprecise
and require interpretation (cf. Hill, 2006, p. 28f). The textual
material that our editors provide could also be used to test andimprove automatic methods of geographical relation extraction(e.g. Blessing and Schütze, 2010). Still, automatic georesolving
is hindered by the limited (historical) coverage of contemporary
gazetteers, spelling changes and changing administrative
boundaries (Tobin et al., 2010, p. 8). Such limitations also
pertain to prisons and camps, those places of high interest in
our domain, whose exact geographical locations have to bereconstructed manually before adding them to our databases.

4 Acknowledgements
Fig. 3: Exemplary database entries for a person : c) related alternative/additional information

While a person entity has certain fields that can be filled in(see Fig. 1b), we use object relations (Fig. 1c) to add alternative
information and related values of certainty and/or a note.
The second example describes a literary work with anuncertain year of publication. A relational database wouldrequire intermediate tables for all attributes of one entity, which
may have uncertainties and/or notes attached (cf. Bradley andShort, 2005). In an object relational database using one special
entity is sufficient in such a case.

Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education andResearch (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung,BMBF) from July 2012 to June 2015 (FKZ: 01UG1238A-B).

References
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<doi:10.1093/llc/fqi022>
Entrup, Bastian, Maja Bärenfänger, Frank Binder andHenning Lobin (2013a): Introducing GeoBib: An Annotatedand Geo-referenced Online Bibliography of Early German andPolish Holocaust and Camp Literature (1933-1949). Digital
Humanities 2013, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 16-19 July2013. dh2013.unl.edu/abstracts/ab-229.html
Entrup, Bastian, Frank Binder and Henning Lobin(2013b): Extending the possibilities for collaborative work withTEI/XML through the usage of a wiki-system. In: Proceedingsof the 1st Workshop on Collaborative Annotations in Shared
Environments: metadata, vocabularies and techniques inthe Digital Humanities, DH CASE '13. September 10 2013,Florence, Italy. <doi:10.1145/2517978.2517988>.
Feuchert, Sascha (2012). Fundstücke: Bemerkungen
zu Darstellungskonventionen und paratextuellen
Präsentationsformen früher Texte deutschsprachigerHolocaustliteratur. In: Günter Butzer / Joachim Jacob (Hg.):
Berührungen. Komparatistische Perspektiven auf die frühe
deutsche Nachkriegsliteratur. München: Wilhelm Fink 2012, pp.
217-230.
Hickethier, Knut (2006). Biographie, Autobiographie,
Memoirenliteratur. In Ludwig Fischer (eds), Literatur in derBundesrepublik bis 1967. München 1986, pp. 574-584.
Hill, Linda L. (2006). Georeferencing. The Geographic
Associations of Information, Cambridge: The MIT Press.
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Prosopography and Computer Ontologies: towards anintegrated approach. In: Literary and Linguistic Computing(2013). <doi:10.1093/llc/fqt037>
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Hurni (2013). Modelling Uncertain Geodata for the Literary
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Different Geographies. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation andCartography, <doi:10.1007/978-3-642-29770-0_11>
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As of December 2013 the GeoBib project has identified
and collected bibliographical information on 670 texts of early
Holocaust and camp literature and produced 130 annotation
documents so far. These include references to 620 authors, 550
locations, 230 camps and 45 ghettos.
See for instance svario.it/factoid
German original: „Bereits seit 1933 sind, vor allem imAusland, Texte erschienen, die Erfahrungen mit demnationalsozialistischen Terrorsystem literarisch oder besser:
literarisiert vermitteln“ (Feuchert, 2012, p. 218)
http://www.postgresql.org/about/
We do not use the PostgreSQL entity parameter “WITHOIDS”, because of the high memory requirements (cf.
Scherbaum 2009, p. 161f). Our OID (object identifiers) arecomposed of the entity id and name.
Alternatively, the note field could also contain additional
information.

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