This summer school offers an in-depth and hands-on curriculum to familiarise novice (digital) humanists with the state-of-the-art technologies that are nowadays available to researchers who take an active interest in ‘pixel-based’ artifacts in the Humanities. Topics for the summer school will include technologies such as XML, IIIF and Handwritten Text Recognition.
In this lecture, the basics of IIIF – International Image Interoperability Framework – are presented through the lens of its key benefits for research in Digital Humanities. As an open data API, IIIF allows for clear and well documented research data management practices, for projects ranging from teaching over scholarly annotation or editing up to data mining.
This talk will discuss the topic of human-computer interaction in Digital Humanities, with a focus on image processing, using CATTI (Computer Assisted Transcriptions of Texts Images) as a case study.
There is a field of popular fiction which doesn’t attract the attention of literary scholars very often: dime novels, sometimes also called pulp fiction because of the bad quality of the paper. Millions of them are printed every year but they don’t appear in any bestseller list, because they don’t belong to the usual system of literary communication. Research on dime novels perceived them quite long as part of the cheap escapist entertainment industry, targeting especially the lower classes, while in recent years the complexity of some of the series and of the communication of fans about their dime novels has been highlighted in contrast. The talk will look at 14.000 dime novels published in recent years and explore genres, topics and the complexity of the texts in an attempt to reevaluate some of these research positions.
De Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL) is een digitale collectie van teksten die behoren tot de Nederlandse letterkunde, taalkunde en cultuurgeschiedenis van de vroegste tijd tot heden. Deze infosessie bespreekt de recente geschiedenis en de toekomst van de DBNL. Er zal worden ingegaan op de selectie van de teksten, het productieproces, en de mogelijkheden van hergebruik van data.
We as readers like to think that we don’t have bias, that we can judge books quite objectively. However, when The Riddle of Literary Quality project did a large survey in the world of people who read Dutch-language books, some subtle (and less subtle) gender biases came to light. In this talk, Koolen explains what the team found and the dozen ways she tried to tease out the cause of this bias.
Je m’intéresserai au procédé baptisé ’opérationnalisation’ que Franco Moretti décrit dans sa contribution à La Littérature au laboratoire (trad. fr. Ithaque Editions, 2016). Les ordinateurs tournent à plein régime. Graphes, cartes et arbres sont soigneusement produits. On est en pleine distant reading. Rien à voir, dira-t-on, avec ce qui occupe un Michel Charles, champion de la microlecture ‘à la française’, close reader compulsif et fier de l’être. Et pourtant, et comme on va voir, il s’agit là peut-être d’un faux antagonisme. Intéressons-nous, pour parler comme Proust, au ‘côté Moretti’ de Michel Charles, démarche qui revient à apercevoir symétriquement un ‘côté Michel Charles’ chez Franco Moretti. Bref, nous allons, au pays des humanités numériques, mettre les choses sens dessus dessous, pour une meilleure hygiène intellectuelle.
However you define digital humanities (DH), it often revolves around digitized objects at libraries and archives. In particular, such digital reproductions are used within digital scholarly editions. There, the digital facsimiles are not only illustrations supporting a scholarly text transcription, but can also serve as research tools and instruments for accountability and accessibility. Nevertheless, the “critical gaze” of scholarly editors and DH is directed at text transcriptions, whereas digital facsimiles are often uncritically taken at face value. In this talk, I will address some of the critical considerations libraries face when digitizing their holdings, with significant bearing on the value and (re)usability of the digital reproductions when placed within a scholarly context.
Writing and reading are no longer the exclusive right of the paper. For most authors, their practice is intimately intertwined with software and a networked infrastructure. What does it mean to consciously include this technological context in the literary creation process? How does the use of code – active or passive – change the notion of literature? What happens to the status of the author? And the role of the reader? On Thursday 25 April, Passa Porta organises an evening of debates on these topics, starting with a lecture by Allison Parrish, and continuing with a debate by Zaineb Hamdi and Cecilia Verheyden. The event was sponsored by DHu.F.
This two-part workshop examines the physical gesture and material artifacts of the act of writing, as seen through the lens of computation and digital media. Taking contemporary and historical practices in asemic poetry, experimental typography and automatic writing as inspiration, participants will use the Python programming language to prototype speculative writing technologies that challenge conventional reading practices and notions of sense-making.
