A Workshop on Digital Scholarly Editing, sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC), the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network DiXiT (Marie Curie ITN), and the University of Antwerp; organised by the Centre for Manuscript Genetics.
In his talk, Wido van Peursen shows how combining traditional scholarship with a computational approach permits us to explore linguistic variation in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament from new perspectives. The Old Testament provides a diverse and most compelling field of study. It has a complex composition history that, according to many scholars, stretches out over a period of more than a millennium. Naturally, this corpus of texts presents a great linguistic diversity. For long, researchers have attempted to understand and explain this diversity in all its facets. The promising results of quantitative methods show once more how Digital Humanities can provide a major contribution to an ongoing discussion; respecting, but also improving an honourable scholarly tradition.
In his lecture, Jeroen De Gussem confronts traditional methods of authorship attribution with more recent computational methods for determining the authorship of a text. He addresses a number of practical and theoretical issues. Take a so-called “stylome”, a collection of features in an authors’ personal language use which can be quantified as data and visualized in attractive figures. Can computational formalism (or perhaps computational stylistics) capture “style” by focusing on such a stylome? Where does computational stylistics succeed where traditional stylistics have failed, and vice versa? Are computational stylistics as “objective” (or “unsupervised”) as they purport to be, or do our results only reflect the answers we were hoping to find?
The explosion of interest in the use of digital tools for making scholarly editions, combined with enthusiasm for crowd-sourcing, has led to a proliferation of on-line tools for the making of scholarly editions. Transcribe Bentham and similar enterprises promise a scholarly heaven. We can imagine a massive cohort of enthusiastic and skilled amateurs transcribing manuscripts which we, the scholarly leaders, can use to make editions after our own dreams. This talk will question this vision: is this practical? do we have, can we have, tools to realize this dream of scholarly editions made by all? Is this even desirable? And what might we have to change in our own practice to make this vision real?
Special collections libraries have by no means missed the digital turn. On the contrary, curating materials that are mostly copyright free and dealing with reproduction reqeusts on an almost daily basis, special collections libraries are excellent partners for digitization projects and digital research. Conversely, this implies that digital scholarship on rare books, manuscripts, maps and prints has a lot to gain from the librarian’s perspective. Understanding how physical objects are digitized, how different items are catalogued, and how to extract data and metadata from library systems offers clear heuristic and methodological gains for digital research. This presentation will discuss such a librarian’s perspective starting from the Special Collections of the University of Antwerp Library. It will explain the library’s digitization process and digital platform, analyze its metadata structure and export formats, and finally offer some research suggestions for data mining and other digital scholarship.
Similes such as “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” abound in everyday language and are generally said to be particularly creative as well as stylistically relevant in literary texts. In her talk, Suzanne will discuss the specificities and challenges related to the automatic detection of similes for literary purposes. To illustrate the interest of this task, she will present as case study the use of colour similes in a corpus of French and British novels published between 1810 and 1950.
This talk considers the nature of editorial methodological experimentation, in particular exploring the scholarly edition in the context of open social scholarship. Open social scholarship involves creating and disseminating research and research technologies to a broad audience of specialists and active non-specialists in ways that are accessible and significant. As a concept, it has grown from roots in open access and open scholarship movements, the digital humanities’ methodological commons and community of practice, contemporary online practices, and public facing “citizen scholarship” to include i) developing, sharing, and implementing research in ways that consider the needs and interests of both academic specialists and communities beyond academia; ii) providing opportunities to co-create, interact with, and experience openly-available cultural data; iii) exploring, developing, and making public tools and technologies under open licenses to promote wide access, education, use, and repurposing; and iv) enabling productive dialogue between academics and non-academics. Our example will be the social edition of the Devonshire MS (BL Add MS 17492), the first sustained example of men and women writing together in the English literary tradition, by a research team using crowd-sourcing technologies and operating in conjunction with an advisory group representing key methodological and area expertise.
A workshop co-organised by DHu.F and INT, and hosted by ACDC at the University of Antwerp. In this workshop, the newly founded Instituut van de Nederlandse Taal (INT) will present itself to the DHu.F community. Detailed description, programme, and the workshop sessions all in Dutch.
The recently started BELSPO-funded INSIGHT project (Intelligent Neural Systems as Integrated Heritage Tools) organizes a launch event on 9 November 2017. This event will take the form of an afternoon of plenaries by internationally recognized speakers on topics relating to Artificial Intelligence, Heritage data and Digital Art history.
Cadaster plans are cornerstones for reconstructing dense representations of the history of the city. However, as some of these handwritten documents are more than 200 years old, the establishment of processing pipeline for interpreting them remains extremely challenging. The talk will present the implementation of an automated process capable of segmenting and interpreting Napoleonic Cadaster Maps of the Veneto Region dating from the beginning of the 19th century. The system extracts the geometry of each of the drawn parcels, classifies, reads and interprets the handwritten labels. This efficient and automated process opens new perspectives to reconstitute the past.
