This third edition of the annual DH Benelux conference takes place at the City of Science, located in Belval, the new urban district of Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. The conference rooms are located in the University of Luxembourg’s building Maison du Savoir at Belval Campus.
This two-day workshop offers the perfect opportunity to become better acquainted with some of the main concerns that need to be addressed at the outset of both mass- and ad hoc digitisation projects. The core of the our programme exists of two half-day workshops on software packages that may help the researcher automate some aspects of the transcription process. The first will deal with ABBYY, still one of the best software packages around for OCRing digitised print materials. Focusing on the software’s possible advantages and pitfalls, this workshop will show the participants how to prepare their documents in order to achieve the best OCR results. The second workshop will introduce Transkribus, a software package that has recently made great advancements in optically recognising characters in handwritten materials. The programme will be completed by four (interactive) sessions on related topics that will be organised around these workshops.
The hands-on workshop will introduce participating archivists, philologists and researchers from the humanities into forensic imaging of hard drives, inspection and analysis of forensic images. Two phases of analysis of the process will be covered during the workshop: a) forensic imaging, triage and preservation of hard drives in the archive and b) philological recovery of textual versions of a writing process from a digital forensic image (mounting, inspection of temporary files, undelete, file carving, drive slack analysis, timeline analysis, grep) and by low-level inspection of files (fast save artifacts, RSID-tags). Depending on participants’ interest other scenarios, e.g. cloud services, can also be addressed. To avoid legal issues, participants will work with forensic images created for this workshop’s training purposes with Christian Moch’s Forensig forensic image generator (Moch 2009, Moch Freiling 2009).
Typically, editorial projects – digital or non-digital – get funding for a limited time span, and that time span is usually not sufficient to edit and publish the source or body of sources that the project set out to publish. Often, more funding will be sought, but, as technology and time have moved on, and as one can’t reasonably just repeat the first grant application, the focus of a follow-up project will be slightly different. In a third step, one may ask for a neighbouring source collection to be included in the project, or a new tool added to the collection, dependent on what funders at that moment in time seem willing to support.
Projects may end up with multiple collections and datasets, digitized according to multiple standards using multiple (sometimes obsolete) technologies. Some may have started out on paper, and have ridden the waves of databases, HTML, CD-ROM, XML, mass digitisation approaches and Linked open data. Even projects that have consistently worked within a TEI framework may have had to ingest documents that use different TEI dialects. These technological complexities may be increased by constraints in overall planning and everyday workflow, including time and budget management, especially if there are cross-institutional collaborations, interdependencies on deliverables, strict deadlines, staff mobility etc. The workshop will discuss these and other complexities of project logistics.
The production of digital critical editions is a crucial issue for anyone working on texts written in pre-modern times, philologists, historians, philosophers etc. Yet, there are many different practices, and concepts behind the digital representation of a critical apparatus are difficult to grasp. Besides, there are still very little tools supporting the creation and processing of digital critical editions. The workshop includes talks and presentations by philologists and DH specialists introducing and discussing the very nature of critical editions as well as the digital representation of a critical apparatus. Furthermore, the state-of-the-art in terms of automatic collation tools and methods for processing and publishing digital critical editions will be assessed.
As digital publications are reaching a stage of maturity and scholarly editors are becoming increasingly aware of the seemingly endless possibilities of hybrid or fully Digital Scholarly Editions, the impact of the digital medium on the field of Textual Criticism has become undeniable. As a result of this ‘digital turn’, textual scholars are now faced with new challenges and opportunities that have called for a re-evaluation of the field’s established theoretical and practical framework. For the thirteenth annual conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS), organized in association with the Digital Scholarly Editing Initial Training Network ‘DiXiT’, we intend to face this new direction in textual scholarship head-on, by focussing on the recent developments in textual scholarship that are instigated by this reassessment of the theories, practices, and methods of scholarly editing in general, and of the Digital Scholarly Edition (DSE) in particular.
In her talk, Vernackt will discuss the digitisation of a famous sixteenth-century map of Bruges, the development of a database, and a collaboration between different parties from both the academic and the GLAM sector. The MAGIS Bruges project responds to a variety of research interests and touches upon different issues within and outside the Digital Humanities community.
In her talk, Greta Franzini will discuss the case studies and activities of eTRAP. This project investigates the phenomenon of text reuse in order to advance automatic detection on historical data. Historical texts pose numerous challenges to automatically detect reuse. These challenges are, among others, the fragmentary survival of works, inconsistent referencing, but also the diachronic evolution of language. Unlike modern texts, where sources are consistently quoted and cited, historical texts are not always so transparent, thus opening up exciting opportunities for intertextual research.
In this talk, Erik Kwakkel shows how the study of medieval manuscripts can benefit from a digital approach. He presents two case studies: 1) How medieval script is studied in a quantified manner, using modest statistical research; 2) How MA-XRF, an x-ray technique, enables us to look inside early-modern bookbindings, revealing (and reading) medieval fragments that are hiding inside. These two examples will be taken as representatives of two common types of Digital Humanities research: one using digital techniques to do traditional research more efficiently, the other producing results that could not be gained in traditional research.
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.
