Antwerp DH Summer School 2020: Making a Digital Edition. Basic Skills and Technologies

UAntwerp City Campus Prinsstraat 13, Antwerp, Belgium

In the past few decades, digital editing and digitisation of archival documents have been rapidly gaining prominence. Aiming to cater for both of these branches of Digital Humanities, our summer school offers an in-depth, hands-on curriculum to familiarise students with basic and more advanced tools in the field. Apart from acquiring a set of technical skills (including Command Line, HTML, CSS, TEI-XML XPath, XSLT, and eXist-db), our programme includes the more general practical guidelines on how to make a digital edition.

€150 – €200

Linked Pasts Symposium

The annual Linked Pasts conference, which has previously been held at KCL, Madrid, Stanford, Mainz, Bordeaux and virtually at London brings together scholars, heritage professionals and other practitioners with an interest in Linked Open Data as applied to the study of the ancient and historical worlds.

Lecture Series: Julian Schröter

S.D.015 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Belgium

The challenges of investigating loosely structured genres and of operationalizing semantic content

Literary studies are often dealing with genres that are well established in literary discourse but can, on closer inspection, not be identified on the level of textual features. In other words, there are loosely structured genres that are not instantiated as clear-cut text types. The German novella, which is split up into two genres, that of the ‚Erzählung‘ and that of the ‚Novelle‘, is such a disordered genre. Research in literary genres, however, usually presumes the existence of a common text type on the level of textual features that can be revealed, for example, with stylometric analysis or based on classification tasks. It is the aim of a larger project to reveal the latent structures of German novellas. The presentation gives a systematic outline of the challenge of analyzing the historical change of the novella as a loosely structured genre.

CANCELLED: Lecture Series: Siebe Bluijs & Lois Burke

S.D.013 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium

Towards a Collection of Digital Literature from Flanders and the Netherlands (1971–2022)

Digital literature is an umbrella term that encompasses differing types of multimodal works of literature that are all reliant on the digital environment for their production, dissemination and/or consumption (Rettberg 2018). Digital literature can refer to hypertext fictions, algorithm-generated poetry, works created in virtual reality, online fan fiction, and various other permutations. Digital literature emerged as a concept and a field of study in the 1980s and 1990s. The rapidly changing nature and function of digital media since then have urged new definitions and approaches to this art form.

Antwerp DH Summer School 2022: Genetic editing, from manuscripts to born-digital writing processes

UAntwerp City Campus Prinsstraat 13, Antwerp, Belgium

Intensive 5-day entry level hands-on course on making digital editions of analogue and born-digital texts. In this course, participants will acquire a set of basic computer skills to design a fully-fledged, TEI-compatible Digital Scholarly Edition and deploy keystroke logging technology to record and analyse born-digital texts. Registration information: Early bird registration deadline: 15 March 2022. Regular […]

€200 – €250

Lecture series: Peter Stokes

S.R.118 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Belgium

Machine Learning for Digital Scholarly Editions: The Case of eScriptorium

Digital and computational tools and methods are becoming increasingly part of scholarly activity, including in Digital Scholarly Editing. One example of this is in transcribing texts from manuscripts, where machine learning is becoming more and more effective. To this end, eScriptorium is being developed to leverage Machine Learning to help in transcription, whether automatic, semi-automatic or manual. In principle the software should be useful for any type of edition, in any language and script and from any date. In practice, however, this raises many questions, including to what extent AI can or should be employed in preparing editions, how much the expert should remain ‘in the loop’, but also to what extent it is even possible to develop a single tool that can work for everything from Greek papyrus to 20th-century notebooks to Old Vietnamese inscriptions and beyond. This talk will therefore present the current state of the art while also addressing some practical and theoretical questions that remain for the future.

Lecture series: Megan Gooch

S.C.207 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Belgium

Failure to connect: exploring the human relationships at the heart of digital humanities

Digital humanities means many things to many people – we talk of DH as being a range of methods, technologies, theoretical approaches to ask and answer research questions. But unlike traditional forms of humanities research, the research projects is not often one that can be tackled alone. DH nearly always requires collaboration with people from different subject domains, with technical experts and often with non-academic staff such as librarians, museum staff or administrative support. 
This paper explores the impact of this growth in collaboration through the lens of failure and what happens when collaborations and partnerships don’t go as planned. We have all experienced failure in our professional lives, but it is rarely acknowledged due to risks to reputation or to future funding. But by exploring what can go wrong, we can identify some of the key collaborative skills needed by today’s digital humanists, and begin to understand how to equip the researchers of the future to thrive.

FREE

Lecture series: Nicholas Cornia

S.C.207 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Belgium

Rediscovering the performance practice of musicians in the long 19th century through handwritten annotations on music scores.

FAAM, Flemish Archive for Annotated Music, is a database and research platform aiming to revive the performances of musicians from the 19th and early 20th century through the study of their annotations on music scores. The Heritage Library of the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp provides a substantial collection of historical annotated scores made by Flemish amateur musicians, performers, conductors, and composers of the long 19th century.

FREE

Lecture series: Mike Kestemont

S.R.118 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Belgium

The wandering verse: the computational detection of micro-intertexts in medieval literature

Intertextuality is a ubiquitous concept in literary studies, which – because of its notoriously open-ended nature – covers a variety of correspondences between texts. Signaling intertexts is an important editorial responsibility, because it can deepen one’s reading experience of a literary work. Text reuse detection has become a popular task in the computational humanities too, although its evaluation is complicated by the lack of exhaustively annotated datasets of intertexts. Historic scholarship on medieval epics provides us with a wealthy inventory of micro-intertexts between medieval works, although their status is still hotly debated. Some philological communities have been keen on identifying intertexts as authorial features, whereas others have stressed their conventional status, especially in the wake of the oral-formulaic theory. In this talk, I will present a study on Middle Dutch epic literature, as well as an extension of this work to contemporary Middle English literature, in particular the bookshop theory surrounding the famous Auchinleck manuscript. I will argue that the intricate web woven by computationally detected intertexts can invite radically innovative readings of medieval literature. 

FREE

GitHub Tutorial

S.R.A.111 Lange Winkelstraat 9, Antwerpen, Belgium

On 12 February, Pieter Fivez gives a crash course on GitHub, offering insights into its functionalities such as data storage, version control and collaborative coding. The tutorial will last about an hour.