| 1. |
- Foka, Anna, 1981-, et al.
(författare)
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Beyond humanities qua digital : Spatial and material development for digital research infrastructures
- 2018
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - Oxford : Oxford University Press. - 2055-7671 .- 2055-768X. ; 33:2, s. 264-278
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Universities around the world have increasingly turned to digital infrastructures as a way to revamp the arts and humanities. This article contributes a fresh understanding by examining the material development of HumlabX, a research laboratory for digital humanities at Umeå University, Sweden. Specifically, we approach the empirical case as a timeline of research funding, projects, events, and deliverables to examine how the research laboratory as an organizational and material space developed and evolved in relation to new technology investments. Based on our analysis, we argue that while digital research infrastructures can, indeed, stimulate innovation in and around research, aimed to produce new knowledge, digital technologies carry social and material implications that affect organizational processes. We show that while knowledge production processes at HumlabX were highly influenced by the infrastructural legacy of the past, they indeed directed scholars toward innovation. By discussing these implications in detail, we move beyond the debate of humanities qua digital, and demonstrate the need for scholars of digital humanities to engage in the development of policies for digital research infrastructures. Using a Swedish case study, we argue that research laboratories for the digital humanities must be scrutinized and should be fully exposed as socio-material organizations that develop, and should develop, over time. In particular, we stress the need to ensure that digital humanities laboratories are sustainable and open for redevelopment.
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| 2. |
- Foka, Anna, 1981-, et al.
(författare)
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Visualizing Pausanias’s Description of Greece with contemporary GIS
- 2022
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - : Oxford University Press. - 2055-7671 .- 2055-768X. ; 37:3, s. 716-724
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This progress article focuses on an overview of the potential and challenges of using contemporary Geographic Information System (GIS) applications for the visual rendering and analysis of textual spatial data. The case study is an ancient traveling narrative, Pausanias’s Description of Greece (Periegesis Hellados) which was written in the second century CE. First, we describe the process of converting the volumes to spatial data using a customized version of the open-source digital semantic annotation platform Recogito. Then the focus shifts to the implementation of collected and organized spatial data to a number of GIS applications: namely Google Maps, DARIAH Geo-Browser, Gephi, Palladio and ArcGIS. Through empirical experimentation with spatial data and their implementation in different platforms, our paper charts the ways in which contemporary GIS applications may be implemented to cast new light on ancient understandings of identity, space, and place.
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| 3. |
- Golub, Koraljka, et al.
(författare)
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Digital humanities in Sweden and its infrastructure : Status quo and the sine qua non
- 2020
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - Oxford : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 2055-7671 .- 2055-768X. ; 35:3, s. 547-556
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The article offers a state-of-the-art overview of a number of Digital Humanities (DH) initiatives that have emerged in Sweden over the past decade. We identify two major developments that seem to be taking place within DH, with a specific focus on the infrastructural aspects of the development: (1) a strive to open up and broaden the research output and (2) multi-disciplinary collaboration and its effects. The two major components accentuate the new infrastructural patterns that are developing and the challenges these infer on universities. While current research is at large multi-disciplinary, developing infrastructures also enable the move towards post-disciplinarity, bringing the universities closer to the surrounding society. At five universities in Sweden, individual-sited infrastructures supporting DH research have been built today. They are complemented by national and international infrastructures, thus supporting developments and tackling some of the major challenges. In the article, the relations between individual disciplines, the question of multi- and post-disciplinarity, and the field of Digital Humanities are discussed, while stressing the factors necessary—sine qua non—for a fruitful development of the scholarly infrastructures.
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| 4. |
- Göransson, Elisabet, et al.
(författare)
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Improved distance measures for “mixed-content miscellanies" : an adaptation for the collections of sayings of the desert fathers and mothers
- 2022
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - : Oxford University Press. - 2055-7671 .- 2055-768X. ; 38:1, s. 127-150
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Collections of sayings of the desert fathers and mothers are extant in manuscripts in many languages and are organized differently. They are ‘fixed-content miscellanies’ (FCM): they include material that belongs to the same genre, but is variable both when it comes to appearance and order. Distance measurement methods are particularly suitable for large text traditions including variable content in the so-called mixed-content miscellanies, such as recipes, anthological compilations of shorter text passages, or catalogues, but can also be suitable for text genres like collections of sayings, that are equally variable in appearance and order of sayings, even though the genre is fixed; hence ‘fixed-content miscellanies’. In the article, collections of sayings in seven languages were compared using four distance measures methods. Each segment of the sayings was given a unique id to be comparable. The first method used, the Jaccard distance measure, disregards the linear order of items and instead considers each collection compared only as a ‘bag of stories’. In two other methods used (Birnbaum and Levenshtein methods), the order in which the narratives of each saying appear is compared. All three methods yielded interesting results, but the collections that were apparently closely related were clustered together so tightly that it was not possible to make more nuanced analyses. In order to remove false negatives, particulars concerning lacunes in the material were taken into account in the proposed modified Levenshtein method, the fixed-content miscellanies (FCM)-Levenshtein method. By applying the FCM-Levenshtein method, previously unknown relations between collections witnessed in different languages could be detected.
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| 5. |
- Hallberg Adu, Kajsa, 1981-
(författare)
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The promise of digital humanities pedagogy : Decolonizing a diverse classroom in Ghana
- 2021
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - : Oxford University Press. - 2055-7671 .- 2055-768X. ; 36:suppl 1, s. 37-42
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Higher education operates in a quickly changing, progressively more globalized, cosmopolitan, and interconnected world (Bauman, 2000, Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press; Appiah, 2006, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Co; Zuckerman, 2013, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. New York: W. W. Norton & Company). At the same time, substantive inequalities between people and places mean that this connectivity and knowledge is unevenly spread (Hallberg Adu, 2014, What is the opposite of a knowledge society? A critical reflection from Ghana. In Amoah, L. (ed.), Impacts of the Knowledge Society on Economic and Social Growth in Africa. IGI Global). For our students, the future leaders of this unequal world, critical reasoning becomes a key skill, and perhaps especially so for students in the Global South. This paper argues that digital humanities (DH) can provide both a theoretical framework for decolonizing the academy and technological solutions to hurdles in this process. The paper argues that assignments, their theoretical underpinnings, and implementation are key to decolonizing higher education. It describes three accessible technology-driven assignments with DH pedagogy created for diverse classrooms at Ashesi University in Ghana and discusses their outcomes.
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| 6. |
- Hengchen, Simon, 1988, et al.
(författare)
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A data-driven approach to studying changing vocabularies in historical newspaper collections
- 2021
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 2055-7671 .- 2055-768X. ; 36:Supplement 2, s. 109-126
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Nation and nationhood are among the most frequently studied concepts in the field of intellectual history. At the same time, the word ‘nation’ and its historical usage are very vague. The aim in this article was to develop a data-driven method using dependency parsing and neural word embeddings to clarify some of the vagueness in the evolution of this concept. To this end, we propose the following two-step method. First, using linguistic processing, we create a large set of words pertaining to the topic of nation. Second, we train diachronic word embeddings and use them to quantify the strength of the semantic similarity between these words and thereby create meaningful clusters, which are then aligned diachronically. To illustrate the robustness of the study across languages, time spans, as well as large datasets, we apply it to the entirety of five historical newspaper archives in Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English. To our knowledge, thus far there have been no large-scale comparative studies of this kind that purport to grasp long-term developments in as many as four different languages in a data-driven way. A particular strength of the method we describe in this article is that, by design, it is not limited to the study of nationhood, but rather expands beyond it to other research questions and is reusable in different contexts.
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| 7. |
- Ho, Yu-Fang, et al.
(författare)
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Text-world annotation and visualization for crime narrative reconstruction
- 2018
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - : Oxford University Press. - 2055-7671 .- 2055-768X. ; 34:2, s. 310-334
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- To assist legal professionals with more effective information processing and evaluation, we aim to develop software to identify and visualize the key information dispersed in the unstructured language data of a criminal case. A preliminary model of the software, Worldbuilder, is described in Wang et al. (2016a, b). The present article focuses on explaining the theory and vision behind the computational development of the software, which has involved establishing a means to annotate discourse for visualization purposes. The design of the annotation scheme is based on a cognitive model of discourse processing, Text World Theory (TWT), which describes and tracks how language users create a dynamic representation of events (i.e. text-worlds) in their minds as they communicate. As this is the first time TWT has informed the computational analysis of language, the model is augmented with Contextual Frame Theory, among other linguistic apparatus, to account for the complexities in the data and its translation from text to visualization. Using a statement from the Meredith Kercher murder trial as a case study, we illustrate the efficacy of the augmented TWT framework in the careful and purposeful preparation of linguistic data for computational visualization. Ultimately, this research bridges Cognitive and Computational Linguistics, improves the TWT model’s analytical accuracy, and yields a potentially useful tool for forensic work.
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| 8. |
- Holzapfel, Andre, et al.
(författare)
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Humanities and engineering perspectives on music transcription
- 2021
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 2055-7671 .- 2055-768X.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Music transcription is a process of creating a notation of musical sounds. It has been used as a basis for the analysis of music from a wide variety of cultures. Recent decades have seen an increasing amount of engineering research within the field of Music Information Retrieval that aims at automatically obtaining music transcriptions in Western staff notation. However, such approaches are not widely applied in research in ethnomusicology. This article aims to bridge interdisciplinary gaps by identifying aspects of proximity and divergence between the two fields. As part of our study, we collected manual transcriptions of traditional dance tune recordings by eighteen transcribers. Our method employs a combination of expert and computational evaluation of these transcriptions. This enables us to investigate the limitations of automatic music transcription (AMT) methods and computational transcription metrics that have been proposed for their evaluation. Based on these findings, we discuss promising avenues to make AMT more useful for studies in the Humanities. These are, first, assessing the quality of a transcription based on an analytic purpose; secondly, developing AMT approaches that are able to learn conventions concerning the transcription of a specific style; thirdly, a focus on novice transcribers as users of AMT systems; and, finally, considering target notation systems different from Western staff notation.
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| 9. |
- Kettunen, Kimmo, et al.
(författare)
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Semantic tagging and the Nordic tradition of everyman's rights
- 2022
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - : Oxford University Press. - 2055-7671 .- 2055-768X. ; 37:2, s. 483-496
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article uses semantic tagging to analyse the Nordic concept of everyman's rights (a right of public access to nature) in protocols of the Finnish parliament. In the analysis, we use a novel tool, a lexical semantic tagger for Finnish (Finnish-language Semantic Tagger), which is used to tag key discussions about everyman's rights in the Finnish parliament. The article has two contributions as follows: first, it presents a method that combines semantic tagging and similarity analysis of corpora (keyness) for studying the formation of political concepts in large textual data. Secondly, it sheds light on the Nordic access rights and the underlying customary everyman's rights. Despite its central role in public debate, the history of the concept has not been well researched. Our analysis shows that the legislative context could be clearly detected with our approach, and that the method allowed us to describe shifts in the meaning of everyman's rights in the legislative discussion.
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| 10. |
- Lijffijt, Jefrey, et al.
(författare)
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Significance testing of word frequencies in corpora
- 2016
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Ingår i: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 2055-768X .- 2055-7671. ; 31:2, s. 374-397
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Finding out whether a word occurs significantly more often in one text or corpus than in another is an important question in analysing corpora. As noted by Kilgarriff (Language is never, ever, ever, random, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2005; 1(2): 263–76.), the use of the χ2 and log-likelihood ratio tests is problematic in this context, as they are based on the assumption that all samples are statistically independent of each other. However, words within a text are not independent. As pointed out in Kilgarriff (Comparing corpora, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2001; 6(1): 1–37) and Paquot and Bestgen (Distinctive words in academic writing: a comparison of three statistical tests for keyword extraction. In Jucker, A., Schreier, D., and Hundt, M. (eds), Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, pp. 247–69), it is possible to represent the data differently and employ other tests, such that we assume independence at the level of texts rather than individual words. This allows us to account for the distribution of words within a corpus. In this article we compare the significance estimates of various statistical tests in a controlled resampling experiment and in a practical setting, studying differences between texts produced by male and female fiction writers in the British National Corpus. We find that the choice of the test, and hence data representation, matters. We conclude that significance testing can be used to find consequential differences between corpora, but that assuming independence between all words may lead to overestimating the significance of the observed differences, especially for poorly dispersed words. We recommend the use of the t-test, Wilcoxon rank-sum test, or bootstrap test for comparing word frequencies across corpora.
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