[en] Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects:
Digital Scholarship & Archiving in King’s Digital Lab James Smithies, King's College London; Carina Westling, King's College London; Anna-Maria Sichani, King's College London; Pam Mellen, King's College London; Arianna Ciula, King's College London
Abstract
[en]
During the 2016–2017 financial year, King's Digital Lab (King's College London)
undertook an extensive archiving and sustainability project to ensure the
ongoing management, security, and sustainability of ~100 digital humanities
projects, produced over a twenty-year period. Many of these projects, including
seminal publications such as Aphrodisias in Late
Antiquity, Inscriptions of Roman
Tripolitania, Henry III Fine Rolls,
Jonathan Swift Archive, Jane Austen Manuscripts, The Gascon
Rolls, The Gough Map, and Inquisitions Post Mortem, occupy important positions
in the history of digital humanities. Of the projects inherited by the lab,
about half are either of exceptionally high quality or seminal in other ways but
almost all of them struggled with funding and technical issues that threatened
their survival. By taking a holistic approach to infrastructure, and software
engineering and maintenance, the lab has resolved the majority of the issues and
secured the short to medium term future of the projects in its care. This
article details the conceptual, procedural, and technical approaches used to
achieve that, and offers policy recommendations to prevent repetition of the
situation in the future.
[en] Modelling Medieval Hands: Practical OCR for
Caroline MinusculeBrandon W. Hawk, Rhode Island College; Antonia Karaisl, Rescribe Ltd; Nick White, Rescribe Ltd
Abstract
[en]
Over the past few decades, the ever-expanding media of the digital world,
including digital humanities endeavors, have become more reliant on the results
of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Yet, unfortunately,
medievalists have not had as much success with using OCR software on handwritten
manuscripts as scholars using printed books as their sources. While some
projects to ameliorate this situation have emerged in recent years, using
software to create machine-readable results from medieval manuscripts is still
in its infancy. This article presents the results of a series of successful
experiments with open-source neural network OCR software on medieval
manuscripts. Results over the course of these experiments yielded character and
word accuracy rates over 90%, reaching 94% and 97% accuracy in some instances.
Such results are not only viable for creating machine-readable texts but also
pose new avenues for bringing together manuscript studies and digital humanities
in ways previously unrealized. A closer examination of the experiments indicates
regular patterns among the OCR results that could potentially allow for use
cases beyond pure text recognition, such as for paleographic classifications of
script types.
[en] Towards 3D Scholarly Editions: The Battle of
Mount Street BridgeCostas Papadopoulos, Maastricht University; Susan Schreibman, Maastricht University
Abstract
[en]
This paper explores different ways of modelling and simulating complex spatial
and temporal events, such as battles, for which it has been practically
impossible to (re)construct the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of
variables of which they are comprised. This research utilises as a case study
the Battle of Mount Street Bridge of the Irish Easter 1916 Rising, in which the
number of British casualties has been fiercely debated. The research is framed
within the theory and practice of digital scholarly editions, which provides a
new paradigm for approaching virtual worlds in a contextualized and annotated
environment. This paper also discusses the challenges of creating virtual worlds
for online environments in which there is rapid obsolescence of software and
platforms and an absence of standards.
[en] Music Scholarship Online (MuSO): A Research
Environment for a More Democratic Digital
MusicologyTimothy C. Duguid, University of Glasgow; Maristella Feustle, University of North Texas; Francesca Giannetti, Rutgers University; Elizabeth Grumbach, Arizona State University
Abstract
[en]
This paper describes the work to date on Music Scholarship Online (MuSO), an
online research environment for digitized and born-digital music resources that
inscribes itself within the federated model of the Advanced Research Consortium
(ARC). With the project now in its third year, MuSO has reached an inflection
point where it has developed a music-centered RDF schema and demonstrated the
potential for federated searching across ARC nodes by crosswalking
eighteenth-century music content from Europeana into ARC. The case study
presented here outlines the dissemination role that MuSO proposes to play within
the music research community, the history of MuSO in relation to ARC, the
Europeana test case, and future steps for the continued development of MuSO. By
facilitating the discovery of digital music content, and providing a virtual
environment for music researchers, MuSO will promote data reuse, strengthen
community standards in music representation, and create possibilities for
cross-disciplinary exchange. We propose that by leveraging the connections
between digital music resources and digital humanities research technologies,
MuSO will facilitate new research that expands the musicological discipline.
[en] DH2018: A Space to Build BridgesMolly Nebiolo, Northeastern University; Gregory J. Palermo, Northeastern University
Abstract
[en]
In June 2018, the Digital Humanities annual conference (DH2018) was held in the
Global South for the first time. This conference report offers perspectives from
two graduate students who attended the conference.
[en] Velvet Evolution: A Review of Lev Manovich's
Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic,
2013)Alan Bilansky, University of Illinois
Abstract
[en]
Lev Manovich presents a theory of software as simulation. To form the user
interface for modern media software, older media are metaphorized, and then new
features are added to the media by virtue of their being simulations, and
finally the original media are combined to create new forms of cultural
expression. Movies that seamlessly combine lens photography and 3D computer
graphics are the best example of new cultural forms created by software.
[en] Curating Crowds: A Review of Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage (Ashgate,
2014)Victoria Van Hyning, Library of Congress
Abstract
[en]
Through case studies and theoretical reflections, Mia Ridge’s edited volume
Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage makes a
comprehensive addition to crowdsourcing research and practice. Authors discuss
how issues of project roles, public and volunteer engagement, data use and user
choice reshape institutional presence.
