Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities)

If the 21st century is to understood in terms of the proliferation of interface and image exchange platforms and if predominate forms of media only attempt to reconcile and navigate these technologies, theoretical examinations of these platforms aimed at understanding their aesthetics and effects have become imperative. Utilizing an understanding of cognitive technology from Marcelo Dascal, understandings of networks, protocol and control developed by Alexander R Galloway, and a theory of modern technogenesis by Katherine Hayles, this paper maps out emerging aesthetic forms in art and visual production as a result of the preponderance of computer interface in contemporary modes of communication. It examines the function and form of hypertext and protocol as they relate to visual culture. This work examines film and other visual forms with an eye to cognitive development in order to uncover the visual manifestation of networks as well as the systems of control that are embedded within.

""La lingüística en España" es una contribución a la historia de la lingüística, en la nueva y atractiva vertiente de las memorias personales. Consta de 24 relatos o autobiografías intelectuales de lingüistas sobresalientes, en las que describen su formación y las causas que les condujeron a la lingüística. Permiten comprender mejor el mérito de sus tareas y aportaciones. También tienden un puente entre los orígenes de la lingüística en España y el panorama actual.
La obra presenta la historia como vivencia y reflexión, combina memorias personales, debates profesionales y manifiestos por una lingüística futura. Al mismo tiempo, identifica facetas de la sociedad en la que se han desarrollado esas trayectorias vitales. La escritura del yo produce de este modo un efecto sorprendente, porque trasciende la esfera del autor y plasma un panorama variado y contrastado de la lingüística contemporánea.""

The modeling of the inner world of narrative characters and the ability to capture and formally shape their deep psychological characteristics are at the center of the reflection of a part of literary criticism and remains, today, an open challenge in the Digital Humanities. In this paper, we present an ongoing work of a preliminary version of  the Ontology of Literary Characters (OLC), that allows to capture and inference psychological characters’ traits starting from their linguistic descriptions as they appear in literary texts.

In: Fabio Cozman, Guilherme Plonski, Hugo NerI (Org.). Inteligência artificial: avanços e tendências. São Paulo: Instituto de Estudos Avançados, 2021, p. 225-260.


Em um tempo em que mais da metade da população mundial acessa a internet deixando registro de suas comunicações em trocas de e-mails, de seus pensamentos ou crenças em tweets ou de sua vida familiar compartilhando fotos online, dentre inúmeras angústias, surge uma menos evidente hoje: como pesquisar essas diferentes experiências no futuro? Como dominar a complexidade da construção de novas narrativas sobre o passado diante de tantos traços da experiência humana agora preservados?

Este capítulo busca fazer uma avaliação do que William McAllister chamou de “Big Bang documental”, sobretudo através do reconhecimento de como registros textuais criados, armazenados e acessados em formatos digitais desafiam pesquisadores das Ciências Humanas, em geral, e historiadores, em particular, em seus ofícios. Ao mesmo tempo, preocupa-se em identificar quais métodos (como Aprendizado de Máquina e Processamento de Linguagem Natural) e parâmetros podem ser aplicados ou desenvolvidos para um tempo em que suportes como Facebook e Twitter tornam-se tanto registros da experiência humana como arquivos históricos. Finalmente, com uma preocupação em transpor esse conhecimento para outras áreas de aplicação, como jornalismo, análise de redes sociais ou de mercado consumidor, procura refletir sobre como contornar os desafios tecnológicos para tornar o trabalho com documentos textuais em larga escala e não estruturados acessível a pesquisadores, formuladores de políticas públicas ou quaisquer interessados de uma forma abrangente e útil.

Texto base da apresentação “Arquivos e narrativas sem fronteiras” no evento Inteligência Artificial e suas Aplicações: Avanços e Tendências, de 25 de junho de 2019, da série Strategic Workshops do Instituto de Estudos Avançados da USP (Acesso online http://www.iea.usp.br/midiateca/video/videos-2019/inteligencia-artificial-e-suas-aplicacoes-avancos-e-tendencias-parte-1-de-2).

Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with one or two folds. The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes. We present a fully automatic computational approach for reconstructing and virtually unfolding volumetric scans of a locked letter with complex internal folding, producing legible images of the letter’s contents and crease pattern while preserving letterlocking evidence. We demonstrate our method on four letterpackets from Renaissance Europe, reading the contents of one unopened letter for the first time. Using the results of virtual unfolding, we situate our findings within a novel letterlocking categorization ...

Работа посвящена изучению особенностей формирования моделей исторической памяти в цифровом пространстве при помощи современных информационно-коммуникационных онлайн-технологий на примере Второй мировой войны. Анализируется актуальная практика цифровых «войн памяти» и механизмы переписывания истории в Интернете. В статье показано, что экстерриториальный характер онлайн-коммуникаций позволяет осуществлять внешнюю информационную агрессию в суверенные национальные сегменты Интернета с целью трансформации традиционных исторических кодов, символов и смыслов, а также изменения массовых представлений сетевых пользователей о событиях Второй мировой войны. Автор делает вывод о том, что наличие собственной цифровой информационно-коммуникационной инфраструктуры, каналов распространения исторической информации, субъектов генерации и трансляции исторического контента является ключевым фактором обеспечения выживания национальных моделей исторической памяти в конкурентном цифровом пространстве. В противном случае они замещаются альтернативными моделями, изменяющими массовые представления сетевых пользователей, что ведет к соответствующим изменениям в оценке исторических событий и переписыванию истории в рамках осуществляемых на глобальном уровне «войн памяти». В работе также обосновывается, что основной целевой аудиторией информационно-коммуникационной работы в Интернет-пространстве является молодое поколение, которое в дальнейшем будет выступать ключевым носителем моделей исторической памяти в своих обществах. В связи с этим влияние на процессы формирования представлений об исторических событиях онлайн-пользователей, трансформация отношения молодежи к собственной и мировой истории потенциально позволяют уже в обозримой перспективе осуществить тотальное переписывание исторической памяти на глобальном уровне в случае отсутствия соответствующей активности государств по защите собственных национальных информационных пространств и противодействию внешней информационно- коммуникационной агрессии.

Ключевые слова: «войны памяти», «переписывание истории, Интернет-пространство, цифровые коммуникации, историческая память

This short article summarises a preliminary study of the poetry and correspondence of the English poet Norman Nicholson (1914-1987), undertaken as part of Lancaster University's Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places project. In addition to offering a concise explanation of the Spatial Humanities project and the methods it employs, the article explains how working with GIS, visualisation techniques, and distant reading enriches our understanding both of the geography of Nicholson's poetry and of the spatial dimensions of the network of people with whom he exchanged letters throughout his career.

The "Chronicon" by Romualdus from Salerno is a universal chronical of the XII century in Latin that constitutes an important source for the early stages of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy. I am working on a new digital critical edition of this texts based on the main manuscripts (A, B, C, Aa/D in Schwarz's siglum). It will be based on full transcriptions of the texts of those witnesses, encoded in TEI/XML, and on their semi-automatic collation with CollateX and ad hoc Python software. This digital methodology will provide richer evidence of the textual variance in the manuscripts, especially since the apparatus criticus of Garufi's 1914 edition seems to omit a number of readings. The numerous textual additions differentiating the "long" and the "short" version of the work and the possible transpositions of those passages pose a specific technological challenge because they make computational collation particularly complex. Another challenging task is the distinction between orthografic and substantial variants, since they can serve different research interests of different readers

Tarihçilerin interaktif haritalar yaptığı, dilbilimcilerin metinlerde kullanılan kelimelerin örüntülerini belirlemek için bilgisayar teknolojilerini kullandığı günümüzde, hemen hemen her disiplinden araştırmacıların Internet’i ve Web’i interaktif bir şekilde kullandığı gözlenmektedir. Yakınsama ile birlikte disiplinler arası sınırların belirsizleşmeye başladığı söylenebilir. Dijital İnsanî Bilimler (DİB) de bu gelişmeler neticesinde geleneksel insanî bilimlerde bilgisayar teknolojilerinin kullanılmaya başlanmasıyla ortaya çıkmıştır. Araştırmada DİB’in genel özelliklerini belirlemek amaçlanmıştır. Bu sayede yeni kaynak türlerinin belirlenmesi, yeni yöntem ve araştırma davranışlarının kütüphaneler için oluşturduğu zorlukların tespit edilmesi amaçlanmıştır. Araştırmada DİB alanında yayımlanan yayınlar üzerinden bilimetrik analizler yürütülmüştür. Erişilen yayınlar Keyword Plus (ID), doküman özleri ve doküman başlıklarında kullanılan kavramlar üzerinden incelenmiştir. Kavramların incelenmesinde (anahtar kelime, başlık ya da özler) çoklu uyum analizi (Multiple Correspondence Analysis) kullanılmıştır. DİB’de ortaya çıkan yeni kaynak türleri, kütüphanelerde hangi hizmetleri gerektirmektedir? DİB’de kullanılan yöntemler kütüphane ve bilgi hizmeti sağlayan kuruluşlar için yeni altyapıları gerektirmekte midir? gibi sorulara cevap aranmış, DİB’in kütüphane ve bilgi hizmetleri açısından ortaya çıkardığı meydan okumalara dikkat çekilmiştir. Araştırmada kütüphaneler başta olmak üzere bilgi hizmeti sağlayan kuruluşların, DİB gibi tezahür eden alanlar ile bu alanlara yönelik olarak ortaya çıkan kaynak türleri, ihtiyaçları ve araştırma davranışlarına yönelik tespitlerde bulunulmuştur.

Today while historians producing interactive maps and linguists use computer technology in order to determine the word pattern used in texts, it is observed that researchers from almost every discipline use internet and web interactively. It can be claimed that boundaries among the disciplines have started to become uncertain with convergence. As a result of these developments, digital humanities emerged by the beginning of using computer technologies in traditional humanities. The aim of this study was to determine the general characteristics of Digital Humanities. In this way, it is aimed to identify new types of resources and to identify the challenges of new methods and research behaviors for libraries. In this study, the scientometrics was conducted by considering scientific papers published in the field of digital humanities. Accessed publications were evaluated according to the concepts/terms used in keyword plus, document abstracts and titles. Multiple Correspondence Analysis was used in the analysis of the concepts (keywords, title or abstracts). Scope/field-oriented findings as a result of the analysis were discussed. This study tried to answer the questions such as; which kind of services do new resource types appeared in digital humanities require in libraries? Do methods used in digital humanities require new infrastructures for libraries and organizations providing information services? And points out the new challenges posed by digital humanities for libraries and information services. This study presented findings related to emerging new resource types, needs and research behaviors appeared because of developing digital humanities fields for organizations, especially libraries, providing information services.

Lo studioso di discipline umanistiche oggi non può più prescindere dalla conoscenza e dall’utilizzazione degli strumenti e delle risorse messe a disposizione dalle Scienze dell’Informazione. Ma per poter condurre le sue indagini scientifiche in ambiente digitale, l’umanista deve conoscere bene, anche dal punto di vista storico e teorico, poteri e limiti degli strumenti e delle risorse informatiche. Attraverso la lettura di questo manuale, egli sarà in grado di rispondere ad alcuni quesiti fondamentali: che cos’è l’Informatica umanistica, che cos’è internet e che cos’è il web, quali sono i linguaggi utilizzati nel web, che cos’è un ipertesto e che cos’è l’ipermedialità, come si svolge la codifica e la rappresentazione dell’informazione, che cosa sono e come si sono sviluppati i motori di ricerca nel web, che cosa sono e come funzionano i cataloghi, gli archivi e le library digitali, quali sono i sistemi di ricerca bibliografica avanzata, come si svolge la ricerca umanistica in rete e, soprattutto, quali sono le fonti scientifiche in ambiente digitale. Il fine ultimo del volume è dunque fornire allo studente e allo studioso di discipline umanistiche gli strumenti e il metodo di ricerca necessari per l’indagine scientifica in ambiente digitale, e contribuire così a trasformare l’umanista in umanista informatico.

This document was written for a series of workshops with the intent that on reading and rereading this document it would be possible to understand the main issues surrounding the formulation of a workflow to address data output from digital cinematographic cameras.

This paper describes recent progress of a GIS project on Chinese Buddhist monasteries. The author of this paper, who is also the principal investigator of this project, intends to present the problems which such a digital project faces and to discuss possible solutions of these problems. This paper demonstrates the success of this project but also points out the future directions for further development. Through an analysis of the different kinds of relationships that this database has to provide for, this paper emphasizes the importance of designing an expandable database structure. The potential of such a database demonstrates that digital descriptions of historical events can be a powerful tool for conducting research in Chinese religion.

Toponym matching, i.e. pairing strings that represent the same real-world location, is a fundamental problemfor several practical applications. The current state-of-the-art relies on string similarity metrics, either specifically developed for matching place names or integrated within methods that combine multiple metrics. However, these methods all rely on common sub-strings in order to establish similarity, and they do not effectively capture the character replacements involved in toponym changes due to transliterations or to changes in language and culture over time. In this article, we present a novel matching approach, leveraging a deep neural network to classify pairs of toponyms as either matching or nonmatching. The proposed network architecture uses recurrent nodes to build representations from the sequences of bytes that correspond to the strings that are to be matched. These representations are then combined and passed to feed-forward nodes, finally leading to a classification decision. We present the results of a wide-ranging evaluation on the performance of the proposed method, using a large dataset collected from the GeoNames gazetteer. These results show that the proposed method can significantly outperform individual similarity metrics from previous studies, as well as previous methods based on supervised machine learning for combining multiple metrics.

First created as part of the Digital Humanities Praxis course in the spring of 2012 at the CUNY Graduate Center, Tandem explores the generation of datasets comprised of text and image data by leveraging Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). This project builds upon that earlier work in a new programming framework. While other developers and digital humanities scholars have created similar tools specifically geared toward NLP (e.g. Voyant-Tools), as well as algorithms for image processing and feature extraction on the CV side, Tandem explores the process of developing a more robust and user-friendly web-based multimodal data generator using modern development processes with the intention of expanding the use of the tool among interested academics. Tandem functions as a full-stack JavaScript in-browser web application that allows a user to login, upload a corpus of image files for OCR, NLP, and CV based image processing to facilitate data generation. The corpora intended for this tool includes picture books, comics, and other types of image and text based manuscripts and is discussed in detail. Once images are processed, the application provides some key initial insights and data lightly visualized in a dashboard view for the user. As a research question, this project explores the viability of full-stack JavaScript application development for academic end products by looking at a variety of courses and literature that inspired the work alongside the documented process of development of the application and proposed future enhancements for the tool. For those interested in further research or development, the full codebase for this project is available for download.

Film age appropriateness classification is an important problem with a significant societal impact that has so far been out of the interest of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning researchers. To this end, we have collected a corpus of 17000 film transcripts along with their age ratings. We use the textual contents in an experiment to predict the correct age classification for the United States (G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17) and the United Kingdom (U, PG, 12A, 15, 18 and R18). Our experiments indicate that gradient boosting machines beat FastText and various Deep Learning architectures. We reach an overall accuracy of 79.3% for the US ratings compared to a projected super human accuracy of 84%. For the UK ratings, we reach an overall accuracy of 65.3% (UK) compared to a projected super human accuracy of 80.0%.

Drawing on the expertise of leading researchers from around the globe, this pioneering collection of essays explores how geospatial technologies are revolutionizing the discipline of literary studies. The book offers the first intensive examination of digital literary cartography, a feld whose recent and rapid development has yet to be coherently analysed. This collection not only provides an authoritative account of the current state of the feld, but also informs a new generation of digital humanities scholars about the critical and creative potentials of digital literary mapping. The book showcases the work of exemplary literary mapping projects and provides the reader with an overview of the tools, techniques and methods those projects employ.

Digitalna humanistika je novija znanstvena disciplina u sklopu društvenih i humanističkih
znanosti, koju karakterizira proučavanje mogućnosti uporabe računala u
znanstvenoistraživačkom radu. Promjena koja se dogodila s uporabom računala u
znanstvenoistraživačkom radu predstavlja nove izazove i mogućnosti za humaniste.
Digitalizirani materijal i onaj „born-digital“ koji se kombinira sa metodologijama iz
tradicionalnih humanističkih disciplina migracijom u umreženo okruženje nudi mogućnost
osigurati i unaprijediti digitalne resurse za učenje, poučavanje, istraživanje, proučavanje
dokumentacije i javnu odgovornost. Informacije u digitalnom obliku pružaju neusporedivu
priliku za kombinirati, derivirati, predstaviti i dijeliti složene ideje. Vizualizacija je učinkovit
način za prikaz puno informacija / podataka na jezgrovit i čitljiv način. Vizualizacija
informacija omogućava da se velike količine (često složenih) podataka vizualno prikazuju na
način koji na vrlo učinkovit način otkriva obrasce, anomalije i druge značajke podataka.
Vizualizacijske informacije sadrže mnogo povijesnih i kulturnih informacija u svojim "ekstra"
ili "suvišnim" elementima - tj. oblik vizualizacije je također informacija. Zemljopisni
informacijski sustavi (GIS) se smatraju alatom za mapiranje, ali metodologija koju oni
obuhvaćaju je mnogo više nego samo digitalna kartografija; ona omogućuje istraživačima da
analiziraju i prikažu podatke u raznim kartama, grafikama, mrežama ili hijerarhijskim
stablima, kao i proširuje funkcionalnost baze podataka u istraživanju prostornih odnosa.

This dissertation examines the nearly complete German, English and French secondary literature on, and the composers’ commentary on, three renowned works of the European postwar avant-garde. With the aid of the software MAXQDA, I undertook a meta-analysis combining qualitative and quantitative methods to discover what the texts address and in which amounts, which terms play important roles in them, and what they say about subjects like perception and meaning. I analyse individual terms and topics and interpret their significance based on how often or how seldom each of them arises in the texts in relation to specific works over time. For example, terms or semantic fields such as complexity, extremes, violence and power continuously play a prominent role, while others like world or beauty are rarely used or not used at all during some decades. I discuss the discourses and their arguments - including several so far unknown sources -, which extend over sixty years now, based on analysis producing some surprising results – both for the single works and ultimately across works.

This chapter introduces Boundary Line Type (BLT) mapping, a vector GIS based cross-culturally and diachronically comparative method, used for mapping the socio-spatial significance of urban built environments. This new research method is related to other methods currently used to study contemporary as well as historical urban built environments such as urban morphology, space syntax, and GIS based approaches. BLT mapping uses GIS technology in order to apply an ontology of formal boundary conceptualisations expressing the constitutive differences among the materially constructed subdivisions which shape built environments and are inhabited by urban society. This ontology resulted from a firm socio-spatial theoretical grounding (Vis in Sp Flows: Int J Urb ExtraUrb Stud 2(4): 15–29, 2013a; Vis 2013b; Vis in J Borderland Stud, forthcoming) and is here operationalised on the basis of contemporary, historical, historically reconstructed, and archaeological ground-level city plans of the historic city of Winchester (UK) and Chunchucmil (Classic Maya, Mexico). The research processes of data preparation and the analytical mapping of BLTs by identifying them in empirical data contexts are presented. This alerts the prospective user to the challenges and practical measures involved in using spatial datasets of different origin. The interpretive opportunities of the resultant formal redescription of the urban landscape and the potential of the BLT data structure for both advanced spatial analysis and visualisation is explained. Facilitating this interpretive and analytical mapping practice is expected to stimulate future research to systematically explore societyspace relations as manifest and developing in cities over time and in socioculturally contrasting urban traditions. Devising and conducting this methodology advances the qualitative GIS research agenda for the spatial humanities and social sciences by marrying theoretically informed ideational concepts to quantifiable empirical units of information.

The thesis concentrates on computational methods pertaining to ancient ostraca - ink on clay inscriptions, written in Hebrew. These texts originate from the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and dated to the late First Temple period (8th – early 6th centuries BCE). The ostraca are almost the sole remaining epigraphic evidence from the First Temple period and are therefore important for archaeological, historical, linguistic, and religious studies of this era. This “noisy” material offers a fertile ground for the development of various “robust” image analysis, image processing, computer vision and machine learning methods, dealing with the challenging domain of ancient documents’ analysis. The common procedures of modern epigraphers involve manual and labor-intensive steps, facing the risk of unintentionally mixing documentation with interpretation. Therefore, the main goal of this study is establishing a computerized paleographic framework for handling First Temple period epigraphic material. The major research questions, addressed in this thesis are: quality evaluation of manual facsimiles; quality evaluation of ostraca images; automatic binarization of the documents and its subsequent refinement; quality evaluation of binarizations on global and local levels; identification of different writers between inscriptions (two distinct methods are proposed); image segmentation (with improvements over the classical Chan-Vese algorithm); and letters’ shape prior estimation. The developed methods were tested on real-world archaeological and modern data and their results are found to be favorable.

Digital humanities, computer history, and digital agriculture are the most striking evidence of the widespread penetration of computer technology into all spheres of human life. November 10-12, 2021 Moscow hosted the 7th HISTELCON International Conference-the flagship conference of the IEEE European Chapter, which brings together more than 400,000 individual members working in more than 40 IEEE communities in the field of new technologies and their impact on social and economic development humanity. The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT) is among them, which was founded in 1972. The main area of interest for SSIT members is to maintain a professional dialogue on the study of the impact of new technologies, particularly digital technologies, on the development of humanity and their relationship with society's social life. The motto of the IEEE: Developing Technology for Humanity. Science and society, science and technology policy, communications in science, mobility of scientists, sociology of science, women in science, assessment of the activities of scientists and research teams, science and education, social problems of modern technologies-these are the topics that were discussed at HISTELCON-2021. Holding the HISTELCON-2021 conference in Moscow is a sign of respect for the outstanding achievements of Russian and Soviet science. Seventy years ago, in December 2021, the first Soviet computers M-1 and MESM were created. The Soviet Union was one of the three countries that were the first to enter the era of computer technology. The conference was also timed to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, celebrated in 2022. Most of the reports presented at the conference considered the development of computer technologies and their applications in dynamics, how their achievements could affect the future.