NLP and the Humanities: The Revival of an Old Liaison

This paper presents an overview of some\ud emerging trends in the application of NLP\ud in the domain of the so-called Digital Humanities\ud and discusses the role and nature\ud of metadata, the annotation layer that is so\ud characteristic of documents that play a role\ud in the scholarly practises of the humanities.\ud It is explained how metadata are the\ud key to the added value of techniques such\ud as text and link mining, and an outline is\ud given of what measures could be taken to\ud increase the chances for a bright future for\ud the old ties between NLP and the humanities.\ud There is no data like metadata

Radio Oranje: Enhanced Access to a Historical Spoken Word Collection

Access to historical audio collections is typically very restricted:\ud content is often only available on physical (analog) media and the\ud metadata is usually limited to keywords, giving access at the level\ud of relatively large fragments, e.g., an entire tape. Many spoken\ud word heritage collections are now being digitized, which allows the\ud introduction of more advanced search technology. This paper presents\ud an approach that supports online access and search for recordings of\ud historical speeches. A demonstrator has been built, based on the\ud so-called Radio Oranje collection, which contains radio speeches by\ud the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina that were broadcast during World War II.\ud The audio has been aligned with its original 1940s manual\ud transcriptions to create a time-stamped index that enables the speeches to be\ud searched at the word level. Results are presented together with\ud related photos from an external database

Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Word Archives

This paper presents and discusses ongoing work aiming at affordable disclosure of real-world spoken word archives in general, and in particular of a collection of recorded interviews with Dutch survivors of World War II concentration camp Buchenwald. Given such collections, the least we want to be able to provide is search at different levels and a flexible way of presenting results. Strategies for automatic annotation based on speech recognition – supporting e.g., within-document search– are outlined and discussed with respect to the Buchenwald interview collection. In addition, usability aspects of the spoken word search are discussed on the basis of our experiences with the online Buchenwald web portal. It is concluded that, although user feedback is generally fairly positive, automatic annotation performance is still far from satisfactory, and requires additional research

Linked Data Supported Content Analysis for Sociology

Philology and hermeneutics as the analysis and interpretation of natural language text in written historical sources are the predecessors of modern content analysis and date back already to antiquity. In empirical social sciences, especially in sociology, content analysis provides valuable insights to social structures and cultural norms of the present and past. With the ever growing amount of text on the web to analyze, also numerous computer-assisted text analysis techniques and tools were developed in sociological research. However, existing methods often go without sufficient standardization. As a consequence, sociological text analysis is lacking transparency, reproducibility and data re-usability. The goal of this paper is to show, how Linked Data principles and Entity Linking techniques can be used to structure, publish and analyze natural language text for sociological research to tackle these shortcomings. This is achieved on the use case of constitutional text documents of the Netherlands from 1884 to 2016 which represent an important contribution to the European cultural heritage. Finally, the generated data is made available and re-usable as Linked Data not only for sociologists, but also for all other researchers in the digital humanities domain interested in the development of constitutions in the Netherlands

WP2 Report from the ECHO IT Days

Abstract not availabl