78,613 research outputs found

    Assessing Digital Humanities Tools: Use of Scalar at a Research University

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    As librarians increasingly support digital publication platforms, they must also understand the user experience of these tools. This case study assesses use of Scalar, a digital humanities publishing platform for media-rich projects, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Based on a survey, interviews, and content analysis, the study highlights the platform’s usability, its functionality, and its successes and failures in meeting user expectations. The media upload process, image annotation, and aesthetics factored into user issues. Writing pedagogy also emerged as an important consideration. Results suggest lessons for digital literacy instruction, as well as how and when Scalar might serve patrons’ publishing needs.Ope

    Crowdsourcing Image Extraction and Annotation: Software Development and Case Study

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    We describe the development of web-based software that facilitates large-scale, crowdsourced image extraction and annotation within image-heavy corpora that are of interest to the digital humanities. An application of this software is then detailed and evaluated through a case study where it was deployed within Amazon Mechanical Turk to extract and annotate faces from the archives of Time magazine. Annotation labels included categories such as age, gender, and race that were subsequently used to train machine learning models. The systemization of our crowdsourced data collection and worker quality verification procedures are detailed within this case study. We outline a data verification methodology that used validation images and required only two annotations per image to produce high-fidelity data that has comparable results to methods using five annotations per image. Finally, we provide instructions for customizing our software to meet the needs for other studies, with the goal of offering this resource to researchers undertaking the analysis of objects within other image-heavy archives

    Pratiques d'annotations à l'ère des médias numériques : étude de cas de l'architexte Diigo.

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    International audienceThe integration of technology in higher education raises questions about the potential of digital university teaching. In this article, we approach the influence of environments (hardware or platforms) on the practice of digital annotation. Our project is to analyze the types of use produced by the architext of an online management tool of bookmarks Diigo. We rely on two case studies to identify annotation practices. A first study relates to the practices which students declare they have. Those were collected by questionnaire. The second concerns the actual annotations of expert users of two Diigo groups. The first elements of our analysis reveal that the use of highlighting and annotation features is uncommon despite the heuristic value of this approach. To improve the digital literacy of students, a specific educational approach centered on the implementation of collective and collaborative practices within the training group remains to be built.L'intégration des technologies dans l'enseignement supérieur suscite des interrogations sur les potentialités offertes par la pédagogie universitaire numérique. Dans cet article, nous abordons l'influence des environnements (matériels ou plateformes) sur la pratique de l'annotation numérique. Notre projet consiste à analyser les types d'usage produits par l'architexte d'un outil de gestion de signets en ligne Diigo. Nous nous appuyons sur deux études de cas pour identifier les pratiques d'annotation. Une première étude concerne les pratiques déclarées des étudiants recueillies par questionnaire. La seconde porte sur les annotations effectives d'utilisateurs experts de deux groupes Diigo. Les premiers éléments d'analyse nous révèlent que l'usage des fonctions de surlignement et d'annotations est peu répandu malgré l'intérêt heuristique de cette démarche. Afin d'améliorer les compétences numériques des étudiants, une approche didactique spécifique centrée sur la mise en œuvre de pratiques collectives et collaboratives au sein du groupe de formation reste à construire

    Do peers see more in a paper than its authors?

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    Recent years have shown a gradual shift in the content of biomedical publications that is freely accessible, from titles and abstracts to full text. This has enabled new forms of automatic text analysis and has given rise to some interesting questions: How informative is the abstract compared to the full-text? What important information in the full-text is not present in the abstract? What should a good summary contain that is not already in the abstract? Do authors and peers see an article differently? We answer these questions by comparing the information content of the abstract to that in citances-sentences containing citations to that article. We contrast the important points of an article as judged by its authors versus as seen by peers. Focusing on the area of molecular interactions, we perform manual and automatic analysis, and we find that the set of all citances to a target article not only covers most information (entities, functions, experimental methods, and other biological concepts) found in its abstract, but also contains 20% more concepts. We further present a detailed summary of the differences across information types, and we examine the effects other citations and time have on the content of citances

    The Use of Digital Video Annotation in Teacher Training: The Teachers’ Perspectives

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    The use of digital video offers interesting opportunities in teacher training, particularly the possibilities provided by video annotation, whereby people can add and share comments and opinions on the same videos, even from different places. This exploratory study aims to examine teachers’ perspectives of this technology, taking into account both their explicit and implicit evaluations. Different methods of using video annotation for training are compared, one based on its individual use, another supported by various types of tutorship. The data were collected and analysed first through a quantitative phase, followed by an in-depth qualitative phase. It is pointed out that to make this technology fully operational it is important to address the cultural and psychosocial aspects that control the emotional conditions which arise when one’s teaching behaviour is being observed and assessed

    Multimedia information technology and the annotation of video

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    The state of the art in multimedia information technology has not progressed to the point where a single solution is available to meet all reasonable needs of documentalists and users of video archives. In general, we do not have an optimistic view of the usability of new technology in this domain, but digitization and digital power can be expected to cause a small revolution in the area of video archiving. The volume of data leads to two views of the future: on the pessimistic side, overload of data will cause lack of annotation capacity, and on the optimistic side, there will be enough data from which to learn selected concepts that can be deployed to support automatic annotation. At the threshold of this interesting era, we make an attempt to describe the state of the art in technology. We sample the progress in text, sound, and image processing, as well as in machine learning

    Organisational challenges of the semantic web in digital libraries: A Norwegian case study

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    This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Emerald Group Publishing LimitedPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine from a socio-technical point of view the impact of semantic web technology on the strategic, organisational and technological levels. The semantic web initiative holds great promise for the future for digital libraries. There is, however, a considerable gap in semantic web research between the contributions in the technological field and research in the organisational field. Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive case study of the National Library of Norway (NL) is conducted, building on two major sources of information: the documentation of the digitising project of the NL; and interviews with nine different stakeholders at three levels of NL's organisation during June to August 2007. Top managers are interviewed on strategy, middle managers and librarians are interviewed regarding organisational issues and ICT professionals are interviewed on technology issues. Findings – The findings indicate that the highest impact will be at the organisational level. This is mainly because inter-organisational and cross-organisational structures have to be established to address the problems of ontology engineering, and a development framework for ontology engineering in digital libraries must be examined. Originality/value – ICT professionals and library practitioners should be more mindful of organisational issues when planning and executing semantic web projects in digital libraries. In particular, practitioners should be aware that the ontology engineering process and the semantic meta-data production will affect the entire organisation. For public digital libraries this probably will also call for a more open policy towards user groups to properly manage the process of ontology engineering

    Supporting user-oriented analysis for multi-view domain-specific visual languages

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    This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Information and Software Technology. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2008 Elsevier B.V.The integration of usable and flexible analysis support in modelling environments is a key success factor in Model-Driven Development. In this paradigm, models are the core asset from which code is automatically generated, and thus ensuring model correctness is a fundamental quality control activity. For this purpose, a common approach is to transform the system models into formal semantic domains for verification. However, if the analysis results are not shown in a proper way to the end-user (e.g. in terms of the original language) they may become useless. In this paper we present a novel DSVL called BaVeL that facilitates the flexible annotation of verification results obtained in semantic domains to different formats, including the context of the original language. BaVeL is used in combination with a consistency framework, providing support for all steps in a verification process: acquisition of additional input data, transformation of the system models into semantic domains, verification, and flexible annotation of analysis results. The approach has been validated analytically by the cognitive dimensions framework, and empirically by its implementation and application to several DSVLs. Here we present a case study of a notation in the area of Digital Libraries, where the analysis is performed by transformations into Petri nets and a process algebra.Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and MODUWEB
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