An ecosystem for linked humanities data

The main promise of the digital humanities is the ability to perform scholar studies at a much broader scale, and in a much more reusable fashion. The key enabler for such studies is the availability of suciently well described data. For the eld of socio-economic history, data usually comes in a tabular form. Existing eorts to curate and publish datasets take a top-down approach and are focused on large collections. This paper presents QBer and the underlying structured data hub, which address the long tail of research data by catering for the needs of individual scholars. QBer allows researchers to publish their (small) datasets, link them to existing vocabularies and other datasets, and thereby contribute to a growing collection of interlinked datasets.We present QBer, and evaluate our rst results by showing how our system facilitates two use cases in socio-economic history

Infrastructures for digital research: new opportunities and challenges

No abstract available

Agriculturización e impactos ambientales en un área representativa de la ecorregión de las pampas, argentina.

Estudos prévios demonstram a existência do processo de agriculturização na ecorregião das Pampas, e o partido de Tandil constitui um exemplo desse processo. Esse trabalho compara as áreas ocupadas pelos distintos usos da terra e seus impactos ambientais na Bacia Superior do Arroio Langueyú e no Partido de Tandil, na qual ela está inserta, em três cortes temporais: 1988, 2002 e 2010. Aplicou-se uma classificação supervisada sobre imagens captadas pelo sensor TM com ajustes realizados no campo. Entre 1988 e 2002, os usos agrícolas têm aumentado significativamente na Bacia (159,5%), enquanto no Partido aumentaram 39,4%. Como conseqüência, os impactos ambientais sobre o meio natural, medidos com indicadores de sustentabilidade, foram mais intensos na Bacia do que no conjunto do Partido. Os resultados obtidos permitem colaborar no desenvolvimento de propostas de gestão ambiental tendentes à sustentabilidade agroecológica.Previous studies have shown the existence of the process of agriculturization in the Ecoregion of the Pampas, and Tandil County is a representative example of the process. This paper compares the areas occupied by different land uses and their environmental impacts in the Upper Basin of the Langueyú Creek and in Tandil County, in which the basin is located, in three points of time: 1988, 2002, and 2010. Supervised classification was applied on images captured by the sensor TM with adjustments to field. Between 1988 and 2010, agricultural uses in the Basin increased significantly (159.5%) while in the County, the agricultural areas increased 39.4%. Consequently, the environmental impacts on the environment, measured by sustainability indicators, were more intense in the Basin than in the County as a whole. The results allow collaborate in the development of environmental management proposals aimed at agroecological sustainability.Des études préalables démontrent l’existence d’un processus d’agriculturization dans l’écorégion des Pampas, et le département de Tandil constitue un exemple de ce processus. Ce travail compare des zones occupées par des différents usages de la terre et ses impacts environnementaux dans le Bassin Supérieur du Ruisseau Langueyú et dans le département de Tandil, où elle s’insère, dans trois périodes de temps: 1988, 2002 et 2010. On a appliqué une classification supervisée par des images captées avec le senseur TM et des ajustements réalisé sur le terrain. Entre 1988 et 2002, des usages agricoles ont augmenté considérablement dan le Bassin (159,5%), alors que l’augmentation dans tout le département a été de 39,4%. En conséquence, les impacts environnementaux sur le milieu naturel, mesurés avec des indicateurs de durabilité, ont été plus intenses dans le Bassin que dans la totalité du département. Les résultats obtenues permettent de collaborer dans le développement de propositions de gestion environnemental tendent à durabilité agroécologique.Estudios previos demuestran la existencia del proceso de agriculturización en la Ecorregión de las Pampas y el partido de Tandil constituye un ejemplo del proceso. Este trabajo, compara las áreas ocupadas por distintos usos de la tierra y sus impactos ambientales en la Cuenca Superior del Arroyo Langueyú y en el partido de Tandil, en el cual se haya inserta, en tres cortes temporales: 1988, 2002 y 2010. Se aplicó una clasificación supervisada sobre imágenes captadas por el sensor TM con ajustes realizados a campo. Entre 1988 y 2010, los usos agrícolas aumentaron significativamente en la Cuenca (159,5%), mientras que en el Partido 39,4%. En consecuencia, los impactos ambientales sobre el medio natural, medidos con indicadores de sustentabilidad, fueron más intensos en la Cuenca que en el Partido en su conjunto. Los resultados obtenidos permiten colaborar en el desarrollo de propuestas de gestión ambiental tendientes a la sustentabilidad agroecológica.Fil: Vazquez, Patricia Susana. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Humanas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Zulaica, Maria Laura. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Agronomia; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Linking early geospatial documents, one place at a time: annotation of geographic documents with Recogito

Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from the Classical Latin, Greek and Byzantine periods; on Mappae Mundi and narrative texts from the European Medieval period; on Late Medieval Portolans; and on maps and texts from the early Islamic and early Chinese traditions. Since the start of the project in September 2013, the team has harvested more than 120,000 toponyms, manually verifying almost 60,000 of them. Furthermore, the team held two public annotation workshops supported through the Open Humanities Awards 2014. In these workshops, a mixed audience of students and academics of different backgrounds used Recogito to add several thousand contributions on each workshop day. A number of benefits arise out of this work: on the one hand, the digital identification of places – and the names used for them – makes the documents' contents amenable to information retrieval technology, i.e. documents become more easily search- and discoverable to users than through conventional metadata-based search alone. On the other hand, the documents are opened up to new forms of re-use. For example, it becomes possible to “map” and compare the narrative of texts, and the contents of maps with modern day tools like Web maps and GIS; or to analyze and contrast documents’ geographic properties, toponymy and spatial relationships. Seen in a wider context, we argue that initiatives such as ours contribute to the growing ecosystem of the “Graph of Humanities Data” that is gathering pace in the Digital Humanities (linking data about people, places, events, canonical references, etc.), which has the potential to open up new avenues for computational and quantitative research in a variety of fields including History, Geography, Archaeology, Classics, Genealogy and Modern Languages

Top-down mandates and advocacy will help institutional repositories continue to enhance open access content and delivery

Institutional repositories (IRs) can sometimes be perceived as a low-impact method of open access delivery. Neil Stewart explains how the rapidly changing scholarly communications ecosystem stands to greatly benefit from the continued development of repositories. The future of IRs looks bright, and they and the services built upon them will continue to assist academics, both as producers and consumers of academic literature

Quantitative Perspectives on Fifty Years of the Journal of the History of Biology

Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward the United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century.Comment: 45 pages, 14 figures, 4 table

Hacking the social life of Big Data

This paper builds on the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing