Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers in-creasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are un-derexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data prac-tices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic col-lections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract seman-tic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, en-hancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each other’s work

Who is Patrick? – Answers from the Saint Patrick's Confessio HyperStack. Supporting Digital Humanities, Copenhagen 17 - 18 November 2011, Conference Proceedings

Not everyone realizes that there are two Latin works, still surviving, that can definitely be attributed to Saint Patrick’s own authorship. On 14th September 2011 the Royal Irish Academy published his writings in a freely accessible form on line, both in the original Latin and in a variety of modern languages (including Irish). Designed to be of interest to the general public as well as to academic researchers, the Saint Patrick’s Confessio Hypertext Stack includes such features as digital images of the medieval manuscripts involved, a specially commissioned historical reconstruction that evocatively describes life in pre-Viking Ireland, articles, audio presentations, and some ten thousand internal and external digital links that make it truly a resource to be explored

E-Preservation of Old and Rare Books: A Structured Approach for Creating a Digital Collection

Antique books, old and rare documents are fragile and vulnerable to different hazards. Preserving them for an extended period is a real challenge. From ancient times people started expressing their knowledge by writing and keeping records and subsequently started collecting and storing these at later ages as antique materials.  These can be seen in different museums, libraries, archives, individual households, and other places all over the world. Preserving and conserving these antique, old and rare books, documents etc. in good condition is a challenge for librarians, conservators, preservation administrators or persons associated with storing these. In this paper, details of the digital preservation of such a collection available in the Directorate of Historical and Antiquarian Studies (DHAS), Guwahati, Assam, India, are discussed. DHAS is a Government of Assam wing and is mainly mandated to collect, preserve and research historical and antiquarian resources. The collection of DHAS is one of the oldest collections and has been serving as a study and research centre in Assam since 1928. A special drive has been taken for the digital preservation of an identified part of the collection, with grant support from the National Archive of India.  This paper discusses the entire project process starting from the project proposal formulation to the structuring of the digital collection. The paper sequentially discusses the different steps of the entire work of digitization of a collection of 241 old and rare books from the main collection of DHAS

Understanding Optical Music Recognition

For over 50 years, researchers have been trying to teach computers to read music notation, referred to as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). However, this field is still difficult to access for new researchers, especially those without a significant musical background: Few introductory materials are available, and, furthermore, the field has struggled with defining itself and building a shared terminology. In this work, we address these shortcomings by (1) providing a robust definition of OMR and its relationship to related fields, (2) analyzing how OMR inverts the music encoding process to recover the musical notation and the musical semantics from documents, and (3) proposing a taxonomy of OMR, with most notably a novel taxonomy of applications. Additionally, we discuss how deep learning affects modern OMR research, as opposed to the traditional pipeline. Based on this work, the reader should be able to attain a basic understanding of OMR: its objectives, its inherent structure, its relationship to other fields, the state of the art, and the research opportunities it affords

National Institute of Japanese Literature 2023

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Cyberinfrastructure for Classical Philology

No humanists have moved more aggressively in the digital world than students of the Greco-Roman world but the first generation of digital classics has seen relatively superficial methods to address the problems of print culture. We are now beginning to see new intellectual practices for which new terms, eWissenschaft and eClassics, and a new cyberinfrastructure are emerging

Digital library search preferences amongst historians and genealogists: British History Online user survey

This paper presents the results of a study of 1,439 users of British History Online (BHO). BHO is a digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a principal focus on the period between 1300 and 1800. The collection currently contains 1,250 volumes, and 120,000 web pages of material. During a website rebuild in 2014, the project team asked its registered users about their preferences for searching and browsing the content in the collection. Respondents were asked about their current search and browsing behaviour, as well as their receptiveness to new navigation options, including fuzzy searching, proximity searching, limiting search to a subset of the collection, searching by publication metadata, and searching entities within the texts such as person names, place names, or footnotes. The study provides insight into the unique and often converging needs of the site’s academic and genealogical users, noting that the former tended to respond in favour of options that gave them greater control over the search process, whereas the latter generally opted for options to improve the efficacy of targeted keyword searching. Results and recommendations are offered for managers of similar digitally-driven repositories interested in understanding and improving user experience.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio