THESAURI OF HISTORICAL PERIODS – A PROPOSAL FOR STANDARDISATION

In this paper we present the development of a methodology for creating multilingual thesauri of period names based on CIDOC CRM, archeological theory and results from Computer Science and Knowledge Representation. Periods are deÞ ned by identity criteria (coming from the archaeological evidence) rather than by time and place. A formal model in the form of XML DTD has been developed as a proposal of standardization for period thesauri. An example thesaurus of Helladic periods is used as a proof of concept

Past, present and future of historical information science

Der Bericht evaluiert Entwicklungen und Einflüsse von Forschungen im Bereich der empirisch orientierten Geschichtswissenschaft und deren rechnergestützten Methoden. Vorgestellt werden ein Forschungsparadigma und eine Forschungsinfrastruktur für die zukünftige historisch orientierte Informationswissenschaft. Die entscheidenden Anstöße dafür kommen eher von Außen, also nicht aus der scientific community der Assoziation for History and Computing (AHC). Die Gründe hierfür liegen darin, dass die AHC niemals klare Aussagen darüber gemacht hat, welches ihre Adressaten sind: Historiker, die sich für EDV interessieren, oder historisch orientierte Informationswissenschaftler. Das Ergebnis war, dass sich keine dieser Fraktionen angesprochen fühlte und kein Diskurs mit der 'traditionellen' Geschichtswissenschaft und der Informationswissenschaft zustande kam. Der Autor skizziert ein Forschungsprogramm, das diese Ambiguitäten vermeidet und die Ansätze in einer Forschungsinfrastruktur integriert. (ICAÜbers)'This report evaluates the impact of two decades of research within the framework of history and computing, and sets out a research paradigm and research infrastructure for future historical information science. It is good to see that there has been done a lot of historical information research in the past, much of it has been done, however, outside the field of history and computing, and not within a community like the Association for History and Computing. The reason is that the AHC never made a clear statement about what audience to address: historians with an interest in computing, or historical information scientists. As a result, both parties have not been accommodated, and communications with both 'traditional' history and 'information science' have not been established. A proper research program, based on new developments in information science, is proposed, along with an unambiguous scientific research infrastructure.' (author's abstract

Detecting Events with Date and Place Information in Unstructured Text

Digital libraries of historical documents provide a wealth of information about past events, often in unstructured form. Once dates and place names are identified and disambiguated, using methods that can di#er by genre, we examine collocations to detect events. Collocations can be ranked by several measures, which vary in e#ectiveness according to type of events, but the log-likelihood measure (-2 log #) o#ers a reasonable balance between frequently and infrequently mentioned events and between larger and smaller spatial and temporal ranges. Significant date-place collocations can be displayed on timelines and maps as an interface to digital libraries. More detailed displays can highlight key names and phrases associated with a given event

Designing a Griotte for the Global Village: Increasing the Evidentiary Value of Oral Histories for Use in Digital Libraries

A griotte in West African culture is a female professional storyteller, responsible for preserving a tribe's history and genealogy by relaying its folklore in oral and musical recitations. Similarly, Griotte is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to foster collaboration between tradition bearers, subject experts, and computer specialists in an effort to build high quality digital oral history collections. To accomplish this objective, this project preserves the primary strength of oral history, namely its ability to disclose "our" intangible culture, and addresses its primary criticism, namely its dubious reliability due to reliance on human memory and integrity. For a theoretical foundation and a systematic model, William Moss's work on the evidentiary value of historical sources is employed. Using his work as a conceptual framework, along with Semantic Web technologies (e.g. Topic Maps and ontologies), a demonstrator system is developed to provide digital oral history tools to a "sample" of the target audience(s). This demonstrator system is evaluated via two methods: 1) a case study conducted to employ the system in the actual building of a digital oral history collection (this step also created sample data for the following assessment), and 2) a survey which involved a task-based evaluation of the demonstrator system. The results of the survey indicate that integrating oral histories with documentary evidence increases the evidentiary value of oral histories. Furthermore, the results imply that individuals are more likely to use oral histories in their work if their evidentiary value is increased. The contributions of this research – primarily in the area of organizing metadata on the World Wide Web – and considerations for future research are also provided

Metodología para la extracción de metadatos semánticos de textos en español utilizando procesamiento de lenguaje natural: subaplicación para la identificación de contextos espaciales y temporales en textos que describan interacciones entre actores

En este trabajo describe el proceso por el cual se ha efectuado la extracción de información e identificación de eventos en un corpus construido para estos fines y compuesto por textos históricos pertenecientes a la Iglesia Católica en el s. XIX en Colombia entre los años 1869 y 1880, con un tamaño de 224 documentos. Este material pertenece a los archivos de la Arquidiócesis de Medellín y ha sido recopilado y suministrado por el padre Iván Darío Toro, Decano de la facultad de Filosofía y Teología de la Fundación Universitaria Luis Amigó y docente de la Escuela de Administración y Negocios de la Universidad EAFIT. Los procesos de extracción de información incluyeron la identificación automática de personajes, lugares y fechas por medio de la aplicación de algoritmos y heurísticas empleadas en las bibliotecas digitales. La identificación de eventos se llevó a cabo utilizando la combinatoria de las etiquetas extraídas previamente del corpus