Software for the collaborative editing of the Greek new testament

This project was responsible for developing the Virtual Manuscript Room Collaborative Research Environment (VMR CRE), which offers a facility for the critical editing workflow from raw data collection, through processing, to publication, within an open and online collaborative framework for the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) and their global partners while editing the Editio Critica Maior (ECM)-- the paramount critical edition of the Greek New Testament which analyses over 5600 Greek witnesses and includes a comprehensive apparatus of chosen manuscripts, weighted by quotations and early translations. Additionally, this project produced the first digital edition of the ECM. This case study, transitioning the workflow at the INTF to an online collaborative research environment, seeks to convey successful methods and lessons learned through describing a professional software engineer’s foray into the world of academic digital humanities. It compares development roles and practices in the software industry with the academic environment and offers insights to how this software engineer found a software team therein, suggests how a fledgling online community can successfully achieve critical mass, provides an outsider’s perspective on what a digital critical scholarly edition might be, and hopes to offer useful software, datasets, and a thriving online community for manuscript researchers

Pilot Inventory of Community Partnerships

Partnerships with community organizations create increased opportunities for universities to promote community-engaged research, teaching, and service. Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) mission states that the university is committed to sustainable, university-community partnerships that enhance the educational, economic, and cultural vitality of the communities VCU serves. In recognition of its efforts, VCU is among a small number of institutions to be designated as very high research activity and community-engaged by the Carnegie Foundation. It is also a recipient of a NIH-funded Center for Translational and Sciences Award, which promotes community-engaged research. In pursuit of the university’s goal to become a national model for community engagement and regional impact, the Division of Community Engagement (DCE) and Office of Planning and Decision Support (OPDS) – with representatives from across the university - sought to identify current community-university partnerships during 2012-13. The team developed a Pilot Inventory of Community Partnerships (PICP) to test a university-wide data collection process. The findings are presented along with recommendations for improving the long-term ability to count and describe the university’s partnerships. (This effort parallels the VCU Health System’s plans for a similar pilot to identify and document outreach efforts.) The resulting baseline information presented here helps to achieve the University Level Initiative 4 strategy, Define and collate community partnerships and determine measures to leverage assets. The information gathered will provide a resource to our VCU and Health System communities to collaborate, build on existing efforts, and identify gaps

Digitization and the Changing Roles of Libraries in Support of Humanities Research: The Case of the Harrison Forman Collection

Objective – this article examines the role of libraries in expanding access to primary sources through digitization and in providing support for humanities research. Research method – the author analyzes the literature on information behavior of humanist scholars in light of the increased use of digitized primary sources. Next, using the example of the digitized photographs and diaries from the Harrison Forman Collection, the author explores the emerging role of libraries in creating a new source of scholarly materials and supporting research in humanities. Results and conclusion – digitization increasingly matters not only for practical reasons of ease of use and access but also by offering a new potential for humanistic research. Digitization projects provide enhanced intellectual control of primary resources, offer an opportunity to uncover hidden collections, and bring together scattered materials. Digital collections in their present design demonstrate some limitations in supporting scholars’ browsing behavior and in providing contextual information. Creating digital collections in support of humanities research requires the transformation of library roles and collaboration with digital humanities scholars

KNOWLEDGE PROCESS MANAGEMENT AND BIM PLATFORM-BASED SOLUTION FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE GERMAN OPERA HOUSE BUILDING

This article addresses the challenge of reconstructing demolished historical buildings in digital humanities, focusing on the German Opera House Building by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler and emphasizing effective information acquisition and management. Despite the benefits of digitization, knowledge management remains a persistent obstacle. The proposed multidisciplinary approach utilizes Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Common Data Environment (CDE) to seamlessly integrate data from diverse sources, supporting collaboration and ensuring result consistency. This contextualized BIM-based system transforms the reconstruction of non-existent historical buildings, overcoming challenges such as non-uniqueness of historical documents and fragmented knowledge. Results highlight the methodology's effectiveness in digitally reconstructing historical buildings and improving knowledge sharing for the examined property

Annotation Search: the FAST Way

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοThis paper discusses how annotations can be exploited to develop information access and retrieval algorithms that take them into account. The paper proposes a general framework for developing such algorithms that specifically deals with the problem of accessing and retrieving topical information from annotations and annotated documents

Are We Engaged? A College-level Inventory of Community Engagement

In this study, a team of six faculty members from Weber State University’s Telitha E. Lindquist College of Arts & Humanities tested and applied the Engaged College Rubric as part of a pilot program. Based on this application of the rubric, the committee found that the college tended toward the “Emerging” (i.e., first stage) classification for most items, thus indicating a need to continue developing programs and practices that center on community engagement (CE) within the college. The primary finding from this activity was that fragmentation exists surrounding CE in the college, within its constituent departments, and at the university level. This fragmentation limits the effectiveness of community-engaged learning, teaching, and scholarship. The committee’s findings, and interpretations of the rubric elements, are discussed, as are recommendations for future use of the Engaged College Rubric

Texts and Documents: New Challenges for TEI Interchange and Lessons from the Shelley-Godwin Archive

The introduction in 2011 of additional “document-focused” (as opposed to “text-focused”) elements represents a significant additional commitment to modeling two distinct ontologies for textual data within the standard governed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. A brief review of projects using the new elements suggests that scholars generally treat the “document-focused” and “text-focused” models as distinct and even severable—the tools of separate interpretive communities within literary studies. This paper will describe challenges encountered by members of the development and editorial teams of the Shelley-Godwin Archive (S-GA) in attempting to produce TEI-encoded data (as well as an accompanying reading environment) that supports both document-focused and text-focused approaches through automated conversion. Based on the experience of the S-GA teams, the increase in expressiveness achieved through the addition of document-focused elements to the TEI standard also raises the stakes for “interchange” between and among data modeled according to these parallel approaches

Literary texts in an electronic age: Scholarly implications and library services [papers presented at the 1994 Clinic on Library applications of Data Processing, April 10-12, 1994]

Authors and readers in an age of electronic texts / Jay David Bolter -- Electronic texts in the humanities : a coming of age / Susan Hockey -- The Text Encoding Initiative : electronic text markup for research / C.M. Sperberg-McQueen -- Electronic texts and multimedia in the academic library : a view from the front line / Anita K. Lowry -- Humanizing information technology : cultural evolution and the institutionalization of electronic text processing / Mark Tyler Day -- Cohabiting with copyright on the nets / Mary Brandt Jensen -- The role of the scholarly publisher in an electronic environment / Lorrie LeJeune -- The feasibility of wide-area textual analysis systems in libraries : a practical analysis / John Price-Wilkin -- The scholar and his library in the computer age / James W. Marchand -- The challenges of electronic texts in the library : bibliographic control and access / Rebecca S. Guenther -- Durkheim???s imperative : the role of humanities faculty in the information technologies revolution / Robert Alun Jones -- The materiality of the book : another turn of the screw / Terry Belanger.published or submitted for publicatio

FRBR, Facets, and Moving Images: A Literature Review

Annotated bibliography on resources related to FBRB, facets and moving images

CritSpace: An Interactive Visual Interface to Digital Collections of Cultural Heritage Material

Cultural heritage digital libraries have become an important and prominent tool within humanities scholarship, offering increased expressive power for representing complex networks of relationships and the ability to use computational tools and interactive environments to help researchers ask new questions. While digital libraries offer tremendous advantages for publishing the final products of scholarship, in the words of Bradley and Vetch, "as they currently are delivered, do not intersect terribly meaningfully with the process of scholarly research." In this work I investigate how scholars use visually complex source documents-materials where access to a visual representation of the original object is required and present a prototype system, CritSpace designed to facilitate scholarly engagement with digital resources. Rather than creating a one-size-fits-all application, CritSpace is a web-based framework for building interactive visual interfaces that support scholarly use of digital libraries. The theory and design behind CritSpace is based on a formative study of the work practices of scholars from different disciplines and prior research in field of spatial hypertext. To illustrate a concrete example of using CritSpace and to evaluate its usefulness, I conclude with a case study that walks through the process of deploying CritSpace to support work in a specific scholarly domain, textual criticism and presents a summative usability study of the tool. The results of this study show that CritSpace is effective at supporting textual criticism. More significantly, they also indicate that the innovations added in CritSpace promote the intensive analysis of visual material in addition to knowledge organization and structuring