Evaluating Digital Libraries: A Longitudinal and Multifaceted View

published or submitted for publicatio

A Large-Scale Comparison of Historical Text Normalization Systems

There is no consensus on the state-of-the-art approach to historical text normalization. Many techniques have been proposed, including rule-based methods, distance metrics, character-based statistical machine translation, and neural encoder--decoder models, but studies have used different datasets, different evaluation methods, and have come to different conclusions. This paper presents the largest study of historical text normalization done so far. We critically survey the existing literature and report experiments on eight languages, comparing systems spanning all categories of proposed normalization techniques, analysing the effect of training data quantity, and using different evaluation methods. The datasets and scripts are made publicly available.Comment: Accepted at NAACL 201

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

Postgraduate education

This paper reports on the Postgraduate Education research project which was conducted as part of the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA)series of demonstrator research projects. The project was born from the need to connect the IVRLA digital resource more closely with its target audience of students, researchers, and teachers. Three target groups were identified within the UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies: doctoral digital humanities students, general postgraduate students, and lecturers of undergraduate students. These three target groups are representative of academic institutions elsewhere and the materials developed for these groups will therefore be applicable to users throughout Ireland and internationally. The remit of the IVRLA demonstrator projects was to provide digital research resources and to show how digital repositories could not only provide access to archival research materials, but could also present material in new ways and suggest possibilities for further research. This project does so by making available seminars, sample exercises and a seminar blog, all of which demonstrate how the digital resources contained within the IVRLA may be applied by teachers and researchers. The paper outlines issues arising from the proliferation in and use of digital resources, explains the approach taken in the seminar materials, and discusses specific aspects such as metadata, copyright, and the design of digital research projects. Finally, it suggests ways in which this project could be extended by the development of teaching materials for specific groups and detailed modules in order to enhance the engagement of users with the IVRLA digital repositor

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

As the Cursor Blinks: Electronic Scholarship and Undergraduates in the Library

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