The WYRED Project: A Technological Platform for a Generative Research and Dialogue about Youth Perspectives and Interests in Digital Society

European Commision (EC). Funding H2020/CSA. Project Code: 72706

The WYRED project: A Technological Platform for a generative research and dialogue about youth perspectives and interests in digital society

García-Peñalvo, F. J. (2016). The WYRED Project: A Technological Platform for a Generative Research and Dialogue about Youth Perspectives and Interests in Digital Society. Journal of Information Technology Research, 9(4), vi-x

CuneiML: A Cuneiform Dataset for Machine Learning

The cuneiform writing system holds a vast reservoir of ancient literature, encompassing over 3000 years of history. Originating around the mid-fourth millennium BCE and enduring until the late first millennium BCE, cuneiform writing spans various genres such as administrative, legal, medical, and scientific documents, among others. This article introduces a curated dataset, CuneiML, featuring 38,947 high-resolution 2D photos of Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform tablets, accompanied by their cuneiform Unicode transcriptions, transliterations, lineart, and metadata. This dataset aims to support the development of machine learning tools for processing and analyzing Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform artifacts – e.g. for automatically classifying genre, provenance, or period from unannotated tablet images. Thus, CuneiML is designed with consistency of format as a primary concern. Specifically, CuneiML is a result of meticulously preprocessing, segmenting, filtering, and re-transliterating data that is available online in the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) collection

Scriptinformatics

Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa on the basis of their morphological similarity, and does not primarily examine genealogical relationships. Due to the scarcity of morphological diversity of scripts’ features, random coincidences of evolution-independent features are much more common in scripts than in biological species, thus phenetic modelling based solely on morphological features can lead to erroneous results. For this reason, phenetic modeling has been extended with evolutionary considerations, thereby allowing the modelling uncertainties observed in the script evolution to be addressed due to the large number of random coincidences (homoplasies) characterizing each script. The book describes an extended phenetic method developed to investigate the script evolution. This data-driven approach helps to reduce the impact of the uncertainties inherent in the phenetic model due to the large number of homoplasies that occur during the evolution of scripts. The elaborated phenetic and evolutionary analyses were applied to the Rovash scripts used on the Eurasian Steppe (Grassland), including the Turkic Rovash (Turkic Runic/runiform) and the Székely-Hungarian Rovash. The evaluation of the extended phenetic model of the scripts, the various phenograms, the script spectra and the group spectra helped to reconstruct the main ancestors and evolutionary stages of the investigated scripts

Jewish Studies in the Digital Age

The digitisation boom of the last two decades, and the rapid advancement of digital tools to analyse data in myriad ways, have opened up new avenues for humanities research. This volume discusses how the so-called digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies, explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems in the field

Jewish Studies in the Digital Age

The digitisation boom of the last two decades, and the rapid advancement of digital tools to analyse data in myriad ways, have opened up new avenues for humanities research. This volume discusses how the so-called digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies, explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems in the field

Accessible Font. A typeface for teaching strategies of autistic individuals based on latin script

The present research is based on studies in the areas of psychology, pedagogy and design. It was investigated the reading process and reading education strategies of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) with the purpose of developing a typographic system to assist pedagogues and to develop educational aids appropriate for child's reading problems. It was used interdisciplinary research methodology in this thesis with literature study, interviews with experts and a survey study. The survey was based on the opinions and experiences of special education teachers and the following findings were presented: • The student with autism may have difficulties learning to read. • They may mistake similar letters with each other, for example b and p, due to the similarity in letter shape. • Their reading pattern may be characterized by impaired or normal delayed reading pattern. According to the combined results of special education teachers’ common opinions, legibility studies and literature study, the prototype of a typeface for individuals with autism, learning disabilities was developed. The Accessible Typeface v.1, v.2, v.3, v.4, v.5 family has been developed with the intention to ease individuals ability to learn reading and minimize mistakes in reading. However, before being implemented, this font family should be tested to conclude whether it is beneficial or not to teach an individual who has an autism or learning disabilities in reading

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

The Nature of Writing – A Theory of Grapholinguistics [book cover]

Cover illustration: Purgatory: Canto VII – The Rule of the Mountain from A Typographic Dante (2008) by Barrie Tullett (also displayed in Barrie Tullett, Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology, London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014, p. 167). With kind permission by Barrie Tullett. The text is taken from Dante. The Divine Comedy, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, Harmondsworth­Middlesex: The Penguin Classics, 1949. On the lower part of the illustration, one can read the concluding verses of the Canto: But now the poet was going on before; “Forward!” said he; “look how the sun doth stand Meridian­high, while on the Western shore Night sets her foot upon Morocco’s strand.

Information Preserving Processing of Noisy Handwritten Document Images

Many pre-processing techniques that normalize artifacts and clean noise induce anomalies due to discretization of the document image. Important information that could be used at later stages may be lost. A proposed composite-model framework takes into account pre-printed information, user-added data, and digitization characteristics. Its benefits are demonstrated by experiments with statistically significant results. Separating pre-printed ruling lines from user-added handwriting shows how ruling lines impact people\u27s handwriting and how they can be exploited for identifying writers. Ruling line detection based on multi-line linear regression reduces the mean error of counting them from 0.10 to 0.03, 6.70 to 0.06, and 0.13 to 0.02, com- pared to an HMM-based approach on three standard test datasets, thereby reducing human correction time by 50%, 83%, and 72% on average. On 61 page images from 16 rule-form templates, the precision and recall of form cell recognition are increased by 2.7% and 3.7%, compared to a cross-matrix approach. Compensating for and exploiting ruling lines during feature extraction rather than pre-processing raises the writer identification accuracy from 61.2% to 67.7% on a 61-writer noisy Arabic dataset. Similarly, counteracting page-wise skew by subtracting it or transforming contours in a continuous coordinate system during feature extraction improves the writer identification accuracy. An implementation study of contour-hinge features reveals that utilizing the full probabilistic probability distribution function matrix improves the writer identification accuracy from 74.9% to 79.5%