Perks and Pitfalls of City Directories as a Micro-Geographic Data Source

Historical city directories are rich sources of micro-geographic data. They provide information on the location of households and firms and their occupations and industries, respectively. We develop a generic algorithmic work flow that converts scans of them into geo- and status-referenced household-level data sets. Applying the work flow to our case study, the Berlin 1880 directory, adds idiosyncratic challenges that should make automation less attractive. Yet, employing an administrative benchmark data set on household counts, incomes, and income distributions across more than 200 census tracts, we show that semi-automatic referencing yields results very similar to those from labour-intensive manual referencing. Finally, we discuss potential applications in economic history and beyond

Handwritten Text Recognition for Historical Documents through Deep Learning : Towards More Efficient Corpus Development Process

This paper discusses the differences and suitable uses of three handwritten text recognition (HTR) programs developed in Europe: Transkribus, eScriptorium/Kraken, and OCR4all. It commences with an overview of deep learning, HTR, and OCR (optical character recognition) before progressing to review the three programs of interest from the perspectives of history, developer, accuracy rate, layout recognition (including writing orientation), user experience, and cost. All three programs use deep-learning machine-learning technologies. They have also all been proven to reach accuracy rates of close to one hundred percent when appropriately trained depending on the quality of the images of handwritten text, training data, and validation data. Second, the user experience is very important; Transkribus has the simplest installation procedure and graphical user interface, while OCR4all and eScriptorium require users to have expert computer skills. Third, in terms of cost, users of Transkribus are required to purchase credits to access the system and use HTR models to recognize a new text, while eScriptorium and OCR4all do not rely on credit purchase. Finally, we conclude this paper with an overview of suitable cases for each program

DH Benelux Journal 2. Digital Humanities in Society

The second volume of the DH Benelux Journal. This volume includes four full-length, peer-reviewed articles that are based on accepted contributions to the 2019 DH Benelux conference in Liège (Belgium) on Digital Humanities in Society. Contents: 1. Editors' Preface (Wout Dillen, Marijn Koolen, Marieke van Erp); 2. Introduction: Digital Humanities in Society (Ingrid Mayeur and Claartje Rasterhoff); 3. A Corpus-Based Approach to Michelangelo’s Epistolary Language (GianlucaValenti); 4. The Datafication of Early Modern Ordinances (C. Annemieke Romein, Sara Veldhoen, and Michel de Gruijter); 5. A-poetic Technology. #GraphPoem and the Social Function of Computational Performance (Chris Tanasescu, Diana Inkpen, Vaibhav Kesarwani, and Prasadith Kirinde Gamaarachchige); 6. Decomplexifying the network pipeline: a tool for RDF/Wikidata to network analysis (Julie M. Birkholz and Albert Meroo-Peuel

Bilddaten in den Digitalen Geisteswissenschaften

Digitale Bilder sind in Zeiten des Internets, der Mobiltelefonie und der sozialen Medien fest in der Lebenswelt zahlreicher Menschen verankert. Auch in den unterschiedlichen Geisteswissenschaften ist die Nutzung von digitalen Bildern als Forschungsmaterial an vielen Stellen zum Alltag geworden. In Bilddaten in den Digitalen Geisteswissenschaften wird mit einer Auswahl von Anwendungsfällen und Lösungsansätzen aus Informatik und Informationswissenschaft, Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte, Philologie und Medienwissenschaft eine Bandbreite der je nach Disziplin und Gegenstand variierenden Anforderungen dargestellt, wobei auch zunächst eher technisch anmutende Aspekte betrachtet werden. In drei Abschnitten werden digitale Verfahren und ihre Anwendungen in einzelnen Teilgebieten der Geisteswissenschaften behandelt. Obwohl sich die einzelnen Beiträge in unterschiedlichem Maße auf informatische und geisteswissenschaftliche Interessen, Ansätze, Verfahren und Details konzentrieren, verweisen sie immer auch auf den jeweils anderen Aspekt, sodass sich die Fächer in diesen Darstellungen einander annähern. Bilder werden dabei nicht nur als Gegenstände von Wissen betrachtet, sondern sie werden in ihrer Relevanz für die Genese, die Repräsentation und die Dissemination von Wissen untersucht

“The Bard meets the Doctor” – Computergestützte Identifikation intertextueller Shakespearebezüge in der Science Fiction-Serie Dr. Who.

A single abstract from the DHd-2019 Book of Abstracts.Sofern eine editorische Arbeit an dieser Publikation stattgefunden hat, dann bestand diese aus der Eliminierung von Bindestrichen in Überschriften, die aufgrund fehlerhafter Silbentrennung entstanden sind, der Vereinheitlichung von Namen der Autor*innen in das Schema "Nachname, Vorname" und/oder der Trennung von Überschrift und Unterüberschrift durch die Setzung eines Punktes, sofern notwendig

City of Rockland Maine Ordinances

Ordinances cover: General Ordinances of the City, the Council-Manager Charter of the City of Rockland, and Such Other Rules and Regulations as Specified by the City Counci

History/Histoire e Digital Humanities

This volume reconstructs the birth and evolution of the Italian literary history in France and England during the 19th century. In the French context, a comparative reading of the works by Pierre-Louis Ginguené and Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi confirms that the subject had already reached its maturity at the beginning of the century. On the other hand, in England, the path leading from Ugo Foscolo to John Addington Symonds passes through multiple genres and sources, including collections of biographies, anthologies of translations, travel books, histories of individual literary genres, histories from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. At the end of this path, a software pipeline is tested and developed with the aim of expanding the analysis through the computational tools of the Digital Humanities