A survey of comics research in computer science

Graphical novels such as comics and mangas are well known all over the world. The digital transition started to change the way people are reading comics, more and more on smartphones and tablets and less and less on paper. In the recent years, a wide variety of research about comics has been proposed and might change the way comics are created, distributed and read in future years. Early work focuses on low level document image analysis: indeed comic books are complex, they contains text, drawings, balloon, panels, onomatopoeia, etc. Different fields of computer science covered research about user interaction and content generation such as multimedia, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, etc. with different sets of values. We propose in this paper to review the previous research about comics in computer science, to state what have been done and to give some insights about the main outlooks

Illustrations Segmentation in Digitized Documents Using Local Correlation Features

In this paper we propose an approach for Document Layout Analysis based on local correlation features. We identify and extract illustrations in digitized documents by learning the discriminative patterns of textual and pictorial regions. The proposal has been demonstrated to be effective on historical datasets and to outperform the state-of-the-art in presence of challenging documents with a large variety of pictorial elements

Historical Document Digitization through Layout Analysis and Deep Content Classification

Document layout segmentation and recognition is an important task in the creation of digitized documents collections, especially when dealing with historical documents. This paper presents an hybrid approach to layout segmentation as well as a strategy to classify document regions, which is applied to the process of digitization of an historical encyclopedia. Our layout analysis method merges a classic top-down approach and a bottom-up classification process based on local geometrical features, while regions are classified by means of features extracted from a Convolutional Neural Network merged in a Random Forest classifier. Experiments are conducted on the first volume of the ``Enciclopedia Treccani'', a large dataset containing 999 manually annotated pages from the historical Italian encyclopedia

Quantitative Perspectives on Fifty Years of the Journal of the History of Biology

Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward the United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century.Comment: 45 pages, 14 figures, 4 table

Data modeling for museum collections

The relationship between cultural heritage, digital technologies and visual models involves an increasingly wide area of research, oriented towards the renewal of archives and museums for the preservation and promotion of culture. Recent research activities are the result of the progressive strengthening of digital technologies and the needs of a new generation of “digital” users, which requires museums to update their means of communication using Semantic Web languages and technologies shaped by a social conceptualization of a graph-based representation of information. The growth of several digitized heritage collections increases the necessity of proper methodologies to develop a structured system able to access to these collections and the large amount of data, metadata and paradata related to the digitized objects in a structured and organized way, defining a set of collection information models (CIM), that considers not only the digitizing process but also the data collection process, layered by an Upper Ontology level structure, based on CIDOC-CRM

Digitization of Bulgarian folk songs with music, notes and text

A digitization project for Bulgarian folk songs Information technologies for presentation of Bulgarian folk songs with music, notes and text in a digital library has been started last year, joining the efforts of various experts from three institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia University and New Bulgarian University. The research that is carried out under this project aims at the development of a technology and corresponding supporting software tools for the creation and usage of heterogeneous institutional digital libraries. The tools will satisfy the needs of the researchers for information technologies in the fields of ethnology, ethnomusicology and folkloristic. In the project frame a technological environment for digitization of notations is created, specially adapted for Bulgarian folk songs. Now a database with notes, lyrics and music is under development. An initial digitization and preservation of the Bulgarian cultural heritage will be carried out by means of digitization and insertion into the system of over 1000 songs that were recorded and written down during the 60s and 70s of XX century

Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Recommendations and Prototyping Project Reports

This document assembles and describes the outcomes of the four prototyping projects undertaken as part of the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA) research project (2013 – 2015). Each prototyping project team provided its own final report. These reports are assembled together and included in this document. Based on the totality of results reported, the WCSA project team also provide a set of overarching recommendations for HTRC implementation and adoption of research conducted by the Prototyping Project teams. The work described here was made possible through the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Grant Ref # 21300666).The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Grant Ref # 21300666)Ope