Crowds for Clouds: Recent Trends in Humanities Research Infrastructures

Humanities have convincingly argued that they need transnational research opportunities and through the digital transformation of their disciplines also have the means to proceed with it on an up to now unknown scale. The digital transformation of research and its resources means that many of the artifacts, documents, materials, etc. that interest humanities research can now be combined in new and innovative ways. Due to the digital transformations, (big) data and information have become central to the study of culture and society. Humanities research infrastructures manage, organise and distribute this kind of information and many more data objects as they becomes relevant for social and cultural research

The Digital Classicist 2013

This edited volume collects together peer-reviewed papers that initially emanated from presentations at Digital Classicist seminars and conference panels. This wide-ranging volume showcases exemplary applications of digital scholarship to the ancient world and critically examines the many challenges and opportunities afforded by such research. The chapters included here demonstrate innovative approaches that drive forward the research interests of both humanists and technologists while showing that rigorous scholarship is as central to digital research as it is to mainstream classical studies. As with the earlier Digital Classicist publications, our aim is not to give a broad overview of the field of digital classics; rather, we present here a snapshot of some of the varied research of our members in order to engage with and contribute to the development of scholarship both in the fields of classical antiquity and Digital Humanities more broadly

The Digital Classicist 2013

This edited volume collects together peer-reviewed papers that initially emanated from presentations at Digital Classicist seminars and conference panels. This wide-ranging volume showcases exemplary applications of digital scholarship to the ancient world and critically examines the many challenges and opportunities afforded by such research. The chapters included here demonstrate innovative approaches that drive forward the research interests of both humanists and technologists while showing that rigorous scholarship is as central to digital research as it is to mainstream classical studies. As with the earlier Digital Classicist publications, our aim is not to give a broad overview of the field of digital classics; rather, we present here a snapshot of some of the varied research of our members in order to engage with and contribute to the development of scholarship both in the fields of classical antiquity and Digital Humanities more broadly

Crowdsourcing the digital transformation of heritage

Crowdsourcing, or outsourcing to the crowd, serves to redistribute the cost of developing new products and services beyond the firm to a crowd who provides finances, information, labor, or ideas for a marginal cost. Digital networked technologies have increased the pool of providers and speed o

Brokers of Public Trust

A fast-growing legal system and economy in medieval and early modern Rome saw a rapid increase in the need for written documents. Brokers of Public Trust examines the emergence of the modern notarial profession—free market scribes responsible for producing original legal documents and their copies.Notarial acts often go unnoticed, but they are essential to understanding the history of writing practices and attitudes toward official documentation. Based on new archival research, Brokers of Public Trust focuses on the government officials, notaries, and consumers who regulated, wrote, and purchased notarial documents in Rome between the 14th and 18th centuries. Historian Laurie Nussdorfer chronicles the training of professional notaries and the construction of public archives, explaining why notarial documents exist, who made them, and how they came to be regarded as authoritative evidence. In doing so, Nussdorfer describes a profession of crucial importance to the people and government of the time, as well as to scholars who turn to notarial documents as invaluable and irreplaceable historical sources. This magisterial new work brings fresh insight into the essential functions of early modern Roman society and the development of the modern state

Dialogic education, historical thinking and epistemic beliefs: a design-based research study of teaching in Taiwanese classrooms

The study reported in this dissertation explored: (1) teachers’ use of dialogue to facilitate students’ historical thinking and (2) the trajectory of historical personal epistemology through a design-based approach. Empirical evidence emerging in previous decades has acknowledged that good quality classroom dialogue could have a positive impact on students’ learning. Through dialogic teaching, it has been argued that teachers could probe and promote students’ higher thinking skills. However, how dialogue is being used in history classes as well as the cultural context of dialogic education in East Asia was a salient gap in current research. The first research aim was to explore both teachers’ and students’ epistemic beliefs regarding the domain of history, which has been largely neglected in this field of study. The aim of this research was also to propose a new perspective on dialogic education that might not only bridge the dichotomy of the monologic and dialogic forms of teaching, but also address the pedagogical dilemma in history education raised by the latest Taiwanese national curriculum reform. Finally, another major aim of the research was to design a teacher professional development programme to change teachers’ epistemic beliefs and their teaching practice towards dialogic history education for promoting historical thinking. Adopting the notion of design-based research, a teaching professional programme was designed and administered throughout the one-academic year to 7 high school teachers. Three students of each participating teacher were chosen for semi-structured interviews to explore their personal epistemology, which were later analysed with an innovative discourse analysis method: Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA). Data concerning classroom dialogue was collected from monthly class observations and then analysed with a reconceptualised coding framework adapted from the Teacher’s Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA, Hennessy, et al., 2021) and an observational instrument for historical thinking (Gestsdóttir, et al., 2018). In regard to personal epistemology, the findings reported a mixture of results with only a few students seeing a significant change in their epistemic beliefs after the programme. However, a pattern-based model for analysing historical epistemic beliefs reported from this study, has been generated resulting in four major patterns of beliefs being identified. In terms of classroom dialogue, the results found a positive increase in teachers’ use of dialogue. A hybrid form of dialogue informed by current dialogic theories synthesised with Confucianism and Taoism allowed dialogue to transgress away from the dichotomy of structural forms of monologue and dialogue was also put forward and characterised from the analysis. The contributions of this present study are discussed in terms of theoretical, methodological and practical uses

Models and frameworks for studying social behaviors

Studies on social systems and human behavior are typically considered domain of humanities and psychology. However, it appears that recently these issues have attracted a strong interest also from the scienti�c community belonging to the hard sciences {in particular from physics, computer science and mathematics. The network theory o�ers powerful tools to study social systems and human behavior. In particular, complex networks have gained a lot of prestige as general framework for representing and analyze real systems. From an historical perspective, complex networks are rooted in graph theory {which in turn is dated back to 1736, when Leonhard Euler wrote the paper on the seven bridges of K�onigsberg. After Euler's work, di�erent mathematicians (e.g. Cayley) focused their research on graphs {opening the possibility of applying their results to deal with theoretical and real problems. As a result, complex networks emerged as multidisciplinary approach for studying complex systems. From a computational perspective, models based on complex networks allows to extract information on complex systems composed by a great number of interacting elements. A variety of systems can be modelled as a complex network (e.g. social networks, the World Wide Web, internet, biological systems, and ecological systems). To summarize, any such system should give the possibility of viewing its elements as simple (at some degree of abstraction), while assuming the existence of nonlinear interactions, the absence of a central control, and emergent behavior. Nowadays, scientists belonging to di�erent communities use complex networks as a framework for dealing with their preferred research issues, from a theoretical and/or pratical perspective. This work is aimed at illustrating some models, based on complex networks, deemed useful to represent social behaviors like competitive dynamics, groups formation, and emergence of linguistics phenomena

Models and frameworks for studying social behaviors

Studies on social systems and human behavior are typically considered domain of humanities and psychology. However, it appears that recently these issues have attracted a strong interest also from the scienti�c community belonging to the hard sciences {in particular from physics, computer science and mathematics. The network theory o�ers powerful tools to study social systems and human behavior. In particular, complex networks have gained a lot of prestige as general framework for representing and analyze real systems. From an historical perspective, complex networks are rooted in graph theory {which in turn is dated back to 1736, when Leonhard Euler wrote the paper on the seven bridges of K�onigsberg. After Euler's work, di�erent mathematicians (e.g. Cayley) focused their research on graphs {opening the possibility of applying their results to deal with theoretical and real problems. As a result, complex networks emerged as multidisciplinary approach for studying complex systems. From a computational perspective, models based on complex networks allows to extract information on complex systems composed by a great number of interacting elements. A variety of systems can be modelled as a complex network (e.g. social networks, the World Wide Web, internet, biological systems, and ecological systems). To summarize, any such system should give the possibility of viewing its elements as simple (at some degree of abstraction), while assuming the existence of nonlinear interactions, the absence of a central control, and emergent behavior. Nowadays, scientists belonging to di�erent communities use complex networks as a framework for dealing with their preferred research issues, from a theoretical and/or pratical perspective. This work is aimed at illustrating some models, based on complex networks, deemed useful to represent social behaviors like competitive dynamics, groups formation, and emergence of linguistics phenomena

Recent advances in petri nets and concurrency

CEUR Workshop Proceeding