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

SPEEDy. A Practical Editor for Texts Annotated with Standoff Properties

Standoff properties can be used to record textual properties or annotations that may freely overlap and need not conform to a context-free grammar. In this way they avoid the ‘overlapping hierarchies’ problem inherent in markup languages like XML. Instead of embedding markup tags directly into the text stream, standoff properties are stored separately, and refer to positions in the text where each property starts and ends. However, this has the effect of tightly binding the properties to the text, and hence any change in the underlying text invalidates them. This limitation usually makes this method impractical in cases where the text is mutable, and is mostly used when the text is already fixed or proofread to a high standard. However, if it did become feasible to use standoff properties on mutable texts, this method could also be used in the process of text production, on dynamically evolving texts, such as emails, forum messages, personal notes and even drafts of academic papers. Digitised transcriptions of historical documents, whether produced manually or through OCR, could then be easily corrected at an earlier stage of typographic correctness. By overcoming the overlapping hierarchies problem this technique thus offers the prospect of significant productivity gains for producing digital editions, as well as a new mode of engagement for annotation. This paper describes the SPEEDy editor, a practical realisation of this technique. It outlines the editor’s foundational concepts, its standoff properties model, and its main interface features

The Digital Humanities and textual scholarship. Integration between digital resources in the humanities, challenges and possibilities

Este artículo explora el papel de la producción académica digital en el modelado, edición, consulta y publicación de textos de humanidades. Se hace especial referencia al campo emergente de las "Humanidades Digitales" y de los marcos y normas que han surgido al amparo de las mismas, incluida la Text Encoding Initiative (Iniciativa de Codificación de Textos) y de las iniciativas de dominio específico para garantizar una mayor integración entre investigación y edición digital.Artikulu honek produkzio akademiko digitalaren eginkizuna aztertzen du humanitateen alorreko testuen moldaketa, edizio, kontsulta eta argitalpenari dagokionez. Bereziki aipatzen dira goraka ari den "Humanitate Digitalak" alorra eta horien babesean sortu diren esparruak eta arauak, Text Encoding Initiative (Testuak Kodetzeko Ekimena) eta arlo bereziko ekimenak barne, zeinek ikerketaren eta edizio digitalaren arteko integrazio handiagoa bermatzeko helburua duten.Cet article explore le rôle de la production académique digitale dans la modélisation, l'édition, la consultation et la publication de textes en sciences humaines. Il fait notamment référence au domaine émergent de les "Sciences Humaines Digitalisées" ainsi qu'aux cadres et aux normes qui ont émergé sous son égide, dont la Text Encoding Initiative (Initiative de Codification de Textes) et des initiatives spécifiques aux domaines pour assurer une plus grande intégration dans la recherche impliquant l'édition digitale.This paper explores the role of digital scholarship in modelling, editing, querying and publishing humanities texts. It makes particular reference to the emerging field of the 'Digital Humanities' and the frameworks and standards that have emerged under it s umbrella, including the 'Text Encoding Initiative' and domain-specific initiatives to ensure greater integration between research involving digital edition

“Standing-off Trees and Graphs”: On the Affordance of Technologies for the Assertive Edition

Starting from the observation that the existing models of digital scholarly editions can be expressed in many technologies, this paper goes beyond the simple opposition of ‘XML’ and ‘graph’, It studies the implicit context of the technologies as applied to digital scholarly editions: embedded mark-up in XML/TEI trees, graph representa- tions in RDF, and stand-off annotation as realised in annotation tools widely used for information extraction. It describes the affordances of the encoding methods offered. It takes as a test case the “assertive edition” (Vogeler 2019), in which the text is considered in a double role: as palaeographical and linguistic phenomenon, and as a representation of information. It comes to the conclusion that the affordances of XML help to detect sequential and hierarchical properties of a text, while those of RDF best cover the representation of knowledge as semantic networks of statements. The relationship between them can be expressed by the metaphor of ‘layers’, for which stand-off annotation technologies seem to be best fitted. However, there is no standardised technical formalism to create stand-off annotations beyond graphical tools sharing interface elements. The contribution concludes with the call for the acceptance of the advantages of each technology, and for efforts to be made to discuss the best way to combine these technologies

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

The Evolution of the Text Encoding Initiative: From Research Project to Research Infrastructure

It is twenty-five years since the Text Encoding Initiative was first launched as a research project following an international conference funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities. This article describes some key stages in its subsequent evolution from research project into research infrastructure. The TEI's changing nature, we suggest, is partly a consequence of its close and highly responsive relation with an active user community, which may also explain both its longevity and its effectiveness as a part of the digital humanities research infrastructure