Open Philology at the University of Leipzig

The Open Philology Project at the University of Leipzig aspires to re-assert the value of philology in its broadest sense. Philology signifies the widest possible use of the linguistic record to enable a deep understanding of the complete lived experience of humanity. Pragmatically, we focus on Greek and Latin because (1) substantial collections and services are already available within these languages, (2) substantial user communities exist (c. 35,000 unique users a month at the Perseus Digital Library), and (3) a European-based project is better positioned to process extensive cultural heritage materials in these languages rather than in Chinese or Sanskrit. The Open Philology Project has been designed with the hope that it can contribute to any historical language that survives within the human record. It includes three tasks: (1) the creation of an open, extensible, repurposable collection of machine-readable linguistic sources; (2) the development of dynamic textbooks that use annotated corpora to customize the vocabulary and grammar of texts that learners want to read, and at the same time engage students in collaboratively producing new annotated data; (3) the establishment of new workflows for, and forms of, publication, from individual annotations with argumentation to traditional publications with integrated machine-actionable data

Digital Humanities in the Classroom: Bridging the Gap between Teaching and Research

The Department of Classics at Tufts University seeks level II funding to design and test an integrated platform on which students will collaboratively transcribe, edit, and translate Latin and Greek texts, creating vetted open source digital editions. This project, while giving students the opportunity to work with original untranslated documents, also contributes to the efforts of the scholarly community worldwide to meet the challenge of publishing large numbers of primary source documents online while preserving high editorial standards. The students' work will be vetted by experts, encoded in XML TEI following best practices in the Digital Humanities, and published online in the Tufts Digital Library and the Perseus Digital Library, which receives more than 700,000 visits a month. The integrated platform will be made available as open-source software and can be used as a model for editing and translating any source documents in any language and any Humanities field

The Linked Fragment: TEI and the encoding of text reuses of lost authors

This paper presents a joint project of the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies to produce a new open series of Greek and Latin fragmentary authors. Such authors are lost and their works are preserved only thanks to quotations and text reuses in later texts. The project is undertaking two tasks: (1) the digitization of paper editions of fragmentary works with links to the source texts from which the fragments have been extracted; (2) the production of born-digital editions of fragmentary works. The ultimate goals are the creation of open, linked, machine-actionable texts for the study and advancement of the field of Classical textual fragmentary heritage and the development of a collaborative environment for crowdsourced annotations. These goals are being achieved by implementing the Perseids Platform and by encoding the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, one of the most important and comprehensive collections of fragmentary authors

Digital Papyrology II

The ongoing digitisation of the literary papyri (and related technical texts like the medical papyri) is leading to new thoughts on the concept and shape of the "digital critical edition" of ancient documents. First of all, there is the need of representing any textual and paratextual feature as much as possible, and of encoding them in a semantic markup that is very different from a traditional critical edition, based on the mere display of information. Moreover, several new tools allow us to reconsider not only the linguistic dimension of the ancient texts (from exploiting the potentialities of linguistic annotation to a full consideration of language variation as a key to socio-cultural analysis), but also the very concept of philological variation (replacing the mono-authorial view of an reconstructed archetype with a dynamic multitextual model closer to the fluid aspect of the textual transmission). The contributors, experts in the application of digital strategies to the papyrological research, face these issues from their own viewpoints, not without glimpses on parallel fields like Egyptology and Near Eastern studies. The result is a new, original and cross-disciplinary overview of a key issue in the digital humanities

Collaborative Research Practices and Shared Infrastructures for Humanities Computing

The volume collect the proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities (Aiucd 2013), which took place at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, 11-12 December 2013. The general theme of Aiucd 2013 was “Collaborative Research Practices and Shared Infrastructures for Humanities Computing” so we particularly welcomed submissions on interdisciplinary work and new developments in the field, encouraging proposals relating to the theme of the conference, or more specifically: interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, legal and economic issues, tools and collaborative methodologies, measurement and impact of collaborative methodologies, sharing and collaboration methods and approaches, cultural institutions and collaborative facilities, infrastructures and digital libraries as collaborative environments, data resources and technologies sharing

SUMMARY OF PROCEEDINGS OF THE “LINKING THE MIDDLE AGES” WORKSHOP (MAY 11-12, 2015) at the University of Texas at Austin

Summary of Proceedings of Workshop on the possible application(s) of Linked Open Data to Medieval Studies.In May 2015 the CLIR/Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows in Medieval Data Curation convened a two-day workshop on the sharing and publishing of linked open data (LOD). Funded by a CLIR/Mellon microgrant, the workshop brought together librarians, technologists, and scholars to exchange ideas on the challenges posed to medievalists in sharing data on digital platforms. More than thirty experts took part in the workshop, which was held at The University of Texas at Austin on May 11-12, 2015. Participants presented their work in linked open data operational sites and took part in discussions about the obstacles and opportunities of LOD in three areas: research, teaching, and publication. This paper documents the possibilities and problems of applying LOD in medieval studies. It focuses specifically on its application to the field’s data, which requires medievalists to work together with librarians and technologists, and considers a technical infrastructure that can maintain and proliferate this type of collaborative work.Council on Library and Information Resources, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at AustinUT Librarie

Collaborative Research Practices and Shared Infrastructures for Humanities Computing

The volume collect the proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities (Aiucd 2013), which took place at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, 11-12 December 2013. The general theme of Aiucd 2013 was “Collaborative Research Practices and Shared Infrastructures for Humanities Computing” so we particularly welcomed submissions on interdisciplinary work and new developments in the field, encouraging proposals relating to the theme of the conference, or more specifically: interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, legal and economic issues, tools and collaborative methodologies, measurement and impact of collaborative methodologies, sharing and collaboration methods and approaches, cultural institutions and collaborative facilities, infrastructures and digital libraries as collaborative environments, data resources and technologies sharing

Digital Classical Philology

The buzzwords “Information Society” and “Age of Access” suggest that information is now universally accessible without any form of hindrance. Indeed, the German constitution calls for all citizens to have open access to information. Yet in reality, there are multifarious hurdles to information access – whether physical, economic, intellectual, linguistic, political, or technical. Thus, while new methods and practices for making information accessible arise on a daily basis, we are nevertheless confronted by limitations to information access in various domains. This new book series assembles academics and professionals in various fields in order to illuminate the various dimensions of information's inaccessability. While the series discusses principles and techniques for transcending the hurdles to information access, it also addresses necessary boundaries to accessability.This book describes the state of the art of digital philology with a focus on ancient Greek and Latin. It addresses problems such as accessibility of information about Greek and Latin sources, data entry, collection and analysis of Classical texts and describes the fundamental role of libraries in building digital catalogs and developing machine-readable citation systems

Investigating Linked Data Usability for Ancient World Research

Linked Data technologies are used to describe and connect entities, based on features they have in common. Rich semantic descriptions, disambiguation capabilities, and interoperability allow investigation of new research questions and reveal previously undiscovered relationships. However, previous studies have shown that uptake of Linked Data among Humanities researchers has, thus far, been low, partly due to usability issues with the resulting tools and resources. I therefore set out to investigate how their usability might be improved, and how Linked Data technologies might most effectively be integrated with existing research methods. My study focused on the Ancient World, where Linked Data implementation seems to be higher than in other Humanities disciplines, and involved a survey and interviews to elicit user and producer needs from researchers in this subject area. I start this thesis by introducing and contextualising my research topic in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, I consult existing literature and datasets to discuss Linked Humanities Data implementation, its advantages, and current barriers. Chapter 3 provides an outline of my survey and interview methodologies, while Chapter 4 presents initial survey analysis and identifies themes for discussion in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 5 focuses on five research methods already embedded in the practices of Ancient World researchers, where Linked Data could effectively be integrated: Discovering, Gathering, Data Recognition, Annotating, and Visualization. In Chapter 6, I explore the user experience more broadly, including aspects such as interface design, reliability, and data quality. Chapter 7 then discusses areas of the production process that affect Linked Data usability: training, collaboration, user-centred design, documentation, access, and sustainability. My findings form the basis of a series of recommendations in Chapter 8, which focus on teamwork, openness and transparency, extensibility, user consultation, discoverability, sustainability, and communities, culminating in a Five-Star Model for Linked Humanities Data Usability.</i