Building a Disciplinary, World-Wide Data Infrastructure

Sharing scientific data, with the objective of making it fully discoverable, accessible, assessable, intelligible, usable, and interoperable, requires work at the disciplinary level to define in particular how the data should be formatted and described. Each discipline has its own organization and history as a starting point, and this paper explores the way a range of disciplines, namely materials science, crystallography, astronomy, earth sciences, humanities and linguistics get organized at the international level to tackle this question. In each case, the disciplinary culture with respect to data sharing, science drivers, organization and lessons learnt are briefly described, as well as the elements of the specific data infrastructure which are or could be shared with others. Commonalities and differences are assessed. Common key elements for success are identified: data sharing should be science driven; defining the disciplinary part of the interdisciplinary standards is mandatory but challenging; sharing of applications should accompany data sharing. Incentives such as journal and funding agency requirements are also similar. For all, it also appears that social aspects are more challenging than technological ones. Governance is more diverse, and linked to the discipline organization. CODATA, the RDA and the WDS can facilitate the establishment of disciplinary interoperability frameworks. Being problem-driven is also a key factor of success for building bridges to enable interdisciplinary research.Comment: Proceedings of the session "Building a disciplinary, world-wide data infrastructure" of SciDataCon 2016, held in Denver, CO, USA, 12-14 September 2016, to be published in ICSU CODATA Data Science Journal in 201

Computer-Aided Palaeography, Present and Future

The field of digital palaeography has received increasing attention in recent years, partly because palaeographers often seem subjective in their views and do not or cannot articulate their reasoning, thereby creating a field of authorities whose opinions are closed to debate. One response to this is to make palaeographical arguments more quantitative, although this approach is by no means accepted by the wider humanities community, with some arguing that handwriting is inherently unquantifiable. This paper therefore asks how palaeographical method might be made more objective and therefore more widely accepted by non-palaeographers while still answering critics within the field. Previous suggestions for objective methods before computing are considered first, and some of their shortcomings are discussed. Similar discussion in forensic document analysis is then introduced and is found relevant to palaeography, though with some reservations. New techniques of "digital" palaeography are then introduced; these have proven successful in forensic analysis and are becoming increasingly accepted there, but they have not yet found acceptance in the humanities communities. The reasons why are discussed, and some suggestions are made for how the software might be designed differently to achieve greater acceptance. Finally, a prototype framework is introduced which is designed to provide a common basis for experiments in "digital" palaeography, ideally enabling scholars to exchange quantitative data about scribal hands, exchange processes for generating this data, articulate both the results themselves and the processes used to produce them, and therefore to ground their arguments more firmly and perhaps find greater acceptance

HiER 2015. Proceedings des 9. Hildesheimer Evaluierungs- und Retrievalworkshop

Die Digitalisierung formt unsere Informationsumwelten. Disruptive Technologien dringen verstärkt und immer schneller in unseren Alltag ein und verändern unser Informations- und Kommunikationsverhalten. Informationsmärkte wandeln sich. Der 9. Hildesheimer Evaluierungs- und Retrievalworkshop HIER 2015 thematisiert die Gestaltung und Evaluierung von Informationssystemen vor dem Hintergrund der sich beschleunigenden Digitalisierung. Im Fokus stehen die folgenden Themen: Digital Humanities, Internetsuche und Online Marketing, Information Seeking und nutzerzentrierte Entwicklung, E-Learning

LAF-Fabric: a data analysis tool for Linguistic Annotation Framework with an application to the Hebrew Bible

The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) provides a general, extensible stand-off markup system for corpora. This paper discusses LAF-Fabric, a new tool to analyse LAF resources in general with an extension to process the Hebrew Bible in particular. We first walk through the history of the Hebrew Bible as text database in decennium-wide steps. Then we describe how LAF-Fabric may serve as an analysis tool for this corpus. Finally, we describe three analytic projects/workflows that benefit from the new LAF representation: 1) the study of linguistic variation: extract cooccurrence data of common nouns between the books of the Bible (Martijn Naaijer); 2) the study of the grammar of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms: extract clause typology (Gino Kalkman); 3) construction of a parser of classical Hebrew by Data Oriented Parsing: generate tree structures from the database (Andreas van Cranenburgh)

When images work faster than words: The integration of content-based image retrieval with the Northumbria Watermark Archive

Information on the manufacture, history, provenance, identification, care and conservation of paper-based artwork/objects is disparate and not always readily available. The Northumbria Watermark Archive will incorporate such material into a database, which will be made freely available on the Internet providing an invaluable resource for conservation, research and education. The efficiency of a database is highly dependant on its search mechanism. Text based mechanisms are frequently ineffective when a range of descriptive terminologies might be used i.e. when describing images or translating from foreign languages. In such cases a Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system can be more effective. Watermarks provide paper with unique visual identification characteristics and have been used to provide a point of entry to the archive that is more efficient and effective than a text based search mechanism. The research carried out has the potential to be applied to any numerically large collection of images with distinctive features of colour, shape or texture i.e. coins, architectural features, picture frame profiles, hallmarks, Japanese artists stamps etc. Although the establishment of an electronic archive incorporating a CBIR system can undoubtedly improve access to large collections of images and related data, the development is rarely trouble free. This paper discusses some of the issues that must be considered i.e. collaboration between disciplines; project management; copying and digitising objects; content based image retrieval; the Northumbria Watermark Archive; the use of standardised terminology within a database as well as copyright issues

Conversations on a probable future: interview with Beatrice Fazi

No description supplie

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51166-10