Beyond the Matrix: Repository Services for Qualitative Data

The Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) provides infrastructure and guidance for the sharing and reuse of digital data used in qualitative and multi-method social inquiry. In this paper we describe some of the repository’s early experiences providing services developed specifically for the curation of qualitative research data. We focus on QDR’s efforts to address two key challenges for qualitative data sharing. The first challenge concerns constraints on data sharing in order to protect human participants and their identities and to comply with copyright laws. The second set of challenges addresses the unique characteristics of qualitative data and their relationship to the published text. We describe a novel method of annotating scholarly publications, resulting in a “transparency appendix” that allows the sharing of such “granular data” (Moravcsik et al., 2013). We conclude by describing the future directions of QDR’s services for qualitative data archiving, sharing, and reuse

The T-PEN Tool: Sustainability and Quality Control in Encoding Handwritten Texts

The Center for Digital Theology and the Carolingian Canon Law (CCL) Project will collaborate to develop a Transcription-Paleographic and Editing Notation (T-PEN) Tool. Using digitized images of medieval manuscripts, this tool will assist scholars in the transcription of such sources and will allow automatic insertion of markup of textual features during the transcription process. T-PEN will be a new research tool in the CCL, permitting any number of scholars to submit their transcriptions of unpublished texts of early medieval canon law. Moreover, T-PEN will assist the CCL in maintaining quality control of transcriptions, as it will supply continuous comparison of manuscript image and the transcriber's work in a transparent display. It supports easy and immediate insertion of annotations (paleographic, discursive, and bibliographic), insertion of TEI P5 markup according to project protocols and validation against the schema during the transcription process

INVESTIGATING THE IMPACT OF ONLINE HUMAN COLLABORATION IN EXPLANATION OF AI SYSTEMS

An important subdomain in research on Human-Artificial Intelligence interaction is Explainable AI (XAI). XAI aims to improve human understanding and trust in machine intelligence and automation by providing users with visualizations and other information explaining the AI’s decisions, actions, or plans and thereby to establish justified trust and reliance. XAI systems have primarily used algorithmic approaches designed to generate explanations automatically that help understanding underlying information about decisions and establish justified trust and reliance, but an alternate that may augment these systems is to take advantage of the fact that user understanding of AI systems often develops through self-explanation (Mueller et al., 2021). Users attempt to piece together different sources of information and develop a clearer understanding, but these self-explanations are often lost if not shared with others. This thesis research demonstrated how this ‘Self-Explanation’ could be shared collaboratively via a system that is called collaborative XAI (CXAI). It is akin to a Social Q&A platform (Oh, 2018) such as StackExchange. A web-based system was built and evaluated formatively and via user studies. Formative evaluation will show how explanations in an XAI system, especially collaborative explanations, can be assessed based on ‘goodness criteria’ (Mueller et al., 2019). This thesis also investigated how the users performed with the explanations from this type of XAI system. Lastly, the research investigated whether the users of CXAI system are satisfied with the human-generated explanations generated in the system and check if the users can trust this type of explanation

Semantic annotation of natural history collections

Large collections of historical biodiversity expeditions are housed in natural history museums throughout the world. Potentially they can serve as rich sources of data for cultural historical and biodiversity research. However, they exist as only partially catalogued specimen repositories and images of unstructured, non-standardised, hand-written text and drawings. Although many archival collections have been digitised, disclosing their content is challenging. They refer to historical place names and outdated taxonomic classifications and are written in multiple languages. Efforts to transcribe the hand-written text can make the content accessible, but semantically describing and interlinking the content would further facilitate research. We propose a semantic model that serves to structure the named entities in natural history archival collections. In addition, we present an approach for the semantic annotation of these collections whilst documenting their provenance. This approach serves as an initial step for an adaptive learning approach for semi-automated extraction of named entities from natural history archival collections. The applicability of the semantic model and the annotation approach is demonstrated using image scans from a collection of 8, 000 field book pages gathered by the Committee for Natural History of the Netherlands Indies between 1820 and 1850, and evaluated together with domain experts from the field of natural and cultural history.Computer Systems, Imagery and Medi

Desarrollo de RIAS: caso de estudio en el dominio de la anotación de textos literarios digitalizados

La digitalización masiva de textos literarios abre amplias oportunidades de investigación, antes permitidas a grupos reducidos de investigadores, y limitadas muchas veces por la disponibilidad de los textos, debido a la ubicación geográfica o el deterioro de los mismos. Esta actividad ha fomentado la aparición de un nuevo campo de investigación conocido como las “Humanidades Digitales”. Esta nueva disciplina está enfocada a la interacción de la computación y las disciplinas humanísticas. Por esta razón, han emergido nuevas herramientas digitales de análisis textual. Sin embargo tales herramientas necesariamente deben ofrecer dinamismo, rapidez y sentido intuitivo para los investigadores humanistas. Para llevar a cabo tales exigencias, es posible utilizar un nuevo tipo de aplicación web: las Aplicaciones Ricas de Internet (RIA – Rich Internet Applications), las cuales utilizan datos que pueden ser procesados por el servidor o cliente, ofreciendo un look-and-feel similar a las aplicaciones de escritorio. Sin embargo la ingeniería de las RIAs es un campo relativamente nuevo en el área de la Ingeniería de Software, área en la que todavía no se ha delimitado formalmente una definición precisa de RIA ni una especificación rigurosa de sus características. Este proyecto de investigación se encamina precisamente a buscar de forma teórica y práctica el enfoque, metodología, y tecnologías necesarias para el desarrollo de una RIA que sirva de herramienta de anotación de textos literarios digitalizados con propósitos educativos, cumpliendo con las exigencias de análisis de los investigadores humanistas. [ABSTRACT] The massive digitization of texts grandly opens research opportunities, previously allowed to small groups of researchers, and limited (sometimes by geography or damage of the text) in availability. This activity has permitted the entrance to a new research field known as "Digital Humanities", focused on the interaction of computing and the humanities. For this reason new digital tools of textual analysis have emerged. However, such tools must necessarily offer dynamism, speed and intuitive sense for scholar humanists. To carry out these requirements a new type of web application can be used, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), which use data that can be processed by the server or client, offering a lookand- feel similar to desktop applications. However, RIAs engineering is a relatively new field in the area of software engineering, in which a precise definition of RIA and the specification of its features have not yet been formally defined. This research project is aimed precisely in focusing on the theoretical and practical approach, methodology, and technologies needed for the development of a RIA to serve as an educational-oriented text annotation tool that meets the demands and requirements of scholar humanists' analysis