Visual Analytics for the Exploratory Analysis and Labeling of Cultural Data

Cultural data can come in various forms and modalities, such as text traditions, artworks, music, crafted objects, or even as intangible heritage such as biographies of people, performing arts, cultural customs and rites. The assignment of metadata to such cultural heritage objects is an important task that people working in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) do on a daily basis. These rich metadata collections are used to categorize, structure, and study collections, but can also be used to apply computational methods. Such computational methods are in the focus of Computational and Digital Humanities projects and research. For the longest time, the digital humanities community has focused on textual corpora, including text mining, and other natural language processing techniques. Although some disciplines of the humanities, such as art history and archaeology have a long history of using visualizations. In recent years, the digital humanities community has started to shift the focus to include other modalities, such as audio-visual data. In turn, methods in machine learning and computer vision have been proposed for the specificities of such corpora. Over the last decade, the visualization community has engaged in several collaborations with the digital humanities, often with a focus on exploratory or comparative analysis of the data at hand. This includes both methods and systems that support classical Close Reading of the material and Distant Reading methods that give an overview of larger collections, as well as methods in between, such as Meso Reading. Furthermore, a wider application of machine learning methods can be observed on cultural heritage collections. But they are rarely applied together with visualizations to allow for further perspectives on the collections in a visual analytics or human-in-the-loop setting. Visual analytics can help in the decision-making process by guiding domain experts through the collection of interest. However, state-of-the-art supervised machine learning methods are often not applicable to the collection of interest due to missing ground truth. One form of ground truth are class labels, e.g., of entities depicted in an image collection, assigned to the individual images. Labeling all objects in a collection is an arduous task when performed manually, because cultural heritage collections contain a wide variety of different objects with plenty of details. A problem that arises with these collections curated in different institutions is that not always a specific standard is followed, so the vocabulary used can drift apart from another, making it difficult to combine the data from these institutions for large-scale analysis. This thesis presents a series of projects that combine machine learning methods with interactive visualizations for the exploratory analysis and labeling of cultural data. First, we define cultural data with regard to heritage and contemporary data, then we look at the state-of-the-art of existing visualization, computer vision, and visual analytics methods and projects focusing on cultural data collections. After this, we present the problems addressed in this thesis and their solutions, starting with a series of visualizations to explore different facets of rap lyrics and rap artists with a focus on text reuse. Next, we engage in a more complex case of text reuse, the collation of medieval vernacular text editions. For this, a human-in-the-loop process is presented that applies word embeddings and interactive visualizations to perform textual alignments on under-resourced languages supported by labeling of the relations between lines and the relations between words. We then switch the focus from textual data to another modality of cultural data by presenting a Virtual Museum that combines interactive visualizations and computer vision in order to explore a collection of artworks. With the lessons learned from the previous projects, we engage in the labeling and analysis of medieval illuminated manuscripts and so combine some of the machine learning methods and visualizations that were used for textual data with computer vision methods. Finally, we give reflections on the interdisciplinary projects and the lessons learned, before we discuss existing challenges when working with cultural heritage data from the computer science perspective to outline potential research directions for machine learning and visual analytics of cultural heritage data

The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru

Long recognized as a classic account of the early Spanish efforts to convert the Indians of Peru, Father De Arriaga’s book, originally published in 1621, has become comparatively rare even in its Spanish editions. This translation now makes available for the first time in English a unique record of the customs and religious practices that prevailed after the Spanish conquest. In his book, which was designed as a manual for the rooting out of paganism, De Arriaga sets down plainly and methodically what he found among the Indians—their objects of worship, their priests and sorcerers, their festivals and sacrifices, and their superstitions—and how these things are to be recognized and combated. Moreover, he evinces a steady awareness of the hold of custom and of the plight of the Indians who are torn between the demands of their old life and their new masters. The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru is an invaluable source for historians and anthropologists. L. Clark Keating is professor of modern languages at the University of Kentucky.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_latin_american_history/1004/thumbnail.jp

31th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

Information modelling is becoming more and more important topic for researchers, designers, and users of information systems.The amount and complexity of information itself, the number of abstractionlevels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases arecontinuously growing. Conceptual modelling is one of the sub-areas ofinformation modelling. The aim of this conference is to bring together experts from different areas of computer science and other disciplines, who have a common interest in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying the results of research to practice. We also aim to recognize and study new areas on modelling and knowledge bases to which more attention should be paid. Therefore philosophy and logic, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics and management science are relevant areas, too. In the conference, there will be three categories of presentations, i.e. full papers, short papers and position papers

Portraits of Human Monsters in the Renaissance: Dwarves, Hirsutes, and Castrati as Idealized Anatomical Anomalies

At the center of this interdisciplinary study are court monsters - dwarves, hirsutes, and misshapen individuals - who, by their very presence, altered Renaissance ethics vis-à-vis anatomical difference, social virtues, and scientific knowledge. These monsters evolved from objects of curiosity, to scientific cases, to legally independent beings. Although many images of and writings about these individuals depict them as jokes of nature or indices of courtly wit, others transcend these categories, combining a vocabulary of courtly self-fashioning with close observations akin to dissections that humanize monsters, while simultaneously stressing their anatomical difference. More importantly, the works examined in this book point to the intricate cultural, religious, ethical, and scientific perceptions of monstrous individuals who were fixtures in contemporary courts. From entertainers to advisors, and from faithful companions to collectible objects, monsters at court held liminal positions used by rulers to create and shape their own personae.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_mpd/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Aesthetics of Waste: Michel Tournier, Agnes Varda, Sabine Macher

In this dissertation, I engage with authors and works that sweep waste to the center, destabilizing our expectations of what waste is, and what it does. They do so through an aesthetics of waste that foregrounds waste as a major theme and mode of artistic creation. By waste, I refer to the wide material and metaphorical implications of the word – from trash, refuse and excrement, to textual debris that would typically be discarded from a finished work of art. My corpus is composed of contemporary French works and spans the genres of novel, film and poetic notebook. It begins with a trash-centered reading of Michel Tournier’s Les M�t�ores (1975), before moving on to Agn�s Varda’s documentary Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000) and a selection of Sabine Macher’s poetic notebooks (1992 – 2005). Through these works, my dissertation interrogates the relationship between writing (�criture and cin�criture) and waste. Tournier, Varda and Macher mount a critique of commodity culture and its values of standardization, homogenization, over-consumption and plastic perfection. At the same time, they locate waste as a subversive site for new artistic creation. Waste in these works thus functions as an alternative aesthetics and a social and ecological critique. Waste also emerges as an ambiguous concept, negatively figured as the by-product of our relentless production-consumption, and positively figured as a means of escaping such a system. Each genre and work under study lends itself to its own blend of “waste making” or “waste management” techniques, including recycling, bricolage, gleaning and a poetics of lack. In self-conscious gestures, Tournier, Varda and Macher place themselves in their works to model their waste-making practices as trash aesthete-pickers, gleaners and bricoleurs. My dissertation thus approaches the issue of waste from a literary, artistic and aesthetic perspective, while incorporating discourses from the fields of eco-criticism, ethics, postmodernism and waste studies. Ultimately, I argue that waste is the ‘stuff’ that works of art are made of

Together | Apart: Printmaking and the Space Between

In this practice-led creative research, being both artist and identical twin, I examine sameness and difference in the relationships between two people and between multiple objects/creative works. Through the inherent ability of printmaking processes to produce multiples and the attendant installation opportunities created by punctuated space, I unfold and re-tell a doubled and ambiguous understanding of being in the world. Martin Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world (Dasein) underpins and situates my understanding of being in the world, thrown into a world as an individual, and my existence as a double: being in the world with others. I relate his thinking through Barbara Bolt’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Dasein to the artist’s making to seek new ways of understanding Dasein / being-there. The work I make is a metaphor for investigating how I understand the world around me. To do this, I discuss tacit methodology and draw together the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’, which forms and informs a praxical knowledge, a knowledge that comes from doing and its reflective dimension. By investigating practices by both historical and contemporary artists who employ the diptych as a device to present works as an interconnected pair, I position my forms of the diptych to create relationships of closeness and separation, together | apart. The space in between two people or artworks—a gap—becomes instrumental in separating while simultaneously relating to and evoking continuation and connection. Imagery derived from and alluding to the body, in a gap between figuration and abstraction, is developed in an iterative, open-ended series of prints. Academic discussions about the nature of studio research are applied and interpreted through creative practice, imparting and enabling both an informed, personally situated perspective and an appraisal of the engagement of other artists, such as Roni Horn, Lesley Duxbury, and Paul Uhlmann, whose practices of ambiguity, in-between spaces and gaps are embedded in the wider field of visual arts practices. This research contributes to a broader field of discussion of understandings of being in the world, of spaces in-between and impermanence as related to unique printmaking practices

English for science students: Teacher’s book

Авт. указ. на обороте тит. л.Текст книги: англ., рус