Treebanking in the world of Thucydides. Linguistic annotation for the Hellespont Project

The Hellespont project (DAI, Tufts University) aims to structure the text of a passage from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (1.89-118), in order to highlight events, persons and peoples that populate the world of the author and connect the different digital sources available for their study. Event annotation in the text in particular requires an in-depth linguistic analysis of morphology, syntax and semantics. However, the available resources for Ancient Greek do not provide adequate standards to support the encoding of semantic and pragmatic phenomena in Ancient Greek texts. In this paper, we discuss the motivation of the project and how we adapted the so called tectogrammatical annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank to identify the events and describe their structure. The linguistic notion of valency, which is central to tectogrammatical sentence representation, proves very useful for this analysis of Ancient Greek

The emerging digital infrastructure for research in the humanities

This article advances the thesis that three decades of investments by national and international funders, combined with those of scholars, technologists, librarians, archivists, and their institutions, have resulted in a digital infrastructure in the humanities that is now capable of supporting end-to-end research workflows. The article refers to key developments in the epigraphy and paleography of the premodern period. It draws primarily on work in classical studies but also highlights related work in the adjacent disciplines of Egyptology, ancient Near East studies, and medieval studies. The argument makes a case that much has been achieved but it does not declare “mission accomplished.” The capabilities of the infrastructure remain unevenly distributed within and across disciplines, institutions, and regions. Moreover, the components, including the links between steps in the workflow, are generally far from user-friendly and seamless in operation. Because further refinements and additional capacities are still much needed, the article concludes with a discussion of key priorities for future work

Intelligent Information Access to Linked Data - Weaving the Cultural Heritage Web

The subject of the dissertation is an information alignment experiment of two cultural heritage information systems (ALAP): The Perseus Digital Library and Arachne. In modern societies, information integration is gaining importance for many tasks such as business decision making or even catastrophe management. It is beyond doubt that the information available in digital form can offer users new ways of interaction. Also, in the humanities and cultural heritage communities, more and more information is being published online. But in many situations the way that information has been made publicly available is disruptive to the research process due to its heterogeneity and distribution. Therefore integrated information will be a key factor to pursue successful research, and the need for information alignment is widely recognized. ALAP is an attempt to integrate information from Perseus and Arachne, not only on a schema level, but to also perform entity resolution. To that end, technical peculiarities and philosophical implications of the concepts of identity and co-reference are discussed. Multiple approaches to information integration and entity resolution are discussed and evaluated. The methodology that is used to implement ALAP is mainly rooted in the fields of information retrieval and knowledge discovery. First, an exploratory analysis was performed on both information systems to get a first impression of the data. After that, (semi-)structured information from both systems was extracted and normalized. Then, a clustering algorithm was used to reduce the number of needed entity comparisons. Finally, a thorough matching was performed on the different clusters. ALAP helped with identifying challenges and highlighted the opportunities that arise during the attempt to align cultural heritage information systems