Computational Models (of Narrative) for Literary Studies

In the last decades a growing body of literature in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Science (CS) has approached the problem of narrative understanding by means of computational systems. Narrative, in fact, is an ubiquitous element in our everyday activity and the ability to generate and understand stories, and their structures, is a crucial cue of our intelligence. However, despite the fact that - from an historical standpoint - narrative (and narrative structures) have been an important topic of investigation in both these areas, a more comprehensive approach coupling them with narratology, digital humanities and literary studies was still lacking. With the aim of covering this empty space, in the last years, a multidisciplinary effort has been made in order to create an international meeting open to computer scientist, psychologists, digital humanists, linguists, narratologists etc.. This event has been named CMN (for Computational Models of Narrative) and was launched in the 2009 by the MIT scholars Mark A. Finlayson and Patrick H. Winston1

From Inscriptions to Lexica and Back: A Platform for Editing and Linking the Languages of Ancient Italy

Available language technology is hardly applicable to scarcely attested ancient languages, yet their digital semantic representation, though challenging, is an asset for the purpose of sharing and preserving existing cultural knowledge. In the context of a project on the languages and cultures of ancient Italy, we took up this challenge. This paper thus describes the development of a user friendly web platform, EpiLexO, for the creation and editing of an integrated system of language resources for ancient fragmentary languages centered on the lexicon, in compliance with current digital humanities and Linked Open Data principles. EpiLexo allows for the editing of lexica with all relevant cross-references: for their linking to their testimonies, as well as to bibliographic information and other (external) resources and common vocabularies. The focus of the current implementation is on the languages of ancient Italy, in particular Oscan, Faliscan, Celtic and Venetic; however, the technological solutions are designed to be general enough to be potentially applicable to different contexts and scenarios

Popol Wujs: Culture, Complexity, and the Encoding of Maya Cosmovision

The Popol Wuj is one of the most important, commonly studied, and widely circulated Indigenous literary works from colonial Mesoamerica. By some accounts, there are 1,200 editions of the work published in thirty world languages, all of which trace back to a single manuscript—itself a copy of an earlier Mayan work. To protect their work from being destroyed by colonial officials or Inquisitional authorities, the original K’iche’ authors of the Popol Wuj had to embed their ways of knowing in a language and narrative structure that could not be detected by Spanish readers. Each edition of the Popol Wuj therefore helps to uncover different elements of the cosmovisión that is embedded in the text. This article draws from recent collaborative efforts to prepare a digital critical edition of the Popol Wuj based on the editorial standards and scholarly conventions of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). By comparing and contrasting the advantages and drawbacks of this edition relative to printed works and digital editions, we suggest how methods from the digital humanities can shed new light on texts like the Popol Wuj

Ontology-based data integration in EPNet: Production and distribution of food during the Roman Empire

Semantic technologies are rapidly changing the historical research. Over the last decades, an immense amount of new quantifiable data have been accumulated, and made available in interchangeable formats, in social sciences and humanities, opening up new possibilities for solving old questions and posing new ones. This paper introduces a framework that eases the access of scholars to historical and cultural data about food production and commercial trade system during the Roman Empire, distributed across different data sources. The proposed approach relies on the Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) paradigm, where the different datasets are virtually integrated by a conceptual layer (an ontology) that provides to the user a clear point of access and a unified and unambiguous conceptual view

When linguistics meets web technologies. Recent advances in modelling linguistic linked data

This article provides an up-to-date and comprehensive survey of models (including vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies) used for representing linguistic linked data (LLD). It focuses on the latest developments in the area and both builds upon and complements previous works covering similar territory. The article begins with an overview of recent trends which have had an impact on linked data models and vocabularies, such as the growing influence of the FAIR guidelines, the funding of several major projects in which LLD is a key component, and the increasing importance of the relationship of the digital humanities with LLD. Next, we give an overview of some of the most well known vocabularies and models in LLD. After this we look at some of the latest developments in community standards and initiatives such as OntoLex-Lemon as well as recent work which has been in carried out in corpora and annotation and LLD including a discussion of the LLD metadata vocabularies META-SHARE and lime and language identifiers. In the following part of the paper we look at work which has been realised in a number of recent projects and which has a significant impact on LLD vocabularies and models

Appropriate Use Case modeling for humanities documents

This article details a modeling methodology that is appropriate for historical, functional documents that are to be digitally represented and hosted within a software environment for humanities research. The functionality is derived from Use Case modeling that can be undertaken in consultation with the User Group. The Use Cases are an expression of the whole-system model as they embody the interaction of User, with the document, in the software environment. The encoding mechanism largely practiced within the humanities computing community is represented by the TEI, which seeks to provide a set of guidelines for encoding humanities documents. However, TEI offers no guidance in relation to creating an encoding of a document that is supportive of the software environment that will host it, the interaction mechanisms required, or the User. We argue that modeling with recourse to the Logical, the Physical and the Interaction classes enables not just the generation of an appropriate encoding scheme, but also the software to manipulate it. We situate Use Case methodology within Activity Theory and relate this to the humanities computing community. The argument is framed in relation to the creation of a digital edition of an 18th century Spanish Account Book manuscript