VennMaker para historiadores : fuentes, redes sociales y programas informáticos

Este artículo explora la aplicabilidad del programa informático VennMaker para la investigación histórica. El artículo se apoya en dos casos de estudio de investigaciones históricas actuales orientadas a estudiar las redes y que cubren diferentes periodos de tiempo y distintas fuentes. La mayor ventaja de VennMaker es que invierte el proceso de recolección de datos. Mientras que los programas tradicionales utilizan datos pre-codificados para producir el mapa de una red, VennMaker genera los datos mientras que el investigador dibuja los nodos y crea el mapa de una red. Las bases de datos de matrices prefabricadas ya no son necesarias; por lo tanto, el programa puede ser utilizado fácilmente por historiadores que no se han formado en las ciencias sociales. Los dos casos incluyen el análisis de una estructura familiar en la historia antigua y las redes ego-centradas de judíos que se escondían durante el Nacional-Socialismo. Artumentamos que una representación visual de las relaciones sociales ayuda a revelar modelos invisibles y caracerísticas de las redes que ofrecen a los investigadores nuevas perspectivas sobre sus temas de investigación. El programa ofrece una variedad de herramientas para representar las relaciones sociales y su desarrollo a lo largo del tiempo y del espacio.This paper explores the applicability of the software VennMaker to historical research. The paper draws on two case studies from current network-oriented historical research projects, covering different time periods and sources. VennMaker's biggest advantage is that it inverts the process of data collection. While traditional software uses pre-coded data to produce a network map, VennMaker generates data while the researcher draws nodes and creates a network map. Prefabricated data matrices are no longer necessary; therefore, the software can easily be used by historians lacking training in the social sciences. Our two cases include an analysis of a family structure in ancient history and ego-networks of Jews in hiding during National Socialism. We argue that a visual representation of social relations helps to reveal unseen patterns and characteristics of networks therefore offering scholars new perspectives on their research subjects. The software offers a variety of tools to represent social relations and their development over time and space

VennMaker for Historians : sources, social networks and software

This paper explores the applicability of the software VennMaker to historical research. The paper draws on two case studies from current network-oriented historical research projects, covering different time periods and sources. VennMaker's biggest advantage is that it inverts the process of data collection. While traditional software uses pre-coded data to produce a network map, VennMaker generates data while the researcher draws nodes and creates a network map. Prefabricated data matrices are no longer necessary; therefore, the software can easily be used by historians lacking training in the social sciences. Our two cases include an analysis of a family structure in ancient history and ego-networks of Jews in hiding during National Socialism. We argue that a visual representation of social relations helps to reveal unseen patterns and characteristics of networks therefore offering scholars new perspectives on their research subjects. The software offers a variety of tools to represent social relations and their development over time and space.Este artículo explora la aplicabilidad del programa informático VennMaker para la investigación histórica. El artículo se apoya en dos casos de estudio de investigaciones históricas actuales orientadas a estudiar las redes y que cubren diferentes periodos de tiempo y distintas fuentes. La mayor ventaja de VennMaker es que invierte el proceso de recolección de datos. Mientras que los programas tradicionales utilizan datos pre-codificados para producir el mapa de una red, VennMaker genera los datos mientras que el investigador dibuja los nodos y crea el mapa de una red. Las bases de datos de matrices prefabricadas ya no son necesarias; por lo tanto, el programa puede ser utilizado fácilmente por historiadores que no se han formado en las ciencias sociales. Los dos casos incluyen el análisis de una estructura familiar en la historia antigua y las redes ego-centradas de judíos que se escondían durante el Nacional-Socialismo. Artumentamos que una representación visual de las relaciones sociales ayuda a revelar modelos invisibles y caracerísticas de las redes que ofrecen a los investigadores nuevas perspectivas sobre sus temas de investigación. El programa ofrece una variedad de herramientas para representar las relaciones sociales y su desarrollo a lo largo del tiempo y del espacio

Network Analysis Between Distant Reading and Close Reading

The advent of “distant reading” methods has created the opportunity to look at texts in a new way. But with the shift from close to distant reading, there is also a danger of loosing sight of fine-grained text structure. Like any method, distant reading methodology is not theoretically neutral, but carries a bundle of presuppositions. In this paper, a new method of text network analysis is proposed as a bridge between close and distant reading. Network analysis as a methodological basis offers two advantages: Firstly, it links methodology to theoretical perspectives that highlight relational aspects of linguistic, historical and social phenomena. Secondly, it allows humanities scholars to participate in the interdisciplinary field of network research and to benefit from available methods and tools. The proposed methodology of text-based network generation links close and distant reading in two ways. By building on syntactical structures, the networks resemble closely the linguistic structure of text. And by linking network data and text passages, the method allows to go back and forth between a distant view of the textand its close reading. The method is discussed using Novalis’ essay from 1799 “Die Christenheit oder Europa” as an example

Historical Newspaper Content Mining: Revisiting the impresso Project's Challenges in Text and Image Processing, Design and Historical Scholarship

impresso. Media Monitoring of the Past is an interdisciplinary research project in which a team of computational linguists, designers and historians collaborate on the datafication of a multilingual corpus of digitised historical newspapers. The primary goals of the project are to improve text mining tools for historical text, to enrich historical newspapers with (semi-) automatically generated data and to integrate such data into historical research workflows by means of a newly developed user interface. In this paper we discuss our efforts to overcome inherent challenges and to integrate text mining and data visualisation applications in general historical research practices which are characterised by search operations as well as the need to create topical collections

impresso Text Reuse at Scale. An interface for the exploration of text reuse data in semantically enriched historical newspapers

Text Reuse reveals meaningful reiterations of text in large corpora. Humanities researchers use text reuse to study, e.g., the posterior reception of influential texts or to reveal evolving publication practices of historical media. This research is often supported by interactive visualizations which highlight relations and differences between text segments. In this paper, we build on earlier work in this domain. We present impresso Text Reuse at Scale, the to our knowledge first interface which integrates text reuse data with other forms of semantic enrichment to enable a versatile and scalable exploration of intertextual relations in historical newspaper corpora. The Text Reuse at Scale interface was developed as part of the impresso project and combines powerful search and filter operations with close and distant reading perspectives. We integrate text reuse data with enrichments derived from topic modeling, named entity recognition and classification, language and document type detection as well as a rich set of newspaper metadata. We report on historical research objectives and common user tasks for the analysis of historical text reuse data and present the prototype interface together with the results of a user evaluation

Fairness and transparency throughout a digital humanities workflow: Challenges and recommendations

How can we achieve sufficient levels of transparency and fairness for (humanities) research based on historical newspapers? Which concrete measures should be taken by data providers such as libraries, research projects and individual researchers? We approach these questions from the vantage point that digitised newspapers are complex sources with a high degree of heterogeneity caused by a long chain of processing steps, ranging, e.g., from digitisation policies, copyright restrictions to the evolving performance of tools for their enrichment such as OCR or article segmentation. Overall, we emphasise the need for careful documentation of data processing, research practices and the acknowledgement of support from institutions and collaborators

From Hermeneutics to Data to Networks: Data Extraction and Network Visualization of Historical Sources

Network visualizations can help humanities scholars reveal hidden and complex patterns and structures in textual sources. This tutorial explains how to extract network data (people, institutions, places, etc) from historical sources through the use of non-technical methods developed in Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) and Social Network Analysis (SNA), and how to visualize this data with the platform-independent and particularly easy-to-use Palladio

Conference "(Retro)Digitalisate – Kommentarkultur – Big Data" 8-9 October

In this blog post I highlight a few aspects which were of particular interest for me during the conference (Retro)Digitalisate – Kommentarkultur – Big Data: Zum Stand des Digitalen in den Geisteswissenschaften. The concept behind the conference was quite intrigueing: No classical paper presentations as an attempt to stop people from saying what they always say. Instead the organizers opted for a combination of panel discussions and keynotes. The conference's subtitle describes the angle: "The..

Setting up Open Journal System for CVCE – Part I

This post gives an overview of the peculiarities of Open Journal System, an open source publication tool and might be of help when considered together with OJS’s documentation. OJS is developed by the Public Knowledge Project has become the chosen publishing platform for CVCE. OJS sports a variety of features which are of relevance for us: Multi-language support, xml integration and a clean and customizable look to it. In this blog post I describe the process of setting up Transactions in Dig..

Should I do Social Network Analysis?

Network theories and methods have recently gained wide-spread attention. Graph visualizations look great and will easily grab the attention of any audience. However for those who are new to the field, there is a steep learning curve. Novices need to learn to master a variety of skills starting from network theory to systematic data collection, appropriate means to compute and visualize them and finally the challenge to link back the results of any analyses to their original research questions..