Citizen science for cuneiform studies

This paper examines the potential applications of Citizen Science and Open Linked Data within a critical Web Science framework. Described here is a work-inprocess concerning an interdisciplinary, multiinstitutional project for the digitization, annotation and online dissemination of a large corpus of written material from ancient Mesopotamia. The paper includes an outline of the problems presented by a large, heterogeneous and incomplete dataset, as well as a discussion of the potential of Citizen Science as a potential solution, combining both technical and social aspects. Drawing inspiration from other successful Citizen Science projects, the current paper suggests a process for capturing and enriching the data in ways which can address not only the challenges of the current data set, but also similar issues arising elsewhere on the wider Web

Students as Collaborators: a digital humanities and GLAM sector collaboration to produce new web-based content through student led projects

This paper shares the success of research-led teaching and GLAM sector collaborations developed as part of the Digital Humanities (DH) teaching program at the Australian National University. This collaborative project offered a shared solution to two distinct problems. For teaching in DH we found that students, while fascinated by the GLAM and DH crossover space, struggled to evaluate the challenges and affordances of digital resources developed for collection-based research and engagement when studied in the abstract. The students were unfamiliar with the pragmatics and realities involved in working with materials from the GLAM sector as they came from diverse academic backgrounds (computer science, linguistics, engineering). For our GLAM partners, project deadlines, organisational structures, and, most importantly, budgets constrained innovative work with digitised collections. The pilot program ran across two courses in DH, one with the National Museum of Australia that focused on development of web-based educational resources, and one with the British Library Labs where students could develop a project focused on any of the following: Research, Artistic, Community, and, Teaching/Learning. This pilot program has now become a permanent fixture of our teaching. It has offered a productive way for a small research centre to engage with a range of GLAM partners, and offered them the chance to see how to use collections in the digital space, from marketing to games to advanced research projects. Meanwhile, students in DH from diverse backgrounds are shown the opportunities for future work pathways in GLAM, and exposed to not just the technical challenges of digital project development, but the social and institutional ones as well

Building Prototypes Aggregating Musicological Datasets on the Semantic Web

Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, and SPARQL can be successfully used to bridge complementary musicological information. In this paper, we describe, compare, and evaluate the datasets and workflows used to create two such aggregator projects: In Collaboration with In Concert, and JazzCats, both of which bring together a cluster of smaller projects containing concert and performance metadata

A toolkit for live annotation of opera performance: Experiences capturing Wagner's Ring Cycle

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A Strategy of Violence?: Using Game Theory to Analyse Political Power in the Ancient Near East

Violence can be argued to be a powerful tool in securing and maintaining political power. In this interdisciplinary paper, a game-theoretical model is used in order to evaluate the role that the threat of violence has in the establishment and maintenance of control of a population, even when it is detrimental to collective well-being. The model is motivated by Assyriological data on violence. We use the model with a regional approach to describe the possible opportunities for maintenance of power that repression of the opposition and possible bribery of the military may enable. We also discuss the challenges to this analysis presented by the heterogeneous and incomplete historical data

AI3SD Video: Linked Data – Examples and Heuristics

With their inherent flexibility and robustness to change, the decentralised interconnected knowledge graphs that lie at the heart of semantic web technologies are ideally suited for the challenges of converting the messy, often incomplete, and internally heterogeneous datasets of the Humanities into machine processable data. Although a matter of some debate, the reuse and adoption of known ontologies, schema, and taxonomies across disparate projects across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences landscape has been steadily increasing over the last decade in particular. This talk will describe the practical approaches and heuristics of such Linked Data projects, commenting on the effect of political, institutional, and socio-cultural factors in their planning, implementation, and evaluation

Linked Data in the Digital Humanities: Examples, Projects, and Tools

Harnessing the potential of semantic web technologies to support and diversify scholarship is gaining popularity in the digital humanities. This talk describes a number of projects utilising Linked Data ranging from musicology and library metadata, to the representation of the narrative structure, philological, bibliographical, and museological data of ancient Mesopotamian literary compositions