Nuovi servizi a valore aggiunto per riviste elettroniche di studi classici

Le riviste elettroniche sono decisamente meno diffuse in ambito umanistico piuttosto che scientifico, non tanto per un ritardo delle discipline umanistiche in questo senso quanto per la diversa rispondenza del medium alla disciplina stessa. La vasta gamma di funzionalità e servizi che possono essere offerti online in aggiunta alla copia stampata di una rivista costituisce una delle più importanti differenze tra l'editoria tradizionale e quella elettronica. L'attuale offerta ed i futuri sviluppi delle riviste nell'ambito delle scienze umane sono analizzati attraverso i dati raccolti con un sondaggio sulle caratteristiche di una rivista elettronica, del tipo di diritti impiegati, degli strumenti elettronici usati nel lavoro editoriale e degli elementi che ne ostacolano la diffusione. Ne risulta una realtà ancora legata alla pubblicazione a stampa; nel caso di esistenza di riviste elettroniche, la presenza di una forma non innovativa, che ricalca piuttosto la forma tradizionale. Inoltre, sono stati rilevati pregiudizi sulla qualità delle risorse elettroniche, sull'accuratezza degli articoli, sulla loro persistenza e reperibilità on-line, e dubbi sui diritti d'autore. Nonostante i timori degli editori, l'editoria on-line può tuttavia divenire un fertile campo in cui l'accesso libero si sposa con la nascita di funzionalità aggiuntive. I servizi a valore aggiunto possono incentivare l'uso delle riviste di un'area disciplinare come quella umanistica, in cui le riviste elettroniche hanno ancora poca diffusione.E-journals are undoubtedly less widespread in the Humanities than in the Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) field. This is not just because of a lag in Humanities journals' development, but also because of the different extent at what electronic publishing technologies fit respectively the different nature and requirements of disciplines. The wide range of functionalities and services that can be offered online in addition to the print copy of a journal is one of the most important differences between paper-based and electronic publishing. Value Added Services (VAS) represent also a key aspect to be leveraged in the development of a sustainable business model for open access journals. VAS need to be though carefully. To provide them comes at a cost and it is a process that can just partly be automated. The paper aims at designing a new model for Classics e-journals specifically tailored on classicists' needs, identifying a set of functionalities that may be provided by e-journals on the basis of a deep understanding of the field and of recent user studies. The implementation of such functionalities and the automatisation of the process needed to enable them are then discussed in detail

Towards the Automatic Retrieval of Cited Parallel Passages from Secondary Literature

My presentation at the "Classical Philology Goes Digital" workshop in Potsdam (16-17 February 2017), www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/events/global-philology-open-conference

Turning Research Code into a Webservice with CLAM

Abstract The Computational Linguistics Application Mediator (CLAM) is a Python tool developed in the context of CLARIN-NL which aims to simplify the process of transforming code into webservices. In this demo I show a concrete example of applying CLAM to the code I've written for my doctoral research project. What the code does is to extract bibliographic references to classical texts and map them to a set of unique identifiers. Thanks to CLAM I was able within few hours to turn my code into a fully-fledged web-service, which provides an interface for humans as well as machines. In this hands-on session I will demonstrate two ways in which this web-service can be used to index automatically a set of documents: manually by means of a graphical user interface and programmatically by means of a client library

Towards Resolution Services for Text URIs

In this paper we address the lack of fully resolvable URIs for texts and their citable units in the currently emerging Graph of Ancient World Data. We identify three main architectural components that are required to provide resolution services for text URIs: 1) a registry of text services; 2) an identifier resolution service; 3) a document metadata scheme, to represent the relations between texts in the registry, as well as between these texts and related external resources (e.g. library catalogues). After presenting some of the use cases a central registry providing resolvable URIs for texts would enable, we discuss in detail each component. We conclude by considering three examples where the proposed document metadata scheme is used to describe digital texts; this scheme contains a minimum yet extendable set of metadata that can be used to explore and aggregate texts coming from a network of distributed repositories

From Index Locorum to Citation Network: an Approach to the Automatic Extraction of Canonical References and its Applications to the Study of Classical Texts

My research focusses on the automatic extraction of canonical references from publications in Classics. Such references are the standard way of citing classical texts and are found in great numbers throughout monographs, journal articles and commentaries. In chapters 1 and 2 I argue for the importance of canonical citations and for the need to capture them automatically. Their importance and function is to signal text passages that are studied and discussed, often in relation to one another as can be seen in parallel passages found in modern commentaries. Scholars in the field have long been exploiting this kind of information by manually creating indexes of cited passages, the so-called indices locorum. However, the challenge we now face is find new ways of indexing and retrieving information contained in the growing volume of digital archives and libraries. Chapters 3 and 4 look at how this problem can be tackled by translating the extraction of canonical citations into a computationally solvable problem. The approach I developed consists of treating the extraction of such citations as a problem of named entity extraction. This problem can be solved with some degree of accuracy by applying and adapting methods of Natural Language Processing. In this part of the dissertation I discuss the implementation of this approach as a working prototype and an evaluation of its performance. Once canonical references have been extracted from texts, the web of relations between documents that they create can be represented as a network. This network can then be searched, manipulated, visualised and analysed in various ways. In chapter 5 I focus specifically on how this network can be leveraged to search through bodies of secondary literature. Finally in chapter 6 I discuss how my work opens up new research perspectives in terms of visualisation, analysis and the application of such automatically extracted citation networks

Page Layout Analysis of Text-heavy Historical Documents: a Comparison of Textual and Visual Approaches

Page layout analysis is a fundamental step in document processing which enables to segment a page into regions of interest. With highly complex layouts and mixed scripts, scholarly commentaries are text-heavy documents which remain challenging for state-of-the-art models. Their layout considerably varies across editions and their most important regions are mainly defined by semantic rather than graphical characteristics such as position or appearance. This setting calls for a comparison between textual, visual and hybrid approaches. We therefore assess the performances of two transformers (LayoutLMv3 and RoBERTa) and an objection-detection network (YOLOv5). If results show a clear advantage in favor of the latter, we also list several caveats to this finding. In addition to our experiments, we release a dataset of ca. 300 annotated pages sampled from 19th century commentaries.Comment: Same as https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3290/long_paper8670.pd

Extended Overview of HIPE-2022: Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Multilingual Historical Documents

This paper presents an overview of the second edition of HIPE (Identifying Historical People, Places and other Entities), a shared task on named entity recognition and linking in multilingual historical documents. Following the success of the first CLEF-HIPE-2020 evaluation lab, HIPE-2022 confronts systems with the challenges of dealing with more languages, learning domain-specific entities, and adapting to diverse annotation tag sets. This shared task is part of the ongoing efforts of the natural language processing and digital humanities communities to adapt and develop appropriate technologies to efficiently retrieve and explore information from historical texts. On such material, however, named entity processing techniques face the challenges of domain heterogeneity, input noisiness, dynamics of language, and lack of resources. In this context, the main objective of HIPE-2022, run as an evaluation lab of the CLEF 2022 conference, is to gain new insights into the transferability of named entity processing approaches across languages, time periods, document types, and annotation tag sets. Tasks, corpora, and results of participating teams are presented. Compared to the condensed overview [1], this paper contains more refined statistics on the datasets, a break down of the results per type of entity, and a discussion of the ‘challenges’ proposed in the shared task

The References of References: Enriching Library Catalogs via Domain-Specific Reference Mining

The advent of large-scale citation services has greatly impacted the retrieval of scientific information for several domains of research. The Humanities have largely remained outside of this shift despite their increasing reliance on digital means for information seeking. Given that publications in the Humanities probably have a longer than average life-span, mainly due to the importance of monographs in the field, we propose to use domain-specific reference monographs to bootstrap the enrichment of library catalogs with citation data. We exemplify our approach using a corpus of reference monographs on the history of Venice and extracting the network of publications they refer to. Preliminary results show that on average only 7% of extracted references are made to publications already within such corpus, therefore suggesting that reference monographs are effective hubs for the retrieval of further resources within the domain

Predictors of Alcohol Consumption Among Younger Adults During the First Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic may lead to negative mental health effects but the effect on alcohol consumption among younger adults is unclear. We assess predictors of change in alcohol consumption during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic among younger adults. Methods: This cross-sectional internet-based survey was part of an overarching project, the Corona Drug Survey, which was conducted from April 30 to August 4, 2020. Participants of any sex and >= 18 years old were included. The primary outcome measure was change in alcohol consumption during the early COVID-19 pandemic. We implemented an ordinal logistic regression to assess the effect (odds ratio [OR] and 95% confidence interval [CI]) of the following predictors: quarantine restrictions on leaving the residence, number of individuals in the household, problematic alcohol consumption before the pandemic (CAGE [cutting down, annoyance by criticism, guilty feeling, and eye-opener] score), personal concern regarding the pandemic, age, and sex. Results: 3,321 participants with a mean age of 32 (SD: 13) years were included in this study. 70.4% of participants reported less or unchanged alcohol consumption in the recent 4 weeks of the pandemic compared to before the pandemic. A higher number of individuals in the household was associated with a reduced alcohol consumption (OR = 0.869; 95% CI = 0.815-0.927). No quarantine restrictions on leaving the residence (OR = 1.593; 95% CI = 1.397-1.817), a higher age (1.006; 1.001-1.011), and female sex (compared to males: 1.206; 1.062-1.371) were associated with an increase in alcohol consumption. The CAGE score before the pandemic (OR = 0.983; 95% CI = 0.931-1.037) and the pandemic concern (0.927; 0.857-1.003) were not associated with a significant change in alcohol consumption. Celebrations were no longer frequent drinking occasions during the pandemic compared to before the pandemic. The majority of participants (60.9%) did not use alcohol drinking as a coping mechanism to mitigate negative effects of the pandemic. Interpretation: In this cohort of younger adults with fewer celebratory drinking occasions, restrictions on leaving the residence and the number of persons in the household were the strongest predictors of reduced alcohol consumption during the early phase of the pandemic.</p