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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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

Telling ancient tales to modern machines: ontological representation of Sumerian literary narratives

This thesis examines the potential of semantic web technologies to support and complement scholarship in Assyriology. Building on prior research, it is unique in its assessment of the suitability of three existing OWL ontologies (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, FRBRoo and Ontomedia) to adequately capture and represent the heterogeneous and incomplete narratives published as composites by the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.Its agenda sits firmly within the interdisciplinary context of the Digital Humanities and Web Science, and it describes a process centered on the development, implementation and valuation of an ontological representation system (mORSuL), designed to reflect the needs, desires, challenges and opportunities of Assyriological research paradigms. Underlying the process are two fundamental assumptions: firstly, that semantic technologies can be used to support academic endeavours in the Humanities, and secondly, that the benefits of doing so can be identified and evaluated. The thesis culminates in the conclusion that these existing ontologies are mostly suitable for the representation of the narrative content of these ancient texts, requiring only a few additions and changes

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