European Survey on Scholarly Practices and Digital Needs in the Arts and Humanities

This report summarizes the statistical analysis of the findings of a web-based survey conducted by the Digital Methods and Practices Observatory (DiMPO), a working group under VCC2 of the DARIAH research infrastructure (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities). In order to provide an evidence-based, up-to-date, and meaningful account of the emerging information practices, needs and attitudes of arts and humanities researchers in the evolving European digital scholarly environment, the web survey involved a transnational team of researchers from more than a dozen countries, and addressed digitally-enabled research practices, attitudes and needs in all areas of Europe and across different arts and humanities disciplines and contexts

Exposing geospatial cultural heritage content in map-based applications

<p>This paper presents our implementation of interactive services related to map-based exploration of cultural heritage geospatial data. We first present our methodology for interlinking geographical entities (e.g., Points of Interest), i.e., the identification of same real-world geographical representations between different data sources. Then, we present efficient methods towards functionalities related to itinerary planning. The methods are part of the Mythotopia infrastructure which includes multilingual and multimodal digital content in the humanities, and advanced exploration-based functionalities. An interface allows users to interact and explore the rich content of the corpus.</p&gt

Mythotopia: The educational application

<p>Within the framework of the project "Mythological Routes in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace", Mythotopia was created, highlighting the cultural and tourist wealth of the area. The region is significant not only geographically or geomorphologically but also historically and archaeologically. Over the centuries, significant cultures developed on its lands. A particular characteristic is the coexistence and mixture of different cultural elements, leading to a unique multicultural result. The project uses as means to get acquainted with the area the myths handed down by ancient writers. Most of these myths are set or related in some way to the broader area or specific regions. Thus, beyond getting to know the place and creating personalized routes according to the searches of its visitors, the project aims to highlight these myths. Through their recording and projection, mapping, and identification of the corresponding areas, visitors learn unknown aspects of the rich local history, ancient Greek and Latin philology, archaeology, and many other elements.</p&gt

Language Resources for human-centric NLP: the MYTHOTOPIA geo-tagged dataset

<p>The quest for new explorations in the digital humanities domain brings about the notion of representation and organization of the data at hand that will allow not only for the efficient indexing and retrieval of the content but also for providing meaningful visualizations and new experiences for users. Lately, adding accurate geographical information that is relevant to the content of texts, images or videos has become of paramount importance not only to applications that seek to address the so-called "placing task" but also to tools aimed at visualizing the spatial features of texts. When performed manually, geo-tagging is a costly and time-consuming endeavour. To overcome this obstacle, domain-and language-specific tools for geotagging are required, that is, tools to automatically disambiguate names of localities, identify locations and geotag texts, images, audio, or video. In this regard, there is a need for hand-crafted quality datasets that are applicable for training and evaluating purposes. Our work seeks to address the above issues. We will, therefore, present an infrastructure aimed at providing a multi-faceted experience to visitors of Northern Greece using mythology as a starting point. This infrastructure comprises primarily a multi-lingual and multi-modal dataset (that is a corpus of textual data supplemented with images and videos) that belongs to the humanities domain; the corpus bears various annotations including geo-tagging. The backbone of the infrastructure is a content management system that facilitates advanced indexing, linking, and search functionalities. On top of this infrastructure, a tool creates sightseeing scenarios, i.e., itineraries for users based on their preferences. We will present the corpus itself focusing on the content and the steps taken towards rendering it accessible via the content management system in a way that also facilitates useful visualizations and human-centered applications.</p&gt