Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Gate City: A History of Omaha\u3c/i\u3e By Lawrence H. Larsen and Barbara J. Cottrell

This work, the fourth volume in Pruett Publishing Company\u27s Western Urban History Series, is a survey of the history of Omaha from its founding in 1853-1854 to 1980. It is the third general history of Omaha to be published since 1980 and is the first to give any relatively significant treatment to the city\u27s history in the post-World War II era. Larsen and Cottrell divide their narrative into ten chapters that cover five periods, each from twenty to thirty years. The narrative of fewer than three hundred pages, including a large number of photos, is synoptic and fast. paced, and extensive details are used only to illustrate essential points about Omaha\u27s development. The emphasis is upon economic and social trends in each of the five periods. For the most part, politics and politicians do not 100m large in The Gate City, although ample space is given to Boss Tom Dennison and his era in the early twentieth century. This is as it should be, for local political figures normally have not been primarily responsible for the most critical decisions in Omaha\u27s history. Persons, particularly business leaders, who were crucial in shaping the development of Omaha, or whose lives illustrate an important facet of the city\u27s past, receive due attention. One of the best features of this book is that it carefully relates the economic history of Omaha to economic conditions in Nebraska. Aside from seeking to interpret the life of the city in the context of its trade area, the authors have shown the impact of other external forces, such as the federal government, in molding the community. Anyone familiar with the history of Omaha will find little new information in The Gate City, yet the integration of local history with broader currents enhances its potential readership. The authors make extensive use of unpublished as well as published materials and their bibliographical essays for each chapter are excellent. Although the book is well illustrated, the quality of reproduction of many of the photographs could be better. Moreover, the inclusion of some maps showing Omaha\u27s growth and its economic and ethnic concentrations would have enhanced the volume. There are some factual errors, but these are generally minor and do not seriously detract from this fine study

Guest Editors’ Note

With this inaugural issue of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, we are happy to present selected papers from TEI Conference and Members’ Meetings held in 2008 and 2009. In 2007, the TEI Consortium expanded its members’ meetings to a full conference format. At the 2008 and 2009 conferences there was great variety in the topics presented and discussed among approximately 100 participants from around the world at each event, reflecting the broad range of the TEI community. While a sin..

Reading Environments for Genetic Editions

This paper discusses the state-of-the-art in digital “genetic” editing, that is the philological analysis (and presentation) of the processes behind the creation of literary texts. Research on such processes is mainly based on draft manuscripts or typescripts that authors have left behind intentionally or accidentally. Creative note-taking, revisions, proof-readings, cross-linkings and additional material makes them a complex and interwoven set of data requiring specific analytic tools and reading and research environments for both general and specialist readers and users to understand them better. The paper traces the idea of pre-electronic genetic editing and the significant changes it is undergoing in the digital era. It compares two editorial projects on renowned authors, one in print and one digital: the so-called ‘Frankfurt edition’ of Friedrich Hölderlin, and the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. The paper discusses these in particular as “reading environments” (or user interfaces) designed for “critically experiencing” authorial writing processes in both the print and the digital medium

The Present and Future of the TEI Community for Manuscript Encoding

This article provides a detailed analysis of the current state, needs, and desires of members of the TEI community working with manuscript material, based on the results of a survey carried out by the authors. An analysis of the survey results provides insights into the practices, problems, and limitations of the community utilizing the TEI for manuscript encoding. The results demonstrate the existence of a steep learning curve for the TEI, where many practitioners are self-taught and where learning-by-doing dominates; there exists a long gap between the first encounter with the TEI and its actual use in projects. Survey results highlight the need for user-friendly, bespoke tools facilitating the processing, analysis, and publishing of TEI-encoded texts. Feedback on the Guidelines themselves reveals aspects that do not fully meet the needs of those encoding manuscript material. To better address these needs, a strengthening of the Special Interest Groups is proposed

Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits

This manifesto documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 ‘Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits’. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and me- dieval documents, with computerised tools, particularly those developed for analysis of digital images and text mining. The goal of this marriage of disciplines is to provide e cient solutions to time and labor consuming palaeographic tasks. It furthermore attempts to provide scholars with quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, consequently facilitating a better understanding of our cultural heritage through the unique perspective of ancient and medieval documents. The workshop provided a vital opportunity for palaeographers to interact and discuss the potential of digital methods with computer scientists specialising in machine vision and statistical data analysis. This was essential not only in suggesting new directions and ideas for improving palaeographic research, but also in identifying questions which scholars working individually, in their respective elds, would not have asked without directly communicating with colleagues from outside their research community

Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative - Selected Papers from the 2011 TEI Conference

International audienceThe special issue contains a selection of papers from the TEI conference in Würzburg, 2011

Visualizing the Evolution of Historical Networks Using Graphs and Matrices

History and methodologically similar disciplines present interesting conceptual problems for network visualization. The evolution of a network over time is a dif-ficult process to visualize because the complex notions of time used in historical disciplines are not reducible to chronological time, a concept often implicit in scientific models of dynamic networks. Further, historical and humanistic datasets do not always contain time stamps that are as accurate or as detailed as those in most contemporary datasets; thus, a sequential model of time with variable tem-poral units is more generally appropriate than a set chronometric one. Finally, more than one agent’s perspective on the evolution of a network is often con-tained in one historical account of an event or series of events. In this article, we present a theory and a method for visualizing historical networks. We propose an agent-perspective-time matrix that allows researchers to compare the state of the network at various times and from various perspectives. In our method for creat-ing network diagrams, we use graphs and graphs-within-matrices to represent time-varying dynamic networks, with or without time-stamped data and with or without multiple perspectives. We present a method for coloring nodes and edges automatically according to whether they persist, disappear, or emerge between two points in time. We discuss how these network diagrams can be placed in ma-trices to compare the network at several points in time. Finally, we show how different perspectives on the evolution of the network can be visualized by placing network diagrams within a multi-perspectival 3D matrix online or on paper. Using examples from German history, we supply visualizations for each case study and commentaries on how these visualizations can be used

From digital archive to digital edition

Contemporary techniques allow us to handle some 100.000 pages of digitized manuscripts. If it is possible to bring collections of this size at low costs to the desktop of the researcher, the environment of historical research will change fundamentally. To explore these possibilities the Duderstadt Municipal Archive (Stadtarchiv Duderstadt, Germany) and the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen started a project in 1996. This project aims at developing a computerised version of the files of an entire archive. The older records of the archive are completely digitized and then put at the user's disposal together with registers. The aim is to create a research System which offers not only access to the sources in a way which preserves the originals, but also many facilities for the researcher that go beyond the ordinary work with originals. The second part of this paper goes to the opposite extreme. The possibility of integrating information into a database system opens completely new approaches to the source that can go far beyond a single text. Apart from visualizing information that Gould never he represented in a printed edition, the dynamic digital edition gives access to the various readings of a manuscript and thus deals with the aspects of the source's tradition. A software tool has been developed which supports the creation of digital editions to be build upon digitized collections, such as the one we present here. This project would not exist without the generous sponsoring of the Volkswagen-Stiftung

Uncertainty in humanities network visualization

Network visualization is one of the most widely used tools in digital humanities research. The idea of uncertain or “fuzzy” data is also a core notion in digital humanities research. Yet network visualizations in digital humanities do not always prominently represent uncertainty. In this article, we present a mathematical and logical model of uncertainty as a range of values which can be used in network visualizations. We review some of the principles for visualizing uncertainty of different kinds, visual variables that can be used for representing uncertainty, and how these variables have been used to represent different data types in visualizations drawn from a range of non-humanities fields like climate science and bioinformatics. We then provide examples of two diagrams: one in which the variables displaying degrees of uncertainty are integrated/pinto the graph and one in which glyphs are added to represent data certainty and uncertainty. Finally, we discuss how probabilistic data and what-if scenarios could be used to expand the representation of uncertainty in humanities network visualizations