[en] Building Bridges: Collaboration between Computer
Sciences and Media Studies in a Television Archive ProjectJasmijn Van Gorp, Utrecht University; Marc Bron, Schibsted
Abstract
[en]
This article sheds an empirical light on interdisciplinary collaboration within the
Digital Humanities by investigating the daily research practice of the Dutch Digital
Humanities-project BRIDGE. The project developed and tested methods for automatically
creating meaningful links and expanding archival television data. In the project, a
high level of collaboration was required between scholars from two different
disciplines: computer sciences and media studies. The majority of the epistemological
encounters between the two disciplines took place in the design of the developed
tools and the user studies to test the tools. The article is based on structured
conversations between the two central staff members in the project, i.e. the computer
science PhD-student and the media studies postdoctoral researcher. By unravelling the
research project as a process of confrontation, identification and acknowledgement of
situated knowledges, the article shows when and how the boundaries between the two
disciplines have been maintained, crossed and blurred. The authors point to the
benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration in the Digital Humanities,
and formulate some best practices for future Digital Humanities-projects.
[en] Narrelations — Visualizing Narrative Levels and their Correlations with Temporal PhenomenaHannah Schwan, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam; Janina Jacke, University of Hamburg; Rabea Kleymann, University of Hamburg; Jan-Erik Stange, ATLAS.ti; Marian Dörk, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam
Abstract
[en]
We present findings from interdisciplinary research at the intersection between
literary studies, information visualization, and interface design. Despite a
growing interest in text visualization among literary scholars, so far,
narrative visualizations are not designed to support the particular tasks
involved in narratological analysis and often fail to reveal nuanced
narratological features. One major outcome of our iterative research and design
process is Narrelations, a novel visualization technique specifically suited for
analyzing and interpreting narrative levels of a story and temporal aspects of
its narrative representation. The visualization provides an overview of the
nesting and distribution of narrative levels, integrates the representation of
temporal phenomena, and facilitates the examination of correlations between
these aspects. With this research we explore how collaboratively designed visual
encodings and interaction techniques may allow for an insightful analysis at a
high level coupled with a close inspection of text passages. We discuss prior
work relevant to our research objectives and explain the specific
characteristics of narrative levels and temporal aspects of narrative
representation. After describing the research process and design principles, we
apply the visualization on a test corpus of eight annotated German short stories
and demonstrate its heuristic value for literary analyses and interpretations.
In particular, we explore the intricate connections between the literary content
of the novellas and their narrative form.
[en] Textension: Digitally Augmenting Document Spaces
in Analog TextsAdam James Bradley, Ontario Tech University; Victor Sawal, Ontario Tech University; Sheelagh Carpendale, University of Calgary; Christopher Collins, Ontario Tech University
Abstract
[en]
In this paper, we present a system that automatically adds visualizations and
natural language processing applications to analog texts, using any web-based
device with a camera. After taking a picture of a particular page or set of
pages from a book or uploading an existing image, our system builds an
interactive digital object that automatically inserts modular elements in a
digital space. Leveraging the findings of previous studies, our framework
augments the reading of analog texts with digital tools, making it possible to
work with texts in both a digital and analog environment.
[en] Building the Women in Book
History Bibliography, or Digital Enumerative Bibliography as
Preservation of Feminist Labor.Cait Coker, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Kate Ozment, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Abstract
[en]
This article articulates a digital adaptation of enumerative bibliography and
argues for its recuperative potential in feminist literary history. Digital
enumerative bibliography uses bibliographical structures within a relational
database that allows researchers to track more relevant metadata such as
geographical location of subject matter, language, and time period. Whereas
traditional enumerative bibliographies use a hierarchy of textual data, a
relational database creates a nexus that facilitates new kinds of research
queries. As an example, we offer our digital project the Women in Book History Bibliography and use its 1,550 citations as a
dataset to trace what is women’s book history. We then advocate for digital
enumerative bibliography as a form of feminist recovery efforts that recovers
not only primary texts but scholarship about them.
[en] DH Moments, Caribbean Considerations: On
Reaction, Response, and Relevance in the Digital HumanitiesKelly Baker Josephs, York College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Abstract
[en]
This essay was written specifically for NYCDHWeek 2018, the theme of which was
DH in the Moment: Reaction, Response,
Relevance. The author examines how we define digital humanities
activism and how we frame its histories. Relying primarily on examples from
Caribbean-oriented digital work, the author argues for a broad definition of DH
activism that allows for a variety of projects and intended audiences. In
particular, the essay responds to the tendency to focus on “DH in the
moment” (projects that can be done quickly and yield a high social
impact) as the primary form of activism, arguing that alongside such projects we
include as activist projects that have a more cumulative and less immediate
effect. Recently, we have begun to ask not just what the digital humanities
does, but what the digital humanities does for others. This essay considers why
it is that this has become a key question in this DH moment.
[en] A Model of Versions and LayersDesmond Schmidt, Charles Harpur Critical Archive
Abstract
[en]
Our libraries are full of manuscripts, many of them modern. However, the
digitisation of these unique documents is currently very expensive. How can
we reduce the cost of encoding them in a way that will facilitate their
study, annotation, searching, sharing, editing, comparison and reading over
the Web? Unlike new documents prepared for the Web, historical manuscripts
frequently contain internal variation in the form of erasures, insertions,
substitutions and transpositions. Variation is also often expressed
externally between copies of one work: in successive print editions, in
manuscript copies or successive drafts. Current practice is to prepare
separate transcriptions of each physical document and to embed internal
variation directly into the transcribed text using complex markup codes.
This makes the transcriptions expensive to produce and hard to edit, limits
text reuse and requires that transcriptions be first disentangled via
customised software for reading, searching, or comparison.
An alternative approach, described here, is to separate out the internal
variation of each document into notional layers. This is done primarily in
order to facilitate the recording of revisions at any one point. The move
is, of course, counter-intuitive since these document-wide layers were not
intended by the author as texts to be read. But it proves itself in practice
by radically simplifying the tasks of editing, searching and comparison.
Versions, on the other hand, are higher-level constructs that do represent
the state of a text as it was left at some point in time by an author or
scribe.
By employing layers to record complex revisions, the task of computing
differences among intra-document layers and against versions of the same
work in multiple documents may be delegated to the machine rather than
having to be recorded laboriously by hand. The ensuing simplification of
markup reduces transcription and editing costs, boosts text reuse and
searching, and, by removing the need for customised software, increases the
longevity of digital transcriptions.
[en] Manual Annotation of Unsupervised Models: Close
and Distant Reading of Politics on RedditChristoph Aurnhammer, Department of Language Sciene and Technology, Saarland University; Iris Cuppen, Bakken & Bæck; Inge van de Ven, Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences; Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa
Abstract
[en]
This article offers a methodological contribution to manually-assisted topic
modeling. With the availability of vast amounts of (online) texts, performing
full scale literary analysis using a close reading approach is not practically
feasible. The set of alternatives proposed by Franco Moretti (2000) under the
umbrella term of “distant reading” aims to show broad patterns that can be
found throughout the entire text collection. After a survey of literary-critical
practices that combine close and distant reading methods, we use manual
annotations of a thread on Reddit, both to evaluate an LDA model, and to provide
information that topic modeling lacks. We also make a case for applying these
reading techniques that originate in literary reading more broadly to online,
non-literary contexts. Given a large collection of posts from a Reddit thread,
we compare a manual, close reading analysis against an automatic, computational
distant reading approach based on topic modeling using LDA. For each text in the
collection, we label the contents, effectively clustering related texts. Next,
we evaluate the similarity of the respective outcomes of the two approaches. Our
results show that the computational content/topic-based labeling partially
overlaps with the manual annotation. However, the close reading approach not
only identifies texts with similar content, but also those with similar
function. The differences in annotation approaches require rethinking the
purpose of computational techniques in reading analysis. Thus, we present a
model that could be valuable for scholars who have a small amount of manual
annotation that could be used to tune an unsupervised model of a larger
dataset.
[en] Dendrography and Art History: a
computer-assisted analysis of Cézanne’s Bathers.Melinda Weinstein, Lawrence Technological University; Edward Voss, University of Iowa; David Soll, University of Iowa
Abstract
[en]
Using DIAS and DENDRON, computer applications designed for the study of
infectious fungi and cancer cells, we forge a connection in color, composition,
and theme between Paolo Veronese’s Les Noces de
Cana and Paul Cézanne’s Baigneuse debout,
s’essuyant les cheveux. From this connection, we bring to light a
“hidden” compositional structure, heretofore
unidentified, in Cézanne’s Bathers as a series. Using computer-assisted systems
such as DIAS and DENDRON allowed us to detect relatedness in these paintings not
necessarily visible to the human eye. With DIAS and DENDRON, we generated
dendrograms that clustered paintings related in brightness, saturation,
complexity, and color. After studying color, we applied DIAS to the study of
Cézanne’s composition. Because Cézanne expressed Neoplatonic ideals regarding
paintings in his conversations and letters, we programmed DIAS to compute axial
lines and “golden sections” according to the dimensions of
the square or rectangular painting under scrutiny. Using DIAS we identified the
golden rectangle for Veronese’s Les Noces de Cana,
Cézanne’s Baigneuse debout, s’essuyant les cheveux
and Ingres’ La Source (another likely model for
Baigneuse debout, s’essuyant les cheveux). From
the similarities and differences between the three paintings we identified,
regarding their use of axial symmetry and the golden section, we have formulated
a new approach to “seeing” Cézanne’s composition in his
Bather series. Cézanne’s noumenal bodies, formerly perceived as
“awkward” and composed with “baffling
imbalance,” we can now see as “golden.”
[en] “These Violent Delights”: A Review of Timothy J. Welsh’s Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of FictionCara Marta Messina, Northeastern University
Abstract
[en]
Timothy J. Welsh’s monograph Mixed
Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction sets out to construct a new
methodology, mixed realism, which analyzes the material
consequences and experiences that occur from users’ interaction with virtuality and
texts. This methodology centers the user, asking the user to reflect on and
recognize their individual, social, and contextual positions as they consume texts
as well as take responsibility for their interpretations of the narratives.
