The paper discusses an ongoing study of Latvian poetry of the 20th and 21st century, explains its... more The paper discusses an ongoing study of Latvian poetry of the 20th and 21st century, explains its methodology and interprets some preliminary results. The aim of the study is to explore the dynamics of usage of common poetic concepts (such as natural phenomena, concepts of emotions etc.) and look for other patterns of lexical and semantic change that have occurred in the course of time. The study is conducted by statistically analysing a digital corpus of Latvian poetry. The paper shortly discusses current trends in digital humanities and argues that, although computational methods can prove to be forbiddingly difficult to use, there are tools that are comparatively accessible even without prior training in computer programming. In addition to that, even simple inquiries in the statistics of word usage can provide interesting results and allow building a case for further research. Three computational tools have been used for this paper—Stylo package for stylometric analysis, web-bas...
In 2014, the National Library of Latvia (NLL) relocated to a new building, the Castle of Light / ... more In 2014, the National Library of Latvia (NLL) relocated to a new building, the Castle of Light / Gaismas pils, which brought together five former sites. The long-awaited new building significantly improved both the conditions for preservation of the collections and the reader services. The Castle provides spacious and cosy reading rooms as well as many individual and group work carrels and training spaces. Furthermore, the building features conference and concert facilities, exhibition rooms and other event spaces, providing a performance platform for the events of the Library and other institutions. The Castle of Light has become an icon of the city and encompasses many current trends of contemporary philosophy of library buildings: it is open, lucid, technologically abundant, multifunctional, flexible and extraordinary. Meanwhile the NLL explores the strategies of balancing traditional library services and event management.
Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications
The paper presents the results of a study on the dissemination of socio-political and aesthetic i... more The paper presents the results of a study on the dissemination of socio-political and aesthetic ideas of Socialist Realism doctrine in the Latvian periodicals Literature and Art (LitArt) and The Flag. Several programmatic, ideologically saturated articles that were published in The Flag in the 1940s were compared to the rest of the corpus to explore the proliferation and persistence of similar ideas in the course of following decades. Authors have employed methodologies commonly used for plagiarism detection: fingerprinting and the comparison of document similarity based on word embeddings and document similarity measures. In particular, three perspectives were used to examine the similarity and reuse of texts: comparison of matching 5-grams processed by the winnowing algorithm and comparison of documents based on the TF-IDF and Doc2Vec embeddings and cosine similarity metrics. To facilitate the analysis, the results were loaded in the open-source version of Neo4j graph database. Th...
Aktuālas problēmas literatūras un kultūras pētniecībā, Mar 10, 2022
The notions of richness of language and richness of the vocabulary are characteristics that are o... more The notions of richness of language and richness of the vocabulary are characteristics that are often mentioned in the context of practical literary criticism, however, from the theoretical standpoint, the precise meaning of these terms is not clear. Considering that this area of research is not well known in Latvia, the paper first outlines the field of study of vocabulary richness and lexical diversity and maps out the challenges that are related to it, including issues pertaining to selecting the focus and methodology of the study, selecting data, and evaluating the quality of data. Furthermore, the interpretation of the results of the analysis of lexical diversity is discussed, arguing that the vocabulary richness of a literary work does not necessarily indicate only the level of language competencies and artistic skill, it can also be interpreted as a trait of a literary genre or a subject of the artistic choice. Two methods of accounting for lexical diversity are analysed more closely – mean segmental type-token ratio (MSTTR) and moving window type-token ratio distribution (MWTTRD); the main idea and application, as well the place of these approaches among other methods are explained. To conduct the test study, the authors are using a small corpus that entails six Latvian prose writers – Alberts Bels, Augusts Deglavs, Regīna Ezera, Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš, Ivande Kaija, and Zigmunds Skujiņš. In the course of the study it is established that higher values of lexical diversity are achieved by the authors who represent more recent generation – Skujiņš, Ezera, Bels. To suggest further possibilities of employment of these methods in the studies of the stylistics of literary prose, the authors of the paper turn attention towards the diversity of adjectives in the works of the corpus. The MSTTR and MWTTDR of adjectives are measured; the percentage of adjectives that are shared by all authors and the percentage of unique adjectives for each author are being calculated. In conclusion, further developments of quantitative and qualitative digital analysis of prose texts are being suggested.
These are the slides for the LIBER 2021 Session Search & Retrieval: Next Generation Information S... more These are the slides for the LIBER 2021 Session Search & Retrieval: Next Generation Information Services This session will be chaired by Karine Bacher-Eyroi, Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, France <strong>Towards modelling text mining services for digital collections: the case of Latvian Prose Counter</strong>, Anda Baklāne, Valdis Saulespurēns, National Library of Latvia <strong>Creating gold standards and supervising outcomes – the future role of library staff in supporting information services based on Machine Learning</strong>, Timo Borst, ZBW Leibniz Information Center for Economics, Germany <strong>Speed talk: Connecting Open Knowledge Components to enhance searches for researchers and topics</strong>, Arben Hajra, Tamara Pianos, ZBW Leibniz Information Center for Economics, Germany <br> In the first presentation, Anda Baklāne and Valdis Saulespurēns discuss a recent paper presenting a text mining demonstration tool devel...
The paper provides insight into the programme construction of the 5 conference Digital Humanities... more The paper provides insight into the programme construction of the 5 conference Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN) that was to have taken place in Riga in March 2020 and an analysis of the DHN conferences during the last three years by exploring participant activity per country focusing primarily on the Nordic and Baltic region, their disciplinary adherence and the choice of pre-defined topics.
The paper discusses an ongoing study of Latvian poetry of the 20th and 21st century, explains its... more The paper discusses an ongoing study of Latvian poetry of the 20th and 21st century, explains its methodology and interprets some preliminary results. The aim of the study is to explore the dynamics of usage of common poetic concepts (such as natural phenomena, concepts of emotions etc.) and look for other patterns of lexical and semantic change that have occurred in the course of time. The study is conducted by statistically analysing a digital corpus of Latvian poetry. The paper shortly discusses current trends in digital humanities and argues that, although computational methods can prove to be forbiddingly difficult to use, there are tools that are comparatively accessible even without prior training in computer programming. In addition to that, even simple inquiries in the statistics of word usage can provide interesting results and allow building a case for further research. Three computational tools have been used for this paper—Stylo package for stylometric analysis, web-bas...
In 2014, the National Library of Latvia (NLL) relocated to a new building, the Castle of Light / ... more In 2014, the National Library of Latvia (NLL) relocated to a new building, the Castle of Light / Gaismas pils, which brought together five former sites. The long-awaited new building significantly improved both the conditions for preservation of the collections and the reader services. The Castle provides spacious and cosy reading rooms as well as many individual and group work carrels and training spaces. Furthermore, the building features conference and concert facilities, exhibition rooms and other event spaces, providing a performance platform for the events of the Library and other institutions. The Castle of Light has become an icon of the city and encompasses many current trends of contemporary philosophy of library buildings: it is open, lucid, technologically abundant, multifunctional, flexible and extraordinary. Meanwhile the NLL explores the strategies of balancing traditional library services and event management.
Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications
The paper presents the results of a study on the dissemination of socio-political and aesthetic i... more The paper presents the results of a study on the dissemination of socio-political and aesthetic ideas of Socialist Realism doctrine in the Latvian periodicals Literature and Art (LitArt) and The Flag. Several programmatic, ideologically saturated articles that were published in The Flag in the 1940s were compared to the rest of the corpus to explore the proliferation and persistence of similar ideas in the course of following decades. Authors have employed methodologies commonly used for plagiarism detection: fingerprinting and the comparison of document similarity based on word embeddings and document similarity measures. In particular, three perspectives were used to examine the similarity and reuse of texts: comparison of matching 5-grams processed by the winnowing algorithm and comparison of documents based on the TF-IDF and Doc2Vec embeddings and cosine similarity metrics. To facilitate the analysis, the results were loaded in the open-source version of Neo4j graph database. Th...
Aktuālas problēmas literatūras un kultūras pētniecībā, Mar 10, 2022
The notions of richness of language and richness of the vocabulary are characteristics that are o... more The notions of richness of language and richness of the vocabulary are characteristics that are often mentioned in the context of practical literary criticism, however, from the theoretical standpoint, the precise meaning of these terms is not clear. Considering that this area of research is not well known in Latvia, the paper first outlines the field of study of vocabulary richness and lexical diversity and maps out the challenges that are related to it, including issues pertaining to selecting the focus and methodology of the study, selecting data, and evaluating the quality of data. Furthermore, the interpretation of the results of the analysis of lexical diversity is discussed, arguing that the vocabulary richness of a literary work does not necessarily indicate only the level of language competencies and artistic skill, it can also be interpreted as a trait of a literary genre or a subject of the artistic choice. Two methods of accounting for lexical diversity are analysed more closely – mean segmental type-token ratio (MSTTR) and moving window type-token ratio distribution (MWTTRD); the main idea and application, as well the place of these approaches among other methods are explained. To conduct the test study, the authors are using a small corpus that entails six Latvian prose writers – Alberts Bels, Augusts Deglavs, Regīna Ezera, Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš, Ivande Kaija, and Zigmunds Skujiņš. In the course of the study it is established that higher values of lexical diversity are achieved by the authors who represent more recent generation – Skujiņš, Ezera, Bels. To suggest further possibilities of employment of these methods in the studies of the stylistics of literary prose, the authors of the paper turn attention towards the diversity of adjectives in the works of the corpus. The MSTTR and MWTTDR of adjectives are measured; the percentage of adjectives that are shared by all authors and the percentage of unique adjectives for each author are being calculated. In conclusion, further developments of quantitative and qualitative digital analysis of prose texts are being suggested.
These are the slides for the LIBER 2021 Session Search & Retrieval: Next Generation Information S... more These are the slides for the LIBER 2021 Session Search & Retrieval: Next Generation Information Services This session will be chaired by Karine Bacher-Eyroi, Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, France <strong>Towards modelling text mining services for digital collections: the case of Latvian Prose Counter</strong>, Anda Baklāne, Valdis Saulespurēns, National Library of Latvia <strong>Creating gold standards and supervising outcomes – the future role of library staff in supporting information services based on Machine Learning</strong>, Timo Borst, ZBW Leibniz Information Center for Economics, Germany <strong>Speed talk: Connecting Open Knowledge Components to enhance searches for researchers and topics</strong>, Arben Hajra, Tamara Pianos, ZBW Leibniz Information Center for Economics, Germany <br> In the first presentation, Anda Baklāne and Valdis Saulespurēns discuss a recent paper presenting a text mining demonstration tool devel...
The paper provides insight into the programme construction of the 5 conference Digital Humanities... more The paper provides insight into the programme construction of the 5 conference Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN) that was to have taken place in Riga in March 2020 and an analysis of the DHN conferences during the last three years by exploring participant activity per country focusing primarily on the Nordic and Baltic region, their disciplinary adherence and the choice of pre-defined topics.
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