Literary and Linguistic Computing - current issue

Intoduction

Opas-Hanninen, L. L., Ore, E. S., Warwick, C. — 2009-05-21

Reflecting on a dual publication: Henry III Fine Rolls print and web

Ciula, A., Lopez, T. — 2009-05-21

The Henry III Fine Rolls project is a collaborative project between the National Archives in the UK, the departments of History and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London, and the department of History and American Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. Its aim is to produce a digital and print edition of the Fine Rolls from the reign of the 13th-century English King Henry III (1216–72). At the core of the resource are the translated summaries of the fine rolls which have been encoded in TEI XML, complemented by an overarching RDF/OWL conceptual model and digital facsimiles. In this article, we reflect on the ontological complexities of a dual publication, by bringing together various theoretical frameworks. Our aim is to take inspiration from these theories and connect them to the experience of producing two objects of different materiality but of very close scope. Ultimately, we will also explain how some of these reflections have been used to design a study for evaluating the utility of this edition.

Annotated Facsimile Editions: Defining macro-level structure for image-based electronic editions

Audenaert, N., Furuta, R. — 2009-05-21

Annotated Facsimile Edition (AFED) is a high-level model for representing macro-level structure in digital facsimiles. AFED models a facsimile as a set of images with multiple orderings or collations. The structure of these collations are encoded by ‘annotations’ that define a range of images in the collation and describe the properties of the content object identified by the annotations (for example, chapter, paragraph, page, poem). Separate annotation streams encode multiple analytical perspectives, for example, the physical structure of the edition (volumes, pages, and lines) and the poetic structure (poems, titles, epigraphs, and stanzas). Annotations within a single analytical perspective—but not those from different perspectives—follow a hierarchical structure. We discuss our initial results in implementing AFED and using it to deploy a reading interface for AJAX enabled rich-client Web applications. The primary contribution of our work is a general-purpose model for representing digital facsimiles that focuses on the major conceptual structures present among the contents of documents drawn from a wide range of sources. AFED provides a highly flexible model that can serve as a substrate for developing tools designed to support visual document editing during the exploratory stages of scholarly research.

Performance as digital text: Capturing signals and secret messages in a media-rich experience

Coartney, J. S., Wiesner, S. L. — 2009-05-21

As libraries increasingly undertake digitization projects, it behooves us to consider the collection/capture, organization, preservation, and dissemination of all forms of documentation, including and beyond written text. While several libraries have funded projects which acknowledge the need to digitize other forms of text, few have extended the digital projects to include film, much less performed texts. Further, as more performing arts incorporate born-digital elements, use digital tools to create media-rich performance experiences, and look to the possibility for digital preservation of the performance text, the capture of the performance event and its born-digital artefacts must be considered. This article, then, presents a first look at the ARTeFACT project, undertaken at the University of Virginia Library in collaboration with an introductory course in Engineering and a student choreographer at Brenau University Women's College. Historical intersections of technology and dance are introduced, theoretical concerns of using technology in dance are considered, the processes involved in the creation, capture, and preservation of dance data are discussed along with the technologies used to produce an interactive dance performance.

TEI and cultural heritage ontologies: Exchange of information?

Ore, C.-E., Eide, O. — 2009-05-21

The content in information systems and virtual reconstructions in the cultural heritage sector is to a large degree directly based on information deduced from the study of texts. In many cases, even if the texts are available electronically, the links from the deduced facts to the original texts are not available and in many cases very costly to re-establish. Reproducibility of results is a core concept in text-based research as in all research. Thus, such links should be expressed explicitly in the systems and in accordance with the data standards developed in the fields of text encoding and conceptual modelling. To do this it is necessary to create a combined understanding of text encoding represented by the TEI guidelines and the understanding of conceptual models represented by initiatives like the CIDOC CRM and FRBR_oo. In this article, we study a part of this complex by comparing the expressive power of the real world descriptions TEI P5 by mapping central parts of the CIDOC CRM onto TEI P5. It is clear that the TEI P5 has moved a great step in the direction towards an event-oriented model compared with TEI P4. Our use of CIDOC CRM as a yardstick shows that the expressiveness of TEI P5 can be greatly improved by extending the scope of very restricted elements like the relation element and adding a few new elements to the TEI.

The TEI as luminol: Forensic philology in a digital age

Schlitz, S. A. — 2009-05-21

The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore forensic philology in the context of electronic text editing. Drawing primarily on the example provided by the development of a TEI P5 conformant edition of Hafgeirs saga Flateyings, an alleged Icelandic saga forgery attested in a single, unsigned eighteenth century paper manuscript, this discussion explains how literary, linguistic, and transmission-level interpretations can be employed to describe the saga text and to bear witness to its origin and transmission process. It further explains how encoding the metadata described in these interpretations beside the data described in (near)zero-level text can be accomplished without sacrificing the role of the manuscript as artefact and without sacrificing the appearance of the text as it occurs on the page.

TEI Analytics: converting documents into a TEI format for cross-collection text analysis

Pytlik Zillig, B. L. — 2009-05-21

For the purposes of large-scale analysis of XML/SGML files, converting humanities texts into a common form of markup represents a technical challenge. The MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) Project has developed both a common format, TEI Analytics (a TEI subset designed to facilitate interoperability of text archives) and a command-line tool, Abbot, that performs the conversion. Abbot relies upon a new technique, schema harvesting, developed by the author to convert text documents into TEI-A. This article has two aims: first, to describe the TEI-A format itself and, second, to outline the methods used to convert files. More generally, it is hoped that the techniques described will lead to greater interoperability of text documents for text analysis in a wider context.

Sustainability of annotated resources in linguistics: A web-platform for exploring, querying, and distributing linguistic corpora and other resources

Rehm, G., Schonefeld, O., Witt, A., Hinrichs, E., Reis, M. — 2009-05-21

We report on finished work in a project that is concerned with providing methods, tools, best practice guidelines, and solutions for sustainable linguistic resources. The article discusses several general aspects of sustainability and introduces an approach to normalizing corpus data and metadata records. Moreover, the architecture of the sustainability platform implemented by the authors is described.

iTrench: A study of user reactions to the use of information technology in field archaeology

2009-05-21

This article describes work undertaken by the VERA project to investigate how archaeologists work with information technology (IT) on excavation sites. We used a diary study to research the usual patterns of behaviour of archaeologists digging the Silchester Roman town site during the summer of 2007. Although recording had previously been undertaken using pen and paper, during the 2007 season a part of the dig was dedicated to trials of IT and archaeologists used digital pens and paper and Nokia N800 handheld PDAs to record their work. The goal of the trial was to see whether it was possible to record data from the dig whilst still on site, rather than waiting until after the excavation to enter it into the Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB) and to determine whether the archaeologists found the new technology helpful. The digital pens were a success, however, the N800s were not successful given the extreme conditions on site. Our findings confirmed that it was important that technology should fit in well with the work being undertaken rather than being used for its own sake, and should respect established work flows. We also found that the quality of data being entered was a recurrent concern as was the reliability of the infrastructure and equipment.

'It's a team if you use "reply all" ': An exploration of research teams in digital humanities environments

Siemens, L. — 2009-05-21

Given that the nature of research work involves computers and a variety of skills and expertise, Digital Humanities researchers are working collaboratively within their institutions and with others nationally and internationallly to undertake the research. This work typically involves the need to coordinate efforts between academics, undergraduate and graduate students, research assistants, computer programmers, librarians, and other individuals as well as the need to manage financial and other resources. Despite this use of collaboration, there has been little formal research on team development within this community. This article reports on a research project exploring the nature of Digital Humanities research teams. Drawing upon interviews with members of the community, a series of exemplary patterns and models of research collaboration are identified and outlined. Important themes include a definition of team which focuses on common tasks and outcomes as well as a need for responsibility and accountability to the team as a whole; elements of a successful team which include clear task definition and productive working relationships over the life of the project and beyond, a need for balance between digital and face-to-face communication and collaboration tools, and potential for more deliberate training in collaboration and team work. The article concludes with recommendations for the individual team members, project leaders, and teams.

From Common Sense to Common Knowledge. And Vice Versa

Van den Branden, R. — 2009-05-21

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. * Christine L. Borgman.

Spiro, L. — 2009-05-21

Errors and Intelligence in Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Parsers and Pedagogues. * Trude Heift and Mathias Schulze.

Nerbonne, J. — 2009-05-21