Literary and Linguistic Computing - current issue

Introduction

Ore, E. S., Gallet-Blanchard, L., Opas-Hanninen, L. L. — 2008-03-14

Developing Integrated Editions of Minority Language Dictionaries: The Irish Example

Nyhan, J. — 2008-03-14

The Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT) project at University College Cork is an on-line corpus of multilingual texts that are encoded in TEI conformant SGML/XML. As of September 2006, the corpus has 9.3 million words online. Over the last five years, doctoral work carried out at the project has focused on the development of lexicographical resources spanning the years c. AD 700–1700, and on the development of tools to integrate the corpus with these resources. This research has been further complimented by the Linking Dictionaries and Text project, a North–South Ireland collaboration between the University of Ulster, Coleraine, and University College Cork. The Linking Dictionaries and Text project will reach completion in October 2006. This article focuses on CELT's latest research project, the Digital Dinneen project, that aims to create an integrated edition of Patrick S. Dinneen's Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla (Irish-English Dictionary). In this article, the newly developed research infrastructure—that is the culmination of the doctoral research carried out at CELT and the Linking Dictionaries and Text collaboration—will be described, and ways that the Digital Dinneen will be integrated into this infrastructure established. Finally, avenues of future research will be pointed to.

Cross-collection Searching: A Pandora's Box or the Holy Grail?

Schreibman, S., Roper, J. O., Gueguen, G. — 2008-03-14

As digital libraries have expanded to absorb existing collections as well as to create new ones, it has become clear that cross collection discovery is not simply desirable, but is increasingly a necessity demanded by users. Similarly, in the digital humanities community, thematic research collections once distinct from one another now would seem to benefit from interoperability. However, efforts to aggregate disparate resources are often stymied by differing metadata schema and controlled vocabulary. Using the lessons learned from the Thomas MacGreevy Archive, The University of Maryland Libraries designed its digital repository to provide for discovery across object types and collections using Fedora as the underlying architecture. To facilitate access to multiple collections within one repository, University of Maryland developed a flexible metadata standard. This metadata schema is used to describe varying types of materials at varying levels of granularity, while allowing for controlled vocabularies appropriate to specific collections.

The Exhibition Problem. A Real-life Example with a Suggested Solution

Eide, O. — 2008-03-14

As the number of scholarly encoded digital texts is increasing, creating models of these kinds of texts with the help of digital tools is becoming more and more interesting. In connection with this type of work, it is important to have a clear understanding of what these particular models are based on. They will clearly be based on certain readings of the source texts, but we need to keep track of the relationships between the texts, readings of the texts and the models based on such readings.

In this article, a problem of potentially great significance for this kind of modelling is discussed. The problem is called the exhibition problem and is based on the difference in ordinary linguistic communication between asserting a fact, e.g. that a certain person has a certain name, and exhibiting the same fact. In many cases, the latter is modelled as if it was the former. As a solution to this problem, an event-oriented modelling method is proposed.

The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship

Jessop, M. — 2008-03-14

Information about place and location is an essential part of research in the humanities. There are many ways that methods and tools for structuring, visualizing and analysing space, spatial behaviour, and spatial relationships can benefit humanities research but the use of spatial information in digital scholarship by humanists remains very limited. The developing role of the study of place and location through geographical information systems (GIS) and other digital tools is discussed briefly before examining the factors that are inhibiting the use of spatial data in our research. The influences of current research practice and the attitudes of scholarly institutions in the humanities are examined. This article will explore some of the potential research applications but, possibly more importantly; it will also examine why that potential is being developed so slowly and discuss a possible way forward for the community.

BE and HAVE: Qualities and Shortcomings

Labrosse, P. — 2008-03-14

This article examines the hypothesis that a speaker uses the HAVE + noun construction when (s)he wants to express somebody's positive qualities. This hypothesis was tested with two different corpora using two different retrieval programs. The numerous steps that are necessary show that it can take a considerable amount of time to reach sound conclusions and suggests the need to improve the building of those corpora or their retrieval software programs. ² and z-score tests were used to analyse the results. The above hypothesis proves to be too strong: although the verb HAVE is never significantly associated more frequently with shortcomings, the verb BE is sometimes associated more frequently with qualities. The lists of qualities and shortcomings expressed with HAVE or with BE show that BE collocates with a wider range of qualities than shortcomings. These lists also indicate that the qualities often quoted by the theoretical linguist are not those most frequently found in corpora. They also point to differences between the qualities that collocate with HAVE and those that collocate with BE. The use of corpora enabled me to widen the range of qualities or shortcomings that are said to collocate with HAVE or BE, and revealed that, contrary to the hypothesis, the HAVE + noun construction can apply to inanimate subject referents.

The Identification of Spelling Variants in English and German Historical Texts: Manual or Automatic?

Pilz, T., Ernst-Gerlach, A., Kempken, S., Rayson, P., Archer, D. — 2008-03-14

In this article, we describe the respective approaches we have taken when addressing issues of spelling variation in German and English historical texts. More specifically, we describe an experiment to evaluate automatic techniques for the development of letter replacement heuristics against manually created gold standards of known letter replacements rules. As will become clear, the motivation for the research differs according to the team of researchers: the German researchers are seeking to develop a search engine for historical texts; the English researchers want to improve the results obtained when applying corpus linguistic techniques (developed for modern language) to historical data. However, the respective teams do share a longer term goal of assessing whether it is possible to develop a generic spelling detection tool for Indo-European languages.

Killer Applications in Digital Humanities

Juola, P. — 2008-03-14

The emerging discipline of ‘digital humanities’ has been plagued by a perceived neglect on the part of the broader humanities community. The community as a whole tends not to be aware of the tools developed by DH practitioners (as documented by the recent surveys by Siemens et al.), and tends not to take seriously many of the results of scholarship obtained by DH methods and tools. This article argues for a focus on deliverable results in the form of useful solutions to common problems that humanities scholars share, instead of simply new representations. The question to address is what needs the humanities community has that can be dealt with using DH tools and techniques, or equivalently what incentive humanists have to take up and to use new methods. This can be treated in some respects like the computational quest for the ‘killer application’—a need of the user group that can be filled, and by filling it, create an acceptance of that tool and the supporting methods/results. Some definitions and examples are provided both to illustrate the idea and to support why this is necessary. The apparent alternative is the status quo, where digital research tools are brilliantly developed, only to languish in neglect and disuse.

If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data

Warwick, C., Terras, M., Huntington, P., Pappa, N. — 2008-03-14

There are now many online, digital resources in the humanities, and their creation is funded by various governmental, academic, and philanthropic sources. What happens to these resources after completion is very poorly understood. No systematic survey of digital resource usage in the humanities has ever been undertaken—and the factors for use and non-use of digital resources are unknown. The LAIRAH (Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities) Project is a 15-month long study into the factors which determine long-term use and neglect of digital resources in the Arts and Humanities. Using quantitative Deep Log Analysis techniques to understand real-time user behaviour and qualitative user workshops to gain an understanding of user approaches to digital resources in the arts and humanities, the study identifies factors that may predispose a digital resource to become used or neglected in the long-term. This article provides an overview of the techniques used in the LAIRAH project, and presents some preliminary results that may be of use to both the creators of digital resources in the humanities, and the funders of these projects, to ensure that significant intellectual effort and time, and financial resources, are not wasted in the creation of projects that are then neglected by the user community.

Digital Humanities 2006: When Two Became Many

Archer, D. — 2008-03-14

Computer Models of Musical Creativity: A Review of Computer Models of Musical Creativity by David Cope

Wiggins, G. A. — 2008-03-14

Electronic Textual Editing. Lou Burnard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and John Unsworth (eds).

Van Raemdonck, B. — 2008-03-14

The Future of the Book in the Digital Age. Bill Cope and Angus Phillips (eds).

Deegan, M. — 2008-03-14

Corpus Linguistics 25 Years on. * Facchinetti, Roberta (ed.).

De Pauw, G. — 2008-03-14

Corpus Linguistics Beyond the Word-Corpus Research from Phrase to Discourse. * Eileen Fitzpatrick (ed.).

Luyckx, K. — 2008-03-14

Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. * Siegfried Zielinski. Translated by Gloria Custance.

McCarty, W. — 2008-03-14

New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. * Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (eds).

Hesemeier, S. — 2008-03-14