Literary and Linguistic Computing - recent issues

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

Introduction

Flanders, J., Unwalla, F., Shillingsburg, P. — 2009-04-13

Editing Environments: The Architecture of Electronic Texts

Fraistat, N., Jones, S. E. — 2009-04-13

Immersive multimedia performances, especially in the theater, installation art, and computer games, suggest to us interesting models for reconceiving the possibilities of textual editing in digital media. Traditionally, textual editions have taken different forms for different audiences of readers. Editing protocols, including the critical apparatus, are determined in part by those forms. Mostly this has meant conceiving of a given text as produced for a scholarly, classroom, or popular audience. However different these types of editions, they share familiar textual ontologies, developed primarily over the past 200 years and based on print technology. We suggest instead that editors begin thinking of digital editions primarily as ‘editorial environments’, with spatial, temporal, procedural, performative, and participatory properties. An electronic edition is always already a virtual world. A digital edition is an electronic environment. Citing as an example our experiment in the MOO with Shelley's sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, we imagine the role of the editor as textual ecologist/dramaturge/gamemaster, maximizing the resources of digital environments.

The dank cellar of electronic texts

Shillingsburg, P. — 2009-04-13

The dank cellar surveys rather critically the litter of casualty electronic editions and the false bases and limited goals that informed so many early—that is, current—efforts; and it points hopefully to the best early, though still inadequate, efforts to provide electronic texts responsibly and with added scholarly value. It looks at some problems of representing Victorian fiction.

How to teach your edition how to swim

Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. — 2009-04-13

The mutability of electronic editions confronts editors with a new world, in which large parts of current editorial theory must be re-thought, based as it often is on assumptions based on the properties of paper editions. Software can adapt more easily than paper to the needs and interests of the reader, which means many choices about the selection of information in an edition and its presentation to the reader no longer need to be fixed for all time, but can be left open for the reader. Software also tends to have a very short lifetime compared to paper; in order to remain usable for more than a few years, electronic editions must find ways of representing the essential information of the edition in software-independent, non-proprietary ways.

What text really is not, and why editors have to learn to swim

Robinson, P. — 2009-04-13

This article attempts to ask some fundamental questions about editing in the digital age, and give some answers to these questions. It is argued that a concentration on digital methods, for themselves, may neglect the base questions facing any editor: why is the editor making this edition; from whom is the editor making this edition? Indeed, in some respects thinking about text encoding for digital purposes has been built on assumptions which are, for editors, simply wrong. In particular, the concept of what ‘text’ is, upon which (for instance) the Text Encoding Initiative principles are based (what Renear calls ‘realist’), is positivist, overconfident, simplistic and neglects the materiality of actual text instances. This view is opposed by what Renear calls ‘anti-realism’: texts do not have an independent existence, but are constructed by individual and collective acts of perception. In concrete terms, ‘anti-realism’ sees editions as made to serve the needs of the reader, as acts of interpretation and not as representations of some concrete reality: this is Pichler's view of the Wittgenstein transcripts, and the author's views of the Canterbury Tales project transcripts. However, it is argued that both realist and anti-realist extremes are dangerous: ‘realism’ can lead to editions which are arrogant and out-of-touch; anti-realism to editions which are reductionist and etiolated. In place of either extreme, we should substitute a different aim: to challenge readers to make new texts for themselves as they read, by finding new ways of presenting material so that both we editors and those who use our editions become better readers.

Data and Wisdom: Electronic Editing and the Quantification of Knowledge

Flanders, J. — 2009-04-13

The concept of data in the humanistic academy carries a heavy cultural freight: as a reductionist yet efficient representation of complex textual significance. Far from being an invention of the digital age, this conception of the role of quantification has a prehistory whose terms continue to resonate in modern debates about digital editing and digitally mediated scholarship. This essay explores these terms and the anxieties they reflect, concluding that digital representation is no less textually and methodologically rich, and no less a production of knowledge, than its print counterpart.

Access

Lavagnino, J. — 2009-04-13

Digital editions have some distinct features that are not present in digital libraries. Therefore it is somewhat worrisome that there are far more digital libraries than digital editions. This essay argues that the reason for this is not only a pressure towards all-inclusiveness but also the fact that scholarly editions are addressing both scholars and common readers, each of them having their own expectations of what a digital edition should actually offer. The essay suggests that we should get away from the idea of access to data as the principal merit of the edition and suggests a model of criticism instead, meaning that editors should represent their work as providing critical points of view on the texts they are offering, with their actual contents thrown in.

Describing, transcribing, encoding, and editing modern correspondence material: a textbase approach

Vanhoutte, E., den Branden, R. V. — 2009-04-13

While letters and correspondence materials serve as (in)valuable sources of information for historians, philologists, (socio-)linguists, biographers, and textual critics, modern editorial theory merely assigns them a secondary role. Contrary to this traditional documentary view, the authors of this article argue for a treatment of epistolary materials as primary sources in their own right. They propose a generalized text-base approach of encoded and annotated correspondence materials that can accomodate the generation of versatile user-driven electronic editions. This approach needs to address current lacunae in markup theory and practice, resulting in a lack for either provisions for the encoding of letter-specific phenomena in texts, or encoding features for such generative editions. A closer look at broader editorial theories reveals a deeper lack of understanding of the nature and hence definition of correspondence materials. The authors propose a Jakobsonian communicative definition of letters that to a great deal can be mapped onto the textual model of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The second part of this article discusses the motivation for and practical realization of Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders (DALF), a formal framework for encoding correspondence materials which is defined as a TEI customization. Its most important features for capturing detailed metadata as well as letter-specific source phenomena are analysed and discussed against the text-ontological background sketched out before.

Material text, immaterial text, and the electronic environment

Sutherland, K. — 2009-04-13

Digital modes of editing ask us to re-examine the past century of editorial theory and to situate emerging editorial approaches within this history. Using the computer as a new textual medium has brought about a renewed interest in the conditions for representation. This article concerns itself with how books and computers, respectively, represent texts, and how critical editing mediates or organizes those representations. It was written in 1997 as a critical response to J.J. McGann's essay ‘The Rationale of Hypertext’.

Back to the future: what digital editors can learn from print editorial practice

O'Donnell, D. P. — 2009-04-13

This article revisits the question of the intellectual adequacy of the print critical edition. Contemporary theory and current digital practice have encouraged editors and users of editions to dismiss various aspects of the print critical edition–particularly the reading text and the critical apparatus–as artifacts of an obsolete technology. Using database theory, the author shows how many of these basic elements in fact represent the most intellectually efficient possible way of organizing information about texts and the readings of their underlying witnesses. By recognizing the inherent sophistication of the classical model, digital editors can improve of print practice by exploiting features of the new medium that make it easier to present such data in interactive ways.

More statistical observations on speech lengths in Shakespeare's plays

Ilsemann, H. — 2009-03-02

The new drama analysis program IDAP provided charts containing frequency distributions of speech lengths in Shakespeare's plays. Following previous investigations that showed maximum values at the length of four words for plays produced after the opening of the Globe in 1599, and nine words for plays produced before 1599, the present analysis turned to the four plays The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Henry IV, 2, Much Ado About Nothing and King Henry V which already indicate changes in style. Composite curves not only characterize the four texts as transitional plays that embody the old style expressed by a maximum of nine words, but also impending changes expressed by a maximum of four words while the transition was indicated by the maximum of six words. Statistical results thus confirm the theories of stylistic and biographical changes before 1599 that James Shapiro had put down in his work 1599: A Year in the Life Of William Shakespeare. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.

Meaning and mining: the impact of implicit assumptions in data mining for the humanities

Sculley, D., Pasanek, B. M. — 2009-03-02

As the use of data mining and machine learning methods in the humanities becomes more common, it will be increasingly important to examine implicit biases, assumptions, and limitations these methods bring with them. This article makes explicit some of the foundational assumptions of machine learning methods, and presents a series of experiments as a case study and object lesson in the potential pitfalls in the use of data mining methods for hypothesis testing in literary scholarship. The worst dangers may lie in the humanist's; ability to interpret nearly any result, projecting his or her own biases into the outcome of an experiment—perhaps all the more unwittingly due to the superficial objectivity of computational methods. We argue that in the digital humanities, the standards for the initial production of evidence should be even more rigorous than in the empirical sciences because of the subjective nature of the work that follows. Thus, we conclude with a discussion of recommended best practices for making results from data mining in the humanities domain as meaningful as possible. These include methods for keeping the the boundary between computational results and subsequent interpretation as clearly delineated as possible.

An algorithm for automated authorship attribution using neural networks

Tearle, M., Taylor, K., Demuth, H. — 2009-03-02

We present an algorithm as evidence of the possibility of a truly automated stylometric authorship attribution tool, based on committees of artificial neural networks. Neural networks have an advantage over traditional statistical stylometry in that they are inherently nonlinear, and therefore can consider nonlinear interactions between stylometric variables. The algorithm presented (1) is intended to demonstrate the feasibility of an automated approach using neural networks and (2) highlights important areas for further research. We present results of two separate test experiments—Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the Federalist Papers—as a demonstration of the method's; generality. In both cases, our algorithm produces committees that correctly predict the test works, without requiring the usual precursory statistical study to determine efficacious stylometric measures.

Dante's Monarchia as a test case for the use of phylogenetic methods in stemmatic analysis

Windram, H. F., Shaw, P., Robinson, P., Howe, C. J. — 2009-03-02

Dante's Monarchia, a fourteenth century treatise on political theory which survives in 20 manuscripts and the editio princeps, has been studied extensively by scholars using traditional analytical methods to establish textual transmission. It was selected as a suitable tradition for a blind study to test the application of computer-based phylogenetic methods to the stemmatic analysis of manuscript relationships. Our results show that these methods—maximum parsimony, NeighborNet and the Supernetwork algorithm—are capable of producing stemmata in very close agreement with those produced by traditional stemmatic analysis, including the identification of texts that change exemplar in the course of copying. The phylogenetic methods can correctly indicate the affiliations both before and after the point of exemplar change. The maximum chi-squared method (developed to detect recombination in DNA sequences) is able to indicate the region of exemplar change, allowing the precise location to be ascertained by textual analysis.

Reassessing authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification

Jockers, M. L., Witten, D. M., Criddle, C. S. — 2009-03-02

Mormon prophet Joseph Smith (1805–44) claimed that more than two-dozen ancient individuals (Nephi, Mormon, Alma, etc.) living from around 2200 BC to 421 AD authored the Book of Mormon (1830), and that he translated their inscriptions into English. Later researchers who analyzed selections from the Book of Mormon concluded that differences between selections supported Smith's claim of multiple authorship and ancient origins. We offer a new approach that employs two classification techniques: ‘delta’ commonly used to determine probable authorship and ‘nearest shrunken centroid’ (NSC), a more generally applicable classifier. We use both methods to determine, on a chapter-by-chapter basis, the probability that each of seven potential authors wrote or contributed to the Book of Mormon. Five of the seven have known or alleged connections to the Book of Mormon, two do not, and were added as controls based on their thematic, linguistic, and historical similarity to the Book of Mormon. Our results indicate that likely nineteenth century contributors were Solomon Spalding, a writer of historical fantasies; Sidney Rigdon, an eloquent but perhaps unstable preacher; and Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher with editing experience. Our findings support the hypothesis that Rigdon was the main architect of the Book of Mormon and are consistent with historical evidence suggesting that he fabricated the book by adding theology to the unpublished writings of Spalding (then deceased).

Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art. * Caroline A. Jones (ed.).

Wynants, N. — 2009-03-02

Learned Love. Proceedings of the Emblem Project Utrecht Conference on Dutch Love Emblems and the Internet (November 2006) * Els Stronks and Peter Boot (eds).

Pierazzo, E. — 2009-03-02

The Virtual window: From Alberti to Microsoft. * Anne Freidberg.

Nyhan, J. — 2009-03-02

Mind Technologies. Humanities Computing and the Canadian Academic Community. * Raymond Siemens and David Moorman (eds).

Van Raemdonck, B. — 2009-03-02

Stylistics: Prospect & Retrospect. * David L. Hoover and Sharon Lattig (eds).

Luyckx, K. — 2009-03-02

Persuasive Games. The Expressive Power of Videogames. * Ian Bogost.

McDaniel, R. — 2009-03-02

Word Sense Disambiguation and WordNet Technology

Banerjee, S., Mullick, B. P. — 2009-03-02