Poster Session

For 20 years, Persée has been the French operator for scientific literature heritage digitization and online dissemination. Persée currently has a 34 people team, involved in publishing, technical and scientific projects, and working over a fully-fledged paper-to-digital document processing chain. So far Persée has produced :

– a web portal (standard digital library) ;

– a triplestore (linked open metadata outlet) ;

– 5 ‘perséides’ (project-specific online corpora).

Alongside the perseides which are the result of a co-design process, Persée has been providing legacy (meta)data to digital humanists for whom data science and computational methods, not to mention AI/ML, have become standard practice. Since ‘Collections as data designed for everyone serve no one’ (The Santa Barbara Statement on Collections as Data, 2017), Persée has implemented various methods to ensure the fitness for use, including quality checks, user feedback analysis, co-design. Yet, the same questions eventually arise again: ‘Can yesterday’s data fulfil today’s researchers’ needs? What are these needs? How can we ascertain quality?’.

Taking our part in the collaboration of library science, computer science and humanities working together with digital cultural heritage (Oberbichler et al., 2022), we saw fit to extend customer study. Drawing up explicitly the Persée FAIR Implementation Profile (Schultes et al., 2020), mapping visually user types and data dissemination channels, then applying graph analysis, makes it possible to highlight critical nodes, popular use cases and intensive use areas. Moreover, modelling a typical data reuse process makes it possible to (re)locate occurrences of data friction (Edwards et al., 2011). Besides, to our knowledge, few are the summary papers about OCR quality for so called ‘downstream tasks’ (van Strien et al., 2020) in an otherwise abundant literature since Holley’s OCR accuracy categories (Holley, 2009). Setting up a dedicated process of literature review, we found that :

– some tasks, like part-of-speech tagging and NER, seem more affected by OCR quality than others ;

– the performance of a task might relate to specific ranges of OCR quality metrics, although the matter, still open to question, largely depends on the chosen task, language, metrics, and deserves to be explored further.

The introduction of graph study, process modelling and literature review has proved useful to qualify usage more accurately and to get a better scope of the corresponding quality dimensions and metrics. We argue that, for lack of a one-stop standard, such endeavours could help to :

– formulate project-specific data reuse strategies : using data ‘as-is’, counterbalancing defects with smarter processing, applying post-production corrections ;

– tackle the ubiquitous topic of data quality more effectively : finetuning supply and services, avoiding the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ effect in research projects, closing the data lifecycle by re-ingesting the research output.

For the duration of one week (22nd – 26th May 2023) the so-called ExploreSalon will offer a collaborative space to explore digitized memories, in the form of curated biographic, spatial and temporal datasets with focus on Vienna 1900. The event will be organized by the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) and supported by the CLARIAH-AT national consortium as part of its knowledge sharing activities. The ExploreSalon has two goals: Bring people of diverse backgrounds together and provide them with the opportunity to discover innovative ways of data-based storytelling – exploring stories hidden in the data, presenting ideas and sharing findings.

This poster will present the underlying concept and general workflow of this form of cultural hackathon, elaborate on challenges such as bringing together people with different backgrounds and motivate them to get creative and exchange their ideas. The results and outcomes of the individual groups formed during the ExploreSalon event will enrich and underline the presentation.

The role of metadata in scientific research cannot be overstated as it helps to organize, preserve and enhance the value and usability of vast amounts of documents, thereby improving their traceability and understanding.

Despite its importance, documenting metadata is often a time-consuming task for researchers, especially for 3D projects that contain, beyond the 3D data, all the related documents.

To prevent the loss of traceability of these resources, it is essential to simplify the metadata documentation process. The consortium “3D for Humanities”, labeled by Huma-Num since 2014, has taken major steps to tackle this challenge by researching the most effective way to document massive 3D data and simplify the 3D deposit project, both in the French National 3D Data Repository in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences which offers publication services, and at the C.I.N.E.S. (National Computer Center for Higher Education) which offers long-term archiving of electronic data.

The tedious task of documenting metadata for 3D projects highlights the need for simplification. To effectively document, it is important to not only provide information about the document itself through its metadata, but also to link project files together. Traditional web-based interfaces cannot achieve this simplification, but it can be done through specialized software.

With this in mind, the consortium “3D for Humanities”, has developed aLTAG3D, an open source software aimed to be as automated as possible to document 3D research projects and thereby reducing the amount of information that the researcher will have to fill in manually.

The software uses a graphical user interface to make documenting data for archiving and publication more user-friendly. Users simply drag and drop to construct the package, object-by-object, by attaching sources and filling in the requested metadata at all levels. Some information will be extracted automatically, while others will be filled in manually.

At the end of the process, on one hand, we get a hierarchical folder containing all the information and comprehensible data for future users and on the other hand, an XML file of the metadata, a file compatible with the archive at C.I.N.E.S. More metadata schemes may be introduced in a xsd format.

Images play an important role in archaeological research and the 3D medium is becoming increasingly popular: 3D scans of archaeological objects, geo-referenced 3D scans of structures, e.g. tombs, or reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) are increasingly likely to form one part of the digital data created in research projects or by cultural heritage institutions. 3D offers many application possibilities that can contribute significantly to knowledge acquisition. Very often, however, the resulting files are extremely large and not really suited for smooth display. The situation is further complicated by the fact that there is still no real standard for both long-term storage and dissemination of 3D images.

For a data repository such as the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH) which provides a “living archive” where data can be accessed and searched directly by humans as well as by machines, 3D images pose a series of questions and challenges.

• The original 3D-models are often several gigabytes large and their key features, the geometry, texture and possibly also animation, may come in separate files. How can such data be archived properly? Which non-proprietary formats can or should be accepted?

• To achieve interoperability and enable annotation, the goal is to have a type of IIIF dissemination. How can this be achieved from the original 3D-models?

• What open source 3D-viewer should be implemented in web applications?

In order to achieve the long-term goal of proper archiving of the original file(s) on the one hand, and the provision of a lightweight, interoperable, viewable and annotatable version of the 3D-model in the web application on the other hand, a process needs to be established that can be automated. I will present our first attempts of establishing such a workflow.

References

DaSCH Service Platform (DSP): https://www.dasch.swiss/platformcharacteristics

IIIF: https://iiif.io/

IIIF 3D Technical Specification Group : https://iiif.io/community/groups/3d/tsg/

IIIF-Prezi3: https://github.com/iiif-prezi/iiif-prezi3

The need to sustain data and outputs from research projects well beyond their initial grant-funded period is commonplace within academia, particularly so within the Humanities. We often find that these semi-active or warm data collections have value and require care beyond the life of the original hosting, system, or platform they were conceived upon. With the increasing demand to make data more open, and research funding bodies increasing requirements and time periods for which research data must remain available, institutions need to be ready to offer researchers the tools and platforms to comply. Compliance is one lens through which to view this particular challenge. Yet we believe that institutions should and can be motivated to sustain data by celebrating the research they develop, and through reaping the continued scholarly benefits and impact gained through research data being hosted and shared for as long as possible. Our poster will present practical insights into the methods employed at the University of Oxford to support digital humanities scholars (and others) safeguard their digital legacies.

We will showcase three key focus areas of ‘People’, ‘Process’ & ‘Technology’ to highlight how the Sustainable Digital Scholarship (SDS) service at Oxford is helping researchers and their projects secure the long-term future of their research data outputs:

People – Researchers are at the heart of research, as obvious as that sounds! But our data repository service has been developed and led by the needs of academics and this has helped us build a flexible approach to supporting a variety of research projects from may disciplines.

Process – The SDS service offers both a repository and also free researcher consultations, with an aim to embed better research data management processes and practices within research projects with a significant digital component at Oxford. We also have developed a methodology for assessing suitability for supporting research projects on a common / shared infrastructure.

Technology – We offer access to a ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) Open Access Repository for the curation and publication of Digital Humanities research project data and offer flexibility within our standard infrastructure that many benefits to research data hosting, compared to more archival repository solutions, or the custom-built databases and websites developed for each individual research projects.

In this demo, we will demonstrate how TEITOK [1] makes it possible and hopefully even easy to reuse cultural heritage data as data for linguistically driven research. As an example of this, we will showcase the conversion of textual data from the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) [2] into a linguistic corpus in TEITOK [3].

TEITOK is an online environment for annotated corpora – it is used to create, annotate (manually or automatically), display, and search corpora in which each corpus document is a richly annotated TEI/XML document. It can handle linguistic annotation, but also other textual metadata such as manuscript alignment, multimedia alignment, geolocation data, linked open data, etc. It has a modular design, in which each module explores the TEI/XML document(s) in a different fashion. For instance, there is a module that can exploit geolocation data to map search results onto the world map, and a module that can exploit multimedia alignment to display the annotated transcription below a waveform display of the audio.

EHRI is a European research infrastructure aiming to connect sources, institutions, and people connected to the Holocaust around the world. It hosts several digital editions, or collections of source materials, including the Begrentzte Flugt [4] collection, which brings together source material related to people fleeing across the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia after 1938.

We will show how the conversion of the Begrentzte Flugt to a TEITOK corpus [5] opens up this digital edition to a different kind of DH research. The TEITOK version of the corpus makes it possible to quickly get access to passages in the corpus mentioning specific people, places, or organisations, independently of the way they are mentioned or the languages they are mentioned in. And it makes it possible to obtain statistical data about documents with different textual metadata, for instance to compare the kind of words or linguistic constructions used in Czech texts written by women, against similar texts written in German.

The conversion of EHRI to TEITOK is part of an ongoing effort at LINDAT [6] to make relevant project data available as searchable (linguistic) corpora, which includes also ELTeC, DRACOR, and generic schemes to reuse for data from several popular platforms, such as spoken data created with ELAN [7] and manuscript data created with Transkribus [8].

References

[1] https://www.teitok.org/

[2] https://www.ehri-project.eu/

[3] https://blog.ehri-project.eu/2021/03/17/ehri-in-teitok

[4] https://begrenzte-flucht.ehri-project.eu/

[5] https://quest.ms.mff.cuni.cz/teitok-dev/teitok/ehri/index.php

[6] https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/

[7] https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan

[8] https://lite.transkribus.eu/home

How can humanities scholars study framing across audiovisual collections? Segments of audiovisual content are being constantly reinterpreted as they are reused and repeated in new contexts. For instance, a clip from a politician’s speech from an evening news programme might be repeated in the context of a talk show where it is critiqued by experts; that same segment might be repeated in a radio programme where it serves to support a completely different narrative. When applied across large collections, framing analysis can reveal patterns and biases in the way audiovisual content is reused and topics are represented in media. Some clips are being reused so often that they become canonised in our media memory. Researchers in the field of Media Studies are particularly interested in studying such phenomena. At the moment this type of research is performed manually by watching and/or listening to large quantities of audiovisual content or by combing through transcripts. In the context of large audiovisual archives, this anecdotal approach is not scalable.

Questions around framing are highly pertinent in the context of research environments, such as the CLARIAH Media Suite – a virtual research space for humanities scholars that enables exploration and analysis of audiovisual collections. Currently, the Media Suite provides tools for exploring data and collections based on existing metadata and automatically generated transcripts. In the context of the European research project AI4Media, the authors of this paper have been exploring how state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies can further enhance these research possibilities while being aligned with researcher expectations for explainability and transparency when using digital tools.

The focus of this demo paper is on Partial Audio Matching (PAM) functionality developed to support framing analysis in the Media Suite. PAM is a technique that can identify segments in one ‘source’ audio file that are identical to segments in another ‘target’ audio file. This matching process is performed on specifically generated audio fingerprint files, which are compact representations of the audio signal. By exporting audio fingerprints for a range of audiovisual items, it becomes possible to trace reuse at archival scale in an automated fashion. The authors have worked on the underlying infrastructure to process both fingerprint extraction and matching at scale, as well as a User Interface that lets Media Suite users select the ‘source’ and ‘target’ programs to perform matching on and get results which link back to the matched segments in the originating audiovisual programs.

This demo is a work-in-progress and we are keen to showcase the potential of this functionality as well as discuss its limitations and open questions that arose during the implementation and user evaluation.

The French National 3D Data Repository, the C.I.N.E.S (National Computer Center for Higher Education) which offers long-term archiving of electronic data, and aLTAG3D – their companion software to document the deposits, use a unique and dedicated metadata scheme based on the work from 2014 to 2017 of the national consortium “3D for Humanities” from Huma-Num infrastructure. This first version is currently evolving to take into account the evolution of deposited data and research domains.

Scientific Domains. The first scheme was focused on archaeology – the main domain in digital humanities that make use of 3D models. One of our goals is to offer such previously cited services to the entire Humanities and Social Sciences. For this purpose, we divide metadata into generic and domain specific ones, such as 3D restitutions or scans of “physical object” in archaeology.

Automatic Extraction. The metadata are also categorized in two groups: those which can be extracted automatically for the data themselves (such as number of points in a 3D file, creation date from EXIF), and those which have to be filled manually. The automatic process simplifies the user work, and the remaining information volume is still quite large, and we are working on either making it smaller or easier to fill. For this purpose, we are pushing forward the experience gained in developing and experimenting the first scheme.

Referencing data. While data redundancy is a guarantee of sustainability, this has an economic and environmental impact. This is even more important for our 3D deposit since, for an open science perspective, we recommend integrating all the documentation, independently of the format and the origin. To tackle this problem, we are integrating into the metadata scheme the possibility to outsource data curation, by using URI to refer to any data present of a sufficiently perennial and reliable infrastructure. We favor institutional hosting over private enterprise. Corresponding requested metadata has also to be harvested. This process is becoming easier with the development of FAIR and institutional infrastructures.

Standards. The FAIR principles also impose the interoperability of our scheme with standard formats. For this purpose, we ensure the compatibility with Dublin Core, CIDOC CRM and with DOI. We also integrate the use of standard thesaurus such as PeriodO, GeoNames, PACTOLS.

3D data definition. The structure of our metadata scheme has evolved due to our experience in understanding 3D data and their usage. Initially, our 3D object was only defined by a colored or textured mesh. However, it seemed important to include any kind of 3D, from volumetric data to CAO (used in the history of technologies). We need also to consider how to take into account the object’s structure, appearance properties (reflection, etc.), animations, annotations, and everything that can be attached to a 3D object.

Furthermore, the 3D data are intrinsically linked with the software and the hardware that have been used to process it and/or to interact with (e.g., in VR usage). We thus extend the metadata scheme in order to include them.

The University of Vienna, Austria, supports its researchers in managing their research data in various ways. In autumn 2021, the research data management (RDM) policy was adopted. It codifies RDM support and clarifies responsibilities and opportunities for the institution and the researchers. Summer 2022 saw the establishment of a data stewardship programme. It is based on the “data steward network“ model developed in the FAIR Data Austria project: There is one coordinator at the University Library and embedded data steward:esse:s at faculties/centres – in addition to the central services that are offered by various departments and coordinated by a university-wide strategy board. Two faculties and one centre participate in the pilot phase set on three years.

Data steward:esse:s – in contrast to the data managers in the central services – are the central go-to persons with discipline-specific know-how and have a bridging function between the people who use RDM services with those who design and develop them.

The first faculty to employ a data steward:ess was the Faculty of Philological and Cultural studies. Being the largest faculty of the university, it has about 800 researchers in fourteen departments of philologies and area studies. As part of the humanities, the faculty addresses the world’s cultural heritage in its material and immaterial form – languages, literature, music, religious practices, as well as artefacts and media of every type – and has a strong focus on Digital Humanities.

The poster will report on the experiences as a data stewardess in the humanities – the first of its kind in Austria – and address the following aspects:

* specific requirements of humanities scholars: The first few months in this role have shown that there is a high demand for support in archiving and/or keeping online web applications such as digital editions. Establishing a sustainable work-flow from designing the application to long-term preservation is necessary. When cultural heritage institutions provide material for digital editions, they rely on the research institutions securing long-term access.

* establishing the role within the faculty: defining workflows; self-positioning as a go-to person for all things RDM; introducing discipline-specific training; connecting with other DH or CH institutions; balancing cooperation and boundaries with our “sister faculty”, the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies

* possible differences between being a data steward:ess in the humanities and having this role in other disciplines: This aspect includes experiences from the international participants of the Data Steward certificate course that the University of Vienna established in autumn 2022 and from the other data steward:esse:s at the university.

* perception by researchers: Many data managers in the central services also have a humanities background – is there a difference in how researchers perceive them versus the data stewardess? Does it make a difference to have a professional understanding as a librarian and not one as a researcher like many other data stewards have?

This first-hand presentation of experiences with humanities-focussed data stewardship helps others when establishing this role in their institution.

The RnMSH is a national research infrastructure in humanities and social sciences which was created in 2006. It federates the 22 Maisons des sciences de l’homme (MSH) located in the major university sites in France.

Each of the 22 MSHs hosts technology platforms with staff (researchers, engineers) and equipment that support large-scale projects in digital humanities, cognitive sciences, statistical surveys, geomatics, 3D, and scientific audiovisual.

Today, there are 50 platforms that bring together 80 qualified personnels (study engineers, research engineers). These are exceptional devices where interdisciplinarity between the humanities and social sciences, and other scientific sectors (including digital sciences) is practiced.

Since 2016, the RnMSH has federated all of these 50 technological platforms into five categories that take into account the nature of the data processed and the methods used. Thus, the 11 Scripto platforms concern textual data, the 8 Audio-Visio platforms deal with audio and visual corpora, the 9 Spatio platforms deal with spatial and archeological data, the 7 Cogito platforms are facilities for experimental research in behavioral sciences, and the 15 Data platforms are devoted to quantitative data.

Our proposal is in line with axis 3 “Advancing digital methods for the analysis of cultural heritage”. It can be presented either as a paper or as a panel (with the presence of European colleagues who participate in the RnMSH Scientific Council).

We would like to present the activities of these 5 platform networks, focusing on exemplary programs in the field of heritage resources (funds, collections, databases), methods, and major principles (Open Science, FAIR, IIIF, CIDOC-CRM). We will also discuss strategies for sharing skills and know-how among engineers, and the forms of dissemination and valorization of research results.

The first objective of this proposal is to present the RnMSH, its role in coordinating and supporting scientific projects in the field of cultural heritage.

The second objective is to initiate collaborations and partnerships with other European actors (infrastructures, research programs, etc.). It is indeed the first time that we present at the European level this research infrastructure which is registered in the National Strategy of Research Infrastructures of the ministry of Higher Education and Research in France (MESR).

Since 2004, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Dijon (MSH) has been developing a scientific and methodological method to deal with the heterogeneity and the exponential volume of archives and documentation (from the 19th century to the present day). Through the combined work of researchers and scientific information engineers, the MSH is creating and developing standardized digital resources. All stages of the processing chain are ensured: from the digitization of traditional media (such as paper, microfilm, photographs, etc.) to the processing of native digital documents (text, images, audiovisual for example) and from the conversion of data into intelligent resources thanks to indexing, data mining, etc. until the online release and provision of new digital resources.

To make these data accessible to the public, the MSH has set up its web portal PANDOR (https://pandor.u-bourgogne.fr/) which is a powerful tool for the querying and promoting of digital resources. The objective is to enable a unified access to the corpus created in the framework of research programs carried out or supported by the MSH and to provide, via the OIA-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interoperability protocol, an access to FAIR data stored in different locations. By publishing archival finding aids, library catalogs, digitized and OCRized documents, PANDOR meets the national standards for data processing.

The MSH of Dijon possesses an original approach which mixes patrimonial and scientific approach with two collections labeled “Vine, wine and gastronomy” and “Social criticism and movements”. The development of digital collections on PANDOR website is based on the conservation of documentary and archival collections through high-definition digitization (400 DPI in TIFF format), but also by an OCRization process making it possible to consult these documents, which are collected in separate finding aids, in full text search. This patrimonial approach is paired with a complete scientific treatment of the resources, from the constitution of thematic focuses to supplying metadata, including the creation of finding aids.

The choice of archival and documentary material is determined by the MSH’s carried research topics in conjunction with the scientific committees that are linked to them. The production of finding aids is done according to ISAD(G) standard while their encoding is made in XML-EAD. Metadata complement this system, this way enriching the general indexing. For instance, persons names can be accurately specified (author, preface, photographer, etc.) as well as those of geographical locations or keywords, and this depending on the relevance for each collection. The interoperability of these multiple description tools makes it possible to cross-reference full-text searches and searches within notices and, on a macro level, searches within the corresponding thematic axis. An experiment is currently being carried (CONVEX 2 “Collection numérique vitivinicole d’excellence 2” Program : https://pandor.u-bourgogne.fr/fr/convex-2) whose purpose resides in establishing a documentary database in which every publication is provided a scientific notice mentioning the background of writing as well as its historical interest with the ultimate goal of proposing a more comprehensive picture in the corpus-making process.

The project “The School of Salamanca” is creating a freely-accessible online collection of texts produced in the intellectual centre of the Spanish monarchy during the XVI and XVII centuries. Currently 33 works have completed the production cycle (out of total 116) which includes TEI XML encoding, HTML export for the online access and full-text search, IIIF presentation APIs, PDF, and RDF export. The development of a sustainable workflow for the project has been influenced by the massive size of our textual collection and its unique features. In preparing editions of Early Modern Latin and Spanish texts it is crucial to take into account their inherent instability, i.e. heterogeneous structures, orthographic, typographical, and punctuation variations etc. Our editorial principles were therefore shaped by the necessity to trace and reproduce the development steps at any given moment; to reuse tools independent of the context and individual texts; to scale the complex processing tasks; to perform constant data quality checks, and to document the requirements and the results.

Salamanca’s workflow shares common ground with both Waterfall and Agile development techniques. The concept of pipeline, inherent to Waterfall, is in the centre of Salamanca’s editorial technique: the production on the edition consists of a number of steps executed sequentially, where the output of each stage serves as the input for the next one.

Digitization → Transcription in TEI TITE → Structural annotation → TEI transformation → Manual and automatic corrections → HTML, PDF, IIIF, and RDF generation.

The advantage of such a predefined sequence is its reproducibility, where each part of an editorial process can be restored at any time. It makes individual work steps traceable and enables comprehensive documentation in form of the program code and editorial guidelines.

In Agile, the software product is built in small chunks, and each of the development cycles includes feature clarification, design, coding, testing and deployment. For this purpose Agile integrates the software development, testing and operations teams in a single collaborative iterative process. In Salamanca’s adoption of Agile practises each of the above-mentioned development stages contains the definition of the requirements, development and quality assurance. This also means that each stage of the production of the digital edition delivers a part of the overall product features, which can be accessed and disseminated.

For example, the QA routines after step 1 – digitization of the print originals – allow us to publish the IIIF presentation manifests even before the TEI transcription starts. IIIF manifests are later enriched with additional data, pertaining to chapters and pagination. The same applies to PDF generation – it was initially intended to be one of the export methods, located at the end of the workflow. Yet, when implemented, it exposed a number of semantic and structural inconsistencies of the source XML. We therefore decided to use PDF earlier in the pipeline as a diagnostic tool and data quality service. In our talk we will show how the sustainable editorial workflow, adapted for processing of large-scale textual sources, translates into the delivery of high-quality data.

Built heritage, in addition to being an element of cultural identity, is to be regarded as a source of inspiration and creativity for present and future generations. It is an ever-evolving repository of knowledge about culture and society, which, due to its importance and uniqueness, must be preserved. Historical buildings are the expression of the traditions and techniques of people and societies that made them and thus must be studied and documented to prevent loss or damage, also ensuring that any restoration, maintenance, and reuse activities are undertaken consciously. To date, existing digital methods are not always appropriate for the built heritage sector. At the same time, older domain experts and physical textual archives collected a large amount of unique knowledge which is only partially transferred to digital resources. Examples are historical construction techniques, terminology for damage pathologies and heritage elements, etc. Transferring this knowledge into new applications and open data spaces could prevent its loss and improve its sharing.

In recent years, the digitalisation of existing knowledge has been widely debated; there are currently many digital resources available to improve modeling capabilities and solve complex problems in well-defined subject areas of analysis, conservation and restoration. However, this research faces the scattering of a wide variety of digital data, that is distributed in numerous independent archives and possesses a great heterogeneity in the type of media and formats used. Among them, the gradual introduction of Building Information Modelling in the field of built heritage – also referred to as Heritage BIM – HBIM – has only partially mitigated the criticality; especially on aspects concerning representation through standard formats, transmission, and consistency of modeled data, especially in open collaborative formats and platforms. A selection of multiple technologies should be made on a case by case basis.

To solve some of the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes an innovative workflow to integrate technologies related to Open Data, Semantic Web, Linked Data, and HBIM , to manage all the knowledge collected, used and shared for the conservation and enhancement of historical buildings in a collaborative platform, including .geometric-constructive aspects from direct analysis up to intangible data from indirect sources and related to traditions and knowledge of arts and crafts. Such an approach, and the models based on it, would support the ideal collaborative space for the management of open built heritage data, in the framework of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC); thus, they can take on a richer meaning and value, becoming an integral part of an information network that enables their correlation with different disciplines.

The adoption of this open data space workflow, within EOSC, will allow experts and stakeholders in the field to gather the knowledge about construction techniques, spread in different resources around the world. This will enable interdisciplinary exchange and interoperability, as well as promote a culture of data sharing on the permanence and mutations of architectural typologies built over the centuries in Europe, helping to foster a deeper engagement of heritage in modern society.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Open Marketplace (SSH Open Marketplace) – marketplace.sshopencloud.eu – is a discovery portal which pools and contextualises resources for Social Sciences and Humanities research communities: tools, services, training materials, datasets, publications and workflows. The SSH Open Marketplace showcases solutions and research practices for every step of the research data life cycle. In doing so, it facilitates discoverability and findability of research services and products that are essential to enable sharing and re-use of workflows and methodologies.

The SSH Open Marketplace might be regarded as an innovative service. It is, of course, a directory in a classic way, indexing information and allowing researchers to navigate their way to new tools and methods. But it is something new, as well: through the creation and marking of relations between indexed items in a semantically much more meaningful way than the limited textual relatedness of keyword or category classes, it creates contextualization which increases the serendipity in the search of resources.

As a discovery service providing a platform where interactions between arts and humanities researchers, cultural heritage professionals and the computer, information and data scientists enable a collective documentation of uses, sources and tools, the SSH Open Marketplace presents a networking opportunity for both GLAM and academic communities.

The institutional context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) on which the SSH Open Marketplace has been built and is sustained – via the SSH Open Cluster – allows not only for a stable maintenance environment, but also for significant collaborations with Cultural Heritage institutions and infrastructure initiatives such as the European Data Space for Cultural Heritage for example. Within the DARIAH context, it is also a powerful service allowing member countries and cooperating partners to disseminate and promote their collections and the tools and services built on them. Beyond human use, the SSH Open Marketplace also allows for added-value scenarios relying on the machine accessibility of its content via API. The audience of the DARIAH Annual Event can bring their own ideas and discuss them with the SSH Open Marketplace representatives.

This poster and demo will present how the SSH Open Marketplace can provide insights into the use of tools, methods and standards related to cultural heritage collections ‘as data’, and how it can increase serendipity in the discovery of new methods and standards, by interlinking the resources and describing workflows. Some efforts have already been made to curate relevant resources, for example the “Jupyter notebooks for Europeana newspaper text resource processing with CLARIN NLP tools” training (https://marketplace.sshopencloud.eu/training-material/duVII1), but participants of the DARIAH Annual Event 2023 will be invited to contribute to the creation of new or enrichment of existing records guided by the members of the SSH Open Marketplace Editorial Board presenting the poster and leading the demo during the event.

Science and research have always benefited from exchange and openness – both within their own discipline and community and beyond. This principle is the basis of the Association for Research Infrastructures in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (Verein Geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungsinfrastrukturen e.V., GKFI) which is presented on this poster.

This set of posters brings together complementary disciplinary perspectives on working with cultural heritage data from the European project “In/Tangible European Heritage – Visual Analysis, Curation and Communication” (InTaVia).

GREGOR POBEZIN: OPEN CHALLENGES IN TRADITIONAL BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH: NOVEL APPROACHES TO BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH WITH INTAVIA

Among the many factors that distinguish biography, we can perhaps most readily point to two that, while usually helpful and indeed essential to biographical studies, can also be important obstacles: tradition and structure. As a noble historiographical genre with a long tradition, biography inevitably produces its texts along structural guidelines. This structure may not be a problem for scholars of cultural or political history – theirs is the task of querying, questioning and imagining: in various languages and across multi-varied texts. But even historians can sometimes ask too little and imagine too much – or vice versa.

For example, three biographical entries (Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Deutsche Biographie, Slovenska biografija) about Pier Paolo Vergerio the Younger (1498-1565) all cover the all major events along an almost identical timeline. However, while one omits almost all of Vergerio’s literary production, the other concentrates on his contacts with protestants, as if life before his apostasy never existed. Tradition gets in our way.

Technological advancements have had limited success (searching for Vergerio in Europeana will yield little success) – so far. For wider biographical research, a comparative platform seems a tool sorely needed, since it will finally render the comparative reading of numerous multivariate texts, the visualizing of essential data and asking relevant questions beyond the limitations of narrative structure.

MATTHIAS SCHLÖGL: ON BUILDING A TRANSNATIONAL, MULTIMODAL KNOWLEDGE GRAPH

InTaVia aims at bringing together different kinds of cultural data. To do so, the InTaVia Knowledge Graph (IKG) is built using structured biographical data on cultural actors from four European National Biographies as a base layer (Austria, Finland, The Netherlands, and Slovenia) – which have been converted using the IDM-RDF (https://github.com/InTaVia/idm-rdf).

Second level layers enrich the biographical base layer with data on related cultural heritage objects, institutions, and places from reference resources such as Wikidata and Europeana. Currently the IKG contains data on around 300.000 distinct persons from various periods who had an impact on the history of European countries in one way or another.

However, the IKG has to tackle several problems: for example, the source data is quite unbalanced with respect to the level of detail and structure; the sources contain biased data in various forms (e.g. gender bias, “national myths”, …).

This poster gives an overview of the InTaVia System Architecture, presents some statistical analyses on the structure and problems of the IKG and shares the “lessons learned” when integrating large historical secondary data sources.

FLORIAN WINDHAGER, JOHANNES LIEM & EVA MAYR: VISUAL-ANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURAL INFORMATION

The cultural knowledge graph IKG can be a rich integrative resource for multi-faceted research but is challenging to access for people without technical skills or prior knowledge on the structure and kinds of information available. To overcome these barriers, InTaVia develops a visualization-based interfaces for the visual search, analysis and communication of linked cultural information.

Different visual analytical perspectives (for temporal, spatial, but also relational and categorical information related to the cultural entities in the IKG) support researchers to gain an overview on the structured data available, to see patterns from a distant reading perspective, and to identify interesting pieces of cultural information for close reading. For example, a humanist researcher can search for a cultural actor and will easily find a range of relevant cultural resources: biographical texts, related actors and related objects. They can then select entities of interest and analyze their movements over time, see cultural objects related to biographical events. By making transparent also the provenance of the information, this interface allows to compare and synoptically see different biographies on the same actor.

Our poster walks visitors through the architecture of the visualization-based interface and we offer a demo how to use the developing platform it for searching, analysing, and communicating cultural information.

Hungarian cultural heritage experiences a significant loss of valuable research data due to a lack of knowledge, infrastructure, and often even plans by academic institutions to preserve born-digital information. National Laboratory for Digital Heritage (DH-LAB) has launched a project, supporting the open academic research initiative, to archive and provide open access to born-digital research data. DH-LAB plans to achieve a set of digital archiving pilot scenarios starting with a database archiving pilot. This presentation provides a summary of the pilot activities and results.

In the scope of the pilot, three active research databases, created by the Institute for Literary Studies of Hungarian Academy of Sciences, have been archived: Literary and Scholarly Correspondence in the period of enlightenment, Popular prints in the 17-19th century Hungary and Novels in Hungary from the period 1730–1836.

During the pilot we have been testing the results of the E-ARK program by the European Commission. The E-ARK program aims to facilitate interoperability among archival institutions and data producers and impact the development of internationally accessible archives through the provision of technical specifications and tools. E-ARK components are based on international standards and comply with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model for digital archiving.

All three databases are archived as SIARD files. SIARD is a format designed specifically for database archiving by the Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv and further developed in the scope of the E-ARK program. We have used the E-ARK submission information package (E-ARK SIP) specification and the CITS-SIARD content type specification. From the E-ARK toolset the Database Preservation Toolkit was responsible for creating the SIARD files, the RODA-in tool for creating the information packages and RODA Repository for the long-term preservation and access of the archived information.

All three databases are in the phase of their active lifecycle (e.g. they are still in use by the research community). They follow different internal logic and have different data structure, but they all contain front and inside images of the publications, external links, larger OCRed text, and formatted HTML documents. They are also extended with diverse user interface screens (written in PHP language) to provide user-friendly navigation and access of data. These special features of the databases needed to be considered in our archival and long-term preservation strategy.

We have decided to create one-time snapshots of the databases and consider them as the primary archival data for the pilot. Three different large object (LOB, BLOB) archiving strategies have been tested to collect information to find an optimal solution for storing images or other large objects of the databases in SIARD files. We have also analysed possible options to somehow archive external links and the PHP-based user interface within the E-ARK SIP structure.

In our presentation we discuss the known challenges and best practises of database archiving along with the special considerations required in our pilot. We also highlight the large object (LOB, BLOB) handling options provided by the SIARD specification as used in three different archiving scenarios.

One of our online surfaces for our databases is called “Digital Archives Portal” which is a joint surface for many Hungarian archives for online administration and to reach databases and requests for physical documents. Some digitized documents are available here as well.

The other platform, called Hungaricana is especially for online research. This jointly, the huge database serves a representative number of the Hungarian GLAM sector, integrating multiple databases and document types, offering not only searching tools but even accessibility to the scanned documents themselves:

– more than 100 data provider collections

– multiply types of sources and collections

– integrated and sophisticated search

– georeferenced metadata and access via interactive maps

Here we offer databases and metadata structure also, but this surface’s strongest skill is that a lot of digitized documents are easily available and readable here. This is also the site where we manage to solve the challenge of making connections between multiple various document types and the key connection is their geographical aspect: the lot numbers.

The numbers are showing the amount of the lot numbers on the map, in other words: all the accessible documents through the site, are geo-referenced.

Each and every document can have a geographical aspect. Architectural plans, notarial deeds, land registry files, vintage photographs and postcards. They all can be connected to each other and further, create a real data network. Having quite universal datasets about the documents, even the actors are visible

In the past few months, the biggest development has been achieved on the site: the Budapest Time Machine was released on two different maps back in 2015: one was georeferenced and the other is vectorized. Both offered different types of documents to research.

Recently we renewed the site by unifying the two maps into one: integrating all the georeferenced metadata and documents into the page: all the maps, all the documents, the transparent present maps, added newly digitized datasets and documents – and we also have a groundbreaking new feature.

As a result of our contribution to the Óbuda University Ybl Miklós Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering, architecture students have learned how to create 3D models from historical blueprints. They received the digitized drawings from us and delivered the finished building reconstructions in exchange.

Even though, those born digital data types face challenges as they need a completely different handling and interface as the digitized one – and this was one of the reasons that boosted the unification of the different map layers.

Another project is just in the pipeline now: in contribution to the Contemporary Architecture Centre, we will receive data sheets of houses that participated in the annual event Budapest100, and researched mostly in our archive. In this case, our digitally published and physical documents are processed and turned into new documents which are also valid and worthy to preserve in an archival manner.

These two examples mentioned above can cause a data-circulation in the archive.

Digital Humanities Platform: Publishing manuscripts using digital humanities tools

The dHUpla, developed by the Digital Humanities Centre of the National Széchényi Library, is a state-of-the-art online platform for publishing written sources held in public collections, providing a unified research environment for the Humanities. The main objective of this poster-presentation is to describe the platform specialized in publishing manuscript collections and the overall infrastructure behind it. At the same time we will be presenting the workflow of publishing a digitized manuscript, which, as a result becomes a digital text in the online environment.. The tools we employ at each step of the publication process will also be described, including our use of the comprehensive platform of Transkribus, the XML editing software framework of Oxygen, and the different stages of manuscript editing.

The uniqueness of our system lies in the GIT-based version tracking tool and the associated set of automated operations, which altogether replace the need for a traditional database. The described workflow offers a solution for the mass processing of manuscripts but is also suitable for the in-depth philological analysis and publication of smaller corpora.

Before publishing manuscripts, it was also necessary to develop a complete editorial system, a framework that enables editing TEI XML formats in a user-friendly way. In addition, such an editorial shell has many advantages. It supports the encoding of texts in a markup language and makes machine validation possible according to specific rules. In the framework, we can link the text to external databases and perform artificial intelligence-based operations as well.

With the framework, the manual and automated sub-processes go hand in hand, always complementing each other, thus creating a high-quality manuscript publication method that exploits the potential of the digital medium.

The primary collection of proper names identified in text editions is the dHUpla Entity Repository, where entities are associated with fundamental data such as a person’s occupation, place and date of birth, and death. In some cases project-specific notes are also provided alongside the core data. The editors are assisted in the data input by automatic, AI-based name entity recognition and also have the possibility to link the recognised entities directly to external namespaces.

In the dHUpla publishing environment the text-image linking technology makes it possible to the user to examine the position within the text or the search result in both the transcribed text and the original facsimile. TEI encoding allows the annotation of basic textual phenomena such as insertions, deletions, illegible or missing passages, etc.

The text is also annotated with factual and textological-philological notes and bibliographical references. As a result, the text itself functions as a sort of database, and the data it contains can be queried, filtered, searched, displayed and processed in various ways. And thanks to the GIT-based version tracking, the already published source(s) can be easily corrected if necessary.

In developing the framework, we have prepared a Hungarian translation and a detailed specification for the TEI coding of Hungarian texts, which we publish as a national recommendation.

ERICs (European Research Infrastructure Consortia) are European legal entities to facilitate the establishment and operation of Research Infrastructures with European interest. ERICs are increasingly asked to account for their operations (see debate on KPI in the ERIC Forum). At the same time, web services such as the EOSC Resource Catalogues, the SSH Open Marketplace, and OpenAire, provide possibilities to register and disseminate research outputs, making them ready for automatic harvesting. While the need for standardization of the description of ERIC provided services and content is still very much debated, there are also conceptual dimensions we would like to address in this paper.

ERICs, by definition, create and operate in a landscape of distributed, co-created, network of processes. To summarize, services in the large domain of SSH, are increasingly ‘shared’ resources. In the spirit of Open Science and the further consolidation of the European Research Area, this interconnectedness can only be applauded. This is how the integrating function of ERICs materializes, and how we avoid the duplication of effort. At the same time, ERICs are also defined organizations with boundaries, and subject to individual assessments. To some extent ERICs are even in competition with each other, for visibility, user groups, in-kind contributions, funds allocated nationally and from the EC.

This paper makes a first attempt to reflect about intrinsic challenges in accounting single nodes in a network of collaborating nodes. While each ERIC already defines its own policy of how to deal with this complexity according to their needs, there is a debate needed as to how to assess contributions to distributed infrastructures in a way which gives credit to all participating while at the same time avoid mis-allocation, double counting and so on, in particular in the context of the development of the EOSC. The matter of ethical, balanced, effective research assessment which has been discussed extensively in the realm of scholarly communication (Leiden Manifesto) also needs to be addressed in the area of research infrastructures. Such a reflection will inform the current discourse of further standardizing the metadata schema which are behind the different catalogues; the search for meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for ERICs and the further shaping of the collaboration and division of labor between ERIC’s at national and European level.

This paper takes the current discourse around the DARIAH service portfolio as an example/case to highlight these more generic challenges. It also attempts to sort out various sources of ‘assignment uncertainty’ of contributions (e.g. differences in controlled vocabularies, incompatibilities of metadata schemes, user-generated content, metrics of assignments, and policy decisions).

While we focus the discussion on ERICs, our motivation to present this at the DARIAH Annual event is that it might be of particular interest to see how cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, museums…), in their roles as content providers also for ERICs are credited for their contribution to ERICs, and beyond.

In 2017, the non-for-profit organization Archeion Taxis, launched the website “Archive Alert” (https://archivealert.gr/web/en/about). It was designed as an online crowdsourcing open platform allowing individuals, entities, groups, and organizations to report on the status of endangered archives (paper, audiovisual, photographs, maps, printed material, etc.) which enhance our understanding of cultural heritage. Since then, the users report material they are in possession of, or material threatened by ignorance, negligence, or due to lack of expert human resources. At the same time, registered users can report on their own historical documents either to inform archival organizations, or to invite specialized staff to archive, file, preserve and utilize the material. The platform allows for anonymous or public registration, and then, depending on the material reported, it automatically informs all organizations/entities that may be concerned.

Such a digital platform raises awareness concerning an aspect of Greece’s cultural heritage that has been marginalized, or even termed “unwanted”, in many instances throughout the 20th century. If “Archive Alert” facilitated crowdsourcing and enabled the emergence of a bottom-up digital chart of previously unknown archives, then, the concept of “Archival Flows” describes the next step: to ensure the safeguarding of these archives and render them accessible to the various communities (digital, diasporic, etc.) they belong to. We will present the recently completed project “(IN)VISIBLE: The intangible cultural heritage of Zagori through the communal archives” for which the historians and archivists of Archeion Taxis collaborated with local stakeholders from the village of Aristi in Zagori (NW Greece). We will outline the workflow of the project and share our vision on how this process could be further developed, leading to the analog – and digital – engagement of various groups of people with their archival heritage.

In Digital Humanities (DH) research one often needs tools for searching and browsing semantically complex interlinked big data and, at the same time, tools for visualizing and analyzing the data found. This paper first overviews the “Sampo model” [1] for publishing linked data and for integrating faceted search and browsing of linked data seamlessly with data-analytic tools, and then applies the model, as a case study, to design a new DH user interface for the in-use Booksampo knowledge graph. It contains semantically rich comprehensive information about literature published in Finland, based on various databases of the Public Libraries of Finland. The data considered in our work includes 1) novels (80 718 pcs), 2) nonfiction books (1956), 3) authors and other persons (62 207), 4) book covers (112 971), and manifestations of the works ( 213 877), nearly 9 million triples in total. [2]

We report lessons learned on 1) adapting the open source Sampo-UI framework [3] for searching, browsing, and analyzing the data using faceted search as well as on 2) challenges related to data literacy and quality in using linked data for Cultural Heritage (CH) applications. [4] We also present how the Booksampo knowledge graph has been used in DH research, using the SPARQL API of the BookSampo linked data service and the new portal interface, for analyzing trends in developments in Finnish fiction literature. Analyses are presented about how the geographical attention and diversity of Finnish novels have developed over the past decades. [5,6] The analyses suggest, e.g., that the diversity has increased since the 90’s and that the interest of Finnish authors towards foreign countries is increasing, although a majority of Finnish novels still seem to be set in Finland.

[1] Eero Hyvönen: Digital Humanities on the Semantic Web: Sampo Model and Portal Series. Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, in press, 2023.

[2] Eero Hyvönen, Annastiina Ahola and Esko Ikkala: BookSampo Fiction Literature Knowledge Graph Revisited: Building a Faceted Search Interface with Seamlessly Integrated Data-analytic Tools. In: Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TDPL 2022), Accelerating Innovations Track, Padova, Italy, Springer, 2022.

[3] Esko Ikkala, Eero Hyvönen, Heikki Rantala and Mikko Koho: Sampo-UI: A Full Stack JavaScript Framework for Developing Semantic Portal User Interfaces. Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 69–84, January, 2022.

[4] Annastiina Ahola: Utilizing BookSampo data to develop tools for information retrieval and research purposes. Master’s Thesis, Aalto University, Department of Computer Science, forth-coming, 2023.

[5] Telma Peura, Petri Leskinen and Eero Hyvönen: What Linked Data Can Tell about Geographical Trends in Finnish Fiction Literature – Using the BookSampo Knowledge Graph in Digital Humanities. 2022. Abstract under peer review.

[6] Telma Peura: Suomeksi yli rajojen. Kvantitatiivinen tutkimus suomenkielisten romaanien monimuotoisuudesta 1970–2020. Master’s Thesis, University of Helsinki, Department of Digital Humanities, Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG).

This talk will focus on the affordance of idiosyncratic video annotations to be understood as indispensable metadata when digitally documenting performing arts materials or visual intangible heritage in general.

If the use of annotations is a common practice in several daily tasks, it is because making a note of our thoughts is essential to retaining important information in our memory and to help reconstitute and transmit the knowledge contained in that specific event or activity after they have happened.

Annotating and tagging directly over video in real-time have started (Cabral et al. 2011) to be mostly a personal practice used by those involved in the footage or analytical processes of video documentation for dance, but they have not yet been perceived as complementary metadata by cultural heritage archivists.

Based on our previous experience with the TKB project, from 2009 to 2013, my team has since then defined as one of its objectives to research on the multimodal annotation practices as part of the creative process for dance and choreography. The innovation at that time was to accept individual tagging as indexation cues and means of interaction amongst the artists who were self-curating their works, therefore generating dynamic and idiosyncratic “archives of processes”. During TKB, several artists have expressed the need for a handy digital tool to assist them in rehearsal periods where they could take notes on what was being filmed.

Therefore, when joining the subsequent EU projects Culture Moves and Weave, we decided to develop a friendly web-based tool to work as a video annotator in real-time, in fact as a digital notebook to replace paper notes.

MotionNotes is now freely available in the web and is being used by very different kinds of users, from choreographers to ethnographers and CH professionals. Most of the users report that their digital notes (drawings with touch pen, text, marks, links and sound) have become inseparable of the video footage at the end of the creative process, and suggest imaginative ways to embed those personal annotations in future presentations of their work, as well as to include them as an integral part of the documentation and metadata when the work is digitally archived.

Based on this strong and unexpected interest, we would like to discuss with the audience the future usability of idiosyncratic multimodal annotations as great potential for new approaches to documenting, archiving and sharing intangible cultural heritage video content. Moreover, it will be interesting to discuss the possibilities for reusing those annotated files in other contexts and future platforms for transmission and preservation of embodied tacit knowledge that would otherwise be lost in times.

Averell is a tool designed to ease working with annotated poetry repositories. It allows users to download and reconcile different annotated corpora, providing a unified JSON output at the desired granularity. This can be useful for researchers who need to work with substantial amounts of poetry data and need to be able to specify the level of detail they want in their final dataset.

One of the key features of Averell is its ability to reconcile different annotations from different corpora. This can be particularly useful when working with multiple annotated corpora that use various TEI entities, as Averell is able to integrate these entities into a single JSON output, or a single TEI-annotated collection. The importance of being able to use different corpora cannot be overstated, as it allows researchers to expand the scope and depth of their investigations. By using Averell, researchers can easily access a wide range of annotated poetry, making it easier to compare different works and authors.

Averell also enables researchers to customize the final generated dataset by specifying the desired granularity. This allows researchers to tailor the output to their specific needs and research goals. For example, a researcher studying the use of imagery in poetry might choose to work with the entire poem as a unit, while a researcher analysing the structure of poems might prefer to work with lines or even individual words. The flexibility offered by Averell enables researchers to extract the maximum amount of information from annotated poetry corpora, making it an invaluable resource for a wide range of research projects.

In addition to facilitating access to existing corpora to researchers, Averell also offers an additional automatic annotation feature for Spanish poetry. This allows researchers to annotate large volumes of poetry quickly and easily, saving time and effort in the process.

To use Averell, each corpus in the catalogue must specify the parser to produce the expected data format. This ensures that the tool will be able to handle and integrate data from a wide range of sources, making it an ideal tool for researchers working with poetry repositories.

Furthermore, another of the strengths of Averell is that it is an open-source platform, allowing anyone to contribute their own corpora to the catalogue. To do so, users simply need to annotate basic information such as the corpus name, poem author, poem title, and the poem text previously split by stanzas. This means that Averell is constantly evolving and expanding, making it an invaluable resource for researchers working with annotated poetry.

Overall, Averell is a valuable tool for researchers working with annotated poetry data. Its ability to reconcile different annotations and allow users to specify the granularity of the final dataset make it a valuable resource for anyone working with large of poetry collections. By providing a unified JSON output, Averell makes it easy for researchers to work with and analyse complex datasets, enabling them to make more informed and accurate conclusions about the poetry they are studying.

Social media networks have become an increasingly important domain for community interactions and institutional interventions entangling heritage with the formation of contemporary identities and attitudes. In the context of CONNECTIVE Digital Memory in the Borderlands Project, we have been working with digital data to reveal how memory practices on Lithuanian Social Network Sites (SNS) mediated by contested heritage shape cultural identities. Key questions in establishing a digital infrastructure suitable for our evidence-based study were: (a) what should its structure and affordances be? and, (b) what should the properties of entities and relationships representing heritage-related SNS interactions be? Drawing from cultural semiotics and activity theory, we established an approach to research data constitution and infrastructure design based on an event-centric formal conceptualisation of SNS semiotic activity on heritage, memory and identity. This was further used to construct semi-open interviewing scripts and a provisional code system for qualitative data analysis. It also informed the schema of a Neo4j graph database, which we employed to establish a research repository composed of:

(a) digital facsimiles and serialised data streams of SNS conversations (in OAIS terms, Submission Information Package),

(b) graph nodes and relationships of deposits, agents, threads, and messages involved in SNS conversations and represented in message content, enriched with research-driven classifications enabling meaningful queries on SNS interactions related to material and intangible heritage and the difficult past of Lithuania, as well as the people and institutions involved in such interactions (as Archival Information Package), and

(c) export files suitable for researcher-driven qualitative coding and analysis using the MaxQDA Qualitative Data Analysis software, as well as knowledge graphs, tabulations, data summarisations, and outputs suitable for further computational analysis (as Dissemination Information Packages).

A transdisciplinary team of researchers was actively involved in data conceptualisation and corpus constitution. Operating as an SNS counter-archive, the infrastructure offers flexibility to experiment with semantic structure and power to visualise patterns involving conversations, users and communities they belong to, as well as posts or comments they authored, commented on or reacted to, and the historical events, actors, places, and other salient entities these messages refer to. Qualitative data analysis of exported data supports research team members to conduct corpus-based qualitative research on topics as diverse as the Soviet monuments war in Lithuania, the cultural memory of Lithuanian independence in the 1990s, post-World War II memories of resistance, the memory of the Holocaust, metaphor use by SNS mnemonic actors, and contemporary memory wars around Soviet monuments. The experience allows us also to address broader issues related to digital infrastructures suitable for memory- and heritage-related humanities research.

In this presentation we outline the theoretical framework, processes and digital representations established for our research infrastructure, as well as our exploration of its use for computer-assisted research on the mnemonic work of communities and institutions related to the Lithuanian difficult past and heritage. We also offer insights on the significant properties and critical affordances of digital humanities infrastructures as counter-archives capable of supporting the pragmatic curation and fruitful analysis of heritage-related social media data.

The writing of history refers to remains of the past. Not only the time when documents are produced affects the work of historians; the conditions in which documents are preserved and the way they are accessed and displayed also play a role. These aspects invoke the archive, that is, the entity responsible for the custody and disclosure of documents. Therefore, although sometimes disregarded in theoretical-methodological reviews, they are determinant for the writing of history. Historians devoted to writing the story of COVID-19 pandemic should question the involved archival conditions, which involves a deep presence of digital media. With the spreading of personal recording devices, the number people that can produce and archive digital documents by using hard drives and online storage platforms have multiplied. These numerous collections, usually set on social media, compose archives that are significantly different from formal initiatives of public archives or consolidated personal archives. As suggested by Dipesh Chakrabarty, COVID-19 gives rise to a new experience of global historical event inasmuch as all world was affected, which could raise one’s awareness on the transnationality of this tragedy. If the history of COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly global, then the places where it was more intensely experienced need to be the object of priority attention for researchers interested in having a thorough understanding of this event. In this paper, I approach the COVID-19 pandemic digital archives with emphasis in Latin America. The main goal is to discuss the impact of digital transformation within archives and sources on a transnational approach, highlighting issues such as crowdsourcing, born-digital documents, inequality, and memory. Firstly, I discuss the emergence of digital memory initiatives focused on COVID-19, showing typological relations that may arise from transnational analyses. Secondly, I dive into some Brazilian archival initiatives with major ethnographic rigor in order to provide more accurate immersion into the agents, platforms, and challenges of this pandemic digital undertaking. Accordingly, I point out the complex situation of public archives amidst the mass of documents resulting from the pandemic.

The Digital Humanities (DH) are very closely connected to the Cultural Heritage Sector. The development of Information Technology and Digital Humanities have had a great impact on the Cultural Heritage domain (Marsili, G. & Orlandi, L. 2020). DH can provide methods, tools and infrastructures to help cultural heritage institutions digitise their materials and make the data accessible and reusable by scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

In the poster session at DARIAH 2023 we would like to give an update about the latest developments in the DH Course Registry and highlight those courses and programmes that teach digital techniques, methods and tools for the extraction and visualisation of information from cultural heritage objects and creation of of cultural heritage datasets and corpus building.

As a historian of the 20th century, one of the main challenges is the quantitative analysis of contemporary sources. With the abundance of written material, the use of programming languages like Python, and libraries like NLTK or RegEx has become a new reality for the discipline. Recent advances in ML and AI technology have only stressed the need of digital methodology in research. However, the availability and quality of digital data in larger quantities is one of the difficulties for many humanists. For example, my geographical focus of research mostly rests in the interwar Balkans, and the varying degrees of digitalization and the quality of “digitalized” material is often problematic and may vary greatly depending on the country (advanced on the case of Slovenia, and far from satisfying in the case of Serbia).

Therefore, my paper will focus on the ways in which gaps in the span and type of digitalization can be tackled by using various methods connected to the use of Python and many of its libraries. The work will mostly focus on digital repositories of Serbian national institutions like the National Library or regional and state archives, and their digitalized source material which is often in the form of a simple .jpg or .png file without metadata or any readily extractable text. In regard to that, I will discuss some simple methods which can be employed in order to extract text (web scraping, OCR) and analyze it. The analysis is problematic in terms of languages, since e.g.

Serbian is not supported by the current NLTK version, so I will point to some useful codes for simple programs, like custom sentiment analysis or authorship establishment by using vectorized bag-of-words models.

This approach should serve scholars in similar positions (limited or incomplete digitalized data) and with a modest understanding of Python and programming in general. Also, the examples should aid the partial automation of research and an easier grasp of vast amounts of text in those situations where researchers need to take on multiple roles.

SearchCulture.gr is the Greek national cultural aggregator, providing access to over 800k items. Data ingested come from a variety of collections of archeology, folklore, history, arts and crafts and span more than 7,000 years of Greek history. ​SearchCulture.gr is the accredited national aggregator for Europeana.

Addressing metadata heterogeneity in order to be able to provide advanced search, browsing and filtering functionalities to users has been a key target from the start. Controlled linked data vocabularies for item types, historical periods and themes were developed over the course of the past years and are being used for the semantic enrichment of the items’ metadata.

In the current paper we present the methodology used over the past 3 years for the process of enriching the aggregated items’ metadata with person entities and geographical information from two Linked Data vocabularies that we created for that purpose, one with over 8.200 entities (Greek persons) and another with 11.900 geolocations.

The persons’ enrichment process drastically improved SearchCulture.gr by allowing users to easily find all works of a creator and all the items referring a person. We enriched and disambiguated the names in agent fields (creator and contributor) and we extracted personal names from descriptive fields (subject, title and description).

As a result our enrichments are used as search and browsing criteria.The functionalities we developed allow users to retrieve items created by or referring specific persons. The facets can be used in combination, so one can search, for example, for letters exchanged between two individuals or for the “protagonists” of a historical event. The dedicated Persons browsing page provides a list of person entities that include a thumbnail depicting the person, key biographical information, the link to the person’s entity in our vocabulary and external links (VIAF, Wikipedia etc). Users can also see the number of items the person has created, those that depict/refer to him/her and the total number of items relevant to this person.

For the geographical enrichment of our content we retrieved the relevant information from place fields (coverage and spatial) and we extracted additional placenames from descriptive fields (subject, title and description). We used a LOD vocabulary with terms linked to the GeoNames geographical database. We painstakingly added alternative names in our vocabulary entries in order to increase the discoverability and to identify and showcase the way a place changed throughout the centuries (ancient greek, byzantine, turkish etc).

As a result all the enriched items are featured on an interactive map that can be configured by types of items, historical periods or persons a.o.

Enabling person-driven and geographical search can be a excellent wayfinding strategy that widens access to cultural content aggregated for communities such as teachers, students, researchers etc. Our ultimate goal is using contemporary semantic technologies in order to increase content discoverability and to provide the means of extracting new leads, connections and insights.

The aim of this paper is to present the work carried out by the DARIAH-IT team at CNR-OVI (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche – Opera del Vocabolario Italiano) within the context of several national and international projects such as the SSHOC thematic cluster, the IPERION-HS H2020 project and the Italian Roadmap for the development of the DARIAH national node. The paper will focus on issues related to the collection, analysis and digital processing of resources and collections provided by memory and cultural institutions (GLAMs) and Research Organisations. In particular, we will present and discuss the most relevant findings and experiences and present a sustainable workflow for ingesting, mapping, modelling and visualising data collections from the aforementioned research domains.

The discussion will build on the experience of the RESTORE (smaRt accESs TO digital heRitage and mEmory, http://restore.ovi.cnr.it/) project, focussed on providing access to a vast number of non-interoperable digital resources produced by Archives, Museums and Research Institutes during a couple of decades of work. Another goal of RESTORE was to create the right conditions to promote the interpretation, contextualisation and understanding of digital cultural heritage objects by representing their semantic depth and thus reconstructing the complex network of interconnections with other entities (persons, objects, places, concepts) by restoring the links existing between the tangible (intellectual aspects) and the intangible (physical aspects) dimensions of Cultural Heritage.

The paper will focus on different aspects related to the development of the RESTORE platform, including: the architectural design and the implementation of the semantic knowledge base; the integration of custom components to support domain specific standards and needs; the elaboration of specialised interfaces to display information according to the different partners’ needs and resources characteristics; the deployment of tools allowing the users to access the resources in their original contexts or in a new – highly integrated – environment, allowing the transition from a conventional display (lists of data) to a data-graph representation with semantic implications.

Particular relevance will be given to:

Issues in describing and representing tangible and intangible aspects of CH in the digital domain and their implications for the development of innovative, cross-domain, multilingual research tools;

Design and implementation of workflows and tools supporting requirements gathered from the scientific reference communities (SSHOC, IPERION-HS);

Population of the RESTORE infrastructure and its scalability towards the Italian (i.e.: H2IOSC National Recovery and Resilience Plan) and European contexts (i.e.: EGI-ACE) within the DARIAH framework;

best practices to foster interoperability and to ensure reuse and sustainability of data collections and tools.

Development of a prototype supporting specific scientific workflows related to linguistic data (i.e. digital textual corpora and digital lexicography);

Scholars see innovative means of disseminating their work and data as a chance to improve the process of sharing ideas with different audiences, thanks to technological affordances. They understand innovation either in terms of form (novel means of communicating ideas through different media), or access (opening up outputs and making them easily accessible) (cf. Maryl and Błaszczyńska 2021, p. 34). What we consider a “scholarly text” has thus become understood as an expression that can employ different media and engage creatively with underlying data.

However, engaging with novel forms of communication poses new challenges to scholars, who may lack competencies, know-how, or adequate resources to take full advantage of innovative outputs (Tasovac et al. 2018). This presentation will outline the means of support provided by OPERAS Innovation Lab in establishing interdisciplinary, collaborative workflows for supporting innovative outputs in social sciences and humanities (SSH) throughout their lifecycle. The Lab provides guidelines on how to create and sustain FAIR innovative outputs in the SSH.

The poster will showcase three diverse case studies analysed in the ongoing OPERAS-PLUS project. They all aim at addressing the actual needs faced by SSH researchers who decide to use innovative forms of disseminating their output:

(1) The novel publication of project outputs: a scholarly toolkit (SHAPE-ID toolkit) and anthology (Projet Savoirs);

(2) Linking text and data in an interdisciplinary online journal (Journal for Digital History);

(3) Prototyping software services for open science on the example of a recommender system for open access books based on text and data mining (Snijder 2021).

A case study workflow is firstly discussed with the scholars responsible for the project to identify their needs regarding the process and the challenges they are encountering, such as issues of intellectual and technological sustainability or evaluation of non-traditional outputs. Then, in an iterative process, solutions are prototyped, involving various stakeholders, like publishers or e-infrastructures (Ell and Hughes 2013), to forge best practices and provide practical advice. This process is based on a principle of open collaboration whereby different users will be able to engage with the process and thus the workflow itself remains open for contributions from the wider community through feedback and consultation events, such as this presentation.

Each case study will be presented as a workflow, containing solutions and consecutive steps that should be followed by researchers willing to engage with similar formats and face related challenges. It will also feature the support options that could be solicited from various e-infrastructures. The goal of the presentation is to validate the project results by engaging with practitioners at DARIAH Annual Event and receiving feedback on the work.

Journalism in the internet age has considerably transformed from what it was in the 20th century, and so have the methods used for its archiving. The credible long-term preservation of printed cultural artifacts and those born on the web are separate research areas. However, maintaining interoperability between source formats and ensuring their continuous researchability has become a major challenge for researchers. We present how two projects, one for digital conversion of prints and one for archived web sources, can mutually enhance each other by using a shared workflow based on similar philological methodology and principles.

Researchers experimenting with distant reading methods are often forced to adopt transient procedures when facing temporal, technical, and resource dependent limitations, that can impair the accuracy of their research results. Press sources, archived either as images or text (extracted with OCR), or as collected web data do not automatically become material ready for research and analysis. The solution is to create uniform, standardized, transparent, and machine-readable versions using a credible methodology in order to produce flexible and extendable collections that can serve multiple research projects.

We developed our web archiving project with extensive philological requirements and the above principles in mind; the project consists of collecting and managing material from online Hungarian news portals (currently ~3 million articles). Our workflow of generating clean and unified TEI versions for initial HTML documents can be altered to enable processing digitized print sources extracted with OCR. We combine the experiences and the toolset from our workflow with standards of digital philology (TEI XML, Schema.org) to build a hand annotated pilot corpus in collaboration with history students, consisting of thematically selected articles of the daily newspaper Szabad Nép, from the second half of the 20th century (currently 98 articles). With the further help of querying and visualization facilities of our ecosystem even non-technical researchers can conduct analysis on these collections.

We store and make publicly available the created datasets in a repository (Zenodo.org) and mark semantic relations between different versions.

Both our original web archive and the new corpus of women’s day articles could be analyzed using our trend-viewer that allows filtering and visualization according to both timescales and any other recorded metadata. Our initial findings include that some expressions that were used on women’s day in the 1950’s are still prevalent today, such as ‘mother’ (anya), but others, specifically those related to the ideological environment of the time such as ‘work’ (munka) or ‘productivity’ (teljesítmény) were used more frequently than they are today.

The ratio of print and digital sources has consistently shifted towards favoring the latter, therefore current methods should be developed to remain applicable in the predictable future. Our uniform, sustainable and scalable workflow demonstrates an example that could fulfill these criteria. For future progress, source (data) preparation must be counted as a valued research practice and collaboration between researchers should become more explicit, efficient, and common place.

The increasing number of digital projects in the field of history and cultural heritage over the last decade has led to a situation where very extensive information about the past became accessible online. Unfortunately, most projects use their own data model and do not refer to any reference databases. For this reason, researchers who intend to utilize combined resources are often forced to merge the data by themselves. Hence, data produced by projects often do not enter into general use and are not used optimally. The solution of this problem is the creation of an infrastructure that harmonizes and combines different data sets. An environment perfectly suited for this task is Wikibase.

As part of the DARIAH.Lab project, an instance of Wikibase (called WikiHum) has been developed. First of all, it serves as an interface for the automatic delivery of permanent identifiers (each item will automatically receive a Handle.net identifier). Secondly, it enables data from different projects to be added, stored and harmonized with tools compatible with Wikibase (e.g. Open Refine). Thirdly, the infrastructure also makes data available, both through the SPARQL- endpoint, and also through plug-ins to other software (e.g. TEI Publisher). Furthermore, the database will contain not only various external identifiers, but also the most important data to capture the relations between entities and its change in time.

As part of the project, the most important Polish historical resources for places and people in the past will be added to the WikiHum database and mapped onto the most important international resources (VIAF, Wikidata). These include resources already available online (Historical Atlas of Poland, The Historical-Geographical dictionary of the Polish Lands in the Middle Ages), as well as resources that were previously available only in printed form (Polish Biographical Dictionary, Lists of Officials of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). Ultimately, the database in question will harmonize a much larger scale of resources. The database will be expanded both with new resources related to people and places, but also with new types of entities (e.g. intellectual or artistic works as well as seals). The aim of the proposed presentation is to share the experiences gathered during the creation of WikiHum.

Diefenbach, D., Wilde, M.D., Alipio, S. (2021), Wikibase as an infrastructure for knowledge graphs: The EU knowledge graph, in: International Semantic Web Conference, Springer, pp. 631–647

Hyvönen, E. (2012), Publishing and using cultural heritage linked data on the semantic web. Synthesis lectures on the semantic web: theory and technology, 2(1), pp. 1-159

Hyvönen, E. (2022), Digital humanities on the Semantic Web: Sampo model and portal series. Semantic Web Preprint, pp. 1-16

Scholz, M., & Goerz, G. (2012). WissKI: a virtual research environment for cultural heritage, in: ECAI 2012, IOS Press, pp. Spp. 1017-1018

Smith-Yoshimura K., Washburn B., et al. (2019), Creating library linked data with Wikibase: Lessons learned from project passage, DOI: 10.25333/faq3-ax08.

Shimizu C., A. Elles, S. Gonzales, et al., Ontology Design Facilitating Wikibase Integration – and a Worked Example for Historical Data, arXiv:2205.14032 , DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.14032

Italy has been the first European country to declare national lockdown being affected by the COVID-19 virus. In March 2020 the need for a digital cultural offer arose. While cultural institutions were closing, some of them started offering new formats to encourage people to stay at home experiencing virtual entertainment. Despite a lack of digitization of the Italian cultural institutions, they ‘re-opened online’ in response to the dramatic situation. As a consequence, an amount of digital, collaborative and creative cultural initiatives appeared.

The crisis has clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of some relevant Italian museums and cultural institutions due to the national digital backwardness (in term of lack of digital services, scarcity of digital collections, delay in digitalisation, lack of experts in digital data management). On the other hand the crisis has also produced a digital acceleration that has inverted the tendency of “normalize” the diverse cultural institutions (museums, libraries, archives) by simply digitalizing their collections without truly producing innovative curatorial digital formats. That is particularly relevant in Italy where unlike elsewhere in Europe, cultural heritage is spread among a multitude of diverse cultural institutions. In this respect the pandemic has fostered innovative curatorial formats envisaging new ways to manage and to democratize cultural heritage, and offering new ways to provide data accessibility (enhancing for instance the social media to reach a broader audience).

In order to better investigate, analyse and understand this phenomenon, in June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Politecnico di Torino, undertook a multidisciplinary research project entitled MNEMONIC: the Italian Hub of Cultural Resilience combining different expertise including digital history, digital humanists, information technology experts, communication experts. Using a GIS system of data collection, the MNEMONIC online platform allows the networking of the Italian Cultural Heritage data by mapping the exceptional cultural production during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Conceived as a broad curatorial hub of Italian Cultural Heritage, MNEMONIC makes possible connecting data provided by the marginalized and non-centralised small Italian cultural institutions especially those located in the non-digitalized areas. As a digital database on Italian Cultural Heritage during Covid Pandemic, MNEMONIC not only makes data easily findable, but it also allows multiple qualitative and quantitative analysis.

If MNEMONIC mainly shows how digital technologies can help to reach a broader and marginalized audience, it also reveals that the same digital data can be reuse to fulfil different targets, from people with special needs to scholars and researchers. In some cases, the institutions take advantage of digital technologies, to enrich their own collections by overcoming physical barriers, reaching others global collections. For instance the #BotticelliSpringMarathon launched by the Uffizi Galleries was an international campaign on Twitter entitled #BotticelliSpringMarathon allowing followers and the most important museums in the world sharing related digital works on the Uffizi profile).

By analysing the results of the MNEMONIC research project, the paper presents how the Italian cultural heritage institutions (museums, libraries, archives) took advantage of digital acceleration to entails new curatorial practices, to differently manage their collection and to reframe their idea of accessibility.

The fundamental structure and perspective of archives are on a turning track recently. A classic, physical document only has one possibly right place and order in the archival structure, although the digitized version can be accessed from many different angles, reflecting all its possible connections.

The Budapest City Archives positions itself as an “open-archives” and therefore we operate with a very user-friendly, open-minded attitude on a daily basis. Beyond the physical research room which is wide-open not only for professional/scientific visitors but for one-time visitors/citizens as well, we also welcome school groups to get familiar with the institution itself, with the collection. We have recurrent research groups from universities and NGOs, and those are great examples of long-term and mutually advantageous contributions.

Oftentimes they don’t even have to visit us since many documents (blueprints, land registry files, address registries, notarial deeds, postcards and photographs) are already available through the Budapest Time Machine. The surface is integrated into the Hungaricana joint Cultural Heritage Portal of Hungarian public collections — moreover, most of them are on a georeferenced surface, connecting the documents and the metadata through lot numbers.

We have a very efficient contribution with the Óbuda University Ybl Miklós Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering, where architect students learn how to create 3D models using our archive blueprints of the houses of Budapest. We also receive their digital house reconstructions and a series has already been uploaded to the BpTM.

The Budapest100, organized annually by the Contemporary Architecture Centre coordinates voluntary researchers and encourages them to use our online databases already in the early phases of the research. As a result of the work of their researchers, data sheets of houses are provided, with metadata, photo series of the present stage of the houses and sometimes historical research and description – mostly based on our sources. We have made an agreement that for using our documents at their events (e.g., installing exhibitions about the stories of the buildings) we receive these data sheets in return and also integrate them into the Budapest Time Machine. This method ensures the sustainability and the continuity of the mutually rewarding partnership.

The success of the Budapest Time Machine program reached a new level of international professional attention recently. The team of Bp City Archives, Stockholm City Archives and Copenhagen City Archives united in the framework of the program ‘CityMemories’ to exchange practical experiences. We consider co-working and co-creation essential tools in developing a ‘code of practice’ in the field of data management.

The challenge in our data-management system was from the beginning to find connections between multiple various document types. The drawback in the universal vision of standardization also lies in the fact, that the objects we strive to describe cover a colourful palette of sources.

It is well known that in the last two decades, the incidence and usability of digital thematic research collections in the humanities, mainly in top research institutions, has been constantly growing (Palmer, 2004, 348-365). Furthermore, it is increasingly confirmed that the active use of well-built digital research collections should facilitate research practice and support the further development of humanities including ethnology and anthropology (Flanders, 2014, pp. 163-174; Hughes, 2011). The motivation of this paper (and the previous work behind it) is based on the intention to reflect on the persistent unsatisfactory condition of Slovak digital thematic research collections in ethnology (Zajonc, 2006, pp. 30-47) and to fulfill the need for a more systematic and sustainable building of this kind of collections.

The content of the paper can be disciplinary defined at the intersection of archival studies, digital curation, digital humanities as well as the domain of documentation practice in ethnology and anthropology. It follows that it represents a balanced mixture of theoretical, methodological, practical, organizational, and partly institutional knowledge and approaches.

The primary aims of the paper are 1. to analyze the selected significant principles of conceptual preparation and practical building of digital thematic research collections, and 2. to exemplify these principles on the concept and strategy of digitizing and computer processing of the ethnological Collection of research reports located in the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology Slovak Academy of Sciences. The Collection of research reports has been built by the institute staff since 1953 and contains over 1.500 documents recorded in the ethnological field research (a total of 120.000 items in various formats). This unique collection was systematically built and documented by experts in the field of ethnology and comprehensively covers traditional cultural heritage throughout Slovakia (Gogora – Kubisa, 2018).

The scope of the first aim includes, besides principles analysis, highlighting the specificity of thematic scientific digital collections (compared to digital collections as such); determining the differences between key terms (to archive vs. to collect, to preserve vs. to curate, to adapt vs. to standardize). The second aim consists of these investigations: an explanation of the theoretical, methodological, and practical consequences of the particular case that meets the requirements of the digital thematic scientific collection; and an examination of what the effective use of such a collection in domestic ethnological research means for its next life cycle and sustainability.

One of the main contributions of the paper will be to improve the knowledge of professionals from the field of ethnology and anthropology (especially in Slovakia and the central-European community) about the theoretical foundations and practical management of digital thematic research collections.

By providing simple instructions on how GLAM institutions can create good 3D models themselves, we enable them to create digital assets that can be used for multiple applications, meet scientific requirements, but also be easily integrated into marketing and other communication contexts.

So instead of each department in the museum managing its own digitized material, they can all reuse the same thing and integrate it into different contexts. This initiative in terms of empowerment and capacity building of the small CHI is what we are doing in the photogrammetry project, a collaboration between the Digital Humanities Lab of the University of Basel (https://www.https://dhlab.philhist.unibas.ch), Virtual Culture (https://www.virtualculture.ch) and the Digital Museum of Learning (https://www.museumoflearning.org, an Initiative of the Jacobs Foundation).

The poster presents the development of an automatically generated rhyming dictionary of Hungarian canonical poetry. While the creation of explanatory dictionaries presenting the senses of words is a time-consuming task that requires the manual work of many lexicographers, the creation of rhyming dictionaries can be completely automated if you have a sufficiently large corpus of poems. Besides the specific features of the rhyming dictionary, the poster highlights a typical scenario of creating new data from literary corpora. The example of the rhyming dictionary of Hungarian poetry can illustrate the successive stages of such projects, which start with corpus creation, continue with the automatic generation of the domain-specific database and its conversion into formats suitable for different tasks, and end with a web application and with research results.

The rhyming dictionary of Hungarian canonical poetry was generated from the ELTE Poetry Corpus (Horváth et al. 2022). ELTE Poetry Corpus is a database containing all the poems of 50 canonical Hungarian poets with annotations of grammatical properties and poetic features related to sound devices. On the one hand, the poster shows a new algorithm analyzing the rhyme patterns of the poems in the corpus. While the old algorithm analyzed the poems’ rhyme pattern on the basis of one rule set, the new algorithm uses multiple rule sets and selects the consistent output. The script generating the rhyming dictionary is based on the result of the automatic analysis of rhyme patterns.

On the other hand, the poster briefly presents the different formats of the rhyming dictionary and the different characteristics included in the dictionary. The rhyming dictionary contains three types of features: (1) features of the words in the rhyme pairs, (2) features of the rhyme pairs themselves and (3) bibliographic information of the rhyme pairs. The features of the rhyming words were extracted from the ELTE Poetry Corpus. The grammatical features were annotated using the NLP toolchain e-magyar (Váradi et al. 2018, Indig et al. 2019) and the phonological features were annotated using a program developed for the corpus. The features of the rhyme pairs were generated by the script creating the rhyming dictionary. These are the following: distance between the two rhyming words, order of the rhyming words, number of lines rhyming with the rhyming pair between the two words of the rhyming pair.

A web application using an SQLite database of the rhyming dictionary is also under development. The poster briefly presents the test version of the query interface. It also gives some examples of research results based on the data of the rhyming dictionary. These results reveal a peculiar pattern in the length of the first and second words of rhyme pairs and illustrate the decline of inflectional rhymes in Hungarian canonical poetry in the mid-19th century.

Of all born digital objects, email is one of the most challenging to preserve in the long term. Internationally, there is already experience with archiving even large-scale correspondence, but in Hungary the development of a (public) collection-level practice is still to be seen. In order to implement international good practices and results, the Digital Humanities Centre of the National Széchényi Library has launched a pilot project to archive the entire material of the Katalist mailing list (more than 40,000 emails from the start until August 2022), which could serve as a model for further e-mail archiving tasks. Katalist is a list of library and library informatics topics, in operation since the early 1990s. The letters on the list have been preserved since 1997. It has thousands of members, its contents are publicly available and it is an important source of the history of Hungarian librarianship.

In the framework of the process, the entire archive was first discovered using the ePADD software. EPADD is free and open source software developed by Stanford University’s Special Collections & University Archives that supports the appraisal, processing, preservation, discovery, and delivery of historical email archives. EPADD incorporates techniques from computer science and computational linguistics, including machine learning, natural language processing, and named entity recognition to help users access and search email collections of historical and cultural value. The archive was then packaged with the Mailbagit software into an OAIS-compliant AIP package, which includes, in addition to the standard EML, other formats suitable for long-term preservation (HTML, TXT, PDF, WARC) and the extracted attachments from the emails, in accordance with the BagIt package format specifications, together with the collection-relevant metadata for the emails. The Mailbag project is a specification with an open source tool for preserving email archives using multiple formats, such as MBOX, PDF, and WARC developed by a consortium lead by M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives, University at Albany, SUNY. The Mailbag proposal is an extension of the Library of Congress Bagit specification. The archived material will be searchable through a Solr-based search engine.

During the demonstration, one can test the discovery and processing capabilities of the ePADD software on the Katalist mailing list, inspect the OAIS-compatible packages created with Mailbagit software (including testing Mailbagit on the fly, e.g. creating standard derivatives like WARC, PDF etc. from emails), and try out the Solr-based search engine.

While it is still widely accepted in the field of computational stylistics that there are unique patterns of individual language use, so-called authorial “fingerprints”. However, the metaphor of this term can falsely suggest that patterns specific to a particular author can be objectively extracted from texts. The construction of this authorial fingerprint is a much more complex, creative digital humanities task. The main issue is finding a method that can detect ‘patterns’, always interpretable only in comparison with other authorial texts, on the basis of a selection and combination of linguistic markers that can be interpreted statistically in the text and then of various similarity calculations based on these markers.

Given the size of the corpus of texts under study and the complexity of the linguistic markers and similarity calculations, this is now unthinkable without the use of computer algorithms. However, even though stylistometric and computer-based authorship analyses are becoming more and more widespread, and that the last two decades have witnessed intensive technical and methodological changes in these fields, they are still not widely used in Hungary, so further studies are needed to determine which methods, distance measures and stylometric tools would be most effective in clustering Hungarian texts.

It is also unclear, for example, how the linguistic condition of the texts under study may impact the results of the research. We do not know, for example, whether the result of clustering 19th century Hungarian literary texts is distorted or not, if we examine the texts not in their current state, according to the newer edition, but using their old editions, where the orthography was not yet consolidated.

In my research, I am therefore investigating whether the normalisation of texts or the correction of their grammar affects the results of the clustering in any way. Of course, this would require having both versions in computer-readable format, which is problematic in the case of older editions, because most of the 19th century Hungarian literary texts are only available in digitized form in their recent editions, and older editions are generally not accessible. To overcome this challenge in my research, I am using the versions of older editions of short stories which I originally accessed in PDF format, and then digitised, and corrected using standard spelling rules.

Cultural heritage geodata presents an important resource for cultural heritage institutions. It helps people connect places of the past with locations in the present, understand different ways of knowing where culture happens, and relate their experiences to the experiences of others and the past. Beyond scanned artefacts that show historical and cultural geographies, the many possibilities and vibrant interests in places make historical mapped data a central information resource to connect experiences and knowledge of the present with evidence of the past. The workshop, held from 23 to 25.4.2022 with the support of an Europeana Research grant, brought together people involved in collecting, curating, presenting, and researching historical digital geographic data from digitized maps and other sources held and curated by the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector. The outcome is a document, the “Warsaw Statement”, with points that offer guidance on making cultural heritage geodata more accessible through open access. The statement can help inform programmatic endeavours to provide digital geographic data and covers three topics: 1) Citizen science as a guiding concept; 2) The importance of institutional infrastructure; 3) Spatial data in institutions and research in alignment with European activities. The presentation covers these points in detail for cultural heritage institutions and researchers. The Warsaw Statement on Spatial Data in Cultural Heritage is available online at https://zenodo.org/record/6814297#.Y-DySC8w2MA.

This paper presents the outcomes of the Open Research Case Studies conducted at the University of Leeds over the period of May 2022 to early 2023. Funded by Research England, I have conducted interviews with colleagues from different faculties, schools and services across the University of Leeds to raise awareness of open practice across disciplines and career stages. Since I am a researcher in the Humanities, I have been specifically interested in the way in which Arts and Humanities scholars think about research data, use data, and use open and FAIR data as part of their open research practices.

My presentation brings attention to the specificities of Humanities and practice-research data, particularly on how digitised and born-digital data is used by researchers at Leeds. I use the Open Research Case Studies to demonstrate the complexities Arts and Humanities researchers need to navigate from copyrights to ‘data’ being an insufficient terminology that does not describe the vast type of evidence they use. I bring in the perspective of the Library and Research Support Services, including the Digital Content and Copyright Manager at Leeds who described the digitisation strategy of Leeds Special Collections. I will also introduce the SPARKLE (Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement) project-in-development, which wants to find ways to better manage and curate practice-research data ‘which may include text, but also image/video/audio/software, and other less common mediums’.

My paper investigates how researchers in the Arts and Humanities can benefit from open research, particularly practices around data sharing and management for a sustainable, digital, engaged, and equitable knowledge production. Ultimately, this presentation will showcase the Humanities perspective from the Open Research Case Studies and demonstrates the challenges academics and practitioners face as well as the benefits of rethinking what data means in the Arts and Humanities and how can we manage and share the multitudes of evidence researchers work with.

Have you ever explored how your visitors perceive values associated with the collections of your museum?

Have you tried to rethink your collection from a ‘values-perspective’?

Do you want to create novel value-centric activities?

VAST is a research and innovation action in the context of Horizon 2020 Curation of digital assets and advanced digitisation actions that aims to study the transformation of moral values across space and time and bring them to the forefront of advanced digitisation.

The project will trace and inter-link the values…

…of the past through the analysis of collections of narratives, such as theatrical plays, fairy tales, and scientific documents, that come from different places and from significant moments of European history.

…of the present through the collection and digitision of how values are conveyed today and of how the audiences experience and perceive the communicated values.

At the core of the project lies the VAST Digital Platform. What can VAST Digital Platform offer to you?

1. A methodology for capturing you visitor’s experience

2. A toolkit of value-based educational activities

3. Tools for conducting online user surveys

4. Tools for annotating artefacts with values

This poster proposal aims at demonstrating the offerings of the VAST platform, along with some exemplar activities that has helped us in capturing and digitising values, as perceived by audiences engaging in activities like visiting a museum, or participating in an educational activity.

What follows (in the second page of the pdf file) is a poster draft preview.

The paper will present an ongoing project exploring street names changes and history of the streets in the Bulgarian capital city of Sofia since the late nineteenth century. The project that is affiliated within the E-infrastructure CLaDA-BG aims at disseminating its results through digital tools to both professional and wider non-expert public. Exploring a specific case but also suggesting the applicability of the model in other contexts, the project treats frequent street name changes in the Bulgarian capital city as a complex phenomenon reflecting major political and cultural shifts that allows simultaneously to present these broader processes in an accessible and meaningful way. The main product is a web site that is based on an extensive data set featuring streets names and other data throughout history. The onomastic data set is supplemented with other information including pictures, map fragments and original archival documents. The paper will elaborate on the opportunities provided by digital tools for presenting research results, visualization, reaching new audiences etc.

As the volume of data increases and research methods develop, there are becoming more possibilities to do research based on cultural heritage data. The environment is still evolving, and many questions are being debated and some of them are just beginning to emerge for discussion. This paper presents the complex role of data and analyses what kind of role cultural heritage organizations can play across the different dimensions of data now and in the future. The analysis is based on the collaboration experience with researchers, other cultural heritage organizations, and data stewards. The perspective is provided by the National Library of Finland (NLF).

Creating a sustainable workflow from cultural heritage master data to research data requires understanding both data itself and the researchers’ needs. It also requires understanding the direction in which the archiving of research data in humanities and social sciences is going and what kind of infrastructure is available.

The NLF offers researchers many of its collections as data. The purpose is that the data is managed by following the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) principles. There is an ongoing FAIR project with an aim to assist the personnel of the NLF to understand how FAIR principles can help improve the usability of different data types such as data produced in the digitization process, licensed, or harvested as born-digital to the web archive. This also means that the FAIR principles should be adapted wholesomely considering systems and users, not only data.

Identifying all available data sources, and how they can be used, is not done without active collaboration with the researchers of humanities and social sciences. In practice, the NLF participates actively in research-driven projects to be able to develop its data services to meet the needs of researchers. This is a mutual way of closing the gaps and bridging the sense-making of data as approaches towards data vary between participants. So far, the collaboration has increased knowledge about data usage possibilities and raised discussion about data description and research data metadata considering both cultural heritage data for research and research data after the actual research. At this end of the data life cycle, the research data should be archived in accordance with FAIR principles. However, not all products of research projects have a suitable repository to ensure sustainable FAIRness. This has emerged pilot collaboration to integrate a research database into the library’s systems. Further collaboration and discussion are still needed as well as resources to meet the researchers’ needs and to serve in the current and future data-driven research environment.

Anyone who decided to enter Hungarian politics in the 17th century had to face a fragmented environment in the sense of power, culture, and religion as well, which included many interest groups that were sometimes loosely allied, sometimes more closely allied, or even in conflict with each other. Miklós Bethlen, Chancellor of Transylvania (1642–1716), was aware of the power of the written word, and from his peregrination (a.k.a. student years) he consciously took every opportunity to enrich his education, expand his political vocabulary and become able to speak in Hungarian, Latin, French and German, aiming to spread his agenda to different political groups whether it be Catholic Habsburg, Turkish, Protestant-European or Hungarian. He used his network of correspondence not only to promote his private interests effectively, but also to serve the political interests of Transylvania and Hungary—although he acted most effectively when these interests coincided.

In Bethlen’s case, the shaping of collective memory and public opinion was transformed into a political tool, and he sought to influence his political partners by presenting historical facts as arguments and by effectively adapting the views of contemporary political thinkers. All this, together with the religious arguments that were also effectively mobilised, formed part of his political toolkit, the outline of which forms the basis of this presentation. In my presentation, I will identify the basic concepts he used to win over his audience in different situations and outline the possibilities of how to map and, in a longer-term context, encode a political language containing several symbolic expressions and metaphors.

In my research, I analyse Bethlen’s activities in the cause of the galley-slave Protestant ministers, i.e. the Epistola Nicolai Bethlen ad Ministros Exules tam Helveticae luam Augustanae Confessionis, ex Hungaria per hodiernam persecutionem ejectos, and his related private letters, notes and pamphlet with the title Apologia ministrorum. I will investigate the types of arguments and metaphors that can be identified in these private and public political writings, and I attempt to build a data model based on them that can be used as a starting point for topic modelling or for building a metaphor database based on semantic data techniques. My aim is to create a data model that can be incorporated into the analysis tools of historical documents published digitally on ELTEdata.

Sources (Published and Unpublished):

Bethlen, Miklós: Apologia ministrorum Evangelicorum Hungariae… 1677 (1678) Tiszántúli Református Egyházkerület Nagykönyvtára, Debrecen, Rmk929

Jankovics, József (ed.): Bethlen Miklós levelei I – II. [The letters of Miklós Bethlen] Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1987.

References:

Brugman, Britta C., Burgers, Christian, Steen, Gerard J.: Recategorizing political frames: a systematic review of metaphorical framing in experiments on political communication, Annals of the International Communication Association, 41:2 (2017), 181-197, DOI: 10.1080/23808985.2017.1312481

Dorst, A. G.: Metaphor in Fiction: Language, Thought and Communication. Semantic Scholar, 2011. URL: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Metaphor-in-Fiction%3A-Language%2C-Thought-and-Dorst/1f68ed74c9287e2e93fad4341a493f460e6fb532

Hampe, Beate ed.: Metaphor. Embodied Cognition & Discourse. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017.

Semino, Elena – Demjén, Zsófia eds. The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language. Routledge, New York, 2017.

The semantic database, ELTEdata, developed by the National Digital Heritage Laboratory of Eötvös Loránd University, aims to organize the sources of prosopographical, bibliographical and other historical research groups into a semantic data network. Following the data structure of Wikidata, items consist of semantic statements, which can be described in the form of property-value pairs. The SPARQL semantic query language enables complex searches on the database and offers various ways for visualizations. It is important to know that by means of entity linking, it is possible to connect semantic entities to the text fragments of a digitalized source edition. We used a semi-automatic name entity linking method in order to identify the personal and geographical names in the texts and add namespace identifiers to them. Currently, ELTEdata contains more than 15000 items. Besides the possible data enrichment of the three original collections, the forthcoming work focuses on the integration of new projects in our database. Within the framework of a longer cooperation, ELTEdata relates closely to the database developed by the Institute for Literary Studies of the Research Centre for the Humanities (ITIdata). Both projects use the wikibase-software and the semantic statements, entities and properties are also connected. My presentation is centred around the mapping of large datasets, first of all repositories, regarding the history of education. Although the sources are diverse (datasets of the early modern schooling history and prosopography of university teachers from the late 19th, early 20th century period), the similarities of the data structure and the possible common patterns of the sources facilitate the mapping process. Besides the current state of the project, my presentation also pays attention to visualization (in order to analyze geographical and social mobility and the development of social networks based on correspondence) and the ways of a semi-automatic data entry. Because the data import from other namespaces into the aforementioned ITIdata was successful, similar data imports can be realised in ELTEdata as longer-term developments. I will also present, how to run complex queries in SPARQL connecting diverse platforms. For instance, users can search in Wikidata and ELTEdata at the same time, in order to collect items, corresponding the conditions of the query. This way, the separate databases can be connected in the queries as well.

The Encoded Archival Description (EAD) [1] has been promoted since the 90’ies by the International Council on Archives (ICA) as the only international digital standard for describing archival holdings. It is XML-based, i.e., it is written in the utmost preferred language for cultural heritage data. EAD files can be automatically harvested by means of e.g. the Open Archival Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). EAD metadata fields can be used to populate e.g. a SQL as well as a NOSQL database. EAD is successfully mapped to among others MARC21 and Dublin Core in order to enhance Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) intercommunication and data FAIRness. Free open-source tools are available for managing, online-publishing and visualising EAD datasets, which can be ad libitum gathered, processed, queried and stored by digital humanists.

EAD is a data model which procreated in 2016 to children: Records in Contexts Conceptual Model (RiC-CM) [2] and Records in Contexts Ontology (RiC-O) [3]. These two semantic artifacts encompass EAD’s siblings Encoded Archival Context (EAC) for archival authority records and Encoded Archival Guide (EAG) for institutions with archival holdings and make EAD compatible to Linked Open Data.

Should we still agree that “les archives [sont] [l]es greniers à faits [des historiens]” [4], than we should also see in archival digital standards and particularly in EADs the foundations for the management of historical research data, together with the more famous standards TEI, FRBR and CIDOC-CRM. Archival holdings are cultural heritage, whereas archival descriptions are cultural heritage / humanities research data. Archival metadata exemplary shows how deep research data and cultural heritage fusion.

EADs and RiC are an utmost powerful tool for research in the humanities, whose wide and rich diffusion cannot be doubted: the French National Archives make e.g. online available 8 millions [4] descriptions of archival units that can all be exported as EADs; the same does the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal with its 325’000 archival units [5] from all over the world. Many smaller archival institutions too work hard in order to be able to generate their own EADs. Yet, EAD and RiC have got so far little attention in digital humanities scholarship, with notable exceptions [7].

I would like to hold this communication in order to raise awareness and interest among cultural heritage professionals for EAD and archival metadata standards.

Notes

[1] https://www.loc.gov/ead/

[2] https://www.ica.org/en/records-in-contexts-conceptual-model

[3] https://www.ica.org/en/records-in-contexts-ontology

[4] Lucien Febvre. (1948). Sur une forme d’histoire qui n’est pas la nôtre. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 3-1, 21-24. See also: Etienne Anheim. (2019). Science des archives, science de l’histoire. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 74(3-4), 507-520. doi:10.1017/ahss.2020.56

[5] See: https://www.siv.archives-nationales.culture.gouv.fr/siv/rechercheconsultation/recherche/ir/rechercheGeneralisteResultat.action?formCaller=GENERALISTE&searchText=

[6] See: https://portal.ehri-project.eu/

[7] I am thinking to Georg Vogeler. See Georg Vogeler. (2019). Das Digitale Archiv: Der Computer als Mediator, Leser und Begriffsbildner, in Klaus Kastberger, Stefan Maurer and Christian Neuhuber (Eds.), Schauplatz Archiv : Objekt – Narrativ – Performanz. DOI: 10.1515/9783110656725-006

There is a long tradition of solitary scholarship in humanities and many humanities researchers are trained to work independently. This mindset is often reinforced by academic reward structures that value individual achievement and original ideas. This poses a challenge for digital humanities. Utilizing the tools used for processing and analyzing materials –including cultural heritage data – in digital humanities requires a certain level of technical expertise. Without a research group with different kinds of experts in it, individual researchers must be able to run these tools themselves.

The objective of the first line of digital humanities is to offer a web-based tool that facilitates entry into the field also for individual students and researchers. The tool serves two purposes. Firstly, it acts as a generic processing tool for levels commonly used in digital humanities, such as extracting text and images from PDFs, utilizing OCR for image sets, removing stop words, and detecting the language of a document.

The second objective is educational. By allowing students and researchers in the field of cultural heritage to easily test different ways of processing materials with their own data, users become familiar with these tools, and they can determine if these tools will be useful for their research or not.

One of the key requirements for this type of tool is transparency. Instead of functioning as a black box, the tool must clearly display how, and which tools were utilized at each stage. For instance, in the case of OCR, the output should include the version of the OCR engine and the parameters used. This transparency guarantees that the processing of material can be accurately documented in research papers, enabling the analysis to be replicated in other environments. Additionally, transparency permits researchers to surpass the limitations of the first-line tool by utilizing command line tools.

One of the necessary features of this type of tool is the ability to perform multiple variations of the same process. Optical character recognition is a prime example of this, as the typical OCR process often involves multiple attempts with different settings. The tool should enable the creation of multiple processing pipelines with different configurations and allow for easy comparison of the results to determine the best option.

To fulfil the need of accessible tools for digital humanities, we have initiated the development of a first-line tool called Messydesk. It features a graph-based approach with node-based user interface where import nodes, file nodes, processing nodes, and output nodes form a visual graph. The graph-based approach enables the visual chaining of processing stages while maintaining a clear understanding of the data flow and the origin of the data.

Since 2020, Museo Galileo of Florence and University of Milan have been involved as partners in the VAST (Values Across Space and Time) project. VAST has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and is led by NCSR Demokritos, Athens, Greece. The main aim of VAST is to investigate the spatio-temporal transformation of moral values, and how they are tracked in different mediums, in order to exploit the digitized tangible and intangible cultural assets thus supporting and empowering European cultural heritage institutions and practitioners. This is done in two ways: 1. By externalizing values implicitly present in resources from the past (Past of Values); 2. By digitizing values as they are perceived by the general audience today (Present of Values). VAST focuses on three main sources of values: 1. Greek tragedies (Pilot 1); 2. Seventeenth century works of natural philosophy or strongly influenced by natural philosophy (Pilot 2); 3. Traditional European storytelling (Pilot 3). Within VAST, University of Milan and Museo Galileo are together in charge of Pilot 2 (Past of Values and Present of Values, respectively). Drawing on the Museo Galileo’s twenty-year experience in history of science educational activities – which rely on the strong interoperability between its collections of scientific instruments, library, and digital archives – and on the University of Milan’s expertise in semantic web technologies and ontology design, this joint effort produced an effective, data-driven approach to research, digitization, and (co)creation of educational programs for museum visitors. This approach has been developed with insights from many perspectives, and features data gathering through annotation, the creation and implementation of educational activities based on the gathered data, and an iterative-integrative ontology design approach to ensure that different and possibly conflicting interpretations of values are represented and coexist in a semantic graph. The approach is scalable, sustainable, and reusable. It relies on advanced digitization and enables collaborative study, co-creation, and continuous capture and digitization of experience.

For Museo Galileo, which has already begun to move toward Open Data and Open Science, the VAST project represents a step further: the annotation system of seventeenth century scientific texts and images provided by University of Milan makes these data sets available to a public of non-scholar and fosters the dissemination of cultural heritage, thus facilitating the dialogue between past and present. The creation of specific interfaces for an integrated system of annotations and educational programs needs an informatic infrastructure capable of optimizing the browsing experience and giving the audience the possibility to interact and provide feedback. Referring to a specific educational activity that was designed for the VAST project, we shall clarify how and to what extent the VAST project has been integrating the Museum educational program, by implementing the possibility of making cultural heritage data easily accessible to a wider range of audiences, findable and interoperable, reusable during both physical and virtual visits, and sustainable.

In this paper we present an approach to support the processing of long in-depth social scientific interviews and to enable these texts for secondary research. However, the problem area and the implemented solution are generalizable to many other tasks where long texts have to be explored without reading them thoroughly, and relevant text parts have to be found based on complex criteria.

In our approach, the processing of texts starts with digitization (if needed, in case of analogue, heritage interviews) and then they are cut into manageable sized blocks such as pages, which will serve as units for analysis and reuse in other research. These text blocks get automatically assigned keywords, which are consequently mapped to topics using NLP tools. The topic thesaurus specifically created for this task is a hierarchical structure of terms based on the ELSST (European Language Social Science Thesaurus by CESSDA), which contains all major sociological research areas and fields of inquiry. Furthermore, named entities are extracted from texts and, where possible, linked to Wikidata (wikification). Through Wikidata we also collect links to other important registries such as GeoNames, ISNI or VIAF.

Based on these preprocessing steps, an exploratory user interface was built to facilitate searching for pages/blocks in the interview corpus related to the given topics. After selecting a page/block, the researcher sees the text with named entities, keywords and topics highlighted. This will help her decide whether to use the text in her research.

We have also experimented with different methods of mapping the contents of the archives we are working with. We have built various diagrams to characterize interviews or interview collections, and implemented an interface where researchers can prepare these diagrams themselves, for their own use, without any programming.

For more than a decade the digitization of libraries and their development of digital services for users have been growing up and developing parallel to the evolution of digital humanities (DH) research, or the application of digital research methods to humanities disciplines, and its growing establishment as a scientific field. More recently on both sides of the pew a partnership between digital humanities (DH and digital libraries (DL) is being forged, coagulating in a demand for DH centers within academic libraries and an increase in the call for “Embedded Digital Librarians”. The purpose of the Poster is to present socially grounded approaches to understanding DLs. The objectives are: to identify and discuss major issues that arise from the intersection of DLs and DH and, more generally, from the social nature of DLs; and to consider implications for the design and evaluation of DLs.

The Poster’s theme aligns well with the Dariah 2023 Annual Meeting theme 1 “Sustainable workflows for data management and curation” and offers an opportunity to focus scholarly attention on the social, cultural, political, and economic shaping of digital libraries as sociotechnical systems and their consequences.

The authors discuss their current positions and how their experiences have had an impact on DH research. They also suggest directions for future work among researchers and practitioners.

The CLARIN Resource Families (CRF) initiative provides manually curated overviews of prominent language resources and technologies deposited across the distributed CLARIN infrastructure (Lenardič and Fišer 2022). The main aim of CRF is to support other core services of CLARIN from the perspective of the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016). CRF enhances the findability and accessibility of CLARIN resources by collating them under their most common typological characteristic. The initiative facilitates re-use by providing comprehensive descriptions tailored to the unique technical features of each of the families, as well as their qualitative characteristics. Furthermore, CRF provides a funding instrument for external projects to contribute new overviews.

Though originally focused on written corpora (e.g., corpora of parliamentary proceedings, corpora of academic texts), in 2022, CRF was expanded to include corpora of oral history. At present one collection is currently featured – the Ravensbrück corpora (Calamai et al. 2022a) – whose creation was supported by the aforementioned CRF funding instrument. This corpus family contains 8 collections of recorded interviews with survivors of the female concentration camp Ravensbrück, conducted in different languages, such as English, German, Hebrew, and French. See https://www.clarin.eu/resource-families/oral-history-corpora. One collection is available for download (Collection Bruzzone; see Bruzzone and Beccaria Rolfi 1976) while the others can be streamed online.

The inclusion of the Ravensbrück corpora in CRF represents an illustrative example of how the CLARIN infrastructure incorporates and provides documentation for complex objects like oral history sources whose provenance and metadata documentation widely differ from standard written corpora and even from contemporary interviews born digitally. The team working on the Ravensbrück resource family (see Calamai et al. 2022b) availed themselves of CLARIN’s Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI), which is a framework for metadata description that “supports flexible definitions of metadata structure and semantics” by allowing researchers to “create and use their own [metadata] schema tailored specifically towards the requirements of [their] project” (Windhouwer and Goosen 2022: 194 and 199). All the 8 collections within the Ravensbrück family are accompanied by extensive CMDI metadata, prepared by Calamai et al. (2022a,b).

The peculiarity of the interviews in the Ravensbrück family is that they were mostly recorded on an analogue carrier (i.e., audio cassettes), so a new CMDI metadata profile was created that is tailored to such legacy interviews not born digitally. This metadata profile has additional components describing “information about the context in which the interviews were conducted” as well as “information about the process of digitisation” (Calamai et al. 2022a: 3). Being thus digitised, comprehensively described, and carefully curated, the Ravensbrück corpora present a unique opportunity to study and compare these historical interviews. To facilitate their use in research, CLARIN offers through its Speech data and Technology network (Draxler et al. 2020) an open-source web application called TranscriptionPortal (https://speechandtech.eu/transcription-portal), where certain audio recordings (e.g., Collection Bruzzone, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) can be uploaded and then orthographically transcribed on the fly, with manual phonetic and word alignment for a variety of languages.

Text+ is part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and addresses the needs of long term preservation and interoperability of text- and language-based research data. Within Text+ the task area Infrastructure/Operations is responsible for the integration and coordination of the overall infrastructural developments with regard to Text+ as a whole – integrating the three data domains collections, lexical resources, and editions – and with regard to Text+ as part of the NFDI big picture, and the European infrastructure level as well, particularly DARIAH-EU. In this regard IO can be described as an assembly tool for sustainable data management and curation workflows.

The way of working in the Humanities undergoes a digital transformation. The Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation “APOLLONIS” and the European research infrastructures DARIAH for the Arts and Humanities and CLARIN for Language Resources and Technology are important facilitating agents of this transformation in Greece and in Europe respectively. The transformation has been forcefully accelerated by the recent pandemic and, as some early research initiatives are indicating [1], readiness for acceptance of digital work practices appears to rise. Also rising is the need to delve deeper into the nature of digital methods and practices and their impact on research.

The COVID-19 outbreak and the restrictions it imposed brought about new needs in the Humanities research and teaching, introducing new modi operandi, accelerating a digital transformation that has been under way for decades in the Digital Humanities, but also demonstrating the gaps that remain. Funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI), the project “Digital Landscape” (The emerging landscape of digital work practices in the Humanities in the context of the European projects DARIAH and CLARIN, 2022-2024), is capturing the impact of the pandemic in the way we work in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Greece, to better understand current trends and needs, and plan effectively for the future. To this end, we are employing a mixed methodology. The tools to collect evidence-based information are: a) a communities web-survey and b) Humanities and Social Sciences focus groups. The report resulting from the analysis of these data will be used to support the strategic vision and inform the future planning of the APOLLONIS research infrastructure.

The proposed poster will present the findings of the web survey, in which we analyzed data on digital research practices, tools and interaction with digital content gathered from the humanities and social sciences research community in Greece, paying special attention to the impact of COVID-19 on digital humanities research and practice.

Based on past experience and data collected in the context of European research infrastructures and projects in the Arts, Humanities and Language Technologies and Social Sciences, such as Preparing DARIAH, DARIAH-EU, CLARIN-EU, EHRI (the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure), ARIADNE (Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Data Networking in Europe), SSHOC, SoDaNet and Europeana Cloud, we designed, disseminated and implemented the web survey which gathered almost 400 responses, subsequently analysed and discussed in comparison with past trends in Greece.

In this poster we propose that we present these findings and prompt discussions with our European colleagues.

[1] E.g., “DH in the time of Virus: a Twitter Conference”, 02.04.2020, “DHgoesViral” workshop, 26.04.2021.

Libraries and cultural heritage institutions, commonly known as Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM), have traditionally provided access to contents in digital format. New methods of accessing to the digital collections in innovative ways have recently emerged in order to facilitate the application of computational methods based on Data Science, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Recent trends, such as Collections as data, promote the publication of digital collections amenable for computational use. In this sense, and as a relevant example of making available and reusing digital collections in innovative and creative ways, GLAM Labs have gained popularity among the community. However, the adoption of the Collections as data principles has increasingly become a challenge in GLAM institutions due to different reasons including copyright issues, data quality, and lack of personnel or IT skills needed.

Advanced techniques based on ML and AI can be applied to digital collections such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify geographic locations, dates or names of people, and entity linking to create links to external repositories. The richness of the collections hosted by GLAM institutions can play a crucial role in the training process of ML and AI models that can help to maintain their relevancy. Previous studies have focused on literature reviews concerning approaches as well as the developments based on ML models to extract key insights from textual data in a structured way.

In this context, the study of the Spanish Golden Age theatre has traditionally gained attention. Some examples include an analysis on authorship, modelling the social networks underpinning the early modern publication industry and a computational linguistic approach applied to Spanish Golden Age Sonnets.

However, the scarcity of annotated benchmark datasets for particular approaches and languages, such as Spanish Golden Age theatre, has resulted into relatively less progress in these domains. In addition, many of the approaches are offline, computationally expensive and mainly based on predominant languages such as English, French and German.

The objective of the present study was to introduce a method to train a NER model based on Spanish Golden Age theatre made available as datasets by GLAM institutions, in particular the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (BVMC) in Spain. The results of this study are publicly available at the BVMC Lab (https://data.cervantesvirtual.com) and can be used and applied to other domains such as historical documents and newspapers.

The main contributions of this work are as follow: (a) a detailed method to train a NER model for Spanish Golden Age theatre; (b) the model generated; and (c) the results obtained after the analysis and assessment. These are relevant to encourage researchers to use the datasets published by GLAM institutions.%In addition, a collection of Jupyter notebooks is provided to reproduce the results.

DiMPAH aims to aggregate, connect and make widely available novel Open Education Resources (OERs) on selected digital methods, apply these to interdisciplinary contexts and

foster novel creative learning experiences by taking data from the past into future stories.

DiMPAH has three objectives:

Create novel OERs on digital methods and associated tools for the construction of new knowledge on A&H research questions and for audience engagement in a suite across the complementary areas of qualitative and quantitative digital research tools and methods. The DiMPAH suite, channeled by the #dariahTeach platform, will be openly available across European institutions to support current and future professionals from cultural heritage sectors as well as academia in improving competencies, connecting best practices and applying spearheading technologies, to enable collective efforts towards future solutions.

The DiMPAH-selected methods are to be applied and tested via case studies in three prominent European digital heritage contexts: a) digitised newspaper collections; b) built heritage environments and their digital twins; and, c) performing arts collections.

DiMPAH will move this ‘towards new stories for Europe’: the selected new methods and technologies, and cultural heritage case studies, will be deployed in learning scenarios to localise and show possible solutions and potential impact on social equity, transnational and cultural diversity, gender equality, good health and well-being.

Through OERs developed in this project, the European student and researcher will gain access to a one-stop shop for OERs on digital methods for A&H, as well as related disciplines in the interdisciplinary sphere of DH. In addition, teachers in HE institutions will be able to train their students by building on material created by highly experienced professionals in the field. Cultural heritage professionals will learn on how they could best apply digital methods such as Augmented Reality for engagement with audiences online and on-site. Ultimately, long-term benefits can help Europe (and beyond) reach certain sustainability goals by allowing scholars to research digital content and datasets, such as cultural data from cultural heritage and art institutions, which are central to studying identity formation and social cohesion. Complex societal challenges can be addressed through international, cross-disciplinary, collaborative research into human conditions, societies and cultures, and through comprehensive studies using relevant digital methods and datasets throughout Europe and beyond.

The following seven courses are planned:

Introduction to Digital Methods

Text Analysis: Linguistic Meets Data Science

Digital Historical Research on European Historical Newspapers with the NewsEye Platform

Netnography

E-Spectator Digital Tool for Analysis of Performing Arts

Design, Development and Deployment of Augmented Reality Applications

Introduction to Knowledge Organisation Systems for Digital Humanities

The Dimpah suite of courses is organized into two parts, A. Introducing Digital Humanities Methods with six OERs, and B. Organising Digital Humanities Documents with 1 OER.

This presentation is part of an ongoing project to record and analyze different digital solutions to the humanitarian crises generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the months of war that have followed it. In particular, the project focuses on issues of cultural heritage and attempts to both digitally preserve existing cultural heritage, and archive digital cultural heritage.

In November of 2022, we organized a session on this topic at the ASEEES convention in Chicago (“Digital Advocacy: Aggregation and Networking for Displaced Scholars”). The goal was slightly different: to discuss some of the ad hoc solutions that appeared in February and March 2022 to the challenge of immediate and efficient aggregation and distribution of information to help displaced academics, cultural workers, and other scholars. Scholars who represent different approaches to this issue, including Steven Seegal (creator of the Feb 24 archive on Twitter) to Dorine Schellen (who created and maintained the University of New Europe database of resources for displaced scholars). I also presented the work of Science4Ukraine, SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online) and the Lviv Center for Urban History (https://www.lvivcenter.org/en/). What emerged clearly from our discussion was the need to coordinate and compare the manifold efforts.

This is why I have begun a series of long-format interviews with people in Ukraine involved in cultural heritage institutions, as well as those abroad who have been actively involved in digital preservation efforts (Taras Nazaruk and the Lviv’s Center’s Telegram archive, Anton Mudrak, Maciej Maryl, Lars Wieneke, Qunn Dombrowski and Andy Janco), and in June I would like to present the first results of this work, with what will amount to a white paper on where things stand on digital preservation of cultural heritage, and what remains to be done.

In this presentation, we will outline the first phase of our consortium project aimed at creating a Hungarian language model, focusing on the creation of a large corpus of teaching material for the model. This phase is necessary for the effective functioning of the model: The quality and variety of the text collection play a crucial role in determining the performance of the model. The corpus is divided into three subsections.

Common Crawl, which is based on the textual material of the Hungarian Internet, constitutes the largest part of the corpus. The corpus, based on the Common Crawl collection, currently consists of 9 billion tokens and can be further extended (cp. Nemeskey 2020). The best Hungarian contextual word embedding, huBERT (Nemeskey 2021) was trained on this corpus and serves as a basis for other models. The size of this corpus is a major improvement, but the quality needs to be improved given that it is web data.

The second sub-section involves material collected from the Webaratás project (Indig et al 2020). A large amount of high quality text can be extracted from the project material, which collects the texts of Hungarian news portals and organises them in TEI-XML format, supplemented by metadata. To date, all the texts of 18 news portals, forums, and blogs have been collected and converted into TEI XML format.

The third subset consists of non raw text sources. On the web, not only is there raw text on news sites/forums, but there are also a large number of PDFs with live texts, e.g. through digitisation of public collections and publication in research spaces. There are many such texts that are openly accessible: scientific publications, scientific and non-scientific books, and other texts. In this presentation, we will demonstrate our method for the extraction and OCR of textual resources stored in Hungarian repository systems.

All three sources require manual annotation, either due to the nature of the task or for producing training material for machine learning models, such as filtering boilerplate or performing OCR analysis. Building on the three sources outlined above, our goal is to construct a larger Hungarian corpus than ever before by incorporating additional text sources, such as social media postings, which is crucial for a highly efficient language model.

In the presentation I aim to demonstrate what kind of structural data could be extracted from encoded drama texts, and how can we use these data to describe the characteristics of dramatic genre. This characterization could shed light to genres, which are traditionally described by thematic features (such as the extent to which historicity determines the setting and the period the events take place in, the emphasis on moral issues, the social status and speech patterns of the characters, or the conclusion of the plot.)

The presented method suggests that we can distinguish comedies and tragedies from each other primarily based on the character networks of plays, which allows the (1) plot, (2) interpersonal relations and societal world, (3) and/or dramatic form of a given play to be viewed simultaneously on the plane of a surface instead of in the process of reading a play or watching a performance, which inevitably unfold over time. In the study I use the concept of structure, by which I mean the system of relations between characters in the broadest sense: among the metrics of character networks (density, diameter, clustering coefficient, etc.) I also rely on the distribution of words/stage time between characters to reveal structural differences between genres. This conceptualization is closest to form, but it is also related to (and thus brings together) the other approaches—e.g. the analysis of structure also deals with the relationships between characters as a result of the progression of the plot; or following the considerations and methods of SNA (Social Network Analysis), character networks can also be seen as structural representations of the contemporary cultural-historical context of a given drama; and thus plays can be understood as the author’s – not necessarily intentional – attempt to model a society.

Earlier similar research suffered from two crucial problems that call the usefulness of their results into question. First, most papers rely heavily on the size of the networks to classi-fy genres, which instead of capturing the structural design of networks, simply compares the number of characters in the plays. In what follows, an attempt will be made to present a meth-od that does not take the size of the networks into account. The other pitfall to be avoided is the application of overly complicated mathematical procedures to investigate similarities be-tween networks. The problem with this approach is that the results obtained this way cannot be attributed to real properties of the plays; such results would only show whether two works have a similar structure. By contrast, my goal is not simply to confirm that there is such a simi-larity but also to explain what this similarity consists of.

Finally, I will also discuss how these characteristics change over time in two ways: 1. from the perspective of literary history; 2. in term of the development of dramatic plot.

The French National 3D Data Repository (CND3D) is a repository dedicated to the scientific publication and curation of 3D models together with the related data. Deployed in 2020 by the consortium “3D for Humanities” of the research infrastructure Huma-Num, it is currently tested on a large scale by the community of humanities and social sciences. There are currently more than 1100 deposits, 570 viewable 3D models, 7 collections and more than 180 documented sites and over twenty social sciences labs depositing. This secure repository relies on Huma-Num infrastructures, and it is pushing the integration of FAIR principles.

Findable

The National 3D data repository stores 3D models along with all the accompanying resources used in their creation (text, images, publications, etc.). A dedicated metadata scheme is continually augmented to accommodate the different data and scientific domains. With the right amount of metadata, a DOI is generated.

The CND3D relies on standardized and multilingual vocabulary, such as PeriodO, Geoname and PACTOLS thesaurus that covers archaeology and the sciences of antiquity from prehistory to the present day.

Accessible

The metadata is always accessible. Research with a REST API is also available and can be saved as a url link.

However, access to the actual data stored in the repository is subject to the depositor’s decision and may be restricted.

Interoperable

To enhance its interoperability, the repository is actively working on compatibility with other European initiatives.

With the French MASA consortium, we made the metadata scheme compatible with the CIDOC CRM, enabling connection with the European research portal ARIADNEplus.

The repository’s metadata also complies with Dublin-Core standards. It integrates an OAI-PMH harvester used by the French search engine Isidore dedicated to humanities and social sciences. This will also allow data to be harvested by TRIPLE from the European OPERAS project.

Reusable

The 3D data repository promotes the use of PLY and DAE formats for 3D models, which have been standardized by the consortium for archiving at CINES. We are also exploring other formats for various data such as scanned point clouds, tomography, and modeled 3D scenes. However, for the sake of simplicity and for promoting publication of scientific data, the repository accepts any type of data, regardless of format.

As for licensing, the repository favors the use of ETALAB license (equivalent to Creative Commons CC-BY license) or CC-BY-NC.

Deposit

According to the depositor, the access to the stored data can be done either by a direct download directly, or indirectly by contacteur the right owner. Thanks to the integrated 3D viewers, visualization and interactions (cuts, lighting, measures, …) with a dedicated version of the 3D model may be chosen.

Filling metadata can be done on-line. However, to facilitate deposits, an open source software has also been developed. This software, named aLTAG3D, allows a semi-automated deposit through a simple user interface and offers a solution for managing 3D data with their metadata and specific formats for use in the humanities and social sciences community.

The paper deals with the curation of a collection created by the Modern Greek History Research Centre of the Academy of Athens in Greece. The collection is based on an archival series of the British Foreign Office from the period between the outbreak of the Greek-Italian War (October 1940) and the end of the Nazi occupation in Greece (October 1944). Based on this material, the researchers have compiled a detailed chronology, which records specific events, but also information exchange, proposals, plans and reports by Greeks, British, Allies and resistance organizations. The Chronology was published in two volumes. The entries were also captured in a database that allows multiple searches and extraction of data beyond the indexes contained in the publication. Yet this digitized collection had remained a closed corpus of information, without any interconnection with relevant collections of other institutions.

Three years ago, the Chronology was incorporated in the action “The 1940s in Greece” of the project APOLLONIS, in the framework of which the partners of the project, based on the metadata of various collections pertaining to that period, created common indexes and knowledge bases to increase the collections’ accessibility and interoperability, and to familiarize researchers with the possibilities of datasets curation.

Οne of the outcomes of this action was a linked data-based knowledge graph representation of the collections to support expressive semantic queries. The first step for the construction of the knowledge graph was the production of linked data representations of the collections using a mapping tool. The mappings used both standard and custom vocabularies to cover collection-specific modeling needs. The second step was the automatic enrichment of the items in the knowledge graph with annotations, which were produced for three semantic dimensions (place, time, person/organization) by applying NERD tools on the relevant fields. For the Academy of Athens Chronology, these tools produced Geonames, TimeLine and Wikidata annotations. The resulting knowledge graph was further extended with relevant vocabularies (eg. DBPedia, Greek Historical Periods) by including cross vocabulary equivalence alignments for identical terms and containment alignments for temporal terms.

Through these annotations, the knowledge graph allowed unified multi-vocabulary searches over all collections, expressed in any of the supported vocabularies. To exploit the knowledge graph, a search application was built that supported combined cross collection queries over the three dimensions. Through limited reasoning support, the application was able to also answer semantic queries by exploiting the vocabulary hierarchies and other term categorizations.

Practical evaluation showed that, although the quality of the results depended on the quality of the automatically produced annotations, and the complexity of the queries affected performance, knowledge graph technologies can enable researchers to locate relevant material through expressive queries exploiting the levels of abstraction provided by the underlying knowledge. For the Academy of Athens, the outcome was particularly fruitful: firstly, its collection participated in a rich knowledge graph that facilitated research on the specific period; secondly, interconnectivity highlighted documentation inconsistencies that have to be adjusted to improve the quality of semantic queries.

Cultural heritage institutions deal with functions of protection, research, and communication of material and intangible cultural heritage related to their collections. When we talk about research in cultural heritage institutions, it sometimes refers to scientific research in the narrower sense of the word (encompassing construction of research questions and hypotheses, and publication of results in scientific journals and monographs etc.), nonetheless it is always about continuous collection and study of information about cultural objects heritage. That information is both intrinsic information, that results from the materiality of the object (properties such as materials, techniques, dimensions, and condition, that are inquired through observations and predominantly natural science methods) and extrinsic information that is analyzed by studying the history of the objects and the wider context (title, creator, provenance, etc.). That information is recorded through cataloging by established metadata standards and mostly by audio-visual documentation, including 3D models, etc.

But is that enough if we want cultural heritage data to be interoperable and reusable for various future research topics and heterogeneous approaches (multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary studies) in digital humanities? Digital humanities research is a complicated endeavor that could involve many diverse, connected and unconnected, sometimes recursive, human and machine activities of the extraction of evidence and knowledge from cultural heritage objects. That includes but is not limited to digitization, OCR, transcribing, NER techniques, AI methods, documentation and metadata recording, data curation and preparing for statistical analysis and visualizations, mapping and integrating to semantic sources and data publication as Linked Open Data.

All of the above implies continuous communication, dialogue, and cooperation between different experts – renaissance teams of social science and humanities researchers, cultural heritage experts, and computer, information and data scientists.

Furthermore, we believe that in such teams, whenever it is possible and makes sense for research, there is a place for citizens. Cooperation between cultural heritage institutions, researchers, and citizens is important for many reasons. As the number of materials in the collections is huge (most of them are not digitized, nor documented by metadata and contextual information), the engagement of citizens is a matter of feasibility and sustainability. Furthermore, cooperation with citizens implies a better insight into users’ needs, as well as the social relevance of research and the democratization of science in general.

The presentation will report the workflow of the project based on the cooperation of academia (university teachers and students), citizens (retired sports journalists), and heritage experts in documentation, research, and communication of knowledge related to the collection of more than 16.500 digitized photographs from the Croatian Sports Museum (the photographs are documenting local and international sports events in Croatia and Yugoslavia from 1970 to 2000).

Among other goals, the German national research data infrastructure (NFDI) aims to provide an overarching knowledge graph across the domains and subjects. In the field of humanities, arts and culture the two consortia NFDI4Culture and Text+ have chosen the Integrated Authority File (GND) as an initial backbone structure. Within Text+, the NFDI consortium for the language- and text-based research data, a major task is devoted to initiate a GND- Agency revolving around the Integrated Authority File. Inevitably, this task takes interoperability into account, for instance towards Wikidata or VIAF or other approaches in use within DARIAH-EU or EOSC.

In order to facilitate institutions and researchers in exploiting collections to the greatest possible extent and in describing best practices, it is essential to develop sustainable workflows for the creation of and access to cultural heritage data. At the same time, the common European dataspace for cultural heritage[1] outlines the critical need also to share, integrate and provide such high-quality cultural data through the development of respective services. In this paper we describe our ongoing work in developing workflows for accessing the services of the Competence Centre (CC) for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage in the context of the 4CH project [2], thus advancing and contributing to the establishment of best practices in accessing cultural heritage services.

Based on previous experience and considering workflows of known research portals and major infrastructures, e.g. the ARIADNE Portal[3], the PARTHENOS Portal[4] and Europeana[5], we studied and identified the sequence of actions required for accessing CC services. Firstly, an abstract model capturing the sequence of actions required by the user to access CC services in general has been developed, establishing the parameters that need to be defined when applying it. These include, but are not limited to, the type of user requiring access (individual or institution, data creator, data manager, data consumer, researcher, educator etc.), the type of service (access to data, access to tools, training, consultancy, etc.), the type of access (remote or on-site) and charging issues if applicable. This abstract model can then be adapted to each different case by providing specializations of the generalized actions included and leading to variations of the abstract model.

By way of example, we provide in Fig.1 a specialization of the workflow expressed as a UML activity diagram with swimlanes, where specific values have been applied to a subset of these parameters. In particular, we describe the sequence of actions required to provide access to an indivual user that requests remote access without charging fees. The three lanes employed distinguish the actions required to be performed by i. the user, ii. the CC in an automatic way, and iii. the CC interactively. The user formulates a specific need against the 4CH knowledge base, which contains a list of CC services along with other resources like digital tools, training material, documentation files, etc., and which is semantically organized. Several decision points (diamonds) determine in the sequel the exact flow of activities that will be performed each time, ranging from executing a totally automatic workflow to requiring human communication. Application of different values to the same parameters would lead to a different specialization of the workflow. Finally, the activity colored in blue represents a complex activity that requires the execution of a service-specific workflow for its accomplishment.

Upon completion, the proposed workflows will facilitate CC in organizing its services and in guiding users to access them. Going one step beyond, these could also be exploited to facilitate accessibility of services of cultural heritage data spaces, providing the means to formulate and promote common procedures and best practices.

The FAIR principles were published in 2016 to provide a baseline strategy for all domains of research to make their data broadly reusable by others. They describe approaches to findability, accessibility, interoperability and reproducibility for both data and accompanying metadata and, although they are not prescriptive in what may be considered FAIR, the metrics which have been derived to assess FAIRness have largely focused on a limited number of machine actionable criteria applied uniformly across research areas. The WorldFAIR Project, through 11 case studies of different disciplines led by global research partners, aims to broaden our understanding of how FAIR may be interpreted within these disciplinary contexts.

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is leading the Cultural Heritage case study, which seeks to explore how image sharing platforms in the cultural heritage landscape already facilitate the interoperability of both image data and associated metadata. While the overall outcome of the case study will be the production of a model for implementing FAIR recommendations at the Digital Repository of Ireland, it is also an opportunity to highlight achievements in the sector which may usefully inform work in other domains. In that respect, the work is both a valuable opportunity to review and situate the DRI’s position as an image-sharing platform in the cultural heritage landscape, as well as a chance to raise questions about how FAIR may be perceived in that landscape. This presentation will discuss the results of a mapping report documenting policies and practices in image-sharing platforms, as well as a set of recommendations for improving FAIR assessment of cultural heritage image data.

Creating the infrastructure for an archive is considered, nowadays, to be a trivial procedure. Several tools (e.g. Omeka [2], CollectiveAccess[3], CollectionSpace[4]) and prototypes (eg. Dublin Core [5], VRA CORE [6]) are available for use in order to, either directly install and use a CMS for cultural related data (first case), or build a system “from scratch” based on a common prototype (second case). This procedure would lead to the digitization of at least an archive’s metadata and to the organization of the archive itself; it would offer the ability to search for information in the archive in an easy way, it would allow people to access the information of the archive, and it could also be part of a larger cultural data lake (Europeana). The solutions for these use cases, are extant, present and available.

On the other hand, occasionally one comes across archives of artists that have a special view of art, are ahead of their time, design their own universe, and they keep evolving it throughout their life. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of the archive for Dimitiris Papaioannou, a diverse archive which includes several different types of data. In this case, we have selected a special approach, in order to fully capture the artistic aspects of the archive’s content, which was analyzed in the context of the GENESIS project [1]. Throughout this project, the procedure through which the artist approaches the performance arts and generates ideas was recorded and analyzed.

Following the aforementioned analysis, the archive material provides insight for the artist’s visual arts, his dancing roads and his performances, and unveils his approach to performance arts (or art, in general). Then, the archive is structured in a way that would allow all archive visitors, including the general public as well as researchers, to obtain information about the individual elements of the work, but also locate the “genetic material” of the artist into the archive.

To achieve this goal, interdisciplinary research involving the cooperation of scientists and researchers from both the humanities and the technology domains was required. The research team designed an information layer entailing objective information (e.g. works, performances, participants and their roles etc.) and subjective information (e.g. tagging or free text descriptions), and accommodating semantic links between them. Metadata were also associated to information items, where applicable.

The information layer fully serves the needs for information search and retrieval, while it additionally provides the underpinnings for data mining procedures that can possibly reveal patterns or data correlations that have remained unobserved.

In heritage research, the use of data requires a careful definition of research methodology with a multidisciplinary approach both due to the very nature of the cultural heritage which is wide and continuously evolving with new conceptual and practical developments, and due to the issues related to heritage data. An example where these issues have been confronted with digital methods is the RURITAGE ATLAS created in the scope of the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project RURITAGE as a component of the RURITAGE Resources Ecosystem. The ATLAS is the output of the innovative rural landscape creative mapping, and it has been conceived and designed for surveying and making available the multiple and rich functions of rural areas and human-landscape interactions, including heritage values. For this purpose, an integrated digital environment has been constructed on a WebGIS environment and integrated in a digital platform. The ATLAS provides data on cultural and natural heritage (CNH) including land uses and human interactions with CNH assets, but also on the rural regions as a whole by considering urban and rural interactions, issues of connectivity, accessibility, and mobility. These data are also collected by considering a larger framework of comparability, according to the research project methodology.

The data collected and presented on the ATLAS includes economic, demographic, and social factors that are able to underline those economic and social potentials to push resilience and social cohesion in the RURITAGE territories. Data are both extracted by desk research and by botto up processes that engage local stakeholders.

The availability of different kinds of visualization of the stored information, which is managed through databases, offers the possibility to focus either on the single region and human/landscape interactions.

The issues confronted during the ATLAS can be discussed under these themes.

– Identification of heritage data: ATLAS gives the possibility of interacting with data under four sections Places, Experiences, Rural Territory, Stories giving information on both tangible features and intangible futures.

– Collecting, co-creating, co-mapping the data: A co-creation approach was adopted with each rural area stakeholder for better understanding the characteristics of each area to be represented on Atlas.

– Integrating external data: In addition to data collection, further analysis has been carried out for including economic and social data, as well as making maximum use of Copernicus and Galileo data. This has required a continuous update of the back-end structure.

– Reuse of data: Data collected and co-created throughout the project has been reused for different purposes such as creating digital narratives for better presenting the intangible heritage of these areas or deriving performance indexes to better analyze local information and create benckmarks for deeply comparison.

– Linking heritage data to spatial information: cultural natural heritage data among other humanities data characterising spatialised information especially considering the case of data referring to intangible features

– Interoperability: RURITAGE ATLAS is a part of the larger, flexible e modular RURITAGE Ecosystem. Atlas ensures interoperability with existing platforms by using web-service based access and open APIs exploiting a spatial approach supported by a webGIS tool.

Research (and statistics) indicate that despite recent improvements the Latvian humanities and arts community in general still lacks awareness and understanding of contemporary open science and is not particularly supportive of open science practices (Bite et al 2020, Daugavietis et al 2022, Reinsone et al 2023). This phenomenon can be attributed to a multitude reasons, including one of the lowest levels of R&D funding in the European Union and the lag in the implementation of national science policy in this domain. The academic community in the field of humanities is just starting to grasp the notion of “research data” and necessary management it requires, while it remains unfamiliar to most cultural heritage institutions and public cultural administration. The development of digital research infrastructures continues to pose a persistent challenge. Although some progress has been made and there are a sparse examples across several research disciplines, including operation of national CLARIN ERIC repository in recent years and the joining of one institution as a cooperating partner in DARIAH-EU last year, the overall development of digital research infrastructures in Latvia remains deficient. This holds true for the social sciences as well.

In comparative political science, the notion of small states is often employed to argue that the process of socio-economic development in small countries differs from that of larger countries (Katzenstein 1985, Chodak 1989). Latvia, with a population less than 2 million and an even smaller Latvian-speaking community, is considered a small country. The attributes of a small and economically challenged country may shape other optimal scenarios for the development of research data repositories and research infrastructures in general. The research community in such states is commonly limited in size, with a scarcity of research institutions in each field, and characterized by a lack of inner competitiveness. Furthermore, the geographical distances within the country are relatively modest, academic research is predominantly concentrated in the capital city. The administration of science and culture is centralized but both fields are operating independently from one another. The main question this paper seeks to address, with Latvia being the main focus and other small countries being used for comparison, is: which of the above mentioned and other characteristics of a small state facilitate or hinder the EU’s science and culture policy objectives, specifically, the implementation of open science principles and the complete digitisation and accessibility of cultural heritage?

REFERENCES

Bite, K., Daugavietis, J., Kampars, J., Kreicbergs, J., Kuchma, I., Ločmele, E., Ostrovska, D., Vecpuise, E., Veisa, K., & Želve, M. (2020). ‘Pētījums par atvērto zinātni un rīcībpolitikas ceļa kartes izstrādi’. LNB.

Chodak, S. (1989). The New State. In The New State. Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Daugavietis, J., Karlsone, A., Kunda, I., & Kristāla, A. (2022). ‘Latvijas digitālo humanitāro zinātņu rīku un resursu izstrādāšanas prakses’. Letonica, 47, 12–51.

Katzenstein, P. J. (1985). Small states in world markets. Cornell University Press.

Reinsone, S., Matulis, H., & Daugavietis, J. (2023). ‘Digitālie resursi un rīki humanitārajām zinātnēm. Rekomendācijas politikas veidotājiem un digitālo resursu un rīku izstrādātājiem’ [MANUSCRIPT]. LU LFMI.

This poster presents the multimodal experimental project carried out from 2021 to 2023 as part of the European project Collaborative Engagement in Societal Issues (COESO). The research project explores citizens’ relationship to tourism in Sao José, Lisbon. Based on a triple collaboration between CRIA, ZERO association, and CNRS (La FEE – France), we created a transmedia website to depict the sensory experiences of tourism in a neighborhood of Lisbon: https://saojose.huma-num.fr/

Following a citizen science approach, this multimodal anthropology offers a journey into sensory experiences on an open-access visualization medium. In doing so, this project aims to develop a multi-modal anthropology that reaches out to new audiences. Following a participative and critical approach, it hopes to contribute to a better understanding of sensory experiences of tourism in the city.