Author: Max Kemman

AXES

Abstracts for Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

The following are two abstracts that have been accepted for poster presentations at Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (September 22-26, Valetta, Malta). Both are abstracts for papers of four pages, which will be published in conference proceedings by Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LCNS). We will make the manuscripts available Open Access at the Erasmus University Library RePub, and will publish the eye tracking data Open Access at DANS, I’ll provide the links later on the Publications page.

Update (05-09-2013): papers and data have been published, see below.

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conferences

Is sloppy science an institutional issue?

On wednesday June 5th I attended the Erasmus Graduate School of Social Sciences and the Humanities symposium “How to prevent sloppy science? Defining good conduct in science“. This symposium offered much promise with keynotes by prof. Kees Schuyt and dr. Peter Verkoeijen, but eventually did little in defining what this good conduct in science actually is or should be.

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blogposts

Searching in Oral History collections; perspectives and user wishes

In an earlier blogpost, I described a call asking for scholars interested in being part of a focus group in the development of an Oral History (OH) search interface. This call was also sent by email to 113 scholars in our network, after which fifteen people responded to our e-mail (13.2% response-rate, not bad), and one more scholar responded after being tipped by another scholar. In the past two weeks, I’ve interviewed these fifteen scholars via Skype and phone.

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conferences

Building the PoliMedia search system; data- and user-driven

polimedia data and user driven
On Thursday 18 April 2013, Laura Hollink and I presented the PoliMedia project at the e-Humanities “New trends in e-Humanities“ meeting. As Laura’s main research interest in the PoliMedia project was aimed at the links between political debates and media, while mine was at the user requirements and usability, we decided to present PoliMedia from the data- and user-driven research perspectives.

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Oral History Today

How to search Oral History collections?

OHT-logoOral History provides a specific type of data to be explored. Unlike general audiovisual collections as researched in AXES, Oral History collections contain interviews with people who experienced a certain historical event. For example, the collection for the Interview Project Dutch Veterans contains 1,000 interviews with Dutch veterans who’ve served in wars ranging from the Second World War to the war in Afghanistan. Such interviews can be analysed by historians to learn not only what an event meant on a macro level, but how it was experienced by the people undergoing these events.

Oral History collections as these provide an interesting perspective for research, as the collections are sizable, have a clear theme, usually decent metadata, and sometimes transcripts of the full interview. Researchers can use these interviews to pick fragments to provide quotes as illustration to a point, or can search to analyse how different people perceived an event; do men and women talk differently about it, what did it this event mean for common people?

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conferences

CLARIAH – Building tools for structured, textual and audio-visual data

On Tuesday March 11th, the CLARIAH project organized a kick-off meeting at the Meerten’s Institute in Amsterdam to present the five chosen projects.

CLARIAH is a contamination of DARIAH and CLARIN, combining the goals of the two projects. Although CLARIAH did not receive the funding it requested, it did receive a million euros of ‘seed capital‘ to keep the proposal going and build a showcase of why CLARIAH is of importance. To achieve this, five projects will build demonstrators to showcase the aims of CLARIAH, as well as show the technological possibilities pursued. Although the presentations were short, filled with acronyms and the projects are still in their infancy, I’ll try to write a short summary of what the projects were about.

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PoliMedia

Oproep geestes- en sociale wetenschappers voor gebruikersevaluatie PoliMedia

As this call for humanities and social sciences scholars to participate in an usability study is aimed at scholars in the Netherlands, this call is published in Dutch.

Hoe gebruiken geestes- en sociale wetenschappers zoekmachines in hun onderzoek? Dat is een vraag die wij (ESHCC, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam) stellen in onze onderzoeksprojecten waarin wij zoekmachines ontwikkelen voor deze geestes- en sociale wetenschappers. Projecten hierbij zijn zoekmachines voor onderzoek naar politiek en media (PoliMedia project) en onderzoek in audiovisuele archieven (AXES project).

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conferences

PoliMedia symposium: linking political debates and media

On Wednesday January 23rd, the PoliMedia project team organized the symposium ‘Linking political debates and media’. In this symposium the project team presented their current research, and invited two speakers also doing computational research on political and news-media data.

The afternoon was opened by chair Laura Hollink (VUA), who asked for a show of hands. Both the humanities and computer sciences were well represented, mirroring the crossroads of political analysis by computational means.

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