In the summer of 2012, we held a survey amongst scholars, inquiring about their online search practices. The results of this survey were presented in September 2012 at the Digital Humanities Congress Sheffield, titled “Mapping the Use of Digital Sources Amongst Humanities Scholars in the Netherlands“. This August, we hope to publish a (first) paper about the results of this survey in the then launching online journal Studies in the Digital Humanities. This journal will be Open Access, additionally we will make the manuscript available Open Access at the Erasmus University Library RePub, and will publish the survey data Open Access at DANS. I’ll provide the links later on the Publications page.
This paper was co-authored with Martijn Kleppe and Stef Scagliola. Below I provide the abstract we submitted, which undergo some modifications before publication.
Author: Max Kemman
eHumanities Workshop Soeterbeeck: More Digital Than Humanities
On 13-14 June the Radboud University Nijmegen and the eHumanities group from KNAW co-organized the eHumanities workshop Soeterbeeck. This very nice mid-sized workshop with under 50 participants staying in the beautiful monastery Soeterbeeck in Ravenstein included very interesting invited-talks as well as a nice postersession where we presented the PoliMedia project. However, the workshop also demonstrated that so far the Digital Humanities is more Digital than Humanities.
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Presenting PoliMedia poster at The Soeterbeeck eHumanities Workshop
This week Martijn Kleppe and I will present the PoliMedia project at the Soeterbeeck eHumanities Workshop (13 & 14 June 2013, Ravenstein, The Netherlands) at the Posters & Demos session. The poster below will be presented, along with a demonstration of the search user interface.
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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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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“Dutch Journalism in the Digital Age” Abstract
The following is the abstract for the paper on the role of the internet in the research practices of Dutch journalists, which was accepted yesterday for publication. This paper was co-authored with Martijn Kleppe, Bob Nieman and Henri Beunders. Continue reading ““Dutch Journalism in the Digital Age” Abstract”
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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Building the PoliMedia search system; 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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How to search Oral History collections?
Oral 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?
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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