Today the journal History published the paper State of the Field: Digital History to which I had the pleasure to contribute together with Annemieke Romein, Julie Birkholz, James Baker, Michel de Gruijter, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Thorsten Ries, Ruben Ros, and Stef Scagliola. In this paper we provide an overview of the current state of technologies and practices for data generation, analysis, and reflection for historical research. We hope the paper will provide a valuable introduction to historians and students interested in digital methods for historical research, with plenty of references for further exploration of the topic. The paper is available open access here.
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Grasping Technology
With all kinds of digital technologies becoming available, the uptake of digital research methods by the humanities might have been inevitable. How the humanities can incorporate digital tools, and contribute to the development of technology aimed at the humanities were questions central at the DHBenelux conference (12&13 June 2014, The Hague, the Netherlands). Around 180 attendees met to discuss research projects presented in 50 presentations, 16 posters and 10 demo’s.
This blogpost is not intended to provide a complete overview of the conference, but rather to show the discussion from my perspective. The main theme I will follow is that of the humanities grasping technology; referring to 1) taking technology, 2) embracing technology and 3) coming to an understanding of technology.
Searching for Answers and Actions: Competition in Semantic Search
A while back ago I wrote that linking collections is the way to go for digital libraries. Indeed, we see that digital libraries are moving in this direction. For example, Europeana’s plan for 2014 is to shift their priorities from portal to platform. Besides the ability to develop tools on top of linked data platforms, this shift introduces the possibility of semantic search, where the search engine has a certain level of understanding about the concepts in the search query. Thus far, search engines such as Google and Bing have worked by indexing text in webpages without a real understanding of what they mean. Now both are working on semantic search, but in very different ways.
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New research project: Talk of Europe
The below is cross-posted from the Talk of Europe blog.
In 2014-2015 the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), VU University Amsterdam (VUA), DANS and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) will collaborate on the Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus (ToE-TCC) project. This project, an initiative of CLARIN ERIC and CLARIN-NL made possible by NWO and OCW support, is a follow-up on the PoliMedia project in which these partners collaborated previously.
Abstract for Digital Humanities 2014
Today we received the final notification that our poster proposal is accepted for Digital Humanities 2014, to be held 8-12 July in Lausanne, Switzerland. See below the full abstract that Martijn Kleppe and I submitted.
The Future of Libraries Is In Linking
With all digitization efforts of the last decade, researchers are no longer only concerned with libraries, but with digital libraries. How does this transform the distribution of information? At the conference Theory and Practice in Digital Libraries (22-26 September 2013, Valetta, Malta) researchers and librarians discussed the current state-of-the-art as well as the future directions for digital libraries.
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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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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