Digital Humanities Domain Research Articles

Analyzing Recent (2019) Kashmir Socio-Political Issue: A Voyant Sentiment Analysis of Tweets

Computational Textual Analysis (CTA) is an effective way to analyze large texts by incorporating computational tools, such as, Voyant. The current study takes computer-assisted textual analysis (mixed method) to investigate the sentiments on tweets through Voyant computational method, in order to grasp the emotions of the global public who have tweeted about the recent (2019) Kashmir issue. This research is based on the conceptual framework of Ortony, Clore, and Collins (OCC) model and the keyword approach. For this purpose, different tweets have been analyzed to check the level of sentiments as either positive, negative or neutral. The findings suggested that sentiments were neutral towards the issue of Kashmir and negative towards the Indian government. Voyant has also presented the word count, density, and correlation of phrases within the larger text context. Voyant procedures like; cirrus, trend and summary showed the results based on quantitative and qualitative measures. These toolsets are easy to use without any programming skills and seem to be the best for researchers of social sciences and humanities who are trying to work in digital humanities. The study also recommends Voyant as an operative tool for textual analysis for Computational Linguists, Postmodernism, Critical Discourse Analysis, English Literature, History, Sociology, Theology, and any other field of knowledge that falls under the domain of digital humanities.

UFTDRDH: A novel user-oriented solution for full-text database retrieval in Chinese digital humanities

Information technology boosts the development of database retrieval in the Chinese digital humanities domain. However, most database providers adopt a system-oriented design pattern, which fails to handle the problem of query gaps in users’ retrieval process. This issue seriously hinders the effective use of database retrieval functionalities, peculiarly among those historical and humanities researchers. To address it, we propose UFTDRDH, a novel user-oriented solution based on automatic query formulation (AQF) technologies, which integrates a human–machine interactive module for the selection of new query-related expansion terms and a powerful query expansion algorithmic component (UFTDRDH-QEV) optimised by a topic-enhancing relevance feedback model approach (ToQE). To verify the effectiveness of UFTDRDH, several comparative experiments are conducted, including quantitative evaluation for retrieval efficiency and user satisfaction, as well as qualitative studies for interpretative traceability. The empirical results are multidimensional and robust, which not only shows the positive effects of different AQFs on gap reduction, especially the importance of query expansion as the most effective technology, but also underlines the remarkably advantageous performance of UFTDRDH compared with traditional system-oriented automatic query expansion in different task contexts. We believe the application of UFTDRDH can further strengthen the research focus on user-centred design and improve the level of current full-text database retrieval in the field of Chinese digital humanities. Broadly speaking, this solution can be also extended to the full-text database retrieval in other languages and digital humanities domains.

Digital Assyriology—Advances in Visual Cuneiform Analysis

Cuneiform tablets appertain to the oldest textual artifacts used for more than three millennia and are comparable in amount and relevance to texts written in Latin or ancient Greek. These tablets are typically found in the Middle East and were written by imprinting wedge-shaped impressions into wet clay. There is an increasing demand in the Digital Humanities domain for handwriting recognition, i.e., machine reading of handwritten script, focusing on historic documents. Current practice in text analysis of cuneiform script relies heavily on transliteration and translation, which are incomplete and influenced by the knowledge and experience of the expert that created them. The development of computational tools for cuneiform analysis presents many opportunities. An efficient and accurate sign spotting enables cross-referencing and statistical analyzes that are infeasible to perform manually. Furthermore, a wedge constellation spotting tool, provides experts with a significantly broader base of references to create more accurate and less time consuming transliterations and translations. Yet, cuneiform script has since resisted efforts to computational processing on basis of its basic constituents, its 3D wedge-shaped impressions and their free-form arrangements into signs. In this work, we review the literature on computational processing and recognition in the domain of cuneiform script. We introduce the different heterogeneous sources of cuneiform script, namely, manual ink-on-paper drawings, digital vector graphics drawings, photographs, and 3D scans of tablets. We describe the development of methods, beginning with the first computational classification using a hybrid manual encoding and computational comparison, to the latest methods making use of Generative Adversarial Neural Networks to recognize characters automatically. Finally, we give an overview of applications of these methods that enable quantitative mining in the small, e.g., patterns of wedge constellations, and in the large, e.g., networks of economic activity.

Exploring the digital humanities research agenda: a text mining approach

PurposeThis study aims to explore knowledge structure and research trends in the domain of digital humanities (DH) in the recent decade. The study identified prevailing topics and then, analyzed trends of such topics over time in the DH field.Design/methodology/approachResearch bibliographic data in the area of DH were collected from scholarly databases. Multiple text mining techniques were used to identify prevailing research topics and trends, such as keyword co-occurrences, bigram analysis, structural topic models and bi-term topic models.FindingsTerm-level analysis revealed that cultural heritage, geographic information, semantic web, linked data and digital media were among the most popular topics in the recent decade. Structural topic models identified that linked open data, text mining, semantic web and ontology, text digitization and social network analysis received increased attention in the DH field.Originality/valueThis study applied existent text mining techniques to understand the research domain in DH. The study collected a large set of bibliographic text, representing the area of DH from multiple academic databases and explored research trends based on structural topic models.

Review of Cultural Heritage Crowdsourcing in the Domain of Digital Humanities

Review of Cultural Heritage Crowdsourcing in the Domain of Digital Humanities

Creating vocabulary exercises through NLP

The use of technologies in Humanities opens new research opportunities as it allows the access to vast amounts of data such as textual corpora. As, in the Digital Humanities domain, a considerable amount of the research is done on digitised corpora, Natural Language Processing tools can be of much help in their exploitation for they help extracting linguistic information. We present a series of experiments in which we propose text transformations to generate vocabulary learning exercises based on Natural Language Processing. We describe the corpus, databases and tools we have employed in our approach and we offer an overview of a multilingual language processing pipeline. Then we present the experiments and their output. We finally discuss the strengths and shortcomings of our approach.

Distribution features and intellectual structures of digital humanities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to conduct a retrospective bibliometric analysis of documents about digital humanities, an emerging but interdisciplinary movement. It examines the distribution of research outputs and languages, identifies the active journals and institutions, dissects the network of categories and cited references, and interprets the hot research topics.Design/methodology/approachThe source data are derived from the Web of Science (WoS) core collection. To reveal the holistic landscape of this field, VOSviewer and CiteSpace as popular visualization tools are employed to process the bibliographic data including author, category, reference, and keyword. Furthermore, the parameter design of the visualization tools follows the general procedures and methods for bibliometric analysis.FindingsThere is an obviously rapid growth in digital humanities research. English is still the leading academic language in this field. The most influential authors all come from or have scientific relationships with Europe and North America, and two leading countries of which are the UK and USA. Digital humanities is the result of a dynamic dialogue between humanistic exploration and digital means. This research field is closely associated with history, literary and cultural heritage, and information and library science.Research limitations/implicationsThis analysis relies on the metadata information extracted from the WoS database; however, some valuable literatures in the field of digital humanities may not be retrieved from the database owing to the inherent challenge of topic search. This study is also restricted by the scope of publications, the limitation regarding the source of data is that WoS database may have underrepresented publications in this domain.Originality/valueThe output of this paper could be a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners interesting in the knowledge domain of digital humanities. Moreover, the conclusions of this retrospective analysis can be deemed as the comparable foundation for future study.

Motivations of volunteers in the Transcribe Sheng project: A grounded theory approach

ABSTRACTWith an increasing interest in leveraging crowdsourcing in GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) projects, there is a growing trend within the digital humanities field to develop various platforms and tools that outsource the traditionally knowledge‐intensive tasks to the mass volunteers. However, such kind of projects usually entail a greater level of time, effort, and intellectual input from the public. In such case, what motivates volunteers remains little studied and poorly understood. To better understand volunteers' motivations and how they may benefit from their participation, we conducted interviews on volunteers in the Transcribe Sheng project, a crowdsourcing project in digital humanities domain in China. Grounded theory is employed to investigate the motivations from the interview data. The preliminary findings show that volunteers are motivated by a complex framework involving external factors, cognitive value, emotional perception, and task driven factors. Based on the qualitative analysis, this study proposes a preliminary theoretical framework to understand volunteers' motivations, which may also yield practical implications on digital humanity practices.

Perseids: Experimenting with Infrastructure for Creating and Sharing Research Data in the Digital Humanities

The Perseids project provides a platform for creating, publishing, and sharing research data, in the form of textual transcriptions, annotations and analyses. An offshoot and collaborator of the Perseus Digital Library (PDL), Perseids is also an experiment in reusing and extending existing infrastructure, tools, and services. This paper discusses infrastructure in the domain of digital humanities (DH). It outlines some general approaches to facilitating data sharing in this domain, and the specific choices we made in developing Perseids to serve that goal. It concludes by identifying lessons we have learned about sustainability in the process of building Perseids, noting some critical gaps in infrastructure for the digital humanities, and suggesting some implications for the wider community.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Distributed Computing with Applications in Bioengineering

Biomedical Engineering, usually known as Bioengineering, is among the fastest developing and one of most important interdisciplinary fields today. It connects natural and technical sciences, for all of which biological and medical phenomena, computation, and data management play important roles in science and industry. Distributed computing and parallel algorithms have proved to be effective in solving the problem with high computational complexity in a wide range of domains, including areas of computational bioengineering. This special edition collects high-quality research papers in the field of application of distributed computing systems in bioengineering applications. This issue is the achievement of the developments of modern computer and biomedical technology. Most bioengineering or bioinformatics methods need to access and analyses large amounts of data. For that it is necessary to achieve an effective way that from Big data creates knowledge and useful applications. The nature of such scientific data/information/knowledge demands the use of a powerful computing and intelligent database management systems. Areas of current and future research include advanced topics in this special issue. The paper from Juhasz et al. present a novel, GPU-based streaming architecture that has the potential for drastically reducing execution times and at the same time providing simultaneous 2D and 3D visualization facilities. The system uses a highly-optimised and re-configurable pipeline of CPU and GPU cores that attempts to exploit the tremendous computing power whenever possible. The system can process live data arriving from an EEG device or data stored in EEG data files. The computer drives a large display wall system of four 46 monitors that provides a 4K-resolution drawing surface for visualizing raw EEG data, potential maps and various 3D views of the patient's head. Authors from the group of M. Gusev presents the scalable balancer in Cloud computing extended to Dew Computing level. Given a successful implementation of scalable low level load balancer, implemented on the network layer. The scalability is proved with series of experiments. The experiments showed that it adds small latency of several milliseconds and thus it slightly reduces the performance when the distributed system is underutilized. Rybicki et al. demonstrate how to realize a Software-as-a-Service solution for a variety of science software using container technologies. The presented solution utilized DARIAH-DE research infrastructure based on OpenStack and UNICORE grid to deliver an extensible solution for the digital humanities domain. The paper from authors Forer et al. describe the extension of Cloudflow to support ApacheSpark without any adaptions to already implemented pipelines. The described performance evaluation demonstrates that Spark can bring an additional boost for analyzing next generation sequencing(NGS) data to the eld of genetics. The Cloudflow framework is open source and freely available at https://github.com/genepi/cloudflow . The paper by Memon et al. describes an approach for executing computational jobs across HPC and HTC resources while operating on geographically dispersed data via a global federated file system. The solution is realized as a new framework that integrates UNICORE and GFFS to provide a standards-based environment to support large scale data intensive computations frequent in today's biomedical analyses. The paper Parallel algorithm for the state space exploration, authored by L. Allal et al., proposes a new automatic verification technique based on model checking that determines whether a given system satisfies its specification. Such a technique suffers from the state explosion problem when traversing all possible states of systems. A new synchronized parallel algorithm (SPA) of exploration is proposed based on a fixed number of threads. Exhaustive comparative studies between the standard parallel exploration algorithm in SPIN and the new SPA show that the SPA performs slightly better regarding the execution time and memory complexity. Smart systems in telemedicine frequently use intelligent sensor devices at large scale. Practitioners can monitor non-stop the vital parameters of hundreds of patients in real-time. The most important pillars of remote patient monitoring services are communication and data processing. Large scale data processing is done mainly using workflows. In the paper Eszter et al. give a brief overview of the different check pointing techniques and propose two new provenance based check pointing algorithms which uses the information stored in the workflow structure to dynamically change the frequency of check pointing and can be efficiently used for dynamic health care smart systems.

La iconografía en la era digital: hacia una heurística para el estudio del contenido de las imágenes medievales

This article invites us to consider the usefulness of iconography as a method to describe the subjects represented in medieval works of art. In this study, a greater emphasis has been put on investigating the epistemological implications resulting from the use of that method, and the biases that may appear in the process of transforming images into words. The aim is to address what has been called the “semantic gap”, i.e., a kind of barrier that prevents the verbal representation of a non-lexical medium, such as the visual one, in a satisfactory and undiminished way. After a brief panorama of image theory throughout the classical era, with especial reference to the rhetorical genre of ekphrasis, this study suggests that, beneath the apparent balance between the verbal and the visual media, a rivalry persists. Later on, in medieval times, a mutation occurs in the way we perceive the visual arts and the images start being considered as texts that can be read. Thanks to the prejudice implied by the statement that we can only attain knowledge through words, the image is relegated to a decorative role or, at the most, an instrument of evangelisation of the illiterate. In the discipline of medieval art history, defective uses of iconography have led to question its validity as a tool for analysis, even after the systematizing task endeavoured by Erwin Panofsky. Iconography, however, has gained new momentum thanks largely to the creation of digital collections that require iconographic principles to facilitate the recovery of visual documents. The new technologies, however, have accentuated the semantic gap between image and word, and nuanced the value of iconography, combined with indexing techniques based on controlled vocabularies and thesauri. In addition, a critical survey has been made of the most interesting projects which have undertaken the task of indexing the medieval art. Finally, it is argued that migration of iconography into the Web can be the hard core that allows medieval art history to step forward and fully enter into the domain of digital humanities.

Reimagining the facsimile: project report on The Digital Fauvel

The Digital Fauvel is an interactive facsimile edition of the Roman de Fauvel as preserved in the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. fr.146. It enables a variety of user interactions with the manuscript using a large multitouch tabletop computer, including viewing and navigating high-resolution scans, viewing superimposed translations of the text, searching manuscript text and metadata, viewing modern editions of musical items, and listening to musical audio. These modes of interaction synthesize information traditionally available in different places (editions, facsimiles, translations, editorial commentary) to create new modes of interaction with digital manuscripts for students, scholars and the general public. The project has been developed using standard design practices from human–computer interaction, mindful of the implications of adapting such practices for a digital humanities domain. Engaging students in the design and implementation of these new tools has also created unique educational opportunities by raising fundamental questions about encoding practices and manuscript culture alike. Work currently in progress involves the creation of an ‘application programming interface’ for Fauvel and other digital manuscripts, which will enable other scholars and programmers to build new and different types of interactions on top of our existing project infrastructure.

Framing digital humanities: The role of new media in humanities scholarship

The phrase “digital humanities” refers to a range of new media applications that converge at the intersection of technology and humanities scholarship. It is an evolving notion and conveys the role of information technologies in humanities scholarship. Based on a qualitative case study approach, this paper interprets the concept by eliciting the diverse perspectives — which nevertheless express several discernible themes — of a group of humanities scholars. It synthesizes the wide range of opinions and assumptions about information and communication technologies (ICTs) held by these humanists by using Bijker’s (1995) notion of a technological frame. The digital humanities domain is interpreted through three lenses: digital media as facilitator of scholarly communication; digital media as a platform for creative expression and artistic endeavors; and, digital media as context for critical studies of digital culture. The article concludes that, while technologies are being positioned as driving forces behind academic innovation, it is more important than ever to understand the cultural, social, and political implications of new media and how they are perceived and used by humanities scholars.