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Presentation given at UiT Digital Humanities Conference 2017

Abstract The article offers a state-of-the-art overview of a number of Digital Humanities (DH) initiatives that have emerged in Sweden over the past decade. We identify two major developments that seem to be taking place within DH, with a specific focus on the infrastructural aspects of the development: (1) a strive to open up and broaden the research output and (2) multi-disciplinary collaboration and its effects. The two major components accentuate the new infrastructural patterns that are developing and the challenges these infer on universities. While current research is at large multi-disciplinary, developing infrastructures also enable the move towards post-disciplinarity, bringing the universities closer to the surrounding society. At five universities in Sweden, individual-sited infrastructures supporting DH research have been built today. They are complemented by national and international infrastructures, thus supporting developments and tackling some of the major challenges. In the article, the relations between individual disciplines, the question of multi- and post-disciplinarity, and the field of Digital Humanities are discussed, while stressing the factors necessary—sine qua non—for a fruitful development of the scholarly infrastructures.

John Unsworth (2000) proposed a tentative list of scholarly primitives, and although he made a reservation that it was not meant to be exhaustive, one omission is striking, namely the exclusion of communicating. It is even more visible once one realises that all the examples he provides in the paper of comparison IBabble), linking (Blake Archive), or sampling (VRML visualisation of Dante’s Inferno) have the indispensable communication component attached to them. The aim of this presentation is two-fold. First of all, we will reclaim the role of communication as one of the fundamental functional primitives, crucial in all stages of the research workflow. To use Unsworth’s nomenclature, communication takes advantage of the additive characteristics of scholarly primitives and enters into combinations with all other scholarly primitives. Secondly, right after reestablishing the communication as a scholarly primitive we will swiftly proceed to problematise the notion of its universality for all disciplines through exploration of the specificity of scholarly communication in the humanities. We will achieve that using New Panorama of Polish Literature (NPLP.pl) as a case-study, outlining the relevant digital infrastructure for the humanities. It has long been suggested that communication should be seen as a fundamental element of the research workflow, rather than an activity running somewhat separate to the research practice (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Garvey 1979; Galison and Galison 1997; Nielsen 2011). Recently this idea wass reinforced by Hillyer et al. (2017) who describe open science as “opening of the entire research cycle” and include communication as one of its key elements. It means that dissemination is no longer perceived as the final stage of a research process but becomes an integral part of all scholarly activities. New digital methods and tools (Dallas et al. 2017), including electronic communication and social media (Kjellberg 2010), facilitate this process. allowing scholars to communicate and collaborate with each other and the wider audience quickly and efficiently at all stages of their work. This also includes intermediary results of the work, including raw and secondary data (Castelli, Manghi, and Thanos 2013). The incorporation of communication into all stages of the research workflow also means that choosing a certain communication strategy is obviously influenced by the perceived goal, but also the goal influences other phases of the research process. This feedback loop more precisely on the example of NPLP, a research infrastructure for literary scholars enabling the creation of extended, multimedia monographs and presenting scholarly arguments through linking text with image, visualisation, map and video content. Yet, Creating a new digital collection forces researchers to rethink how their work is presented, categorised and displayed . For instance in "Postmodern Sienkiewicz" collection (http://nplp.pl/en/kolekcja/postmodern-sienkiewicz/) authors divided their articles into shorter fragments with additional iconography allowing for non-linear reading and access through image-interface. These activities required additional work on the stage of data collection, analysis and interpretation. In conclusion we will tackle upon the question remains to what extent such communication practices are universal for all sciences and what could be treated as reserved for the humanities in the spirit of Diltheyan disctinction between explaining (in sciences) and understanding (in the humanities). {"references": ["Castelli, D., P. Manghi, and C. Thanos. 2013. 'A Vision towards Scientific Communication Infrastructures: On Bridging the Realms of Research Digital Libraries and Scientific Data Centers'. International Journal on Digital Libraries 13 (3\u20134): 155\u201369. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-013-0106-7.", "Dallas, Costis, Nephelie Chatzidiakou, Agiatis Benardou, Michael Bender, Aur\u00e9lien Berra, Claire Clivaz, John Cunningham, et al. 2017. 'European Survey on Scholarly Practices and Digital Needs in the Arts and Humanities - Highlights Report'. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.260101.", "Galison, Peter, and Joseph Pellegrino University Professor Peter Galison. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. University of Chicago Press.", "Garvey, WILLIAM D. 1979. 'CHAPTER 1 - The Role of Scientific Communication in the Conduct of Research and the Creation of Scientific Knowledge'. In Communication: The Essence of Science, edited by WILLIAM D. Garvey, 1\u201339. Pergamon. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-023344-4.50006-4.", "Hillyer, Rebecca, Alejandro Posada, Denisse Albornoz, Leslie Chan, and Angela Okune. 2017. 'Framing a Situated and Inclusive Open Science: Emerging Lessons from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network'. 2017.", "Kjellberg, Sara. 2010. 'I Am a Blogging Researcher: Motivations for Blogging in a Scholarly Context'. First Monday 15 (8). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i8.2962.", "Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press.", "Nielsen, Michael A. 2011. Reinventing Discovery\u202f: The New Era of Networked Science. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9517.html.", "Unsworth, John. 2000. 'Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?' In . King's College London. http://people.brandeis.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html."]}

International audience; The digital text platform is part of the Flemish contribution to DARIAH Belgium (DARIAH = Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities). The goal is to create a platform for the collaborative management and discovery of digitised textual collections that allows digital humanities researchers to prepare their corpora (consisting of, for example, digitised newspapers and books) for textual analysis. The platform will enable researchers to browse and search the digitised collections compiled, cleaned, enriched and managed by the researchers themselves. Once the relevant research sub-corpus has been compiled, data export tools, using standardised open formats (such as XML, JSON, .csv, .txt, etc.) will enable researchers to export sub-corpus for analysis with existing digital text analysis tools such as MALLET, (http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/topics.php) for topic modelling, VOYANT (http://voyant-tools.org) for data visualisation or AntConC (http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/) for concordance and textual analysis.The platform has been conceived as part of a larger and modular virtual research environment service infrastructure (http://www.ghentcdh.ugent.be/projects/dariah-vl_vre.si). In a previous phase, possible frameworks and content management systems were tested, notably Islandora (a digital asset management system based on Fedora Commons and Drupal), but also Mediawiki and Omeka.One of the main challenges of the envisaged new platform is the possibility to integrate a wider variety of possible textual data streams (including a scan workflow). In addition, user-friendliness, scalability, adherence to standards and facilitating the interoperability of data are key issues to be addressed. The platform will build on the existing IIIF format, the International Image Interoperability Framework. This format is used by some of the most important libraries and cultural heritage institutions in the world, therefore providing access to enormous collections of digital objects. As the name suggests, IIIF is mainly focused on displaying and annotating images. However, we fully endorse the IIIF-community’s vision to develop an overarching interoperability framework for other data types, including all kinds of textual data. Benefits of the format include the interoperability, the ease of sharing images and annotations without the need to exchange files, and its support for multilingual data. In the months leading up to the conference, we will evaluate the existing IIIFpowered digital libraries and research projects and how they deal with practices of co-creation, data cleaning and enrichment of (structural) metadata. OCR improvement will become vital, as digital textual analysis can only be performed well on high-quality textual data. A related challenge will be combining the various input formats and converting them to different output formats required for analysis. In our poster, we will present a summary of our experiences with and technical assessment of our previous Islandora installation, in addition to our survey of the existing corpus management solutions. As a way of conclusion, we will introduce the envisioned new version of the platform.

This article shows that metadata plays a central role in our society and concludes that through collaborative work, it is possible to pool solutions and to establish relationships of cooperation, both at the level of practical tool development and with regard to sharing and creating knowledge and know-how. ispartof: ABB: Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique - Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België vol:106 pages:135-144 status: published

Obtaining high-quality labelled data for training a classifier in a new application domain is often costly. Transfer Learning (a.k.a. “Inductive Transfer”) tries to alleviate these costs by transferring, to the “target” domain of interest, knowledge available from a different “source” domain. In transfer learning the lack of labelled information from the target domain is compensated by the availability at training time of a set of unlabelled examples from the target distribution. Transductive Transfer Learning denotes the transfer learning setting in which the only set of target documents that we are interested in classifying is known and available at training time. Although this definition is indeed in line with Vapnik’s original definition of “transduction”, current terminology in the field is confused. In this article, we discuss how the term “transduction” has been misused in the transfer learning literature, and propose a clarification consistent with the original characterization of this term given by Vapnik. We go on to observe that the above terminology misuse has brought about misleading experimental comparisons, with inductive transfer learning methods that have been incorrectly compared with transductive transfer learning methods. We then, give empirical evidence that the difference in performance between the inductive version and the transductive version of a transfer learning method can indeed be statistically significant (i.e., that knowing at training time the only data one needs to classify indeed gives an advantage). Our clarification allows a reassessment of the field, and of the relative merits of the major, state-of-the-art algorithms for transfer learning in text classification.

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives, and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades have become ever more collaborative, distributed, and data intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organization, analysis, and presentation of research results of individual projects. However, the provision of e-infrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access, and (re) use have lagged behind. This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE, the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This EU-funded network has developed an e-infrastructure that enables data providers to register and provide access to their resources (datasets, collections) through the ARIADNE data portal, facilitating discovery, access, and other services across the integrated..

More and more cultural institutions use Linked Data principles to share and connect their collection metadata. In the archival field, initiatives emerge to exploit data contained in archival descriptions and adapt encoding standards to the semantic web. In this context, online authority files can be used to enrich metadata. However, relying on a decentralized network of knowledge bases such as Wikidata, DBpedia or even Viaf has its own difficulties. This paper aims to offer a critical view of these linked authority files by adopting a close-reading approach. Through a practical case study, we intend to identify and illustrate the possibilities and limits of RDF triples compared to institutions' less structured metadata. Comment: Workshop "Dariah "Trust and Understanding: the value of metadata in a digitally joined-up world" (14/05/2018, Brussels), preprint of the submission to the journal "Archives et Biblioth\`eques de Belgique"