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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.

Sharing archaeological data across national borders and between previously unconnected systems is a topic of increasing importance. Infrastructures such as ARIADNE aim to provide services that support sharing of archaeological research data. Ontologies such as the CIDOC CRM are an appropriate instrument to harmonize different data structures and thereby support data exchange. Before integrating data by mapping to ontologies it is crucial to establish where the shared meaning of the data lies and to understand the methodology used to record the data. As the largest proportion of archaeological data are derived from excavations or field investigations the initial focus falls on the documentation of these “raw data”. But documentation often varies depending on country-specific guidelines, different excavation methods and technologies, project management requirements, budget, etc. Therefore an analysis of the different recording forms should prove helpful to identify the common meanings of concepts and terms used in archaeological fieldwork. This paper will show first results of research based on the collection of excavation report forms and manuals from different countries which cover a range of fieldwork methodologies (e.g. single context recording, palaeolithic excavations, etc.). The aim is to analyse and compare the different methodologies, the archaeological concepts involved and the data records, perhaps for the first time on an international level. We want to discuss the challenges of integrating different concepts, terms and vocabularies, often in different languages, and whether problems with integrating such archaeological data could be addressed by additional archaeological extensions to the CIDOC CRM.

info:eu-repo/semantics/inPress

Im KONDE-Projekt, das aus Hochschulraumstrukturmitteln finanziert wird, beschäftigten sich sieben universitäre Partner und drei weitere Einrichtungen aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln mit theoretischen und praktischen Aspekten der Digitalen Edition. Ein Outcome des Projektes stellt das Weißbuch dar, welches über 200 Artikel zum Thema Digitale Edition umfasst. Die behandelten Themenkomplexe reichen dabei über Digitale Editionswissenschaft im Allgemeinen, Annotation und Modellierung, Interfaces, Archivierung und Metadaten bis hin zu rechtlichen Aspekten.

International audience

Im KONDE-Projekt, das aus Hochschulraumstrukturmitteln finanziert wird, beschäftigten sich sieben universitäre Partner und drei weitere Einrichtungen aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln mit theoretischen und praktischen Aspekten der Digitalen Edition. Ein Outcome des Projektes stellt das Weißbuch dar, welches über 200 Artikel zum Thema Digitale Edition umfasst. Die behandelten Themenkomplexe reichen dabei über Digitale Editionswissenschaft im Allgemeinen, Annotation und Modellierung, Interfaces, Archivierung und Metadaten bis hin zu rechtlichen Aspekten.

Research infrastructures are facilities, resources and services used by the scientific community to conduct research. They include major research instruments, laboratories, databases, libraries and archival collections. Research infrastructures require digital infrastructure and services for information storage, management, processing, publication and access. In archaeology, data centres and repositories where researchers can deposit and access documentation and data from excavations, field surveys, laboratory analysis, etc. already exist in several European countries. The EU FP7 project ARIADNE (www.ariadneinfrastructure. eu) will set up a common interface to a digital infrastructure integrating archaeological information and datasets held by data centres, institutional and other repositories which are distributed across Europe. This paper addresses the following questions: What is an e-infrastructure for research? How will ARIADNE integrate digital resources on the European level? What are major challenges of the project? Beside the considerable semantic and technical challenges, particularly the need to facilitate a culture of collaboration and data sharing among a multi-disciplinary research community is emphasised.

One of the funded project proposals under DARIAH’s Open Humanities call 2015 was “Open History: Sustainable digital publishing of archival catalogues of twentieth-century history archives”. Based on the experiences of the Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), the main goal of the “Open History” project was to enhance the dialogue between (meta-)data providers and research infrastructures. Integrating archival descriptions – when they were already available – held at a wide variety of twentieth-century history archives (from classic archives to memorial sites, libraries and private archives) into research infrastructures has proven to be a major challenge, which could not be done without some degree of limited to extensive pre-processing or other preparatory work. The “Open History” project organized two workshops and developed two tools: an easily accessible and general article on why the practice of standardization and sharing is important and how this can be achieved; and a model which provides checklists for self-analyses of archival institutions. The text that follows is the article we have developed. It intentionally remains at a general level, without much jargon, so that it can be easily read by those who are non-archivists or non-IT. Hence, we hope it will be easy to understand for both those who are describing the sources at various archives (with or without IT or archival sciences degrees), as well as decision-makers (directors and advisory boards) who wish to understand the benefits of investing in standardization and sharing of data. It is important to note is that this text is a first step, not a static, final result. Not all aspects about standardization and publication of (meta-)data are discussed, nor are updates or feedback mechanisms for annotations and comments discussed. The idea is that this text can be used in full or in part and that it will include further chapters and section updates as time goes by and as other communities begin using it. Some archives will read through much of these and see confirmation of what they have already been implementing; others – especially the smaller institutions, such as private memory institutions – will find this a low-key and hands-on introduction to help them in their efforts. International audience