[en] Rule-based Adornment
of Modern Historical Japanese Corpora using Accurate Universal DependenciesJerry Bonnell, Department of Computer Science, University of Miami; Mitsunori Ogihara, Department of Computer Science, University of Miami
Abstract
[en]
Historical materials are an indispensable resource for many scholarly workflows in
the Digital Humanities. These workflows can benefit from the application of natural
language processing (NLP) pipelines that offer support for tokenization, tagging,
lemmatization, and dependency parsing. However, the application of these tools is not
trivial as “off-the-shelf,” or pre-trained, tools are prone to error when given
historical text as input and training data development can be expensive to carry out
in terms of time and expertise needed. This paper introduces a rule-based workflow
that can produce improved annotations encoded in Universal Dependencies (UD) targeted
for modern historical Japanese corpora using only a pre-trained UD tool as a starting
point. The proposed workflow reduces the amount of manual review time needed for
training data development and brings improvements over pre-trained tools on a word
segmentation task. Moreover, the workflow has the potential to pave the path toward
adapting advanced NLP technologies to historical corpora under study.
[en] The circus we deserve? A front row look at
the organization of the annual academic conference for the Digital
Humanities Laura Estill, St. Francis Xavier University; Jennifer Guiliano, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis; Élika Ortega, University of Colorado, Boulder; Melissa Terras, University of Edinburgh; Deb Verhoeven, University of Alberta: Edmonton; Glen Layne-Worthey, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Abstract
[en]
Academic conferences are considered central to the dissemination of research
and play a key role in the prestige systems of academia. And yet the
organization of these, and the power systems they maintain, have been
little discussed. What is a conference supposed to achieve? Who and what is
it for? The annual Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO)’s
Digital Humanities conference is a central occasion in the digital
humanities academic calendar, and, as an international, interdisciplinary,
regular, long-standing, large-scale event, it provides an ideal locus to
consider various aspects of contemporary academic conference organization,
and how this impacts the shape and definition of a scholarly field.
Examining this annual event allows us to clarify ADHO’s policies and
procedures to consider how they frame the digital humanities at large. This
paper approaches the annual Digital Humanities conference via a
Reflection-in-Action and Reflection-on-Action approach encompassing the
experiences of various people formally involved in organizing the
conference over the past decade. Considering the last seven years of the
conference as well as its broader history, we argue that conferences are
central mechanisms for agenda setting and fostering a community of digital
humanities practitioners. Through analyses of the selection of Program
Committees, the choosing of conference themes, the preparation of calls for
papers, the peer review process, and the selection of keynotes, we contend
that existing structures and processes inadequately address concerns around
representation, diversity, multilingualism, and labor. Our recommendations,
including aligning the conference budget with its priorities, fostering
fair labor practices, and creating accountability structures will be useful
to those organizing future Digital Humanities events, and conference
organizers throughout academia interested in making academic conferences
more inclusive, welcoming environments that encourage a plurality of voices
to fully partake in academic discourse.
[en] Digital Humanities Inside Out: Developing a Digital
Humanities Curriculum for Computer Scientists in Singapore Alastair Gornall, Singapore University of Technology and Design; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore University of Technology and Design
Abstract
[en]
This article explores the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of bringing the
Digital Humanities into a STEM-orientated and Singaporean educational context.
Teaching DH from the inside out — to computer scientists rather than humanists — has
allowed us to see more clearly neglected areas of DH pedagogy that are in need of
greater attention. Our experiences have shown us that if DH is to thrive as a field
beyond traditional humanities departments in the U.S. and Europe, we need to better
articulate and theorize the connections between humanities and computer scientific
epistemologies. When teaching non-humanities students, in particular, we have found
it necessary to pay more attention to humanities research methods and projects
grounded in humanities research questions. In developing a curriculum that reflects
our Singaporean context too, we have found that diversity in global DH should go
beyond simply broadening DH’s cultural scope but must involve a more open and global
engagement with computational, cultural research that may not identify disciplinarily
as DH.
[en] Interpreting Measures of Meaning:
Introducing Salience Differentiated StabilityHugo Dirk Hogenbirk, University of Groningen, Departement of the History of Philosophy; Wim Mol
Abstract
[en]
In digital studies of the use of words in intellectual history, meaning is
measured based on the idea of Firth that a word can be characterized by the
company it keeps. The words that are literally close to it in the texts in
which it is written should tell us something about what the word means. In
practice, we will look at meaning being measured by a method called Pointwise Mutual Information or PMI for short.
However, even granting that we use PMI, this description is still quite
vague and allows for multiple different ways to interpret 'the company a
word keeps' in the practice of coding an actual algorithm to discern this
company. In this paper we will look specifically at the choice to 1. use
all words close to another or 2. use merely the ones that are most
disproportionately present. Using work from contemporary philosophers of
language Mark Wilson and Sally Haslanger, we argue that both capture an
aspect of meaning, 2 capturing the most salient way to understand a word,
and 1 capturing the subtle, not so salient, but nonetheless important ways
in which words are used overall. Then we will look to measure the overall
stability in word meaning, the degree to which it is used similarly in
different texts within a corpus. Having characterized PMI, salience and
stability we will introduce Salience Differentiated
Stability or SDS, a value indicating both the salient and less
salient stability of a word, which will help identify words that are
simpler or more shifty than they at first appear. Lastly we will test the
use of this new value by doing a case study of the salience differentiated
stability of common terms in early modern physics text books.
[en] Underlying
Sentiments in 1867: A Study of News Flows on the Execution of Emperor
Maximilian I of Mexico in Digitized Newspaper CorporaAdán Israel Lerma Mayer, Universidad Anáhuac; Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques, University of Zurich; Ernesto Priani Saiso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Hannu Salmi, University of Turku
Abstract
[en]
This article focuses on the international news flow regarding the execution of
Maximilian, the Emperor of Mexico. The execution occurred in June 1867, but it
received global attention only at the beginning of July when the news started to
spread over the borders, via telegraph, and rapidly through the network of
newspapers. The article concentrates on international news on Maximilian's
execution between 5 and 20 July 1867. The aim of the study is both empirical and
methodological. It explores the sentiments underlying the news about the
execution and the regional differences in these sentiments on an empirical
level. On a methodological level, the article investigates the strategies to
analyze sentiments via newspaper corpora in a multilingual research setting. The
study is based on optically recognized historical newspapers in three languages
(German, Spanish and English), and four regions (Austria, Germany, Mexico, and
the United States). Our analysis shows content variations in the corpora, mainly
that news was framed differently in each studied region, indicating that the
local perception of the event and political interests shaped the news. In our
corpus, the Mexican press –published in the middle of a political crisis– tended
towards a neutral stance, the Austrian and German papers mainly were negative,
and the United States showed mixed sentiments on the incident.
[en] The Banality
of Big Data: A Review of Discriminating
DataAmanda Furiasse, Nova Southeastern University
Abstract
[en]
This review critically interrogates Wendy Chun’s book Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics
of Recognition (MIT Press, 2021) from the perspective of the
digital medical or health humanities. The monograph’s exploration of
predictive machine learning and big data’s propensity to encode segregation
through their default assumptions about correlation raises important
questions about machine learning’s growing uses in fields, such as medicine
and pharmacology, where the stakes of such digital experimentation are
particularly high. Chun’s exploration of the predictive processes by which
data analytics replicates 20th-century eugenics discourses makes an
important contribution to the field of digital medical ethics and also
offers unique insight into the mechanisms by which digital humanities
scholars can disrupt and challenge the use and application of such
predictive programs.
[en] Annotation: A
Uniting, but Multifaceted Practice. A Review of Nantke and Schlupkothen
(2020)Melanie Andresen, Universität Stuttgart
Abstract
[en]
The volume Annotations in Scholarly Editions and
Research: Functions, Differentiation, Systematization, edited
by Julia Nantke and Frederik Schlupkothen, assembles research papers that
are united in their focus on annotation, but display a broad variety of
possible understandings of and approaches to annotation.
[en] Response to
“The circus we deserve? A front row look at the
organization of the annual academic conference for the Digital
Humanities”The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations,
Abstract
[en]
The annual, international Digital Humanities conference is what originally
brought ADHO (the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations) together.
Many see it as a cornerstone of our collective identity which enables
collaboration, networking, and the international dissemination of
scholarship in the field. This response to “The circus we deserve? A front
row look at the organization of the annual academic conference for the
Digital Humanities” by Laura Estill, Jennifer Guiliano, Élika Ortega,
Melissa Terras, Deb Verhoeven and Glen Layne-Worthey engages with its call
for ADHO to improve its processes and practices surrounding the DH
conference by describing the work that has been done to date, and
initiatives ADHO is now undertaking.
