Digital Humanties

A collaborative website (with David Black) for the publication of newly discovered documents that refer to Mozart or his music during his lifetime.  The collection will eventually include over 200 new documents.  All documents have a detailed commentary, and most have a facsimile of the original document.  Many of the new documents were found on Google Books and similar digital repositories.  The site will eventually include several thematic essays, in addition to the documents and commentaries.

Il contributo di Stefano Magnolo Open Science? Digital Humanities  e comunicazione del lavoro scientifico tenta di sviluppare la questione della funzione del sistema scientifico nell’ambito della struttura sociale attuale caratterizzata da nuovi mezzi di comunicazione, dalla digitalizzazione della conoscenza e da contesti di interazione e di apprendimento a distanza. Tale funzione verrà affrontata soprattutto in relazione alla questione della comunicazione scientifica, analizzando i contesti di produzione e distribuzione della conoscenza e le nuove possibilità di strutturazione delle forme e dei processi di autoregolazione della scienza, di selezione delle informazioni, nei rapporti tra il lavoro scientifico individuale, la “scientific community” e il pubblico e accennando ai profili suscettibili di regolazione giuridica. Verrà inoltre affrontata la questione della verità scientifica e delle teorie nell’ambito delle Humanities e delle Social Sciences.

The problem of finding a prototype for typewritten or handwritten characters belongs to a family of "shape prior" estimation problems. In epigraphic research, such priors are derived manually, and constitute the building blocks of "paleographic tables". Suggestions for automatic solutions to the estimation problem are rare in both the Computer Vision and the OCR/Handwriting Text Recognition communities. We review some of the existing approaches, and propose a new robust scheme, suitable for the challenges of degraded historical documents. This fast and easy to implement method is employed for ancient Hebrew inscriptions dated to the First Temple period.

After my panel presentation at #4C2019 on "Critical Digital Archiving Against the Grain: Precarities, Negotiations, and Possibilities," one of the attendees came up to me, appreciated my research area, and asked me enthusiastically, "Have you ever imagined how the platform for digital archive built by Non-Westerners would look like?" I just couldn't answer this question the way he might have preferred. I replied, "You know what, I really dunno. I really cannot speak for unlocatable differences there within what we call Non-Westerners. I can't speak even for myself actually, let alone for Non-Westerners." The thing is the kind of homogeneity we incline to accept in the nouns like Non-Westerners backfires the role of activists we might want to assume for ourselves. These nouns should communicate only about alliances among Non-Westerners based on the experiences we share due to different forms of violence caused by colonialism, neocolonialism, and cultural imperialism. But these nouns should not be assumed with any kind of essential feature that 'represent' us all. Furthermore, almost all forms of structural violence are inflicted and justified based on identity constructions and assumed/forced essential features in each identity category (race, nationality, sexuality, gender, sex, color, caste, class etcetera). Therefore, if our resistance relies on the same essentialist epistemology and ontology, which is the tool of violence, we end up persisting the same tool of violence confirming that even if the violence is not right,

Eine der immer wieder kehrenden Herausforderungen in den Digital Humanities besteht darin, in interdisziplinärer Zusammenarbeit multimediale Inhalte in Datenbanken aufzuarbeiten, zu integrieren und zu analysieren. In der Folge des Spatial Turn in den Kulturwissenschaften wird Raum hierbei eine zunehmend größere Bedeutung beigemessen. Die digitale Speicherung, Präsentation und Analyse georeferenzierter historischer Inhalte erfolgt unter Einsatz von geografischen Informationssystemen (Historical GIS): "GIS as a combination of Geography as the study of spatial differentiation and history as the study of temporal differentiation. Historical GIS provides the tools to combine them to study patterns of change over space and time." (Knowles: Historical GIS, S. XI). Idealerweise inspiriert HGIS Geisteswissenschaftler/innen dazu, Quellen in neuer Weise zu kombinieren, geografische Kontextualisierung in ihrer Interpretation zu berücksichtigen und vor diesem Hintergrund frühere Erkenntnisse zu hinterfragen ... und vor allem: neue Fragen zu stellen! Das Projekt "Mapping London" stellt hier ein eindrückliches Beispiel dar und bietet zur Vorbereitung auf die Veranstaltung einen Einblick. Für den Workshop werden wir ebenfalls Beispiele aus der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts nehmen (Tourismus und die Grand Tour Twains, William Booth's London, Whitechapel 1888 etc.). Unser Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Schnittstelle zwischen Quellen (Texte, Bilder, Karten etc.) und digitaler Datenhaltung,-erhebung,-modellierung,-analyse und-präsentation, zwischen Geisteswissenschaften, Informatik und Geographie, die sowohl im Theoretischen diskutiert wie im Praktischen einführend erlebt werden. Die Veranstaltung richtet sich bewusst auch an Doktorierende, die keine Erfahrung in der Arbeit mit der entsprechenden Software haben.

The problem of finding a prototype for typewritten or handwritten characters belongs to a family of "shape prior" estimation problems. In epigraphic research, such priors are derived manually, and constitute the building blocks of "paleographic tables". Suggestions for automatic solutions to the estimation problem are rare in both the Computer Vision and the OCR/Handwriting Text Recognition communities. We review some of the existing approaches, and propose a new robust scheme, suitable for the challenges of degraded historical documents. This fast and easy to implement method is employed for ancient Hebrew inscriptions dated to the First Temple period.

The pervasive belief in gender balance in digital humanities prompts the question of how the field might appear if it could be analyzed across a broader set of perspectives. This chapter considers data gathered through a survey of self-described “digital humanists” to understand the current situation of the field. It concludes with some suggestions that might improve the position of women and minorities within digital humanities.

New music is an area of creative practice informed both by Western art music tradition and the avant-garde’s fluid notions of progress and structural transgression. This paper examines how improvisatory practices in new music repertoire impact the value and interpretation of collection materials contained in the Western Australian New Music Archive, a digital repository for Western Australian new music heritage items. The nature of improvised music practice affects the way that notions of immediacy, relevance and essentiality are performed and articulated in new music works. As a digital collection, the archive mediates these already mediated recordings of tangible performances significantly through its delivery. However, written and improvised approaches to music creation are also tethered to different performative modes that inform the perceived nature of a particular work. From highly conceptual pieces that utilise cutting edge technology and experimental notions of structure and...

After the First World War, experts cooperated to build a better world. Within the international organization Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), architects aimed to improve society by creating efficient cities. While a common cause could dynamically unite a diverse array of experts, the organization’s goal of improving the world through technological progress for social ends would not withstand the test of reality.