To spread the word on emerging good practices around data management in Digital Humanities and to give visibility to young scholars’ critical reflections on how they adopt digital methods and tools to their research questions, DARIAH-EU offered two travel scholarships, open to early career researchers, to attend the Annual Event and showcase their topic as a poster presentation at the conference.
The two winning posts are:
Tide Prediction Machines, Prosopography and Digital Humanities: what are they and how do they fit together? – Helen Mair Rawsthorne
“Here be dragons”: Open Access to Research Data in the Humanities – Ulrike Wuttke
A few words about the authors:
Helen Mair Rawsthorne is studying for a Master’s degree in Epistemology and the History of Science and Technology: the Cultural History of Science and Technology, Digital Humanities and Mediation as an online student at the University of Western Brittany in Brest, France. Her Master’s thesis will be a prosopographical study of analogue tide prediction machines. She graduated with a BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol in 2016 and wrote her Bachelor’s dissertation on the evolution of the relationship between science and technology throughout history.
Ulrike Wuttke is a medievalist and textual scholar by training with a specialisation in Medieval Dutch Literature (Doctor of Literature, Universiteit Gent). Since her PhD, she contributes to digital humanities projects and networks such as the Working Group Data Centres of the Verband Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum, the metablog OpenMethods or the DARIAH Working Group DiMPO (Digital Methods and Practices Observatory). Since 2017, she works and teaches at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Department of Information Science, where she has recently joined the team of the DFG-Projekt RDMO (Research Data Management Organizer). Her special interests are Open Science, Research Data Management and Digital Methods and Tools.
The winning entries will be published on the blog in the coming days – stay tuned!
Congratulations to both our winners and thanks again to everyone who participated in the blog competition!
Have you ever considered blogging about your research tools and methods? Come and share the methodological advancements or challenges of your research and win a scholarship to attend the DARIAH Annual Event 2019 on “Humanities Data”, to be held in Warsaw, on May 15-17.
DARIAH-EU is offering two travel scholarships, open to early career researchers, to attend our Annual Event. On top of the travel bursary, successful applicants will automatically win the opportunity to showcase their topic as a poster presentation at the conference.
To participate, all you need to do is to send us a blog post focusing on one or more of these topics below:
Descriptions of or critical reflections on methods and tools from your own research projects
Case studies about the optimal reuse of data or tools
Practical or theoretical reflections about how and why humanities research is conducted digitally
How the increasing influence of digital methods and tools changes scholarly attitudes and scientific practices of humanities research
How to apply
You don’t need to have your own blog to apply. Please send us your blog post together with a little introduction of yourself to the following e-mail addresses: erzsebet.toth-czifra@dariah.eu and eliza.papaki@dariah.eu
Scholarship details:
DARIAH-EU will reimburse your basic travel costs to Warsaw (flight/train/bus ticket, accommodation and public transport transfer) up to 500 EUR.
Ready, set, go!
The deadline for submissions is the 9th of April. We are looking forward to receiving your posts and will announce the winner on the 12th April 2019.
Helping Digital Humanities scholars to find the tools and methods that are the most relevant to their work is a core mission of OpenMethods. By shifting perspectives from research outputs to the underlying workflow, procedures and tools, we aim to strengthen the culture of reuse of already existing resources in DH. But we do not only propagate the culture of reuse. Putting our money where our mouth is, we are also seeking ways to put DH tools in service of more effective content discovery and enrichment.
As a reusability exercise, recently we have created plugins to achieve interoperability with the entity recognition NERD service and the research discovery platform ISIDORE to increase the visibility and discoverability of our content
The NERD plugin
NERD is a service that recognizes and disambiguates named entities.
This plugin allows integration of the NERD service with WordPress. As a form of content enrichment, the plugin automatically creates tags from the named entities offered by NERD when provided the full text of the original article that has been republished on OpenMethods. The tags, in return, are used to propose extra information coming from Wikipedia and Wikidata. These tags contribute to the better discoverability and searchability of content on OpenMethods and add extra context layers to our content.
Automatically generated tags on OpenMethods content with links to Wikidata and Wikipedia
It is reusable and only needs a NERD server to work with, one instance of this server is freely available at Huma-Num, please contact them for more information.
The Rich meta in RDFa plugin
The second plugin is for increasing the findability of our content on other discovery platforms via metadata enrichment. We wanted Isidore, an indexing and search service for the humanities and social sciences, to harvest our content and make it searchable and findable on their platform that serves as a single point entry for a wide range of open SSH resources, such as data, publications and other materials. To enable indexing by Isidore, OpenMethods has to be able to present information (i.e. a set of dublin core metadata elements such as title, description, date, etc.) in a format understood by Isidore. For this purpose we created this WordPress plugin that allows users to add Dublin Core metadata enrichments in RDFa within the HTML header of each post.
Dublin Core enrichment in OpenMethods’ metadata
Currently it is only used for harvesting by ISIDORE, but it can easily be changed to accommodate other applications. In the future, it will be possible to change the namespace and element names of the RDFa data for a given input such as title or excerpt.
As a result, content from OpenMethods is now connected with and embedded in a large corpus of electronic publications, corpora, databases and scientific news, and thus Isidore users can find OpenMethods posts when looking for information about Digital Humanities. Another benefit of the plugin is that it indirectly, through OpenMethods, enables the integration of content that could not be indexed otherwise on research discovery platforms because of their language (other than English) or content type properties (e.g. blogs, videos or podcasts scattered across the web with insufficient metadata).
The figure below allows for a sneak peek behind the scenes and gives an at-a-glance summary on how the plugins build on DH resources.
As OpenMethods only offers users a very short introduction to and a quotation from the republished source content, first we have to go and look for the full text of the original content (the source of the entire article) from the article’s source site through an HTTP(S) request and keep the relevant textual elements (and exclude other, irrelevant elements of the page e.g. advertisements, menu etc.).
Once the data is retrieved, it is followed by a call to NERD (runned on Huma-Num servers) so that we return the Named Entities that could be found in the text.
These Named Entities are then ingested by OpenMethods to create tags and to be able to send the user back to entities on Wikipedia / Wikidata for more information.
To add an extra discovery layer to the OpenMethods platform, we also integrated a third plugin developed by the Isidore team: it enables listing of similar content recommendations on OpenMethods posts.
Similar content recommendations from Isidore
You are more than welcome to explore how the two plugins jointly contribute to the enrichment and greater visibility of the OpenMethods posts. Besides, as you would expect, both of them are free to download and are available for reuse. Take a look into their documentation and let us know if it inspired you to think about ways to put them to good (re)use in your own projects.
We owe special thanks to Pierre Mounier and Nicolas Larrousse for their idea to develop the two plugins, to Yoann Moranville who created them and to the Huma-Num team, especially to Laurent Capelli who helped us with the design and the Isidore indexing.
Have you ever considered blogging about your research tools? Is it the hassles around maintaining your own blog or finding your audience that holds you back? Would you write about what helps you to do effective research only occasionally? Then this blog is for you. It collects guest posts about Digital Humanities tools and methods. Digital Humanities scholars as well as their collaborators (data scientists, computer scientists, developers, librarians, archivists etc.) are writing for each other about know-hows, best practices, limitations & benefits or reuse potentials of research tools and methods.
This blog is an extension of the OpenMethods metablog. OpenMethods is a platform aimed at republishing and bringing together all formats of Open Access publications (e.g. re-search articles, preprints, blog posts, videos, or podcasts) in different languages about Digital Humanities methods and tools to spread the knowledge and raise peer recognition for them. The platform has been developed in close partnership with and supervision of the DARIAH community since it is an offspring of the DARIAH “Humanities at Scale” project. Relevant content is selected and curated by an international group of Digital Humanities experts to be republished on OpenMethods. The Digital Humanities methods and tools blog will serve as a pool for selection: the most interesting posts will be republished on OpenMethods.
Our goal is to reach and engage the widest possible array of Digital Humanities communities ranging from scholars taking the first steps towards going digital in their research to Digital Humanities experts who are shaping specific research areas as representatives for particular methods.
On the OpenMethods platform we do not publish original contributions but if you have an interesting blog post or video to share with the broader community around Digital Humanities, you are very welcome to share it with us as a post on this blog.
