Distant Reading for European Literary History. A COST Action

4.
The network

Our network of members is currently comprised of researchers in Corpus Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, (Digital) Literary History and Literary Theory from 26 different countries and more than 40 cities across Europe and beyond (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Map of Europe with the locations of Action members; for more details, see:

https://www.distant-reading.net/network/
.

Archiving Small Twitter Datasets for Text Analysis: A Workshop for Beginners

Abstract

In this workshop for non – coders, participants will be guided through two tasks: the first task will guide participants in creating an application to tap into Twitter’s API, in our case to get Twitter data. The second task will guide participants in the use of a Google spreadsheet to capture streaming (live) data from Twitter in order to archive it, download it and perform text analysis, data visualization and other studies. This workshop will include a brief introduction contextualizing social media data collection good practices including user data privacy issues.

Keywords: Archiving, Data Collection, Social Media, Twitter, Text Analysis

Rationale

Twitter data can be very valuable for researchers of perhaps all disciplines, not just DH. Given the difficulties to properly collect and analyse Twitter data as viewable from most Twitter Web and mobile clients (as most people use Twitter) and the very limited short – span of search results, there is the danger of losing huge amounts of valuable historical material.

Tweets are like butterflies – one can only really look at them for long if one pins them down out of their natural environment. The reason why we have access to Twitter in any form is because of Twitter’s API, which stands for Application Programming Interface. Free access to historic Twitter search results is limited to the last 7 days. This is due to several reasons, including the incredible amount of data that is requested from Twitter’s API, and – this is an educated guess – not disconnected from the fact that Twitter’s business model relies on its data being a commodity that can be resold for research. Twitter’s data is stored and managed by Twitter’s enterprise API platform.

For the researcher interested in researching Twitter data, this means that harvesting needs to be do ne not only through automated means but in real time. It also puts scholars without the required coding and data mining skills at a disadvantage. As a researcher, this basically means that there is no way to do proper research of Twitter data without understanding how it works at API level, and this means understanding the limitations and possibilities this imposes on researchers.

What’s a n individual researcher without access to pay corporate access to do? The whole butterfly colony cannot be captured with the nets most of us have available. At small scale, however, and collecting in a timely fashion, it is still possible to capture interesting and more – or – less complete specimens using fairly simply, non – coding required methods. (The Library of Congress h s now 12 years’ worth of text – only Tweets. However, as before, the Library of Congress Twitter collection will remain embargoed and there was no projected timetable for providing public access as of 26 December 2017).

Most researchers out there are likely not to benefit from access to huge Twitter data dumps. For researchers without much resources that are trying to do the talk whilst doing the walk, and conduct research
on Twitter and
about Twitter, this workshop and tutorial will guide participants into creating a Twitter application in order to tap into the Twitter API, followed

by the setting up of a Twitter Google Archiving Spreadsheet. Once a trial archive or dataset has been collected, we will attempt text analysis and basic visualisations using Excel and Voyant Tools. This workshop will include a brief introduction contextualizing social media data collection good practices including user data privacy and research ethics issues.

Workshop Requirements

• Room with projector and screen

• Wifi access

• Power plugs for participants to charge devices if required

Participants Requirements

• Interest in collecting small Twitter datasets and basic Text Analysis

• Wifi – enabled Laptop with Excel or similar spreadsheet software

• Twitter account, and the login credentials to access it (username and password)

Tools We’ll Use

• TAGS

Home

• Voyant Tools

https://voyant – tools.org/

El taller se puede dar también en español o bilingüe inglés – español.

A Graphical User Interface for LDA Topic Modeling

Using LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) for analyzing the content structure of digital text collections is a possibility, that aroused the interest of many digital humanists in the recent years. The method allows to generate a so called ‘topic model’ from a text corpus, each ‘topic’ in the model being represented by a probability distribution over the words in the corpus. In each of these topics, another group of semantically related words appears with high probability scores. By labeling topics with their most probable words and then calculating the relative contributions of the topics to each text or text segment, researchers can use LDA as an unsupervised method to survey the contents of a text corpus (Blei 2012, Steyvers and Griffiths 2006).

However, to actually use LDA, technical skills lacked by the majority of humanities scholars is necessary. There is a number of accessible implementations of the LDA algorithm, the most popular being in MALLET (McCallum 2002), a Java program that has to be run and controlled from the command line and Gensim (Rehurek und Sojka 2010),  a text analysis library for the Python programming language. Basically, most existing implementations of the algorithm require programming skills to be used efficiently, and for most use cases one has to switch between systems, tools and programming languages to complete the entire workflow from preprocessing to the analysis of results.

With the aim of lowering the threshold to use LDA for humanities scholars, we developed a programming library in Python that significantly reduces the complications to control the whole process of topic modeling from preprocessing to the visualization of results with a single Python script. The library, developed with funding from the European infrastructure project DARIAH (

https://de.dariah.eu/

), allows to choose from three different LDA implementations (MALLET, Gensim, and the ‘LDA’ package by Allan Riddell;

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/lda

). It provides a number of interactive, extensively annotated
jupyter notebooks (

http://jupyter.org/

) that can be used as tutorials for beginners and template workflows that can be adjusted to individual needs.

Many potential users are not yet familiar with programming at all, but interested in the method and eager to experiment with it a little before deciding if it is worth learning a new set of skills to use it to its full extent. For them the learning curve of a jupyter notebook is still too steep.  That at least was the feedback we received in our workshops which we organized to get feedback from scholars: the wish for a GUI to access at least the basic functionalities was expressed frequently. To meet this demand, we started the development of a ‘GUI Demonstrator’ that mirrors the working steps and explanations in the notebooks, and allows users to analyse their own texts using LDA with a limited set of options.

The current version, that is implemented in the FLASK microframework (

http://flask.pocoo.org/

) and runs within a browser window (Fig 1.), includes all steps necessary to get from a number of raw text files (txt and xml file formats are supported) to a visualized output, currently an interactive heat map showing the distribution of topics over texts (Fig. 2). As the quality of results depends on removing frequent words that appear in all texts, users can decide on the number of most frequent words to remove, or provide their own stopword list. They can control the number of topics to be generated, and the number of iterations the algorithm should run. The latter is important, because a large number of iterations will produce more stable results, but the algorithm will take longer to finish the task.

The next working steps include the implementation of standalone graphics in the Qt library (

https://www1.qt.io/

), and in allowing for flexibility in the choice and use of the results and outputs users are specifically interested in. The possibility to include metadata and evaluation results is another focus for upcoming developments, e.g. to sort text in the output heatmap according to different categories, or topics according their quality indicated by evaluation metrics.

Both the library and the Demonstrator as a standalone executable for Windows and OSX are open source and available on Github (

https://github.com/DARIAH-DE/Topics

).

Figure 1: Screenshot of the upper end of the input screen in the current version of the GUI Demonstrator.

Figure 2: Example for an interactive heatmap output in the current version of the GUI Demonstrator.

Perspectivas Digitales y a Gran Escala en el Estudio de Revistas Culturales de los Espacios Hispánico y Lusófono

Este panel se propone avanzar, desde un punto de vista metodológico, en el análisis a gran escala de la revista como institución cultural, una aproximación que puede cuestionar centros de producción literaria y revelar dinámicas de relación hasta ahora desconocidas entre las mal denominadas literaturas periféricas y los centros culturales hegemónicos. Para ello, los coordinadores de este panel proponemos cuatro presentaciones que abordan el estudio de revistas culturales históricas del ámbito hispánico y lusófono a través de diversos estudios de caso que utilizan herramientas digitales y combinan intereses disciplinares en los campos de la historia de las ideas, la historia cultural, los estudios de traducción, y la literatura comparada desde una perspectiva transnacional. El panel se propone dar muestra del estado actual del estudio de revistas culturales en los espacios hispánico y lusófono a través del uso de herramientas digitales que permitan avanzar en la discusión metodológica.

A este respecto, las propuestas de comunicación que se presentan se enmarcan en proyectos de investigación en curso vinculados a distintas universidades de Bélgica, Alemania, Portugal y España (Universiteit Antwerpen, Universität Tübingen, Universidade Nova de Lisboa y Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, respectivamente). Estos proyectos privilegian a la revista cultural como objeto de estudio y emplean distintas herramientas y metodologías digitales, dando sobradas muestras de la riqueza de perspectivas analíticas dentro del campo de las Humanidades Digitales (digitalización de materiales impresos y POS-tagging, construcción de repositorios electrónicos y de portales de investigación, bases de datos relacionales, geolocalización y visualización). Los autores de las distintas presentaciones comparten un compromiso similar en la colaboración científica entre pares, gracias a la publicación en abierto de los datos recogidos en sus investigaciones (
open source). Las comunicaciones presentarán los respectivos proyectos en curso, ejemplificando con estudios de caso que de ellos se derivan.

En concreto, las comunicaciones del panel abordarán los siguientes objetos:

1. La creación de un repositorio de textos a partir de revistas en las Filipinas entre 1850 y 1945, dentro del marco del proyecto “Digitization of Philippine Rare Periodicals and Training in DH”, con el propósito de facilitar el futuro estudio de textos históricos a través de herramientas digitales. Por medio de un análisis textual computacional, esta comunicación ejemplificará la utilidad de este repositorio con un estudio sobre la actitud que adopta la sociedad de habla filipina respecto de otros países en tres momentos concretos del siglo
   xx.
2. La presentación del entorno digital “Revistas culturales 2.0” al servicio de investigadores de revistas culturales históricas en lengua española. En base a este portal, la comunicación presentará un estudio de redes sociales entre los autores, revistas y géneros literarios con el objetivo de centrarse en textos programáticos (editoriales, prólogos o manifiestos).
3. La presentación de la base de datos de “Revistas de Ideias e Cultura” portuguesas del siglo
   xx que combina aproximaciones a partir de la historia de las ideas, la biblioteconomía y la ciencia de la información. La comunicación abordará las redes de recepción en revistas portuguesas en base a las obras y los nombres citados en ellas.
4. La identificación y análisis de las traducciones literarias publicadas en revistas hispánicas en el primer tercio del siglo
   xx con el objetivo de descubrir publicaciones hasta ahora desconocidas y revelar las relaciones literarias y editoriales entre distintos órganos de la prensa cultural hispánica a escala transnacional. Este estudio se realizará a partir de los datos recogidos en el VRE “MapModern” sobre revistas clave españolas e hispanoamericanas, mediadores culturales, y su participación en eventos y organizaciones culturales internacionales.
   [Page]

Educational Bridges: Understanding Conservation Dynamics in the Amazon through The Calha Norte Portal

Calha Norte is the northernmost region of the Brazilian Amazon, and the largest mosaic of protected areas in the world, encompassing nearly 14 million hectares. Given the vastness of this area, government enforcement of parks and conservation zones can be poor, and scarce resources prevent authorities from providing much-needed support to the inhabitants of protected areas. This poster focuses on the Calha Norte Portal, a digital project that constitutes a personal initiative to encourage awareness of conservation efforts in the region. The portal is an educational tool intended to demonstrate the power of digital technologies for fostering greater transparency in conservation management. It also aims to provide a clearer understanding of the social, political, economic and historical dynamics which have shaped the challenges to protecting the Amazon forest today.

The data for the Calha Norte Portal was gathered during my work with the Social Policy department of the Amazonian Institute for Man and the Environment (Imazon), an environmental NGO based in Belém. In accordance with the department’s focus on communities in the Calha Norte region, I compiled information from various sources about the region’s history, cultural diversity, transportation networks, governing bodies, development indices, demographics, economic activities, protected area implementation, and accessibility. This data was then used to create the Calha Norte Portal, a website and blog with an interactive Google map of the municipal capitals and protected areas in the region. The Google Earth application allows the user to navigate through protected areas, indigenous territories, maroon communities, and municipalities. At a click, each area on the map displays a pop-up window with historical information, demographic statistics, economic and political data, photos, deforestation figures and an implementation index for protected areas. Furthermore, users can look back in time at satellite images from 1960 to the present and visualize patterns of deforestation, and urban sprawl over time.

Ex. 1&2: A bauxite mine in the Saraca-Taquera national park. Top, a satellite image of the mine in 1986, bottom, the same mine in 2017.

The project focuses mainly on political, economic, historical, cultural and social data for populations in protected areas and the surrounding municipalities. As an anthropologist, I am particularly interested in dispelling the myth of Amazonia as an uninhabited biological entity, and exposing the important historical dynamics which have shaped the Amazon region as it is today. Understanding the human forces which have pushed the economic development of the region is a crucial first step for conservation policy which can protect both human livelihoods and biodiversity, in line with current sustainable development benchmarks. I also hope to draw attention to the power of digital technologies for overcoming communication barriers between isolated regions and institutional bodies, a major issue in developing informed and tailored conservation policy.

My hope is that, in breaking down the collected data in a visual, interactive format, the uninitiated user will be able to play with the information and learn about the region in any way that suits their interests. The user’s guide and tutorials available on the portal offer a guided introduction, but the stand-alone map itself is meant to be played with, manipulated and explored, in ways that dismantle a traditional historical narrative. This poster presentation will elaborate on the features of the Calha Norte Portal and its contribution to greater awareness of regional conservation efforts. The overarching aim is to convey the importance of transparency in the institutionalization of protected areas and to encourage a more thorough understanding of the cultural fabric of the Northern Amazon region, so that research and conservation initiatives might be better tailored to the realities of local communities and their involvement in the protection of the natural resources upon which their livelihoods depend.

Ex.3: Calha Norte in Google Earth. The portal offers users the opportunity to navigate through the online version of the map, or the option to download Google Earth and the Calha Norte KMZ file, for a more complete user experience.

Project Management For The Digital Humanities

Many projects taken on by humanists — whether large scale with many team members and substantial budgets, or smaller, such as editing books and journals — require management. Regardless of size, scope, and budget, projects members must coordinate tasks, responsibilities, budgets and achieve objectives (Boyd and Siemens 2014; Siemens 2009).  Project management (PM) with its accompanying methods, tools and techniques provides one way to accomplish this. PM can help manage common issues related to risks, obstacles and tasks which might be unanticipated, team member turnover, timelines, scope creep, and budget overspending (Siemens 2016). To facilitate skill development in this area, there are training opportunities within Digital Humanities courses (Bailar and Spiro 2013), stand alone courses (University of Alberta 2015), training programs (Scholars’ Lab 2011), workshops (DHSI 2015; HILT 2015; The European Summer University in Digital Humanities 2015) and, finally, supporting websites (Appleford and Guiliano 2013).

While it has proven extremely useful to apply PM methods and tools to DH work, this panel examines the reverse: how do the principles, methods, and concerns of DH inform our PM methods and techniques?  How do we adapt PM frameworks to address issues specific to DH projects – such as complex scholarly research agendas, or interest in topics such as community engagement, design thinking, open source development, activism, etc.? This panel is concerned with what it means to incorporate project management into a DH project, looking particularly from the perspective of individuals who shape and implement these methods and tools. While scholars have reflected on aspects such as teamwork and collaboration (Siemens and INKE Research Group 2015; 2016; Ruecker and Radzikowska 2007) and project process and outcomes (Causer, Tonra and Wallace 2012; Simeone
et al. 2011; National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities 2010; Guiliano 2012), surprisingly little attention has been paid to how DH transforms project management implementation.

This panel seeks to address this gap with papers that demonstrate various project management methodologies specifically for the DH context. Panelists will discuss: how design can be integrated into the project management process, how PM can support the creation of a distributed and emergent open source development model, how PM can facilitate rigorous and satisfying interpersonal scholarly exchange, and how PM has been used to manage a multi-year, large scale DH project with over 35 partners.  The panel’s goal is to showcase solutions to issues that arise in DH work, and to see if we can derive a set of general principles or processes inherent in project management for the digital humanities.

Project Management and INKE

The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) is a large-scale, long-term interdisciplinary research project that has been researching the future of books, e-books and reading.  To coordinate tasks, budget and a research team with over 35 members, research assistants, postdoctoral fellows, and partner organizations, the collaboration used a combination of project management tools.  In particular, INKE incorporated governance documents and a yearly planning cycle with associated research plans.

INKE’s governance documents were designed to guide the collaboration and support accountability by providing a foundation of common understandings.  At the start of funded research activity, the administrative team jointly developed these and laid out the working relationship between researchers, the sub-research areas, the administrative team, partners, and the executive committee, and outlined an authorship convention, intellectual property clause, and decision-making and dispute resolution processes, among other things.  An important part of these documents was a researcher agreement that all team members signed before receiving research funds. To further accountability, a copy of the governance documents were also posted on the online project planning workspaces as well as published and updated as necessary. These documents also proved useful for incorporating new team members and sustaining the working relationships.  As a sign of their strength, these have served as models for other team projects (Nowviskie 2011; The Praxis Program at the Scholars’ Lab 2011; nd).

Another important project management tool was the annual project plans where each sub-research area needed to develop to receive research funds.  These outlined research tasks, outcomes, responsibilities and accountabilities, timelines and required resources. With approval of these documents, funds were then distributed to the sub-research areas and their research started for the year.  To ensure accountability, the team reported at multiple points of the year and compared actual activities against those planned. The administrative team realized that this was not something to which they were accustomed and required skills that are not typically developed in graduate school and were often the equivalent to writing an article in terms of intellectual effort.  Having said that, the administrative team realized that this planning process provided an important foundation to create cohesion, and underpin the project’s working culture and serve to ensure that research was still completed even when researchers were busy with other responsibilities. Finally, given the pace of technological change, the yearly planning cycle made it easier to plan tasks that could be accomplished within a shorter timeframe while still addressing the overall research question which had a seven year mandate.

Overall, INKE has been a successful research endeavor as measured in terms of conference presentations, articles, and prototypes.  This project management framework contributed to that success.

Design for Digital Humanities Project Management

The project management workflow at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton (CDH) changed significantly when we hired a User Experience Designer in 2016. Though the CDH had only been developing DH projects for two years, we had established a robust project management process in consultation with our institution’s OIT Project Management Office, and with insights from literature and models from PM resources within the DH community (
Siemens, 2016; Leon, 2011). But a designer’s input helped surface aspects of the process that are crucial for DH work, and our revised workflows have enriched both research outcomes and product deliverables.

In this talk we will discuss why and how design can be integrated into the DH project management process.  Visualization and design are becoming increasingly important in DH projects, and major points of intersection between design and DH have emerged. And we feel that DH project management would benefit from more engagement with the perspectives of theorists and practitioners in the design disciplines (Blauvelt 2008; Maurer et al, 2008). Design can play a key role in the “thinking-through-practice” (Burdick et al, 2012) ethos of DH work, and can contribute to the research process by shaping communication and argumentation. The addition of a “designerly way of knowing” (Archer, 1979) into the DH project management process can enhance research approaches by fostering productive synthesis in teams with diverse expertise and content knowledge.  When design thinking and tools are integrated into the co-creation of research, tool- and resource-building, new methods of inquiry emerge that deepen collaboration and enhance knowledge-making.

We will open by discussing the role of design in the current non-DH Project Management field. We will then outline our own PM methodology, and describe the interventions of design in this process: tools and strategies such as creating sitemaps, siteflows, interface wireframing, art direction, design mockup and acceptance testing.  Our presentation will be supported by examples from the major projects we have developed at our Center, which feature performative interfaces that go beyond pre-conceptualized interpretation and arguments to encourage discovery. These examples will demonstrate how design practice and ideation can inform each other in a iterative process of synthesis and refinement, and can facilitate diagrammatic thinking to help those unfamiliar with visual thinking adopt new approaches and perspectives. Importantly, we will conclude by discussing the challenges of integrating design into the project management process, and offer suggestions for how to overcome common roadblocks and misunderstandings.

DH Project Management as Scholarly Exchange

When considering the ways in which the principles, methods, and concerns of Digital Humanities (DH) can usefully inform and adapt established Project Management (PM) methods and techniques, it is helpful to observe at the outset that «management» is not a particularly valourized term in the (digital) humanities. Regarded as a (cold, profit-driven) business mechanism rather than an important aspect of scholarly practice, (digital) humanities faculty typically bristle at the idea that their research (individual or collaborative) should be subject to managerial protocols—an attitude only exacerbated by the pervasive administrative control exercised over their professional lives as a result of the  «corporatization of the university.» «Digital humanities» has even been accused (along with other transgressions against the humanities) of really being the «managerial humanities» (Allington) because DH projects can require substantial grants (usually to employ research assistants and technicians) that require strict administration and reporting, thus turning researchers into project managers (which, Allington presumes, is a bad thing).

However, in this presentation I will argue, based on my own experience as a DH scholar and project manager that project management, as it adapts to the particularities of (digital) humanities project requirements and personnel is, at its best, a collegial facilitation of rigorous and satisfying interpersonal scholarly exchange that is not available in familiar modes such as the conference presentation, the academic journal monograph review or the blind peer review process. The key practices of project management as they function in DH, I suggest, contribute to optimizing a sustained, substantive, and productive dialogue that can both «get things done» and contribute to intellectual and professional growth.

Themes of Community-Driven Project Management

The purpose of project management is to leverage and coordinate the creativity and effort of human beings in a common commitment to accomplish a shared goal. Having managed a wide range of projects in music composition, performance and production, print and film/video production, commercial software development and, most recently, open source digital humanities projects, the core skills required from a project manager remain essentially those of a skilled conductor, irrespective of medium. Nevertheless, projects in the digital humanities present their own unique challenges for effective management.

The essential challenge facing the project manager – to coordinate actions across a team’s heterogeneous backgrounds, requirements and skill sets – is foregrounded in Digital Humanities projects. Academic projects span a vast gamut of human interest, far more than commercial efforts tailored for profit, and they are evaluated not by market penetration or sales but on the value of their scholarly contribution.  Unlike many commercial projects, in an academic project context, team members often cannot readily be hired or replaced for the purposes of fulfilling the needed skill sets at hand. In addition, academic projects can often depend on only a fraction of the work hours otherwise available from each team member, causing additional barriers to effective team interactions.

Accompanying and informed by the project’s efforts to overcome challenges of staffing are matters of process. Within a digital humanities team, one often finds mismatching working hours between staff, significant differences in prior professional experience and other team issues caused by the conflicting demands of the academic context. As a result, process often evolves as a crutch or mitigation of the team’s shortcomings rather than an emergent behavior that maximize their strengths. Good DH project and project management ‘hygiene’ requires that the manager(s) and team properly apply, and effectively cultivate, a team ethic that empowers all to provide ongoing input on the team structure and dynamics, a dialogue that informs and engages the appropriate levels of process.

To accomplish success in a DH context, every project manager must compose the appropriate team according to the available talent, identify and understand the goals and requirements of the project, and coordinate the team’s activities according to the needs of a diverse user community. In my prior project management career, I have been gratified to be able to help compose and cultivate a team of talented collaborators, and to help a team process emerge from within the diverse team’s core strengths and identities. By carefully evaluating various distributed and feature-specific team models, and by taking a minimalistic approach to job- and issue-tracking, a team can often emerge its own process, grounded in the scholarly context of its genesis and eventual reception that truly speaks to the scholarly intent of the project.

An Ontological Model for Inferring Psychological Profiles and Narrative Roles of Characters

2.
The ontology of literary characters

The ontology of literary characters (OLC) integrates different ontological models already available in conceptual models literature. In particular, it integrates the ontology framework LEMON (The Lexicon Model for Ontologies, (McCrae et al., 2011)) and the Ontology of Emotion (OE) (Patti et al., 2015) (encoding affective knowledge in emotional categories based on both Plutchik’s (Plutchik, 1997)) and Hourglass’s models in (Cambria et al., 2012)) with two additional models:

• a preliminary ontology of narrative roles
• a model of psychological profiles relying on the model of the Big 5 personality traits (Digman, 1990).

In our ontology, the word level is encoded in our model as Lexical Entry in the LEMON module. Lexical Entries are linked to their corresponding Emotion through the property
describes emotion. The different set of Emotions is represented with the OE model that currently includes 32 emotional concepts. Each of such concept, as specified above, is connected to the word level and, in addition, is connected with specific concepts represented the micro-ontology of the Big Five Personalty Traits. The latter integrated model allows to categorize the psychological profiles of the characters along the axes of Openness to experience Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Finally, the concepts of Big Five micro-ontology are connected with those represented in an additional module that allows to represent the narrative roles played by the characters in a given story. Such integrated micro-ontology of narrative roles has been based on the archetypes of HERO, ANTI-HERO and VILLAIN which are commonly used in the narrative realm (Lieto and Damiano, 2014). Regarding the HERO class is represented with the following relevant narrative features: e.g. the fact that it is characterized by his/her fights against the VILLAIN of a story, the fact that his/her actions are necessarily guided by general goals to be achieved in the interest of the collectivity, the fact that they fight against the VILLAIN in a fair way and so on. The ANTI-HERO, on the other hand, is described as characterized by the fact of sharing most of its typical traits with the HERO (e.g. the fact that it is the protagonist of a plot fighting against the VILLAIN of the story); however, his/her moves are not guided by a general spirit of sacrifice for the collectivity but, rather, they are usually based on some personal motivations that, incidentally and/or indirectly, coincide with the needs of the collectivity. Furthermore the ANTI-HERO may also act in a not fair way in order to achieve the desired goal. A classical example of such archetype is Shylock which is described with the words “rabbia”/“anger”, «vergogna»/»shame», etc (See Figure 1) . Each of these words is associated with a specific emotion of the OE ontology. In addition, each emotion is linked in the ontology to a particular Psychological Profile from the Big Five Model. Finally, each Personality of the Big Five Model is semantically connected with a particular narrative role. Finally the VILLAIN is represented as a classic negative role in a plot and is characterized as the main opponent of the protagonist/HERO.

The overall integrated ontological model allowed us to show how a given character (e.g. Shylock in figure 1) described in the text with some particular psychological-denoting words (e.g. described by the words “rabbia”/“anger” …) can be automatically associated to one of the 5 classes of the personality traits of the Big Five and, as as consequence, also to the corresponding narrative role played in a story. Such semantic association is performed by using the ontological connections between the lexical level and the Emotional Concepts and an additional layer of SWRL rules connecting specific types of Words to specific Personality Traits, (See Figure 1).

Figure 1. Example Shylock.

Modeling Linked Cultural Events: Design and Application

Introduction

This paper discusses the promises and pitfalls of linking historical data on cultural events. Quite a few datasets on historical European music, theatre and film are now publicly available online (Baptist 2017). The ones that contain programming information are, at least to some extent, already event-based. However, they are highly heterogeneous in scale and scope, and they generally do not use the same definitions for, for example, venues, events, or companies. Conceptualizing and embedding cultural events such as concerts or theatrical performances in a linked data framework helps to overcome such issues without forcing an overarching ontology, and it enables researchers to acknowledge the performative and interactive nature of cultural expressions within their (local) societal context (Nijboer and Rasterhoff 2018).

By linking event data internally as well as to external knowledge bases such as DBpedia and Wikidata by means of shared vocabularies, researchers are invited to systematically analyse cultural life cross-sectorally (i.e. theatre, music), internationally (European comparisons and connections), and contextually (in relation to local social, economic, political and cultural features) (cf.
EPAD: European Performing Arts Dataverse). In this paper we discuss the conceptual and practical requirements for such a linked-data approach on the basis of a series of research projects on historical cinema, musical, and theatrical events in the research program
Creative Amsterdam: An E-Humanities Perspective (CREATE).

Cultural events

Events play a key role in historical scholarship, and have gained even more urgency with the increasing importance of digital resources in humanities research. Many projects on historical events, however, employ them as devices to structure data collections and do not explicitly aim to develop analytical frameworks in relation to event data collection and data modeling (De Boer et al. 2015; Van Hage et al. 2011; Shaw 2013. An exception can be found in a statistical method known as event history analysis, which treats events as dependent variables, seeking to statistically describe, explain, or predict their occurrence (Allison 2004). Most research on (urban) arts and culture, however, does not try to statistically identify variables that predict or explain an event, for example the staging of the opera Norma or the screening of the movie Casablanca. Rather, historians may seek to identify (series of) events that have contributed to, for example, the canonical status of specific expressions or genres, to the shaping of local and international cultural taste cultures, or to the emergence of some places as particularly creative and cultural.

We therefore emphasize that (networks and series of) events should also be considered as independent variables that can help us identify and disentangle processes of cultural change and continuity. Central in this view is the assumption that 1) events can be seen as units of analysis with structural properties (notably, a time and place) with links to, for example, actors, institutions, other events, and local properties, and 2) that these interlinkages are key to analysing their role in shaping, for instance, local cultural or social life (Tilly 2002). Turning individual event datasets into linked data versions would provide instantaneous insight into how much performing arts datasets overlaps, ontologically, with any of the others. This provides a roadmap for integrating these still scattered data and studying them in conjunction. A systematic analysis of cultural events therefore requires a data structure which allows for querying connections.

Linking cultural event data

A first analysis of performing arts datasets demonstrated that normalizing even the most basic data across datasets is tricky and that trying to completely harmonize and link all the relevant datasets is futile (Baptist 2017). Fortunately, the structure of linked data provides a way to transparently query heterogeneous data, without enforcing an overarching ontology. Breaking events down into variables such as ‘people’, ‘venues’, ‘place’, and ‘time’, for instance, circumvents the issue of formally defining a ‘performance’. Linked data also allows researchers to test various different link-ups of two data sets so they can evaluate the results when they adjust their queries. In the case of cinemas, for example, one of the problems is that the typology of cinemas differs across countries and periods. In the Netherlands cinemas are divided into types ‘A’ and ‘B’ according to frequency of screenings; in Flanders the cinemas are classified according to how soon they tend to new films after their premiere. If the data was put into a relational database it would be necessary to ‘reconstruct’ either of the classifications for the other dataset. But linked data, because of its model of loose connections, allows querying both datasets, defining a classification only during the query.

For the datasets on cultural events such as historical musical and theatrical performances we build on a rigorous relational data model by Karel Dibbets et al. for the
Cinema Context database (Van Vliet et al. 2009). All movies (often circulating under various titles), persons and companies in in this dataset have been identified and aligned to a master record, and where possible linked to the well known and well maintained Internet Movie Database (IMDb). We develop this approach for other datasets and by linking data on cultural events to other datasets and to other knowledge bases using shared vocabularies such as

schema.org
and
Vocabulary of a Friend (VOAF). In this paper we illustrate research potential, but also practical issues by discussing a recent project on the establishment of movie theatres in the city of Amsterdam in the early twentieth century. By linking data on the history of cinema and movie-going to local contextual data (e.g. census data, municipal election data), we assess how linked data might be used to analyse how specific local historical characteristics shaped form and function of urban cultural life.

SSK by example. Make your Arts and Humanities research go standard

Arts and Humanities research has to address new challenges raised by the increasing amount of digital sources, contents and tools. New digital practices and protocols, new digital methodologies and services, new software and databases, offer a completely renewed framework for research, and encourage the emergence of a next generation of digitally-aware scholars.

Digital infrastructures, such as PARTHENOS, aim at supporting and accompanying the rise of this new generation of scholars by offering innovative solutions to connect digital tools and contents to Arts and Humanities researchers’ needs. PARTHENOS has thus acknowledged the growing importance to develop a data-centered strategy for the management of scientific data (European Commission, 2010), and is currently developing the Standardization Survival Kit (“SSK”) to help Arts and Humanities scholars understand the crucial role that proper data modelling and standards have to play in making digital contents sustainable, interoperable and reusable.

Accompanied by a live demo of the website


¹

, the poster will be composed of three parts: introducing the Standardization Survival Kit or “SSK”, using the SSK, customizing the SSK.

Even if it is not obvious that the Arts and Humanities would be well-suited to taking up the technological prerequisites of standardization, it is yet essential that standardization takes a crucial role in the management of Arts and Humanities data. In this framework, this poster will present the Standardization Survival Kit, an overlay platform dedicated to promote a wider use of standards within Arts and Humanities. This comprehensive interface aims at providing documentation and resources concerning standards (especially authoritative references for each standard such as sources, Standard Development Organizations), and at covering three types of activities related to the deployment and use of standards in the Arts and Humanities scholarship: documenting existing standards by providing reference materials, supporting the adoption of standards, and communicating with all Arts and Humanities research communities.

The SSK is designed as a comprehensive interface for guiding Arts and Humanities scholars through all available resources (collected within a dedicated Zotero library


²

), on the basis of reference scenarios identified since the beginning of the project (PARTHENOS, 2016). The interface intends to provide a single entry point for both novice and advanced scholars in the domain of digital methods, so that they can have quick access to the information needed for managing digital content, or applying the appropriate method in a scholarly context. Users will be able to explore the platform according to their needs, thanks to precise research criteria: disciplines, standards, research activities and research objects. The poster will show how an Arts and Humanities scholar can navigate the Standardization Survival Kit website, by taking the example of an actual reference scenario. A live demo of the interface will also accompany the presentation, so that those interested in the poster will be able to search the website according to their needs.

To stress the importance of standards for Arts and Humanities scholarly work, let us take the example of a sociologist who is a novice in digital methods, but who wants to disseminate a collection of field survey data online, so that they could be used by other researchers in the long-term. By browsing in the SSK, she or he will find a standardized scenario that could be perfectly suited to her or his needs: “Encode and modelize field surveys for their online dissemination”. The poster will follow this researcher exploring this reference scenario, and going through its nine steps


³

with the associated resources. Let us take some of the scenario’s steps as examples:

• the fourth step “Anonymize” offers a curated and up-to-date list of resources to help the researcher respect ethical practices and adopt proven techniques for anonymizing the collected data.
• the second and sixth steps stress on the importance of using tested standard – such as EAD to “Collect and classify” the data, and TEI to “Transcribe the interviews” -, highlight the importance of proper data modelling before disseminating them, and give access to appropriate resources on the subject.

More advanced users will also be able to edit the scenarios themselves, by submitting new resources or adding new steps. They can also create new scenarios. The SSK scenarios and steps can be easily extended, reused and customized, thanks to their flexible data model in TEI


⁴

. A dedicated interface in the Standardization Survival Kit will enable users to make suggestions, automatically converted in TEI according to the appropriate schema. The poster will present this interface and the associated functionalities. And for those who will be eager to test it, a live demo will be provided.

Monroe Work Today: Unearthing the Geography of US Lynching Violence
(Monroe Work Hoy en Día: Desenterrar la geografía de la violencia linchamieno de EEUU)

MonroeWorkToday.org, launched in November 2016, is a digital history project that synthesizes current historical research on the scope of American lynchings. The website was updated again in October 2017 with additional content digitized from Tuskegee University Archives.

Lynchings in the United States were perpetrated as homegrown acts, not orchestrated regionally in any way. This exhibit focuses on people of color murdered over 100 years in this fashion under the pretext of white supremacy. Yet unlike most academic studies, the project does not compartmentalize by region (e.g. the South or West) or by group (e.g. Mexican-Americans). By contrast,
Monroe Work Today is the first of its kind to use web technologies to visualize the entirety of these documented events, connecting scholarship about African Americans, Native Peoples, Mexicans, Sicilians and Chinese immigrants across the United States (Carrigan and Webb, 2013) (Frazier, 2015) (Pfaelzer, 2007) (Pfeifer, 2013) (and others). Through four years of work, Auut Studio meticulously created a database and directory in the form of a map, compiling all modern academic research with century-old archives of the Tuskegee Institute. This national map carries the names of 4166 victims of lynchings and nearly 600 other victims of racialized mob violence. The project gives clarity to the sheer extent of the murders.

Previous inquiries into the lynching record have relied on tabulations and statistics, enumerating one tally for each state or county – such as 531 lynchings in Georgia vs. 205 in Kentucky, etc. (Tolnay and Beck, 1995) (Guzman, c.1960) (Pfeifer, 2013). This project, however, transforms the public’s interaction with
each lynching using maps and extensive contextual narrative. Its goal is to spawn a public discussion about the logic of white supremacy.

As a second phase to the project, the author now proposes a novel approach to using GIS to understand these murders. Acts of lynching are better examined like other crime data: not as tallies, but rather as incidents with a geographic location. As the commission of overt intimidation over people of color, they were in fact perpetrated with a specific geography in mind. The terrorizing effect was intended to carry over the nearby locale: it enforced the racial order “around
here.” In this context, maps of smaller areas may better recreate the historical truth about lynching, and a geospatial visualization of the regional landscape may better illuminate the original effect of these individual violent acts.

A new computer model created by the author animates regional maps of the USA, weighting the nearby radius around a murder but also the persistence of its memory over a span of many years. The model makes certain blanket assumptions about the duration of trauma and fear–how long does the grotesque murder of a neighbor dissuade one’s actions? These are starting assumptions which the author readily admits may be
wrong, but they are coded as parameters. This allows different scholars for the first time to test their various interpretations of historical trauma and compare the visual output of competing viewpoints in the model.

This geo-temporal-visual model has the potential to drastically reframe the academic interpretation of lynching by unearthing multiple evolving shapes of the pockets of terror in the historical United States. As a stepping point for future research, this model for the broad reach of real, acute fear could be laid upon a map with other major events in the history of the Jim Crow South and brave acts of popular resistance.

In this poster session, the author will demonstrate the software model to attendees, exchange ideas and suggestions, as well as interrogate on-screen with them several new maps created with the model.