Research Uncovered—Beyond reading: understanding the book through computer vision

Book tickets!What: Research Uncovered—Beyond reading: understanding the book through computer vision

Who: Giles Bergel

When: 13:00—14:00, Thursday 2 November 2017

Where: Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Access: open to all

Admission: free

Registration is required

This talk showcases Oxford’s cutting-edge research at the intersection of book history and computer vision. It aims to make images of books as easy to search, compare and annotate as their texts.

The University’s Visual Geometry Group has a long track record of working with University researchers and collections, building tools to help researchers analyse everything from classical art to fifteenth-century printed books and English broadside ballads, as well as numerous applications in the sciences. Several of these tools have now been openly released for all to use and adapt.

The talk reveals how computer vision, far from detracting from understanding books as material objects, offers a fresh pair of eyes on what remains one of humanity’s most sophisticated inventions and richest forms of heritage.

Dr Giles Bergel is Digital Humanities Research Officer in the University of Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group. He works on printed books, printing materials and the history of the book trade. Find out more information.

Book tickets: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/whatson/whats-on/upcoming-events/2017/nov/beyond-reading

Reconciling database identifiers with Wikidata

Charles Grey, former Prime Minister, has an entry in Electronic Enlightenment. How do we find his UK National Archives ID, British Museum person ID, History of Parliament ID, National Portrait Gallery ID, and 22 other identifiers? By first linking his Wikidata identifier.

In a previous blog post I stressed the advantage of mapping the identifiers in databases and catalogue to Wikidata. This post describes a few different tools that were used in reconciling more than three thousand identifiers from the Electronic Enlightenment (EE) biographical dictionary.

The advantages to the source database include:

  • Maintaining links between Wikipedia and the source database. EE and Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) are two biographical projects that maintain links to Wikipedia. As Wikipedia articles get renamed or occasionally deleted, links can break. It is also easy to miss the creation of new Wikipedia articles. As EE and EMLO links are added to Wikidata, a simple database query gets a list of Wikipedia article links and their corresponding identifiers. Thus we can save work by automatically maintaining the links.
  • Identifying the Wikipedia articles of individuals in the source database. These are targets for improvement by adding citations of the source database.
  • Identifying individuals in the source database who lack Wikipedia articles, or who have articles in other language versions of Wikipedia, but not English. New articles can raise the profile of those individuals and can link to the source database. We raised awareness among the Wikipedian community with a project page and blog post. We also arranged with Oxford University Press to give free access to EE for active Wikipedia editors who requested it, via OUP’s existing Wikipedia Library arrangement.

Continue reading

Report from Wikimania

Last month I had to privilege to attend the Wikimania conference in Montreal, Canada, where 900 people from around the world gathered for two days of hacking and building and then three days of conference sessions. The conference scope includes not just the Wikimedia projects but also the big themes of open education, open access, community building, and privacy and rights in the digital age. One blog post by one attendee is only going to capture a sliver of what went on, and here I am summarising some big projects of most relevance to university research projects and GLAMs.

This time round, Wikidata rather than Wikipedia was generating the most excitement. Wikidata, the free structured knowledge-base, is going through a period of explosive growth, helped in a small part by data shared from partner institutions including Oxford University, and the conference brought together many people using Wikidata to document cultural heritage and current knowledge.

The author and hundreds of other Wikimedians. Photo by Victor Grigas of the Wikimedia foundation, CC-BY-SA 4.0

Continue reading

Data Carpentry Workshop for Humanists

You are invited to join a free Data Carpentry workshop run by the Reproducible Research Oxford project. Registration is required.

 

Date: 26–27 September 2017 

Venue: Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, 64 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PN

 

The workshop will cover data organization in spreadsheets and OpenRefine, data analysis and visualization in python, and SQL for data management, with a focus on humanities data. This is a joint effort with Data Carpentry to develop a (pilot) curriculum for the digital humanities. It is at an introductory level.

See the workshop website for details: https://rroxford.github.io/2017-09-26-oxford/

The workshop is free and open to any member of the University — researchers, staff, and students. It will be particularly relevant to people working with humanities data, though the methods are widely applicable.

 

IIIFrankenstein

Last week Digital.Bodleian reached 700,000 images with the help of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein notebooks. These have been accessible online at the wonderful Shelley-Godwin Archive for some time now, complete with transcriptions, TEI markup and detailed explanatory notes, alongside other manuscripts from Mary Shelley, Percy-Bysshe Shelley, and William Godwin. Porting them to Digital.Bodleian is not intended to replace this brilliant resource, but it helps with the Bodleian’s mission to improve the discoverability of our online resources. It also lets users do a few extra neat things with the images.

Bodleian MS. Abinger c.57, fol. 23r.

Everything added to Digital.Bodleian receives a IIIF Manifest. This means the image sets and accompanying metadata are expressed in a rich, flexible format conforming to a shared API standard. IIIF tools exist for manipulating and comparing, as well as viewing, digital images. This comes in handy for the Frankenstein notebooks (properly called MS. Abinger c.56, MS. Abinger c.57 and MS. Abinger c.58). At present they are fragmented, and the ordering of the pages in the Draft notebooks (MS. Abinger c. 56 and c.57) is different to the linear order of the novel. Using IIIF tools, we can easily work with the notebooks side-by-side, and remix the ordering of pages to fit the novel’s sequence.

The Mirador viewer, created by Stanford University with the help of the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation, lets us quickly and easily view multiple IIIF-compliant image sets alongside each other. We’ve created an instance with the Frankenstein notebooks ready-loaded side by side.

Bodleian MS. Abinger c.56, c.57 and c.58 viewed in Mirador.

The Bodleian’s Digital Manuscripts Toolkit, also funded with help from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, includes a Manifest Editor. This lets us remix and combine IIIF-compliant image sets into new sequences. Following the lead of the Shelley-Godwin Archive, we’ve created a manifest which reorders the Frankenstein Draft pages into the linear sequence of the novel. This can be viewed in a Mirador instance here – though note that the extant Draft is incomplete! The manifest itself lives here, and can be used with any other IIIF-compliant API.

IIIF Manifests are in a standardised JSON format.

If you’d like to use Mirador to view Digital.Bodleian images, you can use the link in the sidebar (the stylised ‘M’) when viewing any image or item. IIIF, Universal Viewer and Mirador Icons on Digital.Bodleian

To add further images alongside an item in Mirador, select ‘Change Layout’ from the top menu and choose how many items you’d like to view together, and the layout you’d like to view then in. You can then simply click-and-drag the IIIF icon from any other Digital.Bodleian image set into the Mirador browser tab. You can also open IIIF-compliant image sets from other institutions – you just need the URI of the IIIF Manifest.

For instructions on using the Digital Manuscript Toolkit’s Manifest Editor (and other tools), please see the DMT website.

Digital Approaches to the History of Science: two workshops

Book a place at the first workshop, 28 September! 

You are warmly invited to join us at day-long workshops on Digital Approaches to the History of Science. These workshops are supported and co-organized by the Reading Euclid project, the Newton Project, the Royal Society, and the Centre for Digital Scholarship.

Digital Approaches to the History of Science

—Life out of a coffin—

When: 10:00—17:00,  Thursday 28 September

Where: Faculty of History, University of Oxford, 41–47 George Street OX1 2BE (map)

Access: all are welcome—see below for information on travel bursaries

Admission: free, refreshments and lunch included

Registration is required for each workshop: register for workshop 1, 28 September

This pair of one-day workshops will showcase and explore some of the work currently being done at the intersection of digital scholarship and the history of science. Visualizing networks of correspondence, mapping intellectual geographies, mining textual corpora: many modes of digital scholarship have special relevance to the problems and methods of the history of science, and the last few years have seen the launch of a number of new platforms and projects in this area.

With contributions from projects around the UK, these two workshops will be an opportunity to share ideas, to reflect on what is being achieved and to consider what might be done next.

Workshop 1: Thursday 28 September

Confirmed speakers include:

  • Pierpaolo Dondio: Publishing the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
  • Kathryn Eccles: Cabinet Project
  • Louisiane Ferlier: The Royal Society Journal Collection: Science in the Making?
  • Rob Iliffe: Newton Project
  • Lauren Kassell: Casebooks Project
  • Alison Pearn: Darwin Correspondence
  • Anna Henry: Sloane’s Minute Books

Workshop 2

Details of Workshop 2 will be announced shortly, when registration will open.

We have taken inspiration from William Stukely’s isolation and seek to converse, as it were, out of a coffin:

in my situation at Stamford there was not one person, clergy or lay, that had any taste or love of learning or ingenuity, so that I was as much dead in converse as in a coffin

Travel bursaries

We are delighted to be able to offer travel bursaries to enable students and early career researchers (up to 3 years beyond the award of most recent degree) to attend. If you would like to apply for a bursary, please contact co-organizer Yelda Nasifoglu on yelda.nasifoglu@history.ox.ac.uk, providing:

  • Your name
  • Your institution
  • Your level of study/year of award of most recent degree
  • Travelling from
  • Estimate of travel cost

These workshops are organized by:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quotation:

Lukis, ed. ‘Family Memoirs’, vol. I (1882), p.109, cited in Michael Reed, ‘The cultural role of small towns in England, 1600–1800’, in Peter Clark, Small Towns in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 1882), p.147, via Google Books.

Images:

Tycho Brahe, Tabulae Rudolphinae (Ulm, 1627), frontispiece. Bodleian Library Savile Q 14. Edited in Photoshop by Yelda Nasifoglu.

René Descartes, Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam, 1644), ‘Cartesian network of vortices of celestial motion’, p. 110. Bodleian Library Savile T 22. Edited in Photoshop by Yelda Nasifoglu.

Resource discovery and Wikidata

How can I find reference materials about Jane Austen? This query could potentially take me to dozens of different sites and databases, each with different types of material. Project Gutenberg has transcribed text of her works. Librivox has audiobooks. Find A Grave has images of her memorial stone in Winchester Cathedral. The Huygens database of Women Writers has citations for modern research about her. The Stanford project Kindred Britain has her family tree. Across the Wikimedia family of sites, there are articles about Austen in 103 language versions of Wikipedia, quotations in 27 language versions of Wikiquote, and various images in Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Jane Austen by her sister, Cassandra. From the National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons

Title page of a first edition of Pride and Prejudice. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Coat of arms of the Austen family. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

How do we capture the fact that all these different resources are about the same person? How do we make a path to these and similar sources, bypassing all the irrelevant links that would come up in a web search? Continue reading

Research Uncovered—Historiography at Scale: People, Places, and Professions in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

BOOK TICKETS!

We are delighted to co-host this Research Uncovered talk with Oxford University Press’s ODNB and TORCH.

What: Historiography at Scale: People, Places, and Professions in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Who: Chris Warren

When: 13:00—14:00, Friday 9 June 2017

Where: Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: recommended

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published initially in 2004, is the work of roughly 10,000 scholars, runs to 60 volumes in print, and is made up of more than 62 million words. So immense is the ODNB that one early reviewer complained, ‘reviewing it is like exploring a continent by rowing boat’: ‘If you were to read one life in the new DNB every day you would take 137 years to finish it.’  Information overload is not a new problem in the humanities, but Christopher Howse’s analogy helpfully suggests why an engine of some sort might be desirable in studying historiography at scale. In this presentation, Chris will use digital humanities methods to map the people, places, and professions of the ODNB in a new way.

Christopher Warren is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches early modern studies, law and literature, and digital humanities. He is the author of Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 (OUP, 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature by the Sixteenth Century Society. With Daniel Shore, he is co-founder of Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, a collaborative reconstruction of Britain’s early modern social network. His articles have appeared in journals including HumanityLaw, Culture, and the HumanitiesThe European Journal of International LawEnglish Literary Renaissance; and Digital Humanities Quarterly. His current projects include work on anachronism and presentism in the history of international law and a “distant reading” of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Research Uncovered—The Role of Biographical Data in Digital Scholarship: Reassembling the Digital Self

Book a place!


What: The Role of Biographical Data in Digital Scholarship: Reassembling the Digital Self

Who: Paul Arthur

When: 13:00—14:00, Monday 12 June 2017

Where: Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Registration: required

Biography is only one of many disciplines that have been deeply influenced by advances in digital media and computing, and that have required new theoretical approaches to help understand the changes. Yet the digital revolution has arguably had a more profound effect on biography and life writing than on any other branch of literature, perhaps any branch of the arts. At the intersection of biography and digital humanities, key questions can be posed: In what ways does the Web act to co-shape our identities? Do we know ourselves, each other, or historical actors differently? How permanent are the digital records of lives that are being produced? Do we, or will we soon, remember differently? And, what are the research futures for digital biographical research?

Paul Arthur is Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Centre for Global Issues at Edith Cowan University, Australia. He was previously Professor in Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University. From 2010–2013 he was Deputy Director of the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, and Deputy General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Recent publications include Migrant Nation (in press, 2017, ed.), Private Lives, Intimate Readings (2015, ed. with Leena Kurvet-Käosaar), and Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (2014, ed. with Katherine Bode).

Image credit: https://www.theengineer.co.uk/

Research Uncovered—Capture, Model, Interpret: new ways of imaging ancient text artefacts

RTI Dome 7. Credit: Custom Imaging; https://custom-imaging.co.uk/projects/dome-7/

What: Capture, Model, Interpret: new ways of imaging ancient text artefacts

Who: Jacob Dahl and Kirk Martinez

When: 13:00—14:00, Tuesday 30 May 2017

Where: Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Imaging systems have been developed over the years to capture images of  objects which are more detailed, have accurate colour and have  revolutionised our records of our cultural heritage. Some objects have subtle surface details which are difficult to capture. We have been using a technique called “reflectance transformation imaging”. This allows the viewer to move a virtual light around to highlight the detail of interest. This talk will explain the technique and show the systems we made to capture hundreds of images.

Seal impression on the proto-Elamite tablet Sb 04832 captured from an RTI dome image made in the Louvre. Credit: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative; http://cdli.ucla.edu/P008022.

Jacob Dahl is a specialist of the pre-Classical cultures and languages of the Near East. He has written on early Babylonian socio-economic history, early Near Eastern writing systems, and Sumerian literature. He works on the decipherment of proto-Elamite, the last undeciphered writing system from the ancient Near East with a substantial number of sources (more than 1600 tablets divided between the Louvre Museum and the National Museum of Iran). Initially inspired and influenced by archaic cuneiform from Mesopotamia, proto-Elamite was a very short-lived writing system (ca. 3100 – 2900 BC) used across much of what today constitute the Islamic Republic of Iran.As a co-PI of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative he seeks to document and safeguard Mesopotamia’s contribution to our shared world history by making its ancient records available freely online.

Kirk Martinez is a Professor of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. His imaging and image processing research includes the VASARI and MARC projects on high resolution colorimetric imaging,  In Viseum a new system was designed to allow web browsers to view high resolution images (which became IIPimage). He founded the VIPS image processing library. He has developed nine RTI imaging systems and is currently collaborating with Jacob Dahl in Oriental Studies on the
imaging of ancient seals.