Poster session
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DHOxSS 2018 featured a short poster session as part of the Welcome Reception at the Weston Library (see below for abstracts).​ This took place early in the evening on Monday 2nd July. Applications were open to all DHOxSS participants and speakers, and members of the University of Oxford.
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Prizes were awarded to three of the posters (see abstracts below):
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Oxford University Press prize
Lena Emelyn Zlock
The Voltaire Library Project
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Oxford University Press prize
Viktoriya Lebedynska
Field mail during the Second World War
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The Sebastian Rahtz prize
Nataliya Berbyuk Lindstrom
Employment Integration with Mobiles:
Developing mobile solutions for language
and intercultural communication training
for migrants in Sweden (joint paper with
Sylvana Sofkova Hashemi)
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Sebastian Rahtz (1955-2016)
Sebastian Patrick Quintus Rahtz was a digital humanist of note, with significant contributions ranging from the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and computer methods in archaeology, to TeX and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
In Oxford he had important roles in many projects including the TEI technical Infrastructure, CLAROS (the world of Art on the Semantic Web), the Oxford Text Archive, and the Text Creation Partnership. Sebastian led TEI training and workshops from 2006 and created the TEI Summer School, which in 2011 became the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School.
We continue to celebrate Sebastian’s contributions, and especially at the Summer School, where this year we are awarding the Sebastian Rahtz poster prize. We’re grateful to Leonor Barroca for enabling us to commemorate Sebastian through this year’s prize.
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Poster abstracts:
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Lena Emelyn Zlock, Stanford University / Voltaire Lab, Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford - the Voltaire Library Project
The Voltaire Library is a collaboration between Stanford University and the University of Oxford. This explores the thesis of Voltaire’s “working library,” one wholly different from a collector’s library by virtue of his interactions with the texts (there is extant marginalia for over half of the 6500 volumes). Our mission is two-fold: (1) create a database of Voltaire’s personal library, and (2) use digital humanities tools, including Wikidata linked data and Palladio, to gain new insights into his intellectual sources. The database will include 130 metadata categories to explore - from author to publication data -, with the added goal of digitizing the marginalia. But before we can answer how the library shaped Voltaire’s own corpus, we are asking what shaped the library itself. Where did these books come from? Where were they published? Who sent them? And why are they in the library? The poster discusses the approach we took to the 1961 catalog produced by the Academy of Arts and Sciences in St. Petersburg, from OCRing the document, to applying metadata categories to each book, to creating a “subject-code” hierarchy. By combining 18th-century typologies with modern DH tools, we can explore the patterns - literary, social, political, and geographical - that shaped the library. The poster examines the first visualizations generated through this approach, including the “parlement corpus.” Drawn from all texts with “parlement” in the title, this subset sheds new light on the books Voltaire likely used for his 1768 Histoire du Parlement, a work whose origins are shrouded in mystery. To understand the provenance of these texts, we cross-referenced their dates of publication against Voltaire’s letters in Oxford’s Electronic Enlightenment database. The match between the dates of publication and Voltaire’s correspondence with premier conseil Etienne-Noël Damilaville divulges clues not only about provenance, but also the social network that shaped Voltaire’s library (Damilaville in fact sends many of the texts in the corpus). The second example is an edge-node model created in RStudio and a Gephi network. Through this model we can visualize both genre distribution and overlap, a window into the library’s interdisciplinary nature. These data-driven approaches unveils trends that were otherwise obscured. With our current dataset and future database, we hope to assist scholars in better understanding the Enlightenment’s central figure.
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Nataliya Berbyuk Lindstrom, University of Gothenburg - Employment Integration with Mobiles:Developing mobile solutions for language and intercultural communication training for migrants in Sweden
In 2015-2016, over 1.2 million first time asylum seekers were registered in Europe. Host societies face challenges in integrating migrants. Integration can only be "freely" chosen and successfully pursued by non-dominant groups when the host society is open and inclusive, supporting migrants in language and culture learning, participation in host society activities as well as in contacts with the locals. Today’s migration is characterized by the vital role technology plays for millions of migrants. As many migrants have smartphones, they can be used as a potential bridging tool for integration into the host society. In the poster, we show the findings from the research project “Integration with mobiles – support for language and intercultural communication for newly arrived migrants” (2016-2018), funded by AMIF (Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund). We will report on user tests with selected applications based on a model for evaluation we developed that takes into account technological, pedagogical, linguistic and cultural aspects. We further report on migrant integration needs to develop language and cultural knowledge as well as social connections in the community and how they are met in the existing mobile applications. Special focus will be paid to the development of mobile technology in supporting employability of immigrants from different professional groups.
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Viktoriya Lebedynska, University of Cologne - Field mail during the Second World War
More than 30 million letters were sent by or to the soldiers of the German front during the Second World War. Many of the letters survived the war and have increasingly been the focus of historical everyday research since the mid-1980s. They were particularly exciting because they suddenly provided a unique insight into the soldiers' private experience of the war, thus raising up many historical or socio-philosophical discussions and leading to new insights. In recent years, many collections of letters have also appeared, but they all had in common that their possibilities of interaction and investigation were very limited due to their appearance in paper form. Online editions, which offered an extension of the functionalities and thus enabled the acquisition of new insights, have hardly existed until today. This deficiency should be compensated with a series of seminars at the Institute for Digital Humanities at the University of Cologne. The participants of the seminar have already been recording letter collections from private archives for two semesters. The aim of the seminars is on the one hand to develop the encoding models, working environments and publication forms for field mail, letters and postcards from the Second World War. On the other hand, possible approaches of crowdsourcing, citizen science or public history must be discussed, tested and realized. The final result will be a web application that enables everyone to upload digital copies of letters and postcards from WW II, transcribe the text and enter additional information on sender, recipients and places and persons mentioned in order to create an ever growing open online archive providing access to an enormous network of correspondence on everyday life of soldiers and civilians across Germany, Europe and the World at war.
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Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, Australian National University - Skullbook: 3D Digital Bone Library
Skullbook is a collaboration between the Centre for Digital Humanities Research and the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. Its aim is to create a ‘bone library’ of 3D digital models capturing a reference collection of faunal skeletal remains. We report here on the production of 3D models of a cat, a coyote cranium and some of the unique Australian native species as a kangaroo and a wombat, describing two distinct workflows with different softwares and techniques: a largely manual process of photogrammetry, using Photoscan software; and a near-completely automated process using the RangeVision Spectrum 3D scanner. We report on the strengths and limitations of these different methods, and present examples of the models.
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Mike Jones, University of Bristol - Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England project
Before the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, England developed a large, influential and often radical pamphlet literature. Speeches, learned briefs, and scaffold apologies joined character assassinations, secret histories and conspiracy theories in a jumbled literary underground. Large numbers of copies survive - probably in the tens of thousands - suggesting a significant readership. Nevertheless, this pamphlet literature is rarely mentioned and even more rarely analyzed by historians or literary critics, not least because it was written by hand rather than printed with movable type. The Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England project (https://mpese.ac.uk) surveys this vast hidden archive of early Stuart England's manuscript pamphlets. The project uses TEI/XML and the eXist platform to provide a searchable database of several hundred examples with bibliographic information, and digital images, to enable scholars to better understand the production and circulation of pre-Civil War political writing. The AHRC-funded project is a collaboration between the University of Birmingham, University of Bristol, British Library and the History Association. The poster will introduce the aims of the project, the digital platform and the project’s activities such as transcription sessions with volunteers at local archives.
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Nicole Gipson, University of Manchester - Paupers, Paper Tigers, Triage, and Turf Wars in Washington DC
The homeless crisis in American inner cities in the last quarter of the twentieth century was disproportionately represented by black women, black men, and black families. The District of Columbia’s unique history has created a distinctive social and political landscape for the examination of this “advanced,” “submarginalized” homelessness. My study explores the political and social struggles for solutions to the re-emerging homeless crisis in Washington, D.C., during the Reagan Administration. The examination of African American subsets of the homeless population and the development of homeless policy is essential to this exploration.
The sparsity of data pertaining to African American homelessness may perhaps be explained by the more conventional and misguided notions of black homelessness. I wish to use my academic poster to create a more accurate portrait. This will be accomplished by observing the relationship between the low barrier/emergency shelter and welfare hotel use of African American, street poor subsets, and the formulation of homeless policy; and providing an analysis of federal and local triage of its at-risk and homeless populations during this period.
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Daniela Treveri Gennari, Oxford Brookes University - CINERICORDI online archive
CINERICORDI is an online archive that will allow users to explore the history of Italian cinema-going through a portal that reconstructs the historic cinema networks of eight major cities. It stems from the AHRC funded project Italian Cinema Audiences (ICA), the first study of cinema audiences in Italy in the 1950s, when Italians went to the cinema more than almost any other nation in Europe. Over a three-year period (2013 to 2016), the project gathered memories of cinema-going in 1950s Italy from over 1,200 participants. Through the process of ‘deep-mapping’, the archive has integrated our collected data (questionnaires and video-interviews) with new and unexplored archival resources. The CINERICORDI online archive will include digitised artefacts related to cinema-going as well as crowd-sourced collections from individual’s private archives (comprising of photos, programmes, leaflets, private letters, signed posters, etc.), which will be gathered in collaboration with our partners UNITRE (University of the Third Age), Archivio Nazionale di Stato and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Through a programme of community outreach, we have also worked with schools and libraries to promote intergenerational engagement in Italy’s cultural heritage. The CINERICORDI archive aims to enable two different generations of cinema-goers to take control of their shared cultural heritage in order to become the living curators of a virtual archive of the cinema-going experience. The key aim of this project is to engage both older and younger generations with the research gathered during the first phase of the Italian Cinema Audiences project by facilitating their participation in the co-curation of an archive that will preserve and promote the history of Italian culture
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Ganit Richter, University of Haifa - Know your crowd: A study on gamification in crowdsourcing to encourage user contributions
This study focusses on the interaction between crowds (the users) and task (knowledge pooling) through gamification. The term 'crowd’ often symbolizes a 'black box' of participants without acknowledging diversity, prior knowledge, or motivation to contribute. We address this gap by probing the sensitivity of three types of crowd to various gamification designs in a knowledge pooling assignment. This challenge is especially important for Digital Humanities when considering the growing use of collaborative research methods, particularly crowdsourcing. Who are the relevant crowds for researching literature or history? How do we engage the relevant crowds in the desired research goal, such as reading ancient texts or uncovering particular data? Gamification has emerged to describe interactive online designs that incorporate game-like approaches such as immediate feedback and virtual rewards. Through a series of online experiments, this study discusses how different point scoring designs have a differentiated effect on user engagement in terms of intensity of participation, duration and quantity and quality of contribution. The study employed a word association game . Results support the importance of choosing the right mathematical function of scores assignment as a motivator for knowledge contribution, and highlight the nuance between quantity and quality of response in different groups. These findings provide insights for designers of gamification services on how to improve knowledge contributions in crowd-based systems, and indicate that the effect of the scoring mechanism design should be tailored accordingly.
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Asa Larsson, Swedish National Heritage Board - Digital Archaeological Process
The Swedish National Heritage Board has undertaken an ambitious project to create a Digital Archaeological Process (DAP) involving County Boards, contract archaeologists, museums and the Heritage Board. The aim is to ensure efficient sharing and use of digital heritage information, and the preservation of digital documentation and data from surveys and excavations. In order to reach these goals a digital Historic Environment Record with a public web interface has been developed, as well as new web tools for archaeologists and administrators to register data and documents. The Historic Environment Record will include information about known ancient and historic sites, whether excavated or not, as well as areas that have been excavated or surveyed in some manner. These objects will in turn be linked to the reports (PDF) and other digital field documentation in an open archive. Users will be able to register information directly into the system and to download and use all the content under CC-BY (reports) and CC-0 (data). Just as important as these new tools has been the opportunity to take an in-depth look at the way information about ancient sites and artefacts are documented. Current practices are sometimes needlessly heterogeneous and often based on analogue practices where the product created will not be useful for computational processing. Old digital excavation information has been gathered by the DAP project to enrich the HER. Dealing with the old databases it is clear that despite generally similar methodologies among archaeologist, they use different terminologies and practices that severely obstruct the re-usability and interoperability of the data created. Analogue practices are still guiding how data is registered, so comparing, analysing and creating synthesis requires time-consuming homogenisation and re-digitisation. For Digital Heritage to work to its full potential, we need to look not just to developing better tools, but even more to developing better practices among the content creators.
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Audrey Courty, Griffith University, Australia - Mapping social networks on Facebook: the case of right-wing populist parties in the UK, France and Australia
Prior to the widespread use of digital information systems, generating records of social interactions and relationships was challenging. Today, the prevalence of digital social media, and the digital footprint of their users, enables researchers to conduct Social Network Analysis (SNA) on an unprecedented scale. Using my doctoral research on the link between digital social media and right-wing populist parties as an example, the poster demonstrates how to map the social networks of Facebook users and communities. Firstly, it will feature the Facebook web application Netvizz for the extraction of the ‘page like’ data of UK’s Independence Party, France’s Front National party, and Australia’s One Nation party. Secondly, it will feature the data visualisation tool Gephi, which displays the extracted data in terms of ‘nodes’ (distinct users or objects) and ‘edges’ (relationships or connections). By mapping the social networks of right-wing populist parties in this way, the different communities and affinity groups they engage with can be identified. Moreover, the most influential or important users in each network can be identified using ‘centrality’ measures integrated into Gephi. This method allows researchers to develop a more complex picture of how networked technologies are restructuring publics and information flows, including the relationship between political leadership and the electorate.
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João Fernando de Castro Gonçalves dos Santos, FLUP/CETAPS (Portugal) - An exploration of Food Spaces in the Harry Potter series: a PhD project
My purpose with this poster is to discuss my PHD thesis, which focuses on food spaces from the Harry Potter series. I will also be analyzing how the hierarchy between characters is established through their interaction with food spaces, the meaning of food to these characters, and how the characters develop throughout the story both physically and psychologically. In the series, food can be seen as a strong plot enabler. In many moments with food we can see, for example, omens or fears that become a reality later in the plot. This thesis uses as its theoretical background Digital Humanities, Food Studies and Spatiality Studies. The main methodology I will be using is that of Maps, Graphs, Trees, the famous theoretical book of literary analysis written by Franco Moretti. Through the creation of Maps and Graphs it is my intention, like Moretti would say, to discover new questions and answers in my study of Harry Potter. In other words, I wish to discover readings that couldn’t have been made otherwise. The use of technology will, of course, be indispensable for my work, which will, in turn, be a contribution to the Digital Humanities themselves. In the end, I wish to prove how relevant and innovative Moretti’s method is when it comes to analyzing novels, especially novels that are not a part of the literary canon, such as Harry Potter, thus emphasizing their relevance in an academic context.
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Arno Bosse, University of Oxford - ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ project
The accurate identification of people, places, and dates is fundamental to historical research. For places, this includes capturing data describing changes both in how places are named (toponyms) and how these are part of other place-related entities, such as polities. But in practice, large-scale geo-gazetteers (e.g. GeoNames) capture very little of this complexity. In particular, they lack data on the different contexts a given place has occupied throughout its history. Recently, greater attention is being paid to enriching and integrating gazetteers (see Berman et al., 2016). Specialized gazetteers (e.g. Pleiades), conceived from the outset not just for human readers but also for computation, are establishing standards for querying and exchanging datasets, while other projects are preparing data models capable of representing temporal entities (e.g. World Historical Gazetteer). Inspired by these developments, the ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ project at Oxford and the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam are preparing a collaboratively populated, Linked Open Data geo-gazetteer directed at meeting the needs of early modern researchers. EM Places has four goals: 1) to be a resource for identifying early modern places by means of their current and historical name variants, 2) to provide means for researchers to contribute historical contexts and name attestations, 3) to credit, source, and cite all contributions to the gazetteer by individual researchers and projects, and 4) to make the EM Places infrastructure and datasets freely accessible and reusable. EM Places is currently under active development with an initial release scheduled in Autumn/Winter 2018.
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Louisiane Ferlier, The Royal Society - Royal Society secretarial minutes 1686-1711 rendered in digital format
This project seeks to present how five volumes of Royal Society secretarial minutes 1686-1711 will be rendered in digital format. The minutes are records of the Society’s science in their most original form, from the Presidency of Samuel Pepys and the publication of Principia Mathematica, to the early years of Sir Isaac Newton’s Presidency. They contain summary of Royal Society meetings discussing experiments, publications, natural curiosities. The bulk of the manuscripts appear to have been compiled by, or on behalf of, Sir Hans Sloane, who served as Secretary, then President, to the Royal Society. An avid collector, his collections were bequeathed to the nation to give birth to the British Library and the British Museum. Several digital projects relate Sloane’s activities online, this project hopes to become the digital point of connection between the existing resources as the volumes document the ecosystem of people, ideas and scientific objects circulating around Sloane.
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Sinéad Keogh, University of Limerick - It's a Long Way from the Reading Room - Reimagining our collections, our skills and our role in humanities research to create our first online exhibition
Some archives can sit unappreciated or untouched for years, however, the Digital Humanities ‘movement’ gave us a new way of presenting and promoting our collections by reimagining them in new and different contexts. In 1999 the University of Limerick was given an archive encompassing 350 years of family history of the Armstrongs of Moyaliffe Castle, County Tipperary. The collection contains some 50,000 items, including over 13,000 photographs, many of which were taken during the First World War by Captain William Maurice ‘Pat’ Armstrong as he fought in the British Army. Despite this, interest in this collection was largely from a local history perspective. We had already begun to digitise some archival material for use in physical exhibitions but, in 2014, with the WW1 centenery commemorations approaching, the archivist who had worked on the collection suggested creating an online exhibition. And so, using weekly posts containing extracts from diaries and correspondence from 100 years ago that week, ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’(http://longwaytotipperary.ul.ie/) tracked our family during the course of the war. Now, as we near the end of the project, we can appreciate how ambitious our first online exhibition was. Reader engagement has dramatically increased and we have benefitted from both description and item contributions to the archive. We have learned a great deal over the four years and it has given us the confidence to look at our material in new ways, helping to improve our teaching and engagement.
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Jaqueline Pierazzo, CETAPS, University of Porto, Portugal - Grotesque, Arabesque and Beyond: Mapping Edgar Allan Poe’s Terror through the Digital Humanities
With this poster I intend to share an updated vision on my ongoing PhD research regarding the mapping of Edgar Allan Poe’s works of terror first presented last year during the Summer School Poster Session. Since the project matured and changed, it would be interesting to share with the Digital Humanities’s community the results I have achieved so far as well as the novelties brought up by this project. This time, I aim to focus on the main research output: the creation of a digital edition of Poe’s writings of terror. This unique edition will bring together not only the final versions of the texts, but also their first editions and publication formats as well as their manuscripts, allowing the reader to have a direct contact with the original texts, assuming an editorial position. This edition will also include all the changes made by Poe himself over his life, shedding new light into the study of his œuvre. The edition is part of a broader project that aims to offer a new way of approaching Edgar Allan Poe's works of terror through the use and creation of digital tools that may be used by other researchers. This poster will feature the main idea, goals and excerpts of this innovative edition that it is yet to come and will hopefully provide an interesting example of the many possibilities brought forth by the Digital Humanities to the realm of literary studies, especially regarding the importance of the Text Encoding Initiative. Furthermore, it aims to transcend the academic world and to start being used as a powerful tool in schools.
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Orchida Fayez Ismail, College of Humanities, Prince Sultan University - Constructing a Metadata Model to Display the Deconstruction of Literary Expression
This is a pilot project to introduce digital humanities as a minor at the College of Humanities. The project encompasses the dual action of analyzing a continuously transforming literary expression while exploring the computational platform(s) to display this transformation through the construction of a metadata model. Within this framework, students were introduced to Bolter and Grusin's theory of 'remediation' that describes the digital proliferation as an evolution of various forms of media that derives from one another both old and new. Remediation would allow for linking various adaptations and transtextual representations of a work of literature through various media modes. The platform of data analysis, on the other hand, follows the Dublin Core Metadata element set. Students, once familiar with these elements, would publish their mini-project on Omeka, an open source tool. Learning about categorizing and creating links within a work of literature at its different forms (adaptations/transtextual representations) have to start at the initial publication of the story. Students included theatrical performances, movie adaptations in various times, animations, cartoons, modernized versions, computer games, advertisements and even memes.
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Graham Klyne, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford - Capturing contextual information in Semantic Web linked data
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been widely used for scientific and observed data. Humanities require a greater emphasis on capturing the context in which information arises. The simplicity of the RDF data model creates challenges and opportunities. Event-based ontologies, such as CIDOC CRM and PROV, capture some aspects of context. We present some recent RDF modelling work for musical performances and historical places that capture other aspects of context, and suggests some possible modelling patterns that might be useful for Digital Humanities.
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Jonathan Prag,University of Oxford - I.Sicily
I.Sicily is a project based in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford, which is building an open access TEI-XML corpus of all the texts inscribed on stone from ancient Sicily (7th cent. BC – 7th cent. AD, in Greek, Latin, Punic, Oscan, Sikel, and Hebrew). Inscriptions are an invaluable source for institutional, political, cultural and linguistic history on the island, but the limitations of traditional paper publication have restricted their study and use, as well as their wider accessibility to the general public. The project is founded on the principles of restudy and autopsy, and as such is collaborating directly with museums and the archaeological authorities to catalogue and make accessible the many collections on the island. The large and diverse volume of material (4-5,000 inscriptions) means that collaborative approaches are essential. The project has therefore been exploring multiple such approaches, including working with Sicilian schools as well as university students in both the UK and abroad. A major project in Catania involving multiple institutions has resulted in a new museum exhibition supported by a virtual exhibition and the development of work-flows to enable contribution to the digital corpus by Catania school students. At the same time the project has been exploring the potential of the corpus for epigraphical and TEI training among Oxford students, making increasing use of GitHub to manage the workflows involved. The poster will present the overall project and some of these different approaches to involving the wider community of public and scholars.
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Nicholas Cole, Pembroke College, University of Oxford - the Quill Project Platform for the study of negotiated texts
This poster will be a general overview of the Quill Project Platform for the study of negotiated texts. This platform uses a bespoke model based on the rules of debate used in the west over the last four hundred years to encode information taken from the records of formal negotiations. Bespoke visualizations, AI-supported search, statistical analysis, and tools that support the annotation of information in the database, will showcase for delegates a rich application of a variety of digital humanities methodologies by an interdisciplinary team. Though a poster can only give a taste of this work, we hope that this will encourage attendees to explore the project further.
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Alice Gonçalves, CETAPS, University of Porto - African-American community in the American society represented in the works of the novelist Toni Morrison
I am curently investigating the spaces of the African-American community in the American society represented in the works of the novelist Toni Morrison. My poster will show how the heterotopic spaces for the black community, in the United States, are created and also how the interaction between those spaces with the white society affects them, taking into consideration the novel Home. The poster presentation will be useful not only to those who want to see how we can apply the Digital Humanities to aid investigations in the literary field, but also to show that it is possible and relevant to connect it to the social sciences.
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Andrea Bertino, Göttingen University Library - EU-Project HIRMEOS - High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure
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