I remember hearing this same enthusiastic rhetoric about how new technology would transform the humanities in 1979 when the latest in digital technology was a microfiche concordance. The actual optical technology to read the carbonized papyri at Herculaneum or to optically reconstruct destroyed sections of manuscripts are a few instances I can think of where machines will do something that humans cannot. Other than that, while it's great to have manuscript facsimiles available on the web and to catalog and communicate over the Internet, how does this change anything other than the ease with which we can do our research? Like you, I have been waiting for years to hear about how digital humanities is fundamentally different from the old humanities in a new medium. And this is not to denigrate new projects for new media, but to keep some historical perspective on the long term value of what scholars have been doing since ancient times. Nancy

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Peter Damian peter.damian@btinternet.comwrote:

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Digital technologies have the potential to transform the types of

research questions that we ask in the Humanities

How exactly? I know that conferences invite solutions to provocative questions such as these but ...

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but ultimately they will also allow us to answer questions that we were

not even aware we could ask, hence the title of this conference. How

How on earth do we know this? I asked this question to this group a few years ago and got no satisfactory answer. I have a very simple need, which is a Latin spell-checker. This would revolutionise our approach to digitisation of Latin texts. It is a relatively simple task, because I looked at the problem a few years ago. I did not have the time or resource to solve it myself. Perhaps I will look at the problem again. But, then, there seems to be a whole humanities research industry devoted to 'digital humanities', so why hasn't someone provided a solution to this simple problem?

Edward

----- Original Message ----- *From:* Matthew James Driscoll mjd@hum.ku.dk *To:* Digital Medievalist dm-l@uleth.ca *Sent:* Wednesday, June 22, 2011 2:12 PM *Subject:* [dm-l] SDH 2011 Supporting Digital Humanities

First call for papers**** SDH 2011 Supporting the Digital Humanities: Answering the unaskable

*17-18 November, Copenhagen*

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Following the first successful SDH conference in **Vienna** in 2010, the CLARIN http://www.clarin.eu/ and DARIAH http://www.dariah.eu/initiatives have decided to jointly organise the second SDH conference in ****Copenhagen**, **Denmark**** in November 2011. The conference venue will be at the ****University** of **Copenhagen****, a participant in both CLARIN and DARIAH.****

Digital technologies have the potential to transform the types of research questions that we ask in the Humanities, and to allow us to address traditional questions in new and exciting ways, but ultimately they will also allow us to answer questions that we were not even aware we could ask, hence the title of this conference. How can digital humanities help us not just to find the answers to our research questions more quickly and more easily, but also to formulate research questions we would never have been able to ask without access to large quantities of digital data and sophisticated tools for their analysis? *Supporting the Digital Humanities

• will be a forum for the discussion of these innovations, and of the ways

in which these new forms of research can be facilitated and supported.****

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CLARIN and DARIAH are creating European research infrastructures for the humanities and related disciplines. SDH2011 aims to bring together infrastructure providers and users from the communities involved with the two infrastructure initiatives. The conference will consist of a number of topical sessions where providers and users will present and discuss results, obstacles and opportunities for digitally-supported humanities research. Participants are encouraged to engage with honest assessments of the intellectual problems and practical barriers in an open and constructive atmosphere. ****

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The first SDH conference in 2010 gave a broad and multi-facetted presentation of the domains of interest to CLARIN and DARIAH. This time we have chosen a somewhat more focussed approach, focussing on two major themes, but not excluding other themes of interest for the humanities. The two themes are:****

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**· **Sound and movement – music, spoken word, dance and theatre***

**· **Text and things – text, and the relationship between text and material artefacts, such as manuscript, stone or other carriers of text***

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Submissions are invited for individual papers and posters, as well as panels. Focus should be on tools and methods for the analysis of digital data rather than on digitisation processes themselves, both from the provider and from the user perspective. We want to pay special attention to inspiring showcases that demonstrate the innovative power of digital methods in the humanities.****

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Some important dates:****

July 15, 2011: Submission of suggestion for panels****

July 24, 2011: Submission of abstracts (4 pages) ****

August 15, 2011: Notification on panel proposals****

September 15, 2011: Author notification****

October 15, 2011: Final version of papers for publication (8 pages).****

November 17-18: Conference in ****Copenhagen**, **Denmark********

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*Programme committee*

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**Bente Maegaard**, ****University of Copenhagen**, **Denmark********

Steven Krauwer, ****Utrecht University**, **Netherlands********

Helen Bailey, ****University of Bedfordshire**, **UK**** ****

Tim Crawford, Goldsmith’s ****University of London**, **UK********

Matthew Driscoll, ****University of Copenhagen**, **Denmark********

Neil Fraistat, ****University of Maryland**, **United States********

Erhard Hinrichs, ****Tübingen University**, **Germany********

Fotis Jannidis, ****Würzburg University**, **Germany**** ****

Helen Katsiadakis, ****Academy of Athens**, **Greece**** ****

Krister Lindén, ****Helsinki University**, **Finland********

Heike Neuroth, **Göttingen** **State** and University ****Library**, ** Germany**** ****

Laurent Romary, INRIA, France****

Nina Vodopivec, Institute for Contemporary History, ****Ljubljana**, ** Slovenia********

Peter Wittenburg, MPI, Netherlands/Germany****

**Martin Wynne**, ****Oxford University**, **UK********

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Thanks for the many helpful comments and apologies for the negative tone of my original message. On a positive note I would like to enumerate a number of ways in which I have found computers to be helpful. In the majority of cases, however, it has been me as an individual using technology (mostly quite crude, MS office style technology) to do things. I.e. a domain expert who also uses IT as best I can. The idea of non-domain specialists who are proficient in IT of itself is in my view an 'old world' view of technology that takes us back to mainframes and specialist programmers building big systems and databases. But the world we live in, since the PC arrived in the 1980s, is increasingly end-user computing.

1. Spell checking. I have written one program to do this, which involves computing all possible Latin inflections in one fell swoop. The MS Word checker, as you probably know, does not understand inflection. This does not matter with English, which is comparatively uninflected. The problem is that there are a few million possible words required, which is simply too big for MS word, which collapses. The right way would be to construct a proper parser which understood Latin grammar, but this is beyond my skill. (Well, possibly not, as my MSc was in natural language processing and machine translation, but my knowledge of that tells me the job would take more time and effort than I have).

2. More successful was a simple correction function using the VBA 'textreplace' function. The reason I need this is to convert printed versions of Latin text into digitised versions. OCR is still pretty hopeless at character recognition, as we all know, so the corrector function looks for impossible letter combinations. For example, OCR generally confused 'e' and 'c', so renders the Latin 'essent' as 'esscnt' or 'csscnt' or something like that. So I search and replace 'cnt' into 'ent', knowing that 'cnt' is not possible. There are hundreds of other examples. I also check for known mistakes on common words, e.g. 'vcl' should be 'vcl' and stuff like that.

There still remains the bulk of the work, which is formatting the material correctly. OCR is not very good at understanding footnotes, Greek words, other parts of the critical apparatus, and getting this right requires simple hard work. I have a little image of a medieval scribe on my screen, who was doing exactly the same thing, really.

3. I have a Latin site searcher on my website http://www.logicmuseum.com/latinsearcher.htm which uses the Google search engine to look for Latin expressions in a targeted way. This means I can search for hundreds of examples in the original Latin, in many cases matching the Latin to an English translation, e.g. like this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22quod%20quid%20est%22+site%3Ahttp... . This is in principle no different to the way that a dictionary or wordbook gives you an example of how a phrase is used by the classical authors. The difference is merely the scale. A dictionary will give you a handful of results, the search linked to above gives you 53. Again, this is not sophisticated technology - a few lines of Java plus the already existing Google.

4. I have just implemented a wiki on the same site http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Main_Page . This was fairly simple and used existing technology (Mediawiki and Semantic mediawiki). The ambition is to provide access to all the key (Latin) texts of the medieval period - the principles are outlined here http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/The_Logic_Museum:What_is_the_Logic_Museum . Again, the main principles are no different to the old way of doing things. For example, I used 'anchoring' to index Aristotelian texts to their 'Bekker number' (a pre-computer way of locating any Aristotelian text by page, column and line number of the 19C Bekker edition).

5. I have used the (fairly basic) MediaWiki implementation of tables to make parallel Latin English translations - thus fulfillling the ambition of bringing these wonderful works to a wider audience. E.g. here http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Ockham/Summa_Logicae/Book_I/Chapter_... . This is an area where pure IT could actually help, as the Java based CKeditor is awful, full of bugs and difficult to use. But it is usable. Note the green tick marks on the page which tell me that the page has been checked once (but not peer reviewed). This is the technology version of a system that translators have used for centuries.

On the general subject of bringing to a wider audience I was inspired some years ago by the site of a critical edition in a specialist library. It was fifty years old, in tatters, with pages missing. To locate these texts you had to use a card index. When you took the book out, you had to fill a form in and place it on the shelf. Then you would place the book on a trolley for it to be filed by some clerk. The building itself dates from the 1930s and has not received a lick of paint since then. There has to be a better way than this. Add to that the fact that, even though I have the run of the finest London libraries, there are many important texts that they do not have (e.g. the Alluntis edition of Scotus' Quodlibetal questions - not in any London library). Why do people spend a lot of time and effort preparing these editions, to have some press squirt ink onto paper, publish them at hugely inflated prices, even though the main work of doing them (preparation and peer review) was unpaid labour? There has to be a better system - although the problem here is economic, not IT related.

6. Which naturally brings me to wikis. Daniel Paul O'Donnell ("Disciplinary impact and technological obsolescence in digital medieval studies" online here http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Research/disciplinary-impact-and-tec...) makes some very good points on this. The technology of wikis is proven, yet academic specialists do not use them. He says (correctly) that this is an economic problem. Wikis depend on collaborative effort, where the contributions of the individual are subordinate to the interests of the group. But "in my experience, most professional scholars initially are extremely impressed by the possibilities offered by collaborative software like wikis and other forms of annotation engines—before almost immediately bumping up against the problems of prestige and quality control that currently make them infeasible as channels of high level scholarly communication ... Professional scholars traditionally achieve success—both institutionally and in terms of reputation—by the quality and amount of their research publications. Community-based collaborative projects do not easily fit into this model. " I believe these problems could be resolved by better use of categorisation and markup (to address the quality control issue), and by allowing 'ownership' of designated pages on the wiki. There is absolutely no reason why a critical edition, or a translation, could not be produced entirely online, by a collaborative effort of a small group, working in different parts of the world. I would welcome ideas on this, from anyone working on editions, or translations. There has to be a better way than would we have now, and perhaps this could be achieved by appropriate use of technology.

Edward

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Peter Damian peter.damian@btinternet.comwrote:

Of course I forgot to add the link which is:

...

...

http://jeffreycwitt.com/plaoul

Jeffrey Witt's lovely critical edition project. I do recommend this. Nicely laid out, I love the way you can match the image of the manuscript with the Latin transcription (as well as toggle through the ms). Having done this myself, I recognise there is a problem with 'cutting' the digital images so that they match the text. The line spacing of the MS is never consistent from page to page, nor within the page (it is effectively handwriting after all). Could semi-intelligent software scan the MS to determine the lines, and automatically line up with the transcript? I don't bother doing this any more after much experimentation. I simply have the text in one window, the image in another, and use the mouse to line up.

The Text-Image Linking Environment does this: http://tileproject.org, and

it can provide any kind of output (although you'd have to provide an output script - there is documentation on how to do this on the site). As of Monday of this week there was work being done on the Auto Line Recognizer plugin (that's the piece of TILE that does to auto line recognition) however version 1.0 should be out any day now if it's not already.

Dot

Two comments, Jeffrey, and a preliminary remark. Preliminary remark: the three main components of value/reward for academic publishing are (a) accredition - giving an author recognition for the work they have put in (b) authority - having a recognised name or panel of specialists review the work (c) archiving - not just giving a 'how to cite' reference, but also a place that people are guaranteed to find the work, i.e. a library, usually a large number of libraries which store a physical representation of the work, which researchers are guaranteed to find.

With those preliminary remarks in mind, here are my comments.

1. I made two corrections to the transcription via the form provided.

This disappeared into the ether without any recognition. The system therefore fails the accreditation test. I contributed to the project, but it is unlikely I will be recognised. I'm not complaining of course, just noting that in order to give an incentive for people to work on the project, they are likely to need some reward - wiki software can do this, by the way, because you can estimate the amount each person contributed, though an art not a science.

2. The project also fails the 'archiving' test - it is on a personal

website. If I link to the edition, how do I know it won't break in a year or two? I used to create external links when I started my website 6 years ago. So many of them broke that I don't bother. If I want to point to something, I just load it onto my own website, and link internally (always accrediting the orignal owner of the text, of course - no one has complained so far).

BTW archiving, I believe, is what explains the strange economics of academic publishing. There are three components, as I said, of which the first two are given free of cash payment. The labour of the author is rewarded by the accreditation - stuff you can put on your CV. The labour of those who give authority is unpaid,but rewarded by the prestige of being a series editor, or journal editor, or serving on a panel. The publishing, by contrast, is rewarded in cash, to the publisher. The printing costs are negligible (I was told by a good friend who works). The value provided is in distributing the work to archivists - university libraries - who pay handsomely for this. The critical edition I am using for my current translation project cost £80, of which the main labour - the writing and peer review - was free, and the printing cost probably £5. The rest goes to the publisher. And this odd state of affairs will continue until some organisation provides a very large server onto which all such material can be uploaded, for the use of everyone. But no one has an incentive to go to this expense, because it will be unpaid. (A university library, which costs between £5m and £10m a year to run, will go to this expense, because of the value it provides to the university, which will bear the cost. The value to the university, in turn, is to provide access to the library in return for a portion of the tuition fees.

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