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Launch of DigHimapper, a platform to analyse historical maps via georeferencing and annotating

CLARIAH-VL is proud to announce the release of DigHimapper, a platform to analyse historical maps via georeferencing and annotating. It involves the public in two important steps in the processing of historical maps into analysable sources of information to make it possible to visualise landscape evolutions and search maps for place names.

  • In the Georeferencing portal, historical maps are placed as closely as possible to their current state. This is done by looking for points that can be found on both a historical map and in the current landscape. By repositioning the maps, it becomes possible to compare them directly with the present, as well as with other historical maps, thus visualising landscape evolutions.
  • In the Annotation portal, place names (toponyms) on historical maps are converted into text that can be read by computers. Combined with the repositioning of the map itself, these toponyms are given a place in space. Since toponyms often contain a wealth of information about past landscapes, this provides an indispensable resource for studying landscape evolution.

The collection

Central to a first phase of the development of this platform are the magnificent maps of the Arenberg family, which can be found in the General State Archives. The Arenberg family had possessions all over Europe, but mainly in the Low Countries. The collection has now been scanned at high quality and totals some 4,000 maps, ranging from parcel maps of villages to world maps.

An example of georeferencing in the Allmaps Editor

Contribute as a volunteer yourself!

Refine existing georeferences or get to work on toponyms. The results will be used for scientific research on past landscapes, making digital historical maps better available and as a test case to expand the platform with more functions and a multitude of historical maps. Go to the DigHimapper website and you can get started right away!

Contact: dighimaps@uantwerpen.be

DigHimapper is a collaboration between the University of Antwerp, the State Archives of Belgium, Webmapper and Bert Spaan. The project is funded by the Special Research Fund of the University of Antwerp and CLARIAH-VL. The original historical maps were transferred by the Arenberg Foundation to the State Archives of Belgium, which was responsible for scanning them. DigHimapper is also part of the FED-tWIN DigHimaps, a project collaboration between the University of Antwerp and the State Archives of Belgium, funded by BELSPO.

CLARIN-BE joins CLARIN ERIC

Exciting news! CLARIN-BE has joined the CLARIN European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) for the Social Sciences and Humanities focusing on Language Resources and Technology. Within CLARIN ERIC, CLARIN-BE will focus on the inclusion of tools and resources which are not yet present in the CLARIN infrastructure.

logo CLARIN-BE

More specific, CLARIN-BE will increase knowledge on:

  • Digital Text Analysis Dashboard and Pipeline
  • Benchmarking of NLP tools for natural language understanding
  • Integration of NLP tools in Digital Text Analysis Dashboard and Pipeline (DTADP)
  • Tools for linguistic preprocessing for Dutch, English, French and German
  • Tools providing automatic annotation for tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, syntax parsing, chunking and named entity recognition.
  • Tools for natural language understanding (sentiment analysis, emotion detection, document similarity clustering, topic modelling, stylometry)
  • Tools for parallel data (sentence and word alignment)

The CLARIN-BE consortium will fulfill its role by organizing user involvement sessions at Belgian humanities faculties, CLARIN courses at Summer Schools, or a more specific CLARIN training event. Furthermore, sessions about using CLARIN infrastructure will be included in several university courses.

CLARIN-BE also ambitions to work in close cooperation with CLARIAH-NL and will continue its contribution to K-Dutch, the CLARIN Knowledge Centre hosted by the IVDNT (Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal).

Official launch of CLARIAH-VL with European support

Although our ‘CLARIAH-VL: Advancing the Open Humanities Service Infrastructure’ project started in February 2021, it wasn’t until Friday 10th of September that we were finally able to organize our internal launch meeting. Obviously we have had many virtual meetings in the past months, but we were all looking forward to seeing each other in person, to reflect on the work that has been done so far and to look ahead to the many challenging tasks that are planned in the coming months and years.

Sally Chambers presenting the outline of the CLARIAH-VL research infrastructure

We chose the KBR Royal Library of Belgium as the location for our launch meeting. KBR is the national scientific library and preserves, manages and studies more than 8 million documents. Before starting the actual meeting, the project team was happy to catch up over a cup of coffee in the beautiful Consilium meeting space.

As a starter, an interactive group exercise was planned to think about how we want to demonstrate the value of our integrated Open Humanities Service Infrastructure by the end of the project in December 2024. To introduce new members to the project and to reminisce ourselves of the working plan, we discussed the following issues: What do we need? What do we hope our infrastructure will look like? How should we brand our services? How can we improve our communication? Every team member approach and thought about these questions from the perspective of their own service infrastructure components (SIC’s):

  • Aggregating Humanities Research Data Sets
  • Linked (Open) Humanities Data Tool Suite
  • User-driven platforms for data enrichment
  • Digital Text Analysis Pipeline
  • Outreach, Uptake & Sustain
Toma Tasovac adressing the CLARIAH-VL consortium during the launch meeting

After a short break, we discussed the next steps based on the output of the interactive group exercise and decided on the agenda for our next team meeting. Then it was time to welcome two guests for a European Intermezzo: Franciska de Jong (Executive Director of CLARIN-ERIC) and Toma Tasovac (Director of DARIAH-ERIC). Both stressed the importance of the work of the CLARIAH consortium in Flanders, and also the potential to collaborate within the European context.

We concluded this launch meeting with a small reception at the Albert Bar, a rooftop terrace at KBR, and with the promise to see each other soon during our collaborations in the next phase of the development of the CLARIAH-VL services.

CLARIAH-VL awarded funding from FWO

FWO

Our CLARIAH-VL Consortium has received funding for the project “CLARIAH-VL: Advancing the Open Humanities Service Infrastructure” from the International Research Infrastructures programme of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) for the period 2021-2024.

At the universities of Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent and Leuven as well as the Dutch Language Institute, researchers of the CLARIAH-VL consortium will implement a modular research infrastructure embedding high-quality, user-friendly tools and resources into the workflows of humanities researchers.

Offering an open infrastructure which facilitates public humanities will ensure the accessibility and relevance of the humanities to the general public, specific (heritage) community groups and policy makers. It will make it technically possible to share knowledge, including sharing and co-creating knowledge with non-specialist users, such as facilitating citizen science and crowdsourcing projects.

https://www.fwo.be/media/1024233/results-international-research-infrastructurs-2020.pdf