Training – CLARIAH-VL

September 4, 2024November 18, 2024

DH Benelux 2024: report about the CLARIAH-VL contributions

From June 4-7, the 11^th edition of the DH Benelux Conference was held at the Irish College in Leuven, Belgium. With the theme “Breaking Silos, Connecting Data: Advancing Integration and Collaboration in Digital Humanities,” the event gathered a diverse group of Digital Humanities researchers, eager to explore new ways to connect and share knowledge across disciplines. The conference kicked off with pre-conference workshops on June 4, followed by three days of presentations and discussions.

CLARIAH-VL pre-conference workshop

As part of the DH Benelux pre-conference program, CLARIAH-VL hosted a full-day, in-person workshop. The workshop highlighted three tools developed within the CLARIAH-VL infrastructure project: a named entity referencing toolkit, a tool for digital scholarly editing, and a participatory digital asset enrichment platform based on IIIF technology

The workshop was organised into two interactive sessions:

Morning Session: Attendees explored a named entity referencing toolkit (presented by Frederic Pietowski & Tom Gheldof) and a tool for digital scholarly editing (presented by Lamyk Bekius, Vincent Neyt & Nooshin Shahidzadeh Asadi) gaining practical insights into their functionalities and applications.

2024DHB_CLARIAHVL_eXtantworkshop Download

2024DHB_CLARIAHVL_latte workshop_Entity RecognitionLinking Download

Afternoon Session: Focused on Madoc, an IIIF-based platform (presented by Lise Foket, Fien Danniau, Rein Debrulle, Julie Birkholz & Annamaria Van Ingelgem) designed for participatory digital asset enrichment, allowing researchers to annotate and collaborate on image-based datasets.

2024DHB_CLARIAHVL_Madocworkshop Download

This hands-on workshop offered participants a deeper understanding of these tools’ potential to enhance digital humanities research. The workshop bridged theoretical knowledge and practical application, underscoring CLARIAH-VL’s commitment to advancing digital scholarship.

CLARIAH-VL contributions

Members of CLARIAH-VL played an important role throughout the conference. Tom Gheldof, the CLARIAH-VL coordinator at KU Leuven’s Faculty of Arts, served on the DH Benelux Organising and Program Committee. Supervisors of KU Leuven, Mark Depauw and Fred Truyen acted as the local chairs of the conference, strengthening the event’s ties to the local academic community. Moreover, several CLARIAH-VL coordinators (Lamyk Bekius, Julie Birkholz, Mike Kestemont, and Mark Depauw) chaired sessions, contributing their expertise and fostering discussions throughout the conference.

Several CLARIAH-VL researchers also presented a (joint) paper:

Lamyk Bekius presented in the session Literature and Fiction on day 1, with the paper “What does that little black square store? The contents of Herman de Coninck’s floppy disks in the Letterenhuis”, co-authored with Jordan Thijs.

Mike Kestemont was truly a conference marathoner at DH Benelux 2024! On day 1, he presented in the session Statistics and Patterns, with the paper “Painting a bigger picture: the annotation of emotion in Middle Dutch literature”, co-authored with Cecile Vermaas and Laurent Breeus-Loos. He was back again on day 2 in the session Textual Analysis and Stylometry with the paper Abbreviation Application: A Stylochronometric Study of the Abbreviations in the Oeuvre of Herne’s Speculum Scribe, co-authored with Caroline Vandyck. He also made it to day 3, where he presented in the Disambiguating and Annotating Historical Text session with the paper “Coverage-based Comparisons of Cultural Diversity”, co-authored with Folgert Karsdorp and Melvin Wevers. Three days in a row – talk about dedication!

Tim Van de Cruys shared his expertise on day 2 in the session on NER, with the paper “Named Entity Recognition for a Large Scale Analysis of Individuals in Antiquity“, co-authored with Marijke Beersmans, Evelien de Graaf, Alek Keersmaekers, and Margherita Fantoli.

Julie Birkholz took part in the Computer Vision session on Day 3, with the paper “Finding a Needle in a Haystack: Computer vision and machine learning techniques for extracting comics from Belgian Illustrated Periodicals in the Interwar Period“, co-authored with Benoît Crucifix, Erwin Dejasse, Sébastien Hermans, Krishna Kumar Thirukokaranam Chandrasekar, and Bas Vercruysse.

Sytze Van Herck presented in the Disambiguating and Annotating Historical Text session on day 3, with the paper “PiCo in Practice: An ontology to standardise person reconstructions”, co-authored with Rick Mourits and Ivo Zandhuis.

Tom Gheldof

Tom Gheldof is the day-to-day coordinator for DARIAH-BE/CLARIAH-VL at KU Leuven's Faculty of Arts...

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September 1, 2023September 4, 2023

A CLARIAH-VL supported data management system: nodegoat

Information on people, places, and things are related to each other in different ways. There are countless ways we can infer these relations which are research question and source dependent. There are also many ways to store this information as data. The nodegoat platform is an object oriented relational web-based data management system which also provides network and geospatial visualizations in one platform. It has the availability to develop custom data models, and then collaborate on this data and later generate visualizations and export data. Within CLARIAH-VL nodegoat is used to store, organize, maintain and analyze relational data. Below you can find the cases where the platform is currently or has been used.

To support researchers in their use of such data, CLARIAH-VL & GhentCDH are hosting 2 nodegoat workshops. In the workshop you will learn how to use this platform for your research. The workshops will be held in two parts on the same day:

1) beginners

2) advanced users (users that already are using nodegoat or have setup an instance).

The workshops, given by the developers of the platform – Lab1100, will be held on 16 November from 10 – 12h & 14 – 16h respectively at Ghent University. Both workshops will be given in English, but questions may be asked in Dutch. The exact location will be confirmed two weeks before the location to registered participants. Please register here: https://event.ugent.be/registration/nodegoat.

An example of the nodegoat instance, as used in the TIC Collaborative project. This network represents a social visualisation of people and conferences.

To get an idea of how nodegoat can be used in research, see this list of the use cases, all projects supported by GhentCDH (CLARIAH-VL):

juliebirkholz

July 14, 2023July 25, 2023

CLARIAH-VL tools in a computer-assisted genetic editing summer school

The CLARIAH-VL team from the Literature Department of the University of Antwerp looks back on an intense but inspiring week of teaching in the Antwerp Summer University. This year, the theme of the summer school was: Digital Humanities – Computer-assisted genetic editing: from handwritten text recognition to keystroke logging. From 3 to 7 July 2023, participants from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Turkey, Finland, and Slovenia immersed themselves in the world of digital scholarly editing, handwritten text recognition, keystroke logging and X-technologies. In addition to inspiring others to use digital tools in scholarly editing projects, the summer school also provided a great opportunity to test two tools developed within CLARIAH-VL, as part of eXtant, a toolkit for digital scholarly editing: Axolotl and Keystroke Loxensis.

Making XML less scary with Axolotl

The week began on Monday with a lecture on digital scholarly editing by Dirk Van Hulle. After this lecture, which set the context for the summer school, Josip Batinić and Loren Verreyen gave participants a theoretical introduction to handwritten text recognition (HTR). This provided the participants with a solid basis for learning how to use the HTR tools the next day. The afternoon sessions were devoted to learning the basic principles of XML, currently the most widely used markup metalanguage in digital scholarly editing. To practice TEI-XML for manuscript encoding, the participants were divided in groups of five and asked to transcribe a page from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript – as available in the Shelley-Godwin Archive – according to the BDMP (Beckett Digital Manuscript Project) encoding manual. Whereas normally each participant would have to work on their own transcription, or assign one participant the task of typing the transcription, the participants could now join forces and work together on one transcription simultaneously. How? By using Axolotl, a collaborative XML editor, developed by Nooshin Shahidzadeh Asadi. Working in this scenario, the participants were the first users of Axolotl to put the tool to the test. Although the tool is still under development, it proved to be very useful from a pedagogical point of view: enabling group work where participants could help each other, correct each other’s transcriptions, and learn from each other directly by seeing them write TEI-XML. One participant even pointed out that it “made the learning process of TEI-XML a bit less confronting and terrifying”.

*First time testing Axolotl during the summer school Digital Humanities – Computer-assisted genetic editing @ the University of Antwerp*

The sessions on Tuesday were dedicated to handwritten text recognition, and in particular to working with Transkribus. Everyone wrote a short text to be transcribed later, using Transkribus. This way, the participants learned the workflow in Transkribus, how to run the available models and how to interpret the Character Error Rate (CER). Finally, the HTR results were exported to TEI-XML for use in a later phase of the summer school.

Editing digital writing processes

As scholarly editors in the 21^st century, we are not only working with handwritten or typescript material. More and more of our literary heritage is born-digital, and therefore eXtant also provides tools to help and encourage us to work with born-digital material, particularly with keystroke logging data. The sessions on Wednesday were therefore devoted to an introduction to keystroke logging (taught by Lamyk Bekius). Participants began the day by writing a short text and logging their writing process using the keystroke logging tool Inputlog. To enable text genetic analysis of the writing process, the keystroke data needs to be presented in a way that captures only the information relevant to text genetic research, and that conveys the interpretation of the data in a format that is easy to read and preferably familiar to peers. Encoding the keystroke logging data in TEI-XML can be considered as one solution for this task, as Lamyk has argued in the Track Changes project (Huygens Institute/University of Antwerp). Using the encoding manual for keystroke logging data, provided as part of eXtant, the participants had to reconstruct their writing processes in the same way. Encoding the keystroke data is a laborious task, but it is a great exercise for learning XML, and it raises awareness of the peculiarities of digital writing (e.g. typing behaviour) and the challenges of encoding it. On Wednesday afternoon, Mike Kestemont gave the keynote lecture on intertextuality in Middle Dutch epic literature: “The wandering verse: the computational detection of micro-intertexts in medieval literature”. This lecture was open to the public, as part of the Platform{DH} Lecture Series.

Replay it with Keystroke Loxensis!

Since a number of tools in eXtant are developed as applications for eXist-db, we decided to offer an introduction to working with eXist-db during the summer school. eXist-db is an open-source NoSQL XML database and application platform. It provides an integrated infrastructure for the development of any web-based software that is driven by XML data and is increasingly used for many digital edition projects. Including eXist-db in the programme also had the benefit of allowing us to briefly introduce Keystroke Loxensis to the participants. This is a tool for visualizing keystroke logging data encoded in the text in TEI-XML and is part of the eXtant toolkit. Once you have the XML document with the correct encoding, you can upload the document to the application. This therefore allowed the participants to see the results of their encoding efforts: all the writing actions can be shown in one glance or replayed in the order they were carried out. On Thursday, we also took the first steps towards making a simple ‘digital edition’ of the Transkribus output in eXist-db, including an introduction to HTML and CSS – still key to the visualization of transcriptions – given by Nooshin. In the afternoon, we left the classroom behind for an excursion to the Plantin-Moretus Museum and the summer school dinner.

On Friday, we discussed a variety of X-technologies, starting from XPath to XQuery to XSLT. In eXist-db, the participants learned how to use these technologies by making a simple edition of the HTR assignment. With just a little coding, all the images and transcriptions from all the participants could be visualized, and the participants could then modify the HTML and CSS to their own liking. A great result after a week of hard work.

We are very happy with the way the summer school went and with meeting the wonderful participants. It was also great to be able to test our tools with some potential users, as it showed us where to improve and where to fix bugs. At the end of the summer school, participants anonymously filled in a survey to rate the tools they had worked with, giving us useful feedback on Axolotl and Keystroke Loxensis. And, importantly, the majority of participants acknowledged the usefulness of both tools.

Curious about what we will offer in the Summer School Digital Humanities 2024? Keep an eye on the Antwerp Summer University website where you can also sign up for the newsletter.