Three Gifts

With a vague excuse involving wise men and gifts, here are some of my recent finds that might be of interest to humanities scholars:

Visualising Historical Networks looks like a taste of how historians might present their analysis in the future . Well worth watching these projects as they develop. (Thanks to Pat Lockley for pointing this out to me). Here's a tiny snippet of a network graph of economists in Cambridge with connections to Keynes: the gephi map is embedded in the page so you can zoom in and out and explore the links between people.

Cambridge Economists: Graphing Ideas

Putting Time in Perspective is an amazing piece of work. It visualises time from the last 24 hours to the whole of human history to geological time, and further. The annotations are thought-provoking too. Here's a taster:

and finally, the big news of the week: Pictures (loads of 'em)

This is HUGE .. over a million images released by the British Library on flickr with a public domain mark which means you can pretty much do anything with them. Put them in blog posts, use them in slides, make art out of them: and there are over a million images taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books. A treasue trove! There's a project wiki and one other way to explore them is to browse the Mechanical Curator tumblr. Which I like to imagine looks a bit like some kind of steampunk machine that makes creaky sounds and occasionally whistles as it churns out these amazing images all available for us to reuse ...

Image from "Notes on the Treatment of Gold Ores. Author: O’DRISCOLL, Florence. Page: 214. Year: 1889

Enjoy!

Amber Thomas : 17 Dec 2013 20:16 |  Tags: History Tei |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Tracking the data trail of 'Spatial Humanities'

Following an excellent introduction to GIS and corpus linguistics in the Spatial Humanities project through this week's working lunch (storifyed here) with guest speaker from Lancaster, Ian Gregory. I enjoyed the way he sharing the process of getting from the text to the maps that could tell a visual story. Mapping the Lakes: A Literary GISminisite for project will show you the results.

I know many in the room were keen to know what is actually likely to be involved. I felt that a visual recipe or workflow of how you bring the corpus linguistics and geography disciplines together in this way would be helpful in order to see at a simplistic level, what steps are involved. Having not yet done any of this myself, this is an observed workflow from what I understood from Ian's project. Doing this, I felt somewhat uneasy in simplifying what is evidently often an iterative and exploratory process.

Each of the steps identified is in itself a sub-process (or collection of) with decision points and often multiple routes and tools that could be applied. Some of these may be the topic of further exploration. I have pulled out one example with annotation/abstraction/analysis as an example. And this one can indeed be broken down yet further.

Steve Ranford : 23 Oct 2013 11:14 |  Tags: Geography Gis History Mapping XML |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Have you heard about? The Casebooks Project

Writing about web page http://www.magicandmedicine.hps.cam.ac.uk/

What is my disease? Am I pregnant? Will I die? These are the sorts of questions that thousands of people asked Simon Forman and Richard Napier, two of the most popular astrologers in early modern England. Through four busy decades, Forman and Napier recorded approximately 80,000 consultations. Their casebooks are one of the most extensive surviving sets of medical records in history. They provide a unique view of the lives of ordinary — and extraordinary — people four centuries ago.

And, thanks to the casebooks project, funded by the Wellcome Trust and supported by the Bodleian Library and Cambridge’s Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, these will all be made available online in a format which is both browse-able and searchable. For those who are new to the genre of early modern casebooks, a guide to reading the texts is provided- discussing everything from the editing conventions utilised to the taxonomy under which the records have been sorted and categorised for searching.

The interface, while not the easiest to use, provides a lot of detail regarding each case as well as a zoomable-image. Summary, or statistical, data is also available on a few clicks:

As with an increasing number of Digital Humanities projects, the website also includes a section “on astrological medicine” providing a rounded guide to the topic as well as a valuable bibliography for those who wish to read around the topic.

If you are interested in a similar project, get in touch with the Digital Humanities team and see how we can assist.

David Beck : 16 Oct 2013 09:41 |  Tags: History Manuscripts Wellcome Trust |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Have you heard about? The Down Survey of Ireland

Writing about web page http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/

The website is the major output from a project funded by the Irish Research Council under its Research Fellowship Scheme, which ran from 1 October 2011 to 31 March 2013. First, surviving copies of county, barony and parish maps were identified and digitised. Then, they were combined with nineteenth century OS maps and twenty-first century satellite images (from google earth) to provide a multiple-scale seamless map of Ireland

These digitised maps provide the backbone of the project, and are a resource in themselves, but to my mind the most interesting thing is the data that has been overlaid onto them from sources such as the 1659 census and 1641 depositions (which have themselves been transcribed and digitised- http://1641.tcd.ie/). This, as in the example below, allows us to “see” land ownership by religion in 1641 and 1670:

Basically, it’s a great example of what Historical GIS can do.

And for the technophiles among you- the sections on Historical GIS (http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/historical-gis.html) contain an admirable amount of information both on the construction of the dataset and the user interface.

If you are interested in a similar project, get in touch with the Digital Humanities team and see how we can assist.

David Beck : 02 Oct 2013 09:16 |  Tags: Geography Gis History Mapping |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

TEI for Translations of Poetry

My current project has poems originally in Old french, that has been translated into both English and Italian. These are to form a collection on a project website, built using the Sitebuilder system at Warwick, and to allow side-by-side comparison between translations. They are also to be made available as downloadable PDFs and eBooks. The translations are currently being done in a microsoft Word workflow. Here, I outline the decisions and processes made to explore and prototype a TEI workflow for the following benefits:

• Long-term preservation format
• Re-use of single source in multiple formats
• Simplified workflow
• Source presented in multiple ways
• Option to perform textual analysis

docx to TEI

From their current format as docx files, I was aware that underlying them all is accessible xml. From a workflow point of view, being able to programatically extract the poems from docx files and reformat into TEI will make the task much more manageable.

Using oXygen, I was able to open the docx and get to the document.xml which holds the content I'm after. The task here looks like some XPath and XSLT to extract the right information. I have some more learning to traverse the XML structure with XPath to get this working, but in principle I see it is very achievable. In terms of impact to the workflow for the academics involved, is to introduce some strict formatting and structure in the Word documents they are putting the translations into, with visible cues to the underlying structure the XSLT intends to extract in order to be able to write more straight-forward XPath.

This could look like:

• Poem Reference at the top of the document styled as a Title
• Two letter language codes as H1 for each version of these poems
• Between these, A title for the poem as heading 2 (may be first line of poem).
• Then the poem stanzas in paragraph style with line-breaks for individual lines of the stanza.

TEI Document structure

TEI seems the natural choice for encoding these poems, with a straight-forward structure. The complicating factor of this is to consider the translations. A core structural decision is to decide whether each translation is a text in itself, or not, making the file either a corpus or a single text structurally. I opted for the latter, and the following structure:

TEI
	teiHeader
	text 
		body
			div xml:id= xml:lang
				head
				lg type=stanza
					l

TEI only allows one text and body, so divs are used at a grouping level with @xml:id and @xml:lang to identify the translation, with an additional @corresp linking back to the original translation div from the translations. This is a first implementation, and I am looking to refine this as the project progresses.

XSLT for XHTML

The first output requirement from this project is a webpage. Its desirable for this webpage to lay out different translations next to each other for comparison, and produce line numbers. In order to provide a helpful interface, I began to look at how I could create a more dynamic experience with interchagable tabs by creating a webpage that uses javascript to build a user interface. Using the simplicity of Bootstrap, I was able to create a tabbed interface to switch between languages. Implementing two tabbed interfaces however was proving more tricky, so in this prototype I opted to keep it simple, produce only one, but also to access the URL 'location.search' parameters to be able to request a particular language to be pre-selected in the tabs.

A learning point:

I learned that in-line javascript can syntactically interfere with the XML, and therefore requires putting within <![CDATA[ tags which is accomplished in XSLT with:

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes" >

	<![CDATA[
		<!--javascript goes here -->
	]]>
</xsl:text>

Currently, this prototype is using browser-based XSLT processing to create the output, and these files are hosted on Sitebuilder. To get them displayed in a page therefore requires me to load these with iframes. So I put two iframes side-by-side and pass a parameter to set the default language differently in each to get a configurable UI. Modern browser support for XSLT (not XSLT 2.0) is reportedly good, via w3schools, but I have not tested mine cross-browser yet. Explorations into either cross browser frameworks including javascript implementations, or doing the transform server-side.

I hope to provide a link to this prototype soon.

Steve Ranford : 02 Sep 2013 10:21 |  Tags: Tei XML Xsl Xslt |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Faculty of Arts Sitebuilder Training

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/resources/staff/sitebuilder

Via Laura Meadows:

What? Specialist Sitebuilder training for all those who help maintain departmental web pages within the Faculty of Arts. Julie Moreton and Gavin Wray from the web team will run a special session open to all members of staff in the Faculty focussing on functionality and maintenance of the new-look web pages.

When? 23 September 2013, 10-12.30pm

10.00-12.00: Training

12.30-13.00: Lunch

Where? Library computer room R041 (next to Library café)

Who? Open to all staff in the Faculty who update departmental web pages

Sign up http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/resources/staff/sitebuilder (please ensure you are signed in and the form should auto fill)

Places are limited. If you are unable to attend on the 23^rd September, pleased complete the form and we will try to organise another session

Steve Ranford : 30 Aug 2013 10:32 |  Tags: Event Feature Training |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem