JournalTOCs

International Journal of Digital Humanities
Number of Followers: 3

Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
ISSN (Print) 2524-7832 - ISSN (Online) 2524-7840
Published by Springer-Verlag

[2469 journals]

Web-history: designing a course, shaping the discipline
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  Abstract: Abstract A full-fledged reconstruction of the history of contemporary society is impossible without studying web archives as the most valuable historical source storing artifacts of the information age. At the same time, web history as a discipline is just beginning its formation as a research field. The specific methodology, source base, methods, and techniques of using the archived resources are being determined. The development of web history as a discipline can be facilitated by specialized educational courses within the framework of academic programs in the direction of "History" designed to prepare professional historians to work with web archives and their resources. The purpose of this article is to give a brief overview of the new course "Web History of Society and Its Institutions" designed for the master's program in the direction of "History" at the Faculty of History and Politics in Perm State University. The paper focuses on the opportunities for deeper engagement of the students with web archives as a historical resource. Several interrelated stages of the course are highlighted. At the first stage, students become familiar with the structure of web archives, methods of searching, and retrieving information. At the next stage, the cases of web history projects are considered, the methodology and methods for collecting and analyzing data are observed and analyzed, and the research results are discussed. The course has a strong project orientation in its structure. The task called Imaginary Research is devoted to the planning of a large-scale project and consideration of the main stages of the historical research and digital criticism. Then, the students conduct the individual research projects presenting them orally and writing a blog post for the course website. The designed course fits perfectly with Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and develops higher-order thinking skills.
  PubDate: 2022-05-30
Recognition of Oracle Bone Inscriptions by using Two Deep Learning Models
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  Abstract: Abstract Oracle bone inscriptions (OBIs) contain some of the oldest characters in the world and were used in China about 3000 years ago. As an ancient form of literature, OBIs store a lot of information that can help us understand world history, character evaluations, and more. However, as OBIs were only discovered about 120 years ago, few studies have described them, and the aging process has made the inscriptions less legible. Hence, automatic character detection and recognition have become important issues. This paper aims to design an online OBI recognition system for helping cultural heritage preservation and organization. We have evaluated two deep learning models for OBI recognition and designed an application programming interface (API) that can be accessed online for the recognition. In the first stage, You Only Look Once (YOLO) is applied for detecting and recognizing OBIs. However, since not all of the OBIs can be detected correctly by YOLO in the first stage, we then utilize MobileNet to recognize the undetected OBIs by manually cropping the undetected OBIs in the image. MobileNet is selected for the second stage of recognition as our evaluation of ten state-of-the-art deep learning models showed that it is the best network for OBI recognition due to its superior performance in terms of accuracy, loss and time consumption. We have installed our system on a server as an API and opened it for OBI detection and recognition.
  PubDate: 2022-04-05
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-022-00044-9
Capturing stance dynamics in social media: open challenges and research
directions
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  Abstract: Abstract Social media platforms provide a goldmine for mining public opinion on issues of wide societal interest and impact. Opinion mining is a problem that can be operationalised by capturing and aggregating the stance of individual social media posts as supporting, opposing or being neutral towards the issue at hand. While most prior work in stance detection has investigated datasets that cover short periods of time, interest in investigating longitudinal datasets has recently increased. Evolving dynamics in linguistic and behavioural patterns observed in new data require adapting stance detection systems to deal with the changes. In this survey paper, we investigate the intersection between computational linguistics and the temporal evolution of human communication in digital media. We perform a critical review of emerging research considering dynamics, exploring different semantic and pragmatic factors that impact linguistic data in general, and stance in particular. We further discuss current directions in capturing stance dynamics in social media. We discuss the challenges encountered when dealing with stance dynamics, identify open challenges and discuss future directions in three key dimensions: utterance, context and influence.
  PubDate: 2022-03-08
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-022-00043-w
Grappling with the scale of born-digital government publications: Toward
pipelines for processing and searching millions of PDFs
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  Abstract: Abstract Official government publications are key sources for understanding the history of societies. Web publishing has fundamentally changed the scale and processes by which governments produce and disseminate information. Significantly, a range of web archiving programs have captured massive troves of government publications. For example, hundreds of millions of unique U.S. Government documents posted to the web in PDF form have been archived by libraries to date. Yet, these PDFs remain largely unutilized and understudied in part due to the challenges surrounding the development of scalable pipelines for searching and analyzing them. This paper utilizes a Library of Congress dataset of 1,000 government PDFs in order to offer initial approaches for searching and analyzing these PDFs at scale. In addition to demonstrating the utility of PDF metadata, this paper offers computationally-efficient machine learning approaches to search and discovery that utilize the PDFs’ textual and visual features as well. We conclude by detailing how these methods can be operationalized at scale in order to support systems for navigating millions of PDFs.
  PubDate: 2022-01-17
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-022-00042-x
Computationally assisted conceptual analysis-What is it is, and how to do
it
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  Abstract: Abstract In this paper we develop a new hybrid method for conceptual analysis, which combines the scope and representativity of computational quantitative analysis with the semantic depth and nuance of traditional qualitative close reading. This combinatory method consists in a two-step analysis. First, we use two different computational methods in order to generate different representations of the contents of 25,888 JSTOR texts concerning anthropomorphism. On the basis of these results, we generate a representative sub-selection of texts for close reading. The second step of the analysis consists in a qualitative close reading of texts that allows us to evaluate the semantic significance and the thematical contents of the computational results. We examine and debate some of the general limitations associated with computational approaches to textual analysis and exemplify five different kinds of semantic information inaccessible to computational approaches. Our "triangulating" hybrid method for conceptual analysis is developed with the aim of providing the best of both worlds: qualitative depth with quantitative representativity.
  PubDate: 2022-01-13
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00041-4
Introduction: digital humanities and the use of web archives
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  PubDate: 2021-11-01
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00040-5
A semantically annotated corpus of tombstone inscriptions
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  Abstract: Abstract The digital preservation of funerary material is of interest to many different scientific disciplines. Textual information found on tombstones often goes far beyond the expected (name of the deceased, dates of birth and death), and may include information about commemorators, family roles, occupations, references to biblical or other texts, places of birth and death, cause of death, epitaphs and poems. Gravestones are multi-modal media, and besides text are often decorated with artistic symbols. To capture this information in a systematic way and make it available on a large scale for research purposes, a meaning representation based on linking entities by relations has been designed that will extend search capabilities beyond simple string matches. Concepts are represented as WordNet synsets, and a vocabulary of 32 relations make connections between concepts. This formalisation has been developed and evaluated based on a dataset of more than 1,000 Dutch tombstones.
  PubDate: 2021-10-25
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00039-y
Find research data repositories for the humanities - the data deposit
recommendation service
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  Abstract: Abstract How can researchers identify suitable research data repositories for the deposit of their research data' Which repository matches best the technical and legal requirements of a specific research project' For this end and with a humanities perspective the Data Deposit Recommendation Service (DDRS) has been developed as a prototype. It not only serves as a functional service for selecting humanities research data repositories but it is particularly a technical demonstrator illustrating the potential of re-using an already existing infrastructure - in this case re3data - and the feasibility to set up this kind of service for other research disciplines. The documentation and the code of this project can be found in the DARIAH GitHub repository: https://dariah-eric.github.io/ddrs/.
  PubDate: 2021-07-01
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00030-7
Digital sources and digital archives: historical evidence in the digital
age
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  Abstract: Abstract As the cultural record becomes increasingly digital the evidentiary basis of history expands and shifts. How must historical scholarship change when the evidentiary basis shifts toward the digital' Through explorations of a series of born digital and digitized sources, we identify and discuss key issues relating to humanities scholars ability to develop claims and arguments grounded in digital sources and digital archives. In exploring these issues in digital source criticism, we work to provide practical guidance for scholars on key issues and questions to consider when working with born digital and digitized primary sources.
  PubDate: 2021-07-01
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-020-00028-7
Web-archiving and social media: an exploratory analysis
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  Abstract: Abstract The archived web provides an important footprint of the past, documenting online social behaviour through social media, and news through media outlets websites and government sites. Consequently, web archiving is increasingly gaining attention of heritage institutions, academics and policy makers. The importance of web archives as data resources for (digital) scholars has been acknowledged for investigating the past. Still, heritage institutions and academics struggle to ‘keep up to pace’ with the fast evolving changes of the World Wide Web and with the changing habits and practices of internet users. While a number of national institutions have set up a national framework to archive ‘regular’ web pages, social media archiving (SMA) is still in its infancy with various countries starting up pilot archiving projects. SMA is not without challenges; the sheer volume of social media content, the lack of technical standards for capturing or storing social media data and social media’s ephemeral character can be impeding factors. The goal of this article is three-fold. First, we aim to extend the most recent descriptive state-of-the-art of national web archiving, published in the first issue of International Journal of Digital Humanities (March 2019) with information on SMA. Secondly, we outline the current legal, technical and operational (such as the selection and preservation policy) aspects of archiving social media content. This is complemented with results from an online survey to which 15 institutions responded. Finally, we discuss and reflect on important challenges in SMA that should be considered in future archiving projects.
  PubDate: 2021-06-22
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00036-1
When expectations meet reality: common misconceptions about web archives
and challenges for scholars
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  Abstract: Abstract As the study of digital history, politics, and culture emerges as an academic discipline, web archives will play a valuable role as sources of information. Those wishing to engage with web archives will need both specific technical skills and a high-level understanding of how the web works. This paper examines the nature and type of misconceptions that web archivists form when they create and utilise web archives. In order to carry out this research, the author qualitatively analyzed support tickets submitted by web archivists using the Internet Archive’s Archive-It (AIT), the most popular web archiving service. The tickets comprised 2544 interactions between web archivists and AIT support specialists. This paper describes the expectations AIT users bring to web archives, and the differences between their expectations and the realities of the web archiving process. It identifies the most prominent misconceptions AIT users have about both web archives and the web itself, analyses the challenges these misconceptions can pose for researchers, and recommends ways in which these can be addressed.
  PubDate: 2021-06-12
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00034-3
The values of web archives
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  Abstract: Abstract This article considers how the development, promotion and adoption of a set of core values for web archives, linked to principles of “good governance”, will help them to tackle the challenges of sustainability, accountability and inclusiveness that are central to their long-term societal and cultural worth. It outlines the work that has already been done to address these questions, as web archiving begins to move out of its establishment phase, and then discusses seven key principles of good governance that might be adapted by and embedded within web archives: participation, consensus, accountability, transparency, effectiveness and efficiency, inclusivity and legality. The article concludes with a call to action for researchers and archivists to co-create the core values for web archives that will be required if they are to remain a vital part of our cultural heritage infrastructure.
  PubDate: 2021-06-10
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00037-0
Digital humanities and web archives: Possible new paths for combining
datasets
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  Abstract: Abstract This article discusses the importance of web archives making their collections available as data and not only as sources seen through the Wayback Machine’s interface where only individual web pages are displayed. This will help unlock the full potential of the treasure trove that web archives constitute, and thereby also open up for methods from the wider field of digital humanities. Based on a case study of the entire Danish web domain .dk the article discusses methodological challenges involved in combining large extracted datasets from web archives, namely metadata about the size of websites and data about hyperlinks from the same websites. The aim is to answer the following two questions: 1) How to combine two different types of datasets extracted from a web archive, in this case the Danish Netarkivet' 2) What can the result of such a combination teach us about the structural characteristics of the Danish web domain from 2006 to 2015' The article shows that, indeed, it is possible to go beyond the Wayback Machine as the prime interface to web archives by combining two distinct datasets, and that such a venture can provide valuable knowledge about the overall structure of the Danish web domain, thus highlighting that websites of the same size tend to constitute isolated ‘link islands’, and that big websites are also the most important in the hyperlink network, which is more clearly the case in 2015 than in 2006.
  PubDate: 2021-05-28
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00038-z
Toward an integrated digital humanities: a deep reading
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  Abstract: Abstract Over the past decade, the term “digital humanities” has been used in academia extensively and somewhat indiscriminately, which has often led to some misguidance and exhaustion regarding the term itself. This study provides a more extensive and sustainable approach to practicing digital humanities by incorporating arts that bring imaginative and creative experiential encounters and, further, suggests a mode of deep reading. More specifically, this study explores Digital Humanities City: Restoration of Soonsung as an example of an integrated approach based on deep reading in the digital humanities. This project consisted of lectures, workshops, exhibitions, festivals, and, perhaps most importantly, the creation of an augmented reality (AR) mobile application that presented six different storytelling programs created by artists and researchers based on their collaborative research on the heritage site of Hanyang Dosung (Seoul City Wall) in Seoul. In this way, this study shows how AR can be used as an alternative research interface in digital humanities in providing phenomenological and embodied experiences for users by encouraging them to physically experience heritage sites equipped with historically and critically informed virtual information. Through this application, users are encouraged to visit and experience Hanyang Dosung firsthand while enjoying artistic and scholarly interpretations of the site. In facilitating such an embodied experience augmented by AR storytelling that straddles the boundary between the physical and virtual dimensions of the heritage site, this project addresses the fundamental question of how digitality can enhance and augment our humanistic experience, and not just reproduce humanities research in digital formats, by showcasing a mode of deep reading as an integrated approach in digital humanities.
  PubDate: 2021-05-20
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00035-2
Recovering contemporary genre histories – the development of chick lit
as seen through the internet archive’s wayback machine and wikipedia’s
history page
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  Abstract: Abstract In the perception of literary scholars, the investigation of genre histories is still closely linked to ‘offline’ archival work. However, the Internet has been publicly accessible since 1991, and over the last thirty years, numerous new literary genres have emerged. They have often been proclaimed, defined, spread, marketed, criticized, and even pronounced dead online. By now, a great deal of this digital material is said to have disappeared. What many scholars do not consider, however, is that parts of the web are archived, for example by the Internet Archive and Wikipedia, which make their archives publicly available via the Wayback Machine and the history page respectively. This makes it possible to track early online definitions of contemporary genres and their development. In this paper, I will use the chick lit genre, which emerged in the second half of the 1990s, as a case study to show the benefits of including web archives in the reconstruction of contemporary genre histories. An analysis of both the first extensive and long-running fan websites, which are now offline but well-documented in the Internet Archive, and the history page of the Wikipedia article on chick lit will challenge some of the narratives that have long dominated chick lit research.
  PubDate: 2021-05-11
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00031-6
Using mixed methods to study the historical use of web beacons in web
tracking
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  Abstract: Abstract Historical studies of the use of tracking technologies collecting data about web users and their behaviour can help us understand the spread and implications of web tracking. This article presents a historical study of the use of a specific tracking technology, the web beacon, on the Danish web from 2006 to 2015 using archived web materials from the national Danish web archive. The study combines a large-scale quantitative mapping of the use of web beacons on the Danish web with a qualitative study of specific websites. Using this mixed-method design, the article identifies the prevalent third-party domains setting web beacons and the different purposes for beacon use. The findings show the ratio of Danish to international third-party domains involved in the tracking and the development, over time, of what types of beacon providers are dominant on the Danish web. The article also addresses the methodological challenges related to using archived web for a mixed-method historical study of web tracking.
  PubDate: 2021-04-27
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00033-4
‘Go fish’: Conceptualising the challenges of engaging national web
archives for digital research
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  Abstract: Abstract Our work considers the sociotechnical and organisational constraints of web archiving in order to understand how these factors and contingencies influence research engagement with national web collections. In this article, we compare and contrast our experiences of undertaking web archival research at two national web archives: the UK Web Archive located at the British Library and the Netarchive at the Royal Danish Library. Based on personal interactions with the collections, interviews with library staff and observations of web archiving activities, we invoke three conceptual devices (orientating, auditing and constructing) to describe common research practices and associated challenges in the context of each national web archive. Through this framework we centre the early stages of the research process that are often only given cursory attention in methodological descriptions of web archival research, to discuss the epistemological entanglements of researcher practices, instruments, tools and methods that create the conditions of possibility for new knowledge and scholarship in this space. In this analysis, we highlight the significant time and energy required on the part of researchers to begin using national web archives, as well as the value of engaging with the curatorial infrastructure that enables web archiving in practice. Focusing an analysis on these research infrastructures facilitates a discussion of how these web archival interfaces both enable and foreclose on particular forms of researcher engagement with the past Web and in turn contributes to critical ongoing debates surrounding the opportunities and constraints of digital sources, methodologies and claims within the Digital Humanities.
  PubDate: 2021-04-27
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-021-00032-5
From archive to analysis: accessing web archives at scale through a
cloud-based interface
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  Abstract: Abstract This paper introduces the Archives Unleashed Cloud, a web-based interface for working with web archives at scale. Current access paradigms, largely driven by the scope and scale of web archives, generally involve using the command line and writing code. This access gap means that subject-matter experts, as opposed to developers and programmers, have few options to directly work with web archives beyond the page-by-page paradigm of the Wayback Machine. Drawing on first-hand research and analysis of how scholars use web archives, we present the interface design and underpinning architecture of the Archives Unleashed Cloud. We also discuss the sustainability implications of providing a cloud-based service for researchers to analyze their collections at scale.
  PubDate: 2021-01-06
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-020-00029-6
Considering the scholarly edition in the digital age: an engagement by the
modern language association’s committee on scholarly editions
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  PubDate: 2019-10-14
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-019-00026-4
Author Correction to: Born-digital archives
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  Abstract: The original version of this article unwittingly omitted the due and necessary acknowledgment, which is hereby added below: The research for this work and editing of the special issue conducted by Thorsten Ries has been funded by the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship DFitHH - Digital Forensics in the Historical Humanities and the Research Foundation - Flanders, FWO.
  PubDate: 2019-09-16
  DOI: 10.1007/s42803-019-00027-3