Category Archives: TRACER

TRACER tutorial, Göttingen, May 2017!

We’re excited to announce that eTRAP will be giving its next text reuse tutorial as a pre-conference workshop of the Datech International Conference being held in Göttingen, Germany!

The tutorial will run on 30th May at the Historical Library Building (“Vortragsraum”, Papendiek 14, first floor) of the University of Göttingen.

The tutorial builds on eTRAP’s research activities, most of which deploy our TRACER machine. TRACER is a suite of algorithms aimed at investigating text reuse in different corpora, be those prose, poetry, in Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek or medieval German. TRACER provides researchers with statistical information about the texts germany-652967_1280under investigation and its integrated reuse visualiser, TRAViz, displays the reuses in a more readable format for further study.

This tutorial is for anyone wishing to independently understand, use and run TRACER on his/her own data. For the purpose of the tutorial, participants will initially be working on an English data-set provided by eTRAP. Depending on the overall progress, we may also allocate some time for investigating the participants’ own data-sets! For more information about previous editions of this tutorial, visit our Events page.

If you’re interested in exploring text reuse between two or multiple texts (in the same language) and would like to learn how to do it semi-automatically, then this tutorial is for you! In order to provide everyone with adequate (technical) assistance, the workshop can only accommodate 15 participants. To apply to the tutorial, please send a short CV and a brief motivation letter to contact(at)etrap(dot)eu by 30th April 2017. Those accepted will have to register for the conference at http://ddays.digitisation.eu/registration/

In summary:
WHAT: TRACER tutorial for computational text reuse detection
WHEN: 30th May 2017, 9am-6pm
WHERE: GCDH, Seminar Room 1 (ground floor), Heyne Haus, Papendiek 16, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
WHO: For humanists and computer scientists alike who bring their own laptop
HOW MANY: Maximum of 15 participants
HOW: You may attend by applying to the email address provided and then registering to the conference. Registration to the conference is necessary for attending the workshop.  There will be an extra charge of €50 for catering at the workshop and to receive the conference pack
LANGUAGE: The workshop will be in English, with assistance in German should it be necessary
OTHER: You will receive very clear instructions on what to bring and prepare before the workshop

We look forward to seeing you in Göttingen!

AIUCD 2016, Venice

Photo of a fingerprintWe’re very pleased to announce that eTRAP will be giving a text reuse tutorial at the annual conference of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities in Venice, Italy, this coming September! It’s the only tutorial of the conference and it will run on 6th and 7th September at the Ca’ Foscari University.

The tutorial builds on eTRAP’s research activities, most of which deploy Marco Büchler’s TRACER tool. TRACER is a suite of algorithms aimed at investigating text reuse in multifarious corpora, be those prose, poetry, in Italian or medieval German. TRACER provides researchers with statistical information about the texts under investigation and its integrated reuse visualiser, TRAViz, displays the reuses in a more readable format for further study.

This tutorial seeks to teach participants to independently understand, use and run TRACER. For the purpose of the tutorial and to ensure the smoothest possible outcome, participants will initially be working on data-sets provided by eTRAP. Depending on the overall progress, we may also allocate some time to investigating the participants’ own data-sets, provided these comply with the TRACER format1.

The workshop will be conducted in English. An Italian version of the tutorial flyer is available here. For more information about previous editions of this tutorial, visit our Events page.

Eligibility & Requirements

If you’re interested in exploring text reuse between two or multiple texts (in the same language) and would like to learn how to do it semi-automatically, then this tutorial is for you. In order to provide everyone with adequate (technical) assistance, the workshop can only accommodate 12 participants. To apply to the tutorial, please send your CV and a motivation letter to etrap-applications(at)gcdh(dot)de by July 31th, 2016. Those accepted will have to register for the AIUCD conference.

We look forward to seeing you in Venice!


1Should you be interested in investigating your own texts, please send us an email to the address above so that we can send you the requirements.

DH2016, Kraków

Photo of fingerprinteTRAP will be attending the annual Digital Humanities Conference in Kraków, Poland, with three contributions:

  • A joint panel with colleagues from Finland and Estonia on digital folkloristics (15th July);
  • A poster on research progress concerning our Digital Breadcrumbs of Brothers Grimm project (13th July);
  • A full-day text reuse tutorial aimed at teaching participants how to run our TRACER tool (11th July).

We’re very happy that all three proposals were accepted at the conference as each approaches our research from a different angle: during the panel, we will discuss our work in relation to other initiatives in digital folkloristics; the poster will provide a snapshot of the project as a whole; and the tutorial will give an insight into part of our research methodology, which employs a powerful text reuse engine called TRACER.

We look forward to sharing our progress in Kraków and to seeing you, hopefully!

 

English translations of Pan Tadeusz: a comparison with TRACER

As announced in late summer 2015, eTRAP ran a text reuse workshop in Tartu, Estonia, to teach participants how to run TRACER, a text reuse tool developed by Marco aimed at automatically identifying similarities between texts. Some of our participants tested TRACER on sample data we provided (English translations of the Bible); others, like Jan Rybicki, Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków and co-organiser of Digital Humanities 2016, brought their own datasets to directly experiment with ongoing research.

Jan has been working with seven English translations of Poland’s most significant Romantic epic poem, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz (1834). As an expert literary translator himself,  Jan was interested in comparing these translations and to see whether TRACER could reveal any particular relationships between their authors. The translations he analysed are:

  • Maude Ashurst Biggs, Master Thaddeus or the Last Foray in Lithuania, London 1885 (in Miltonian blank verse)
  • George Rapall Noyes, Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania. A Story of Life among Polish Gentlefolk, London & Toronto, New York 1917 (prose)
  • Watson Kirkconnell, Sir Thaddeus or Last Foray in Lithuania: a History of the Nobility in the Years 1811 and 1812 in Twelve Books of Verse, 1962 (verse, based on Noyes)
  • Kenneth R. Mackenzie, Pan Tadeusz or the Last Foray in Lithuania, a Tale of the Gentry in Years 1811 and 1812, London 1964 (iambic pentameter)
  • Marcel Weyland, Pan Tadeusz or the Last Foray in Lithuania, a Tale of the Gentry During 1811 – 1812, Blackheath, NSW 2004 (verse)
  • Leonard Kress, Pan Tadeusz or the Last Foray in Lithuania: a History of the Nobility in the Years 1811 and 1812 in Twelve Books of Verse, Philadelphia 2006 (10 syllables with 5 stresses, with alternating rhymes)
  • Christopher Adam Zakrzewski, Pan Tadeusz or the Last Foray in Lithuania: A Tale of the Minor Nobility in the Years 1811–1812, New York 2010 (prose)

After an automatic lemmatisation all of the above texts, TRACER confirmed existing knowledge surrounding these texts but also provided a detailed overview of the degree of similarity between each pair of translations using its integrated TRAViz tool. Among other things, the fact that Kirkconnell based his verse translation on Noyes’ prose is very visible! Distant reading by TRACER also confirms that Kress’ translation differs from the others.

Jan also produced a more general view of the degrees of similarity between text pairs derived from TRACER with a Gephi network analysis (below).

Photo of Gephi network
Gephi network of Pan Tadeusz TRACER scores (by Jan Rybicki).

Jan’s experiments with English translations of Polish literature demonstrate the potential of TRACER for translation studies. We’re delighted to see this application of TRACER and look forward to hearing more about Jan’s research!

If you’d also like to run TRACER on your data, please contact Marco Büchler. We’d love to learn more about your research and to briefly describe your experience in a blogpost.