Category Archives: Event

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!

TRACER tutorial, Rome 2017

Photo of a fingerprintWe’re very pleased to announce that eTRAP will be giving a text reuse tutorial in collaboration with DiXiT at the annual conference of the Italian Association for Digital Humanities (AIUCD) in Rome, Italy, this coming January!

The tutorial will run on 23rd and 24th January at the Sapienza University in Rome.

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 multifarious corpora, be those prose, poetry, in Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek 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 an English data-set 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 format. A detailed description of the tutorial can be DOWNLOADED HERE.

The workshop will be conducted in English, with assistance in Italian should it be necessary. For more information about previous editions of this tutorial, visit our Events page.

Eligibility, Requirements and Bursaries

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 a short CV and a brief motivation letter to contact(at)etrap(dot)eu by 16th December 2016. Those accepted will have to register for the AIUCD conference at https://www.conftool.net/aiucd2017/

La Sapienza University makes available travel bursaries for early career researchers, who submit an abstract to the EADH day. Should you be eligible for the bursary and wish to attend our tutorial, you must submit both an abstract to EADH and a CV with motivation letter to eTRAP. You may also apply for the tutorial without an EADH submission but you will not be eligible for a bursary in that case.

We look forward to seeing you in beautiful Rome!

Invited talk: “Beyond Word Clouds: Combining Entities and Topics for Fine-Grained Analyses of Historical Texts”

Please spread the word!

Speakers: Simone Ponzetto, Hiram Kümper, Federico Nanni (University of Mannheim)
Title: 
Beyond Word Clouds: Combining Entities and Topics for Fine-Grained Analyses of Historical Texts

Date: August 25th 2016, 12 PM – 1 PM
Location: Seminar room 1, Papendiek 16 (Heynehaus), Göttingen

Abstract: 

Future historians will describe the rise of the World Wide Web as the turning point of their academic profession. As a matter of fact, thanks to an unprecedented amount of digitization projects and to the preservation of born-digital sources, for the first time they have at their disposal a gigantic collection of traces of our past. However, to obtain useful insights from these very large amounts of data, historians will need more and more fine-grained techniques. For this reason, at the Data and Web Science Group, we focus on developing approaches that can sustain researchers moving from text exploration studies towards hypothesis-testing researches. These solutions benefit from the combination of entity linking and topic models, among other methods. Additionally, we also believe that historians who intend to employ computational methods as evidences for supporting a claim, have to use computational methods not anymore as black boxes but as a series of well known methodological approaches. For this reason, the second goal of our research group is to stress the importance of tool evaluation in digital history. In our talk, we will present an overview of some of the works we conducted so far, in collaboration with the Historical Institute and the Political Science Department of the University of Mannheim.

 

ALL WELCOME!

Announcement: Winner of the Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities (GDDH) award 2016

The board of the Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities is pleased to announce the three best contributions of this year’s GDDH series. The winner will be handed a prize of €500 and candidates in the second and third positions will receive a notable mention.

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the seminar series of 2016 is:

Hazel Wilkinson
from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

with
“A database of printers’ ornaments”

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Hazel Wilkinson presenting at GDDH16 on June 27th

The prize is awarded on the basis of an evaluation of both the paper and the quality of the presentation, for which this candidate received 85.73/100!

The winner is followed by yet another worthy candidate with a paper entitled “Inferring standard name form, gender and nobility from historical texts using stable model semantics”. The paper, written by Davor Lauc and Darko Vitek and presented by Davor Lauc from the University of Zagreb in Croatia, receives a notable mention for its high standard and well-presented research results. This candidate received a score of 79.84/100.

The second notable mention is awarded to the paper “Experiments of distributional semantics in stylometry” by Giulia Benotto from the Institute of Computer Linguistics (CNR) in Pisa, Italy. This paper and presentation follows with a total score of 75.68/100. This candidate was appreciated for the originality of the topic and the clear explanation of the methodology.

The slides and videos of these talks are available here.

Evaluation Method

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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!

 

Call for Papers: 2016 Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities

GDDHlogo

The Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities has established a forum for the discussion of digital methods applied to all areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences, including Classics, Philosophy, History, Literature, Law, Languages, Archaeology and more. The initiative is organized by the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) with the involvement of DARIAH.EU.

The dialogs will take place every Monday from April 11th until early July 2016 in the form of 90-minute seminars. Presentations will be 45 minutes long and delivered in English, followed by 45 minutes of discussion and student participation. Seminar content should be of interest to humanists, digital humanists, librarians and computer scientists. Furthermore, we proudly announce that Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann (KU Leuven) will be giving the opening keynote on April 11th.

We invite submissions of abstracts describing research which employs digital methods, resources or technologies in an innovative way in order to enable a better or new understanding of the humanities, both in the past and present. We also encourage contributions describing ‘work-in-progress’. Themes may include – but are not limited to –  text mining, machine learning, network analysis, time series, sentiment analysis, agent-based modelling, lexical and conceptual resources for DH, or efficient visualization of big and humanities-relevant data.

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DH Estonia 2015: attend the eTRAP Workshop!

We will be giving a workshop on Text Reuse at the
Translingual and Transcultural Digital Humanities Conference. Estonia, 19-21 October 2015!!
Day of workshop: Wednesday 21 October 2015

Find the full announcement below:
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eTRAP (Electronic Text Reuse Acquisition Project) is an Early Career Research Group funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and based at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Göttingen. The research group, which started on 1st March 2015, was awarded €1.6 million and runs for four years. As the name suggests, this interdisciplinary team studies the linguistic and literary phenomenon that is text reuse with a particular focus on historical languages. More specifically, we look at how ancient authors copied, alluded to, paraphrased and translated each other as they spread their knowledge in writing. This early career research group seeks to provide a basic understanding of the (historical) text reuse methodology (it being distinct from plagiarism), and so to study what defines text reuse, why some people reuse information, how text is reused and how this practice has changed over history.

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REFLECTING on the recent Digital Humanities Hackathon on Text Re-Use – “Don’t leave your data problems at home!”

The Hackathon week is over and looking back on it the eTRAP team agrees…it was a hit!
23 participants from 15 different institutions and 8 countries hacking away at research questions on their laptops to achieve the same goal, albeit with different datasets. And the goal was achieved. Our hackers were humanists with a desire to find textual reuses across different works of the same author or across several authors from different times and locations. They brought data in English, German, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew and even Arabic and Estonian, spanning across many genres – from folkloristic poetry, to narratives and letters, from lists of citations to biblical texts. From day one they were led by computer scientist and leader of eTRAP, Marco Büchler, through each of the six steps required by the TRACER tool (1) to perform scans of the texts in search of reuse. By using the command line like pros, hackers preprocessed their data and set the parameters they needed to guarantee the most informative outcome. The week culminated with a tutorial on TRAViz (2), an open source variant graph visualisation tool created and presented by Stefan Jänicke (3), which allows users to create a swish visualisation with the results yielded by the TRACER tool.

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Hackathon on Text Re-Use

Digital Humanities Hackathon on Text Re-Use

‘Don’t leave your data problems at home!’

27-31 July, 2015

Computer cartoon

Hosted by the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH), Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany
Organised by:  Franzini, Greta Franzini and Maria Moritz

The Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities will host a Hackathon targeted at students and researchers with agermany-652967_1280 humanities background who wish to improve their computer skills by working with their own data-set. Rather than teaching everything there is to know about algorithms, the Hackathon will assist participants with their specific data-related problem, so that they can take away the knowledge needed to tackle the issue(s) at hand. The focus of this Hackathon is automatic text re-use detection and aims at engaging participants in intensive collaboration. Participants will be introduced to technologies representing the state of the art in the field and shown the potential of text re-use detection. Participants will also be able to equip themselves with the necessary knowledge to make sense of the output generated by algorithms detecting text re-use, and will gain an understanding of which algorithms best fit certain types of textual data. Finally, participants will be introduced to some text re-use visualisations.

Click here for further information on text re-use.

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Seminar Program: Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities 2015

The dialog takes place on Tuesdays at 17:00 during the Summer semester (from April 21th until July 14th). The venue of the seminars is to be announced, at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH). The center’s address is: Heyne-Haus, Papendiek 16, 37073 Göttingen.

As announced in the Call For Papers, the dialogs will take the form of a 45 minute presentation in English, followed by 45 minutes of discussion and student participation. Due to logistic and time constraints, the 2015 dialog series will not be video-recorded or live-streamed.  A summary of the talks, together with photographs and, where available, slides, will be uploaded to the GCDH and eTRAP websites. For this reason, presenters are encouraged, but not obligated, to prepare slides to accompany their papers. Please also consider that the €500 award for best paper will be awarded on the basis of both the quality of the paper *and* the delivery of the presentation.

Camera-ready versions of the papers must be sent to Gabriele Kraft at gddh(at)gcdh(dot)de by April 30th. The papers will not be uploaded to the GCDH and eTRAP websites but, as previously announced, published as a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ). For this reason, papers must be submitted in an editable format (e.g. .docx or LaTeX), not as PDF files.
A small budget for travel cost reimbursements is available.

Everybody is welcome to join in!
If anyone would like to tweet about the dialogs, the Twitter hashtag of this series is #gddh15.
For any questions, do not hesitate to contact gddh(at)gcdh(dot)de.
For further information and updates, visit http://www.gcdh.de/en/events/gottingen-dialog-digital-humanities/.

We look forward to seeing you in Göttingen!

Click the link to view the programme with the locations: GDDH_2015_Poster.

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