During the TEEM 2016 (Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality) conference between 2 and 4 of november in Salamanca we presented our ERC H2020 Project: POSTDATA and the link with digital humanities, web semantic and linked open data method.
Linked open data: standardization, interoperability and multilingual challenges for digital humanities_TEEM 2016
1. Elena González-Blanco (egonzalezblanco@flog.uned.es)
Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales, UNED, Spain
Principal Investigator ERC project Poetry Standardization and Linked Open
Data - POSTDATA
Mara Mănăilescu (mmanailescu@linhd.uned.es)
Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales, UNED, Spain
Salvador Ros (sros@scc.uned.es)
Escuela Technica Superior de Ingineria Informática, UNED, Spain
From syllables, lines and stanzas to
linked open data: standardization, interoperability
and multilingual challenges for
digital humanities
2. Who we are
• LINHD – a pioneer Digital Humanities centre in
Spanish language, from 2014
• We are part of CenterNet (ADHO)
• Completely self-sustained
• Collaboration in diversity
3. • LINHD: a bridge between different fields of
knowledge
Philologists
Software Developers
Natural Language Processing Experts
Ontologists & LOD technologists
Our researchers
3
4. The DH paradigm applied to poetry
Traditional Research Digital Humanities
Counting syllables with fingers Automatic syllable counter
Comparing 2-3 poems at the
same time
Comparing thousands of poems
in parallel
Looking for similar evidences by
reading all papers and books
Finding multiple evidences
through one search engine
Individual research
Collaborative, interdisciplinary
research
6. POSTDATA is structured in three
axes
• Philology
Abstract model of
philological shared
elements
• Technolog
yOntology for Poetry
as Linked Open Data
• Society
Platform for Poetry
storage and analysis
7. Historical developments
• Middle Ages and Renaissance - the powerful
influence of Latin applied to Romance languages
• The musical analysis system was followed as a
valid system
• The international context is richer, especially in
English, with two prominent schools: 1) A
traditional approach based on stress and classical
feet; and 2) A generative approach based on the
terminology and concepts shown through text
grids that take into account word boundaries
14. How to overcome these diferences?
• Development of a Metadata Application Profile
for the European Poetry community
• LOD technology
15.
16. POSTDATA platform is a virtual research
environment for researchers and other
users
Online
User-friendly
Different profiles
Virtual research
environment for
poetry scholarly
editing
Repository
Combination of
tools, which
specifically oriented
to poetry analysis
Lab
A social platform to
find new projects,
partners and ideas
Community
17. Manage textual editions
• A selection of text encoding options based on
TEI-XML tags to build DTDs or schemas
• A complex query system, like XQuery and
• A UX user interface to visualize and publish the
text edition in different formats with search
possibilities, using XSLT and other technologies
(such as Javascript, PHP and CSS)
18. User-friendly environment
• To design a publication environment suitable for
different types of users
• To train academic researchers and professional
in digital humanities through webinars, tutorials,
and learning guides
• To embed all the content available in this virtual
environment into a linked-data framework
19. User Interface
Develop an easy to use interface:
LOD powerful search engine
a digital edition platform
a poetry lab to play with apps and tools
a visualization layer: geolocalization,
timelines, graphs.
20. Conclusions
• Many Digital Humanities and culture-based projects
shown shared problems
• At the conceptualization level it is necessary to map and
translate philological concepts and make information
exchangeable
• At a technological level there is a need for
interoperability and standard solutions
• Interoperability by: using open data formats, APIs,
exchange languages and standardized metadata
From syllables, lines and stanzas to linked open data: standardization, interoperability and multilingual challenges for digital humanities
We received a first grant from the university but now we are self sustained by projects.
Collaboration in diversity: a team that combine teams with technical and philological knowledge and multicultural: Spain, Portugal, Romania, Italia and collaborators from France
The basic idea of POSTDATA_ transform the way of research in Philology.
This is the vision of POSTDATA to transform the way we do research in humanities into a digital humanities ecosystem, where syllable--‐counting would be an automated process, thousands of poems could be compared at the same time, information could be found at a click through a search engine and research becomes more collaborative.
POSTDATA project aims at shortening the digital gap among poetry and technology, looking for interoperability solutions and an interdisciplinary work with innovative results beyond the current state-of-the art. It is based on the application of semantic web technologies to link and publish poetic datasets in a structured way in the linked data cloud.
1 - regardless of their different linguistic traits and verse structures which led to complex situations, such as the creation of conceptual genres that only exist in some traditions.
End - The models described are just an example of the idiosyncrasy that can be observed in each literary tradition.
Each literary work has a set of common characteristics or metadata (such as author, title, date of composition or language) that are shared by all of them. There is also a more limited set of properties, which are specific for poetry. The problem, however, is that each literary tradition has evolved in a particular way, creating different names and conceptualization systems for similar phenomena.
so it is necessary at a first stage to standardize metadata and map vocabularies and terminology at the philological level.
From the philological point of view, the main objective of POSTDATA proposal is to develop a conceptual standardization to build an abstract model for poetry representation based on existing philological concepts taken from projects, handbooks and corpora from the different traditions.
As you can see in this timeline, which represents the evolution of IT and internet, the first poetic repertoires or indexes were written in paper at the end of the 19th century, but they were soon transformed into computer data when the PC era arrived. Some years later, databases became the best solution to classify and analyze poem data.
It is difficult to link data in poetic repertoires as there is a lack of standardization in two levels: philological and technological. Semantic web has proven to be an effective technology as enables us to make information interoperable just by adding a semantic layer of data without altering the sources’ internal structure.
Every digital repertoire or database has a model whose parts are identified with the different elements of the common designed ontology.
The addition of a “semantic” layer of data to existing different databases and digital resources devoted to poetry boosts interoperability among them and lets scholars develop innovative comparative studies, which were not possible to carry out before.
21 repertoires
During the process of reverse engineering we standardize, i.e.
Call the same concepts by the same name (working together with the philologist)
Try to call the same names to tables or properties as classes or terms that already exist
By providing a MAP, the Poetic Community will be able to publish data in the Linked Open Data ecosystem and be interoperable with many other communities (e.g. Arts libraries, geographic resources and others to be established yet).
Chronological approach: Phase 1) creation of an ontological comon model for repertoires and poetry databases, 2) creation of a digital scholarly edition environment for working with poetry texts, 3) creation of a poetry lab using the latest AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learing technologies in order to create apps and tools to analyze poetry, 4) creation of a common shared interface to recover all the information gathered inside the project as linked data and make it browsable and searchable with different ways of visualization.
researchers with academic purposes who want to work on critical digital editions, non- experienced uses that want to read, share and learn more about poetic traditions and also companies who will use this resource for different application in fields like education, psychology, tourism or cultural purposes.
integrating previously existing tools that have been developed by other research teams at previous projects, and develop new ones. The innovation lies in the application context for this combination of tools, which specifically oriented to poetry analysis.
From collaboration great ideas will emerge, our purpose is to share our experience and passion with researchers all over the world.
Intro - We will create a resource that lets users make their own choices following a three step process
1. academic users, social users (users with not academic purposes, but literary interests), and professional users (like teachers, musicians, tourist operators, Apps developers, etc.).
3. to let users perform faceted searches with different levels of complexity, based on SPARQL queries, with multiple visualization possibilities
The final product of POSTDATA project is to develop an easy to user interface, which contains:
The visualization layer will be included at the end with different visualization possibilities
These common problems are not just limited to poetry but as well other áreas of digital humanities so we hope the experience and results of this Project will inform others and at least provide them with some food for thought
End - POSTDATA does not propose a new method for analyzing poetry, but an abstract model based on a working methodology supported by a double standardization system, both at philological and technological levels.
