Conference reports – Digital History Berlin

2. September 20212. September 2021

Jascha Schmitz: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 7 (30 June 2021)

Panel Discussion

The last session of the Data for History Conference 2021 was a panel discussion between Ariana Ciula (King’s College London), Francesca Tomasi (University of Bologna), Harald Sack (Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure Karlsruhe) and Francesco Beretta (University of Lyon) on ‘Historical data and interoperability / Quo vadis interoperability’. The opening speech was held by one of the conference’s co-hosts, Torsten Hiltmann (Humboldt University of Berlin), who also took on the role of moderator for the following discussion.

4. August 20214. August 2021

Jascha Schmitz, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 7 (30 June 2021)

Session 13 – Integrating Different Medialities

Øyvind Eide and Zoe Schubert (University of Cologne) opened with a presentation on their project Kompakkt, entitled “Space, time, and agents in theatre: Digital documentation of the transience of performances through theatrical agents in time and space”.
First, Øyvind Eide introduced the main features of the meaning of space in theatre: While in the text spatiality is represented by linguistic expressions, in performance both the existing spatiality of the stage (and beyond) and linguistic expressions represent space. Hence, concerning theatre, different forms of documentation are necessary for both categories. Many decisions have to be made and ways found to encircle the non-existent centre of documentation, the performance itself, in order to make it part of a (theatre) collection.
Secondary objects and materials are used for this, such as notes, drawings, audio and video recordings. Digital methods now offer the possibility to make these objects/artifacts more available, describable and linkable.
To this end, they have developed Kompakkt, an online repository where artifacts used in performances are digitally available and explorable. For this purpose, they used a selection of artifacts from the theatre collection of the University of Cologne.

12. Juli 202112. Juli 2021

Julia Pabst, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 6 (23 June 2021)

Session 12 – Data from Annotated Texts

The sixth day of the Data for History conference started with Cristina Vertan’s (University of Hamburg) presentation “Representing vague and uncertain historical data on places people and events in historical texts – a case-study of historical texts of Dimitrie Cantemir”. The main focus was on the texts and translations of the universal researcher Dimitrie Cantemir, who was the only one to write a history on the Balkan region from a western perspective. The original work was written in Latin and translated into other languages only in the 18th century. Since there was no word for word translation, the project is now dedicated to such translations. It combines hermeneutic methods with the methods of computer science. There are three directions of investigation: reliability, consistency and vagueness. First, a model with a knowledge base was developed, which also takes into account vague or uncertain places and persons. After that, the detection was done, e.g. to annotate linguistic marks for uncertain places in each of the available languages, followed by the visualization. One of the central points of the modeling was the creation of an ontology. With this ontology, one can now answer queries about the translations and texts, while taking ambiguities into account. The presentation highlighted the complexity of working with texts and translations.

29. Juni 202129. Juni 2021

Julia Pabst, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 5 (16 June 2021)

Keynote #2

The fifth day of the Data for History conference started with the keynote Social Semantic Annotation: Linking People and Places in the Pelagios Digital Ecosystem by Rebecca Kahn (University of Vienna). This talk was about the experience from the Pelagios project on building a method and a community in and around the use of linked geo-data for working with historical sources. Rebecca Kahn’s talk focused not on the methods of the project, but on the community and network around it.
Pelagios is a Network that connects a method and a community with digital resources. Part of the project consists of providing the Recogito and Peripleo, a search engine for Linked Data.
Pelagios consists of four different founders, an investigative team and many other people involved from different directions (GLAM, students, etc.) The Network was built on the premise of openness regarding data, technology and the community.

16. Juni 202129. Juni 2021

Julia Pabst, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 4 (09 June 2021)

Session 8 – Providing Data on Persons

The fourth day of the conference started with the lecture “IPIF – pragmatic modelling decisions”. Contributors were Matthias Schlögl (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna), Georg Vogeler, Gunter Vasold (University of Graz) and Richard Hadden (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna). The idea of IPIF is to take a pragmatic approach to modelling based on the factoid model and to provide a RESTful API to query data structured in this way. In the model, the metadata of its creation and modification aggregates information on a person, the source and the statements are extracted from the source by the creator of the factoid. Dating information a lot of the time is not easy in history with time ranges or broad terms in different sources. To model time and dating, the IPIF model uses a simple approach by distinguishing a date as a label and a sort date which allows to keep the original information in textual form, but also to filter it. The whole idea is to simplify the way data is computed. SPARQL is richer, but because of its complexity, you always have to know very specific information about the implementation. IPIF tries to use a less formalized approach to make it more easy to work with different data sources.

9. Juni 202129. Juni 2021

Lukas Sebold, Leonie Aschmann: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 3

Session 6 – Uncertain Time and Space

In the first presentation of the day, ”Chronology Statements for nodegoat: a temporal topology to interface with vague, relational, and actionable dates”, Pim Van Bree and Geert Kessels (LAB 1100, The Hague) introduced the platform Nodegoat. Nodegoat is a web-based research environment for the humanities, providing services to create e.g. network, linked and spatial data. However, there is also a need for complex statements to express temporal uncertainty.
The speakers pointed out that historians in general lack vocabularies to represent temporal uncertainty. This is reflected in common implementations in DH that miss flexibility and a standard for relational temporal statements. „Lukas Sebold, Leonie Aschmann: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 3“ weiterlesen

8. Juni 20219. Juni 2021

Lars-Erik Brandt, Diana Vegner: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 2

Session 4 – Modelling the Analyses Lars-Erik Brandt

The first presentation of Session 4: Modelling the Analyses was a project of Helen Mair Rawsthorne from the Université Gustave Eiffel with the title “Analysing 18th century hydrographic data: a campaign in the Bay of Biscay, 1750-1751”. The approach focused on maritime maps from the early modern period in France. At that time, a research project was to investigate the depth of the Bay of Biscay at different points and to map the entire bay with information on the depth of the sea and certain characteristics, such as sediment species. Helen Rawsthorne examined not only the maps themselves, created during this campaign, but also the written notes on the various measuring points. The sources are well preserved, since the maps were used by the people of that time in everyday life. The research question was to compare the quality of the results from the historical measurements with modern ones and thus to show how accurate the historical approach was. „Lars-Erik Brandt, Diana Vegner: Report on the conference – “Data for History 2021” – Day 2“ weiterlesen

26. Mai 2021

Julia Pabst, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference “Data for History 2021” – Day 1

The conference was opened by a short introduction by Torsten Hiltmann (HU Berlin), who, in cooperation with Francesco Beretta and Vincent Alamercery (LARHRA Lyon) is the organizer of this event. He offered a brief overview of the still young history of the consortium and introduced the overall aim of the conference, which is to promote exchange within the broader community and to create more stable structures for the future development of the consortium. Even though it can only take place online this year due to the Corona pandemic, it was important to preserve the core idea of the meeting. Therefore, all changes from the initial plans, such as a new schedule spread over 7 weeks and Airmeet as the platform for the conference, were chosen to assure exactly that: namely communication, exchange and discussions among like-minded people facing the same challenges if it comes to the modelling of data in historical research. „Julia Pabst, Anna Grönig: Report on the conference “Data for History 2021” – Day 1“ weiterlesen