Frontiers Digit. Humanit.最新文献

{"title":"Toward an Ontopedia for Historical Hebrew Manuscripts","authors":"M. Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Gila Prebor","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2016.00003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2016.00003","url":null,"abstract":"Historical handwritten Hebrew manuscripts are one of the most unique and authentic evidences of the Jewish culture and thought that survived through the centuries. In order to enable a systematic research of the knowledge embedded in the manuscripts there is a need for a formal conceptual data model with high level of semantic granularity, an ontology. We propose to build a dynamic web-based framework that will allow scholars to create, enrich and consult an \"ontopedia\" (ontology-based encyclopedia) of Hebrew manuscripts. The framework is based on an ontology especially designed and implemented for this domain and goals. We view a manuscript as a \"living entity\" and propose to design a new ontological data model of the narrative for a manuscript, stages/milestones in its biography (creation, copying, acquisition). A sequence of events and places constitutes a timeline of history against which manuscripts, people and their relationships can be placed. A large-scale automated reasoning based on the ontology will also enable us to construct a semantically rich social network of people and manuscripts, and to compare the effect of time and place on the manuscripts’ qualitative characteristics and quantitative distribution.","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125253926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Digital Archeology Is Here (and Has Been for a While)","authors":"A. Costopoulos","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2016.00004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2016.00004","url":null,"abstract":"I want to stop talking about digital archeology. I want to continue doing archeology digitally. This is what Frontiers in Digital Archaeology is about. I echo (Morgan and Eve, 2012; p. 523) the statement that “we are all digital archaeologists.” This statement wants to be radical but is in fact a mundane recognition of a state of normality that has existed for at least 20 years and has described a significant segment of the archeological community for at least 40 years. Evidence of the reality of digital archeology is all around us in the discipline’s data collection and curation (Roosevelt et al., 2015), analysis [mainly through GIS, see Conolly and Lake (2006)], visualization [work in and elaborating on Stanco et al. (2011), among others], public outreach and participation (Richardson, 2013), and training methods. The reflection on what it means to be a digital archeologist is ongoing [Evans and Daly (2006) and work that builds on it]. Perhaps, the best evidence is the growing prominence of archeology blogs in driving the dissemination and interpretation of results (see Colleen Morgan’s middlesavagery or John Hawks’ weblog for notable examples in very different regions of the discipline). In this first editorial, I would like to lay the groundwork for the journal as a place primarily to do archeology digitally, rather than as a place to discuss digital archeology. In the social sciences and humanities, we have an unfortunate tendency to make approaches and tools into objects of study (literally, we essentialize them) and to organize the conversation around them. There are meaningful and even heavy conversations about the implications in other fields of the use of new digital tools. We will have those conversations in this journal. But those conversations in other fields have tended to facilitate rather than impede the setting up of things, such as Genbank1 and arXiv.2 Those conversations have been immensely productive, but they have been more focused and results oriented than I feel they have been so far in archeology. I must admit that I am a bit embarrassed at the public expense involved in the numerous rather sterile meetings in which I have participated about the digital turn in archeology and the setting up of public archives, community GIS, etc., for what so far I consider very little result. The carbon footprint of some of these meetings must have been stupendous. All the right people were at the table (I mean that sincerely), all the right things were said, all the right anxieties were aired out, and all the right authorities were cited. But I do not think the expense so far has been justified by the outcomes.","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123350890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Interactive Urban Model: Histories and Legacies Related to Prototyping the Twenty-First Century City","authors":"T. Verebes","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2016.00001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2016.00001","url":null,"abstract":"This article surveys the theoretical and historical legacies of mass production and standardization, and the cultural issues associated to globalization, in the most prolific era ever of urbanization. Situated at the intersection of scholarly writing on history, current conditions and a speculative future, this paper focuses on themes related to design research on computation, fabrication, and the city. Given the ongoing transition of industrial paradigm from Modernism’s dependency upon Fordist mass production, the context of today’s emerging methods of non-standard production is explored, with an emphasis on design repercussions at the urban scale. Theorisations of the cultures surrounding, within, and against technology, this paper will confront the difficult issues of the expression of identity in late capitalism, through resistance of regionalism and other neo-traditionalist positions in an increasingly globalized world. These issues lead to a proposition of the notion of an interactive urban model, as the basis of embedding intelligence into city design, and the potential of producing highly customized materialization through contemporary production technologies. The hypotheses of these issues is explicated by 3 case study design projects, carried out by the author’s practice, OCEAN CN Consultancy Network, based in Hong Kong. The three projects demonstrate the author’s design research experimentation with design and production technologies at various scales of practice in architecture, urbanism, urban and landscape design, and masterplanning, applying computation towards the objective of achieving, modulated spatial attributes.","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133514968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Discourses and Disciplines in the Enlightenment: Topic Modeling the French Encyclopédie","authors":"Glenn Roe, C. Gladstone, R. Morrissey","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2015.00008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2015.00008","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes the use of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), or topic modeling, to explore the discursive makeup of the18th-century Encyclopedie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1751-1772). Expanding upon previous work modeling the Encyclopedie’s ontology, or classification scheme, we examine the abstractions used by its editors to visualize the various ‘systems’ of knowledge that the work proposes, considered here as heuristic tools for navigating the complex information space of the Encyclopedie. Using these earlier experiments with supervised machine learning models as a point of reference, we introduce the notion of topic modeling as a ‘discourse analysis tool’ for Enlightenment studies. In so doing, we draw upon the tradition of post-structuralist French discourse analysis, one of the first fields to embrace computational approaches to discursive text analysis. Our particular use of LDA is thus aimed primarily at uncovering inter-disciplinary ‘discourses’ in the Encyclopedie that run alongside, under, above, and through the original classifications. By mapping these discourses and discursive practices we can begin to move beyond the organizational (and physical) limitations of the print edition, suggesting several possible avenues of future research. These experiments thus attest once again to the enduring relevance of the Encyclopedie as an exemplary Enlightenment text. Its rich dialogical structure, whether studied using traditional methods of close reading or through the algorithmic processes described in this paper, is perhaps only now coming fully to light thanks to recent developments in digital resources and methods.","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129940139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Logic of the Big Data Turn in Digital Literary Studies","authors":"J. Ganascia","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2015.00007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2015.00007","url":null,"abstract":"The Digital Humanities, and especially the literary side of the Digital Humanities, i.e., Digital Literary Studies, propose systematic and technologically equipped methodologies in activities where, for centuries, intuition and intelligent handling had played a predominant role. The recent “big data” turn in the natural and social sciences has been particularly revealing of how these new approaches can be applied to traditional scholarly disciplines, such as literary studies. In so doing, big data can renew, with the use of computers, the Humanities, i.e., the disciplines rationally studying humanworks and cultural production. Digital Literary Studies are emblematic of these new approaches, certainly because they constitute the oldest subfield of the Digital Humanities, as some early projects like the Trésor de la Langue Française attest but also because they are the domain in which the intellectual stakes of mass digitization has already been extensively used and debated as demonstrated by Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees (Moretti, 2005), for instance. Some view this evolution enthusiastically as a shift toward the “hard” sciences. This is the case of Matthew Jockers who affirms in the chapter entitled “Revolution” of his book Macroanalysis (Jockers, 2013) that: “Now, slowly and surely, the same elements that have had such an impact on the sciences are revolutionizing the way that research in the humanities get done” (p. 10). Further on, he declares that literary methodology is “in essence no different from the scientific one” (p. 13). Others assert that some questions cannot be dealt with using the same methods in the humanities and the natural sciences, like physics or biology. That is the case of Stephen Ramsay, who, in Reading Machines (Ramsay, 2011), assures us that, even if some problems in the Humanities, like authorship identification, can clearly find comfort with themethods developed by the natural sciences, for most literary critical endeavors, such as characterizing the subjectivity of Virginia Wolf in her novel The Waves, for instance, it is not possible to clearly identify a set of “falsifiable” facts. Between these two extremes, many scholars provide convincing illustrations of what digitization allows and then discuss the nature and current evolution of the Humanities in general, and literary studies in particular. TheCompanion toDigital Humanities (Schreibman et al., 2004), theCompanion to Digital Literary Studies (Siemens and Schreibman, 2008), and more recently an excellent online MLACommons anthology dedicated to Literary Studies in the Digital Age (Price and Siemens, 2013) all provide various and enriching views on these topics. We attempt here to conciliate the two above-mentioned and apparently antagonistic views with the help of a philosophical approach. More precisely, our Grand Challenge is in the service of establishing solid epistemological foundations for the Digital Humanities, which is necessitated by the incre","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128955948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Digital Approaches to Paleography and Book History: Some Challenges, Present and Future","authors":"Peter A. Stokes","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2015.00005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2015.00005","url":null,"abstract":"Quantitative methods and the use of technology in paleography and book history are by no means new. The New Palaeographical Society took advantage of the latest printing techniques to produce its albums of facsimiles in the late nineteenth century (Thompson et al., 1903–1930); Jean Mallon began using film in the 1930s to illustrate the development of script (Poulle, 1977); Gilissen (1973) was applying statistical measures to script long before widespread access to computers; and even Mabillon (1681) used advanced printing methods in his foundational study of 1681. Smith (1938) applied innovations in photography for the recovery of damaged or illegible script in the 1930s, and Malachi Beit-Arie’s database of Hebrew manuscripts began in the 1960s and remains one of – probably – the most important works of quantitative codicology. This list is by no means complete, and it demonstrates a continued interest in finding new ways to help us understand books and documents. However, it is also clear that recent developments have dramatically transformed the field. It is now 10 years since publication of what is perhaps the seminal article in what has since become known as “digital” or “computational” paleography (Ciula, 2005). Much excellent work has been done since then, and the whole field of paleography has perhaps been reinvigorated as a result [see, for instance, Rehbein et al. (2009), Fischer et al. (2011), Nelson and Terras (2012), Hassner et al. (2013)]. Nevertheless, much remains to be done, both within paleography in the narrow sense and also, probably even more so, in other areas of book history and diplomatic. Regarding paleography, much work in the last 10 years has been done on questions of “who,” “when,” “where,” and “what”: what was written, by whom, when, and where? However, there is very much more to paleography than this. What about questions of technique, such as searching for “stabbing” strokes that might indicate a scribe used to writing on wax, or changes in scribal “equilibrium,” which might suggest expertise, forgery, or imitation (Stokes, 2011, 2014)?","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133210244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Envisioning the Urban Past: GIS Reconstruction of a Lost Denver District","authors":"Brian Page, Eric Ross","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2015.00003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2015.00003","url":null,"abstract":"Large areas within the old urban core of American cities were destroyed in the post-war era as city leaders sought to counteract metropolitan decentralization by implementing urban renewal programs. For the most part, these places were deemed not worthy of documentation; indeed, areas declared as “blighted” were widely viewed as ugly, cancerous threats to the future health of the city and were enthusiastically demolished. For this reason they have rarely been the object of study. This paper attempts to address the neglect of such lost landscapes by using GIS to provide a means to envision the urban past. Focusing on the case of the old Auraria district in downtown Denver, the paper pursues three aims. The first is to develop and test a new method for reconstructing urban landscapes at the district scale using GIS methods and data derived from historic Sanborn fire insurance maps. The second aim is to conduct preliminary analysis of this historic district-scale GIS, focusing on land use, spatial connectivity, and building massing, in order to evaluate its utility in generating new insight into the form, character, and functioning of the historic city core. The third aim is to assess the degree to which historic urban reconstructions of this kind can become valuable tools in contemporary urban planning efforts.","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125269506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Map for Big Data Research in Digital Humanities","authors":"F. Kaplan","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2015.00001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2015.00001","url":null,"abstract":"This article is an attempt to represent Big Data research in digital humanities as a structured research field. A division in three concentric areas of study is presented. Challenges in the first circle – focusing on the processing and interpretations of large cultural datasets – can be organized linearly following the data processing pipeline. Challenges in the second circle – concerning digital culture at large – can be structured around the different relations linking massive datasets, large communities, collective discourses, global actors, and the software medium. Challenges in the third circle – dealing with the experience of big data – can be described within a continuous space of possible interfaces organized around three poles: immersion, abstraction, and language. By identifying research challenges in all these domains, the article illustrates how this initial cartography could be helpful to organize the exploration of the various dimensions of Big Data Digital Humanities research.","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129469495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Challenges and Opportunities for Digital History","authors":"I. Gregory","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2014.00001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2014.00001","url":null,"abstract":"The challenge for digital historians is deceptively simple: it is to do good history that combines the computer’s ability to search and summarize, with the researcher’s ability to interpret and argue. This involves both developing an understanding of how to use digital sources appropriately, and more importantly, using digital sources and methods to deliver new scholarship that enhances our understanding of the past. There are plenty of sources available; the challenge is to make use of them to deliver on their potential. There have been false dawns for digital history, or “history and computing,” in the past (Boonstra et al. 2004). Until very recently, computers were primarily associated with performing calculations on numbers. This has resulted in them becoming fundamental tools in fields such as economic history, historical demography and, through the use of geographical information systems (GIS)1, historical geography. These are, however, relatively small fields within the discipline as a whole and much of the work that has been done in them has taken place outside of History departments in, for example, Economics, Sociology, and Geography. As most historians work with texts, it is hardly surprising that this style of computing has made little impact on the wider discipline. Within the last few years, however, there has been a fundamental shift in computing in which, put simply, computers have moved from being number crunching machines to become an information technology where much of the information that they contain is in textual form. This has been associated with the creation of truly massive amounts of digital textual content. This ranges from social media and the internet, to private sector digitization projects such as Google Books and the Gale/Cengage collections, to the more limited investment from the academic and charitable sectors (Thomas and Johnson 2013). Thus, computers are now inextricably concerned with texts – exactly the type of source that is central to the study of history. As a consequence, many historians have become “digital historians” almost without realizing it through making use of the vast number of sources that are now available from their desktop. So is everything in the garden that is digital history currently rosy? The answer, judging by work such as Hitchcock (2013) and the responses to it (Knights 2013; Prescott 2013), seems to be a resounding no. Many criticisms are centered on the digital sources themselves, whose quality is lower than that might be hoped. Digitizing a document is usually a two-stage process: first a digital image of the document is created as a bitmap, then the textual content is encoded as machine readable text. The two are then often brought together such that a user can type a search term, this is located in the text, and then the user can be shown the appropriate image of the page. The first of the two stages is relatively simple using a scanner or camera and, if done properly, only r","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"130 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121186114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cities Through the Ages: One Thing or Many?","authors":"Michael E. Smith, J. Lobo","doi":"10.3389/fdigh.2019.00012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2019.00012","url":null,"abstract":"The variability among cities, from the ancient world to the present, can be organized usefully in two ways. First, a focus on the dominant urban activities and processes leads to the recognition of two basic urban types: economic cities and political cities. Most cities today are economic cities in which growth proceeds through agglomeration processes. By contrast, most cities in the ancient world (and some today) are political cities, in which power and administration play a major role in structuring cities and generating change. Second, an alternative focus on processes of social interaction within the urban built environment leads to the recognition that there is only one kind of settlement that includes all cities—economic and political; past and present. Cities in this sense are settings for “energized crowding.” Processes of interaction generate both economic and political growth, and they produce and influence the built forms and social characteristics of all cities. Our model helps scholars distinguish the unique from the universal traits of cities today and in the past.","PeriodicalId":227954,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers Digit. Humanit.","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124595381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}