The Digital Rosetta Stone Project

New Books

Most Digital Humanities programs and centers, as well as the scholars that populate them, tend to be housed in or linked to English or History departments. As a result, graduate students outside of these disciplines with an interest in the Digital Humanities must work within existing institutional structures and constraints to acquire the necessary training and methodological grounding that they need for their research. With these limitations in mind, in this chapter, I consider what it means to implement Digital Humanities approaches into graduate research in the variety of Modern Language departments that exist in the United States. More specifically, I address both the inherent risks and the potential rewards of such interventions. As a way of concluding, I discuss the unique affordances that emerge from encouraging the study of the Digital Humanities in Modern Language departments.

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most important stone fragments in history. It is the most popular single object in London’s British Museum, has been the object of scholarly research and has had much written about it. Indeed, any account of the history of translation will at least mention the Rosetta Stone. Today, the name “Rosetta” is used metaphorically in the context of translation, foreign-language learning, and even space exploration. In the light of this, one would assume that all sources are in agreement on the facts but, surprisingly, this is not the case. This article shows that sources disagree even in the most obvious aspects, such as the material, colour, condition of the stone and, in particular, with respect to its discovery. Based on an excursion to Alexandria, Rashíd and the – in all likelihood – real discovery site in the Nile delta, this article provides facts and casts some doubt on the reliability of internet sources.

The subjectivities that shape data collection and management have received extensive criticism, especially with regards to the digitization projects and digital archives of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions). The role of digital methods for recovering data absences is increasingly receiving attention too. Conceptualizing the absence of non-hegemonic individuals from the catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane as an instance of textual haunting, this article will ask: to what extent do data-driven approaches further entrench archival absences and silences? Can digital approaches be used to highlight or recover absent data? This article will give a decisive overview of relevant literature and projects so as to examine how digital tools are being realigned to recover, or more modestly acknowledge, the vast, undocumented network of individuals who have been omitted from canonical histories. Drawing on the example of Sloane, this article will reiterate the importance of a more rigorous ethics of digital practice, and propose recommendations for the management and representation of historical data, so cultural heritage institutions and digital humanists may better inform users of the absences and subjectivities that shape digital datasets and archives. This article is built on a comprehensive survey of digital humanities’ current algorithmic approaches to absence and bias. It also presents reflections on how we, the authors, grappled with unforeseen questions of absence and bias during a Leverhulme-funded collaboration between the British Museum and University College London (UCL), entitled ‘Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his collections’.

The article presents the mutual relations between the humanities and technology, especially today, in the era of dynamic development of digital technologies. It describes strategies for shaping artistic meanings in electronic literature, which enrich the literariness (poetics of literary texts) with new forms of representation. These include in particular: the semantics of the moving and sounding semiotic tissue of the work and the user’s actions; creating semiotic (especially kinetic) and interactive (causative) figures, alternative narrative; fictionalization of the semiotic layer of the work and data about the reader; creating text meanings in the interaction of the semantics of a word as a graphic-sound sign and as an conventional sign; engaging data about the reader’s space and himself in shaping literary meanings (ambient, personalization); creating macrotexts. These strategies (also affecting the latest printed literature) initiate the development of digital philology, in particular semiopoetics, which recognizes the role of the semiotic layer of the text and the user’s actions in shaping the meanings of a literary work. The article formulates the tasks of the digital humanities and digital philology.

I came across an e-newsletter from the British Museum last week advertising free delivery when you spend more than £100 on British Museum sculptures and replicas. Inasmuch as my small flat in London could use a bust replica of an Egyptian noble woman or a Rosetta Stone coffee mug, it was the ending of the newsletter that caught my eye in particular. To help others find this newsletter, the British Museum has conveniently provided links to ten networking Web sites (some of which I have never heard of): Digg It!, Del.ico.us, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn. The British Museum is e-savvy. I started to think about the IEEE and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), and I thought I would share some of our own proud e-achievements and current endeavors that we have come a long way over the past several years.

Text alignment is one of the fundamental techniques text-related domains like natural language processing, computational linguistics, and digital humanities. It compares two or more texts with each other aiming to find similar textual patterns, or to estimate in general how different or similar the texts are. Visualizing alignment results is an essential task, because it helps researchers getting a comprehensive overview of individual findings and the overall pattern structure. Different approaches have been developed to visualize and help making sense of these patterns depending on text size, alignment methods, and, most importantly, the underlying research tasks demanding for alignment. On the basis of those tasks, we reviewed existing text alignment visualization approaches, and discuss their advantages and drawbacks. We finally derive design implications and shed light on related future challenges.

Las tecnologías y su dimensión ubicua se hacen presentes en todas las disciplinas y han cambiado la forma de estudiar e investigar, creando campos como las Humanidades Digitales cuyo auge es ya innegable. Los estudios de grado en humanidades no siempre reflejan este giro digital. En este artículo presentamos los resultados de una experiencia docente cuyo objetivo ha sido la mejora de la adquisición de los contenidos de métrica en poesía del grado, así como la adquisición de contenidos transversales en relación a la tecnología y la digitalidad. Para ello se ha combinado la enseñanza de la métrica española con la de las tecnologías computacionales que se aplican a su análisis desde las Humanidades Digitales, buscando una implicación directa de los estudiantes en la investigación universitaria. Con ese fin se organizó una actividad que planeó videoconferencias con expertos internacionales y a una actividad de anotación métrica de sonetos para su procesado computacional. Los resultados, obtenidos por medio de una encuesta de satisfacción y las calificaciones de los estudiantes, muestran una clara mejora en los resultados de la asignatura para los que participaron en esta experiencia y una alta satisfacción con los contenidos referentes a tecnología y la digitalidad aprendidos. Ciertos aspectos como el tamaño de la muestra o la necesidad de otros datos comparativos quedan para la discusión de esta experiencia.

Chapter 3 - Digital Humanities as Public Humanities: Transformative Collaboration in Graduate Education

In the light of recent research debates on computational social science and Digital Humanities (DH) as meanwhile adolescent disciplines dealing with big data (Reichert, 2014), I strove for answering in which ways Text Mining (TM) applications are able to support Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) in the social sciences in a manner that fruitfully integrates a qualitative with a quantitative perspective. The guiding assumption was, the more modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms enable us to identify patterns of `meaning’ from global contexts of mass data collections, while at the same time preserving opportunities to retrieve identified patterns again in local contexts of single documents, the more they allow for a fruitful integration of qualitative and quantitative text analysis. By combining extraction of qualitative knowledge from text to buttress understanding of social reality with quantification of extracted knowledge structures to infer on their relevancy, utilizing TM for QDA is inherently a mixed method research design.

Standards issues in data communications

NOVEL STAGING TOOL FOR LOCALIZED PROSTATE CANCER: A PILOT STUDY USING GENETIC ADAPTIVE NEURAL NETWORKS

Hybrid Text Analysis

During the past decade, Molecular Biology wet labs and sequencing activities have been generating a vast amount of data, causing an increase in the adoption of new methods and tools for identification and analysis. In particular, the use of software agent technology in bioinformatics applications has been on the rise, due some of its unique features as autonomy and remote execution capabilities. However, nowadays there exists multiple software agent development platforms, and their potential application to bioinformatics require an assessment based on their inherent features. We therefore present a comparative analysis of the main available platforms focusing on standard compatibility, communication, mobility, security policy, availability, usability and development issues. Our result, based on a scoring system, demonstrate that the JADE platform is the most appropriate and promising one to be used in tackling bioinformatics problems.

As teachers of modern languages we are well acquainted with audio-visual aids. We use slides and sound recordings to teach new words and structures, to build up situations, to start problemsolving activities, to present dialogues or to drill and practise various aspects of the target language — even though course books and copybooks have retained their key position when we go beyond the elementary stage of language learning. Whether we adopt a national/functional or structural approached(1), or more so-called traditional methods, does not make such a great difference in our attitude towards audio-visual aids, for it seems that the more advanced the students are, the more the teacher tends to rely on books. I don't know if this will remain the case but I am inclined to think that there are developments to be expected at the intermediate level and at the advanced level.