Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities)

Comics are complex documents whose reception engages cognitive processes such as scene perception, language processing, and narrative understanding. Possibly because of their complexity , they have rarely been studied in cognitive science. Modeling the stimulus ideally requires a formal description, which can be provided by feature descriptors from computer vision and computational linguistics. With a focus on document analysis, here we review work on the computational modeling of comics. We argue that the development of modern feature descriptors based on deep learning techniques has made sufficient progress to allow the investigation of complex material such as comics for reception studies, including experimentation and computational modeling of cognitive processes.

Fronteras: Congratulations on the publication of the book Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis: Landscapes of Time and Place (Springer, 2020), which you coedited with Francis Ludlow and Ferenc Gyuris. What is GIS and what are some of the ways that your book’s chapters use it to understand historical events and geography?

In the study, the latest computer methods of clustering and visualization are applied to reliable and quantitatively relevant intralinguistic and extralinguistic data on adjacent crossborder dialects of two closely related South Slavic languages, Serbian and Bulgarian, for the first time in Slavic linguistic geography. The survey is a pilot experimental one. The objectives of the study are the correct machine conversion of the existing analog primary data into a digital format, the development of digital tools for processing and clustering the primary data, and the generation of trial combinatorial linguistic maps. It is assumed that as a result of applying the methods of systematization, analysis, synthesis, and visualization of the geographical distribution of clusters of linguistic and extralinguistic data, a cartographic explication of objective boundaries between closely related languages is possible. The primary data for the study were obtained by a machine digitizing of a part of the South Slavic dialect materials from the second volume of the Dialectological Atlas of Eastern Serbia and Western Bulgaria (DAESWB). The immediate tasks of digitalization included the compilation of an electronic geographic grid of the surveyed sites; the digitization of three linguistic maps from DAESWB (on reflexes of the Proto-Slavic *dj, *ǫ, *ь); the development of digital linguogeographic tools and their functions in the R programming language in RStudio; the introduction to the study of extralinguistic information on the altitude of each site above sea level; the creation of combinatorial physical-geographical and linguistic maps using geometric shapes and color scales. A map was generated combining information about reflexes *dj with data on the altitude of sites above sea level, as well as a map clustering reflexes *dj>dž, *ǫ>u, *ь>ǝ. The generated experimental maps demonstrate the clustering of reflexes * dj>dž, *ǫ>u, *ь>ǝ and the contrast of the delimitation of their distribution area from neighboring areas, as well as their direct correlation with the altitude location of the corresponding settlements in the Stara Planina mountain range on both sides of the state border between Serbia and Bulgaria. The working hypothesis about the possibility of a cartographic explication of objective boundaries between closely related languages, in particular between Serbian and Bulgarian, can be considered confirmed. In the future, the study will reliably verify the linguogeographical observations on the delineation of closely related languages.

To foster research into the new coronavirus, we make the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (ca. 51000 articles) available in a beta version of the AVOBMAT (Analysis and Visualization of Bibliographic Metadata and Texts) text mining tool. It includes papers and pre-prints from PubMed, Elsevier, MedRxiv, BioRxiv etc

avobmat.hu/covid-19/

Feel free to use it and share it with research & medical communities who are involved in the fight against the pandemic.

The application was briefly introduced at an NLP meet-up (New York) with the creators of the COVID-19 dataset (starting at min. 40)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GivUfb8KhZY

Organized a campus-wide event at Purdue to participate in Day of Digital Humanities 2020, alongside other universities, colleges, and institutions around the state. Accompanying link directs to website for the event, including Twitter feeds and a blog.

In the olden days, as my children used to say and as now seems more and more appropriate, when I was a graduate student, I had a conflicted relationship with commentaries on classical Greek and Latin texts. When faced with what seemed to be an impossibly huge reading list of texts to prepare in both languages for qualifying exams, I tried hard to avoid both commentaries and translations except when I had no choice. There was just no time, so my constant companions were the dictionaries in each language and a set of blank journals that I filled with two-column lists of the vocabulary in them that I was trying to learn. In those prehistoric times, there were no online tools-in fact, there was no online anything, so even having at hand a commentary or a translation for every text I had to read was by no means a given. On the other hand, there was no way to avoid consulting commentaries in preparing classes and seminars as a student and in teaching. In fact, that was the obvious way to rise to the level of preparation that students and instructors anticipated and that my peers at the very least attained. But my general experience of commentaries-in the '60's, which is the era I'm talking about, most of the commentaries we used were British-was marked by frustration. The typical commentary was not discursive or explanatory but authoritarian. The major element of content was cross-references to other texts in either Greek or Latin or both, texts that established a primary frame of reference on the basis of diction or content but did nothing more than cite intrinsically useful information with minimal analysis or explanation. Unsolicited opinions of the quality of the thought and writing of the ancient author were commonplace and usually negative; the only thing more negative than judgments of the authors themselves were the commentator's opinions of other scholars or, worse still, of the poor, pathetic scribes responsible for messing up the transmission of the Greek or Latin. (I'm exaggerating, of course, but not that much). When I encountered a difficult passage that I could not translate and sought help in a commentary, most of the time, there was no help offered. The reason for that, I assumed, was that the problem was my own inability to read the language, not the failure of the commentator to recognize or solve a real difficulty in the Greek or Latin; in such cases, the only thing that the commentary produced was demoralization. Lastly, when these commentators actually ventured beyond grammatical and textual questions into the interpretation of the text, which was rare, my overwhelming sense was that, although they had and displayed vast knowledge of other, similar texts as evidenced by citations of blinding arrays of cross-references that I could never hope to equal (remember, there were no computers to search with), they had no basic understanding of the literary context that gave meaning to the text beyond the most basic level.

At Archimedes Digital, we believe archaeological data and site narratives should be presented in tandem in a single cross-platform interface and have been creating a web, VR, and AR platform for visualizing, searching, and building narratives with archaeological data. In achieving this end, we have been inspired by digital humanities projects such as the Harvard Art Museum’s Tour Builder and the Recogito annotation environment to create a geospatial data presentation environment where administrators and editors may publish site narratives and embed artifacts from their digital collections platforms directly so that end users may explore their excavations in 2D and 3D environments.

A major challenge that we faced while creating this platform was creating a content editing environment (akin to a Medium.com editing experience) that incorporated saved searches from the faceted search tools, IIIF image viewers, and 3D object embeds, all with captions and optional collections metadata viewable in the reading environment. While the narratives constructed in this editing environment are largely for educational or interpretative purposes, they also at some point in future iterations could be used for publishing digital editions of more traditional research.

The interpretative narratives created on the platform developed by Archimedes may be viewed via geolocation in virtual environments (such as site reconstructions that may be viewed in VR) and augmented reality on mobile devices while users are in the field. Users may start the app and read narratives based on their GPS while they are viewing a 3D reconstruction of the site they are visiting.

In partnership with the Giza Project (Harvard University) and the GizaX MOOC on behalf of Professor Peter der Manuelian, Archimedes Digital is developing a multiplayer virtual reality classroom experience that will enable Manuelian to conduct tours of the Giza Plateau and monuments over multiple time periods and occupations. The teaching environment is used in partnership with GizaX as well as classrooms in the US and China to enable professors to meet virtually with their students to conduct a tour of the Giza Plateau as is relevant to class materials.

The virtual reality experience has a partner mobile application that leverages augmented reality technology in the galleries of the Harvard Semitic Museum to allow museum visitors to translate the hieroglyphs of the Dream Stela of Thutmose IV between the paws of the Great Sphinx (Giza) and view the Sphinx in the Old Kingdom, New Kingdom, and contemporary periods.

Both the VR and the AR applications are backed by data services from the Giza Project’s and Semitic Museum’s collection databases which educators may choose to reference to pull artifacts into the 3D environment at their discretion while creating lectures. The media related to the artifacts displayed in the 3D environment includes 3D objects scans, 360 video, 2D video, audio, and images as well as traditional collection metadata. Lectures are created in a slideshow editing environment which is familiar to users of Microsoft PowerPoint, and each slide may teleport users to a new part of the Giza Plateau and monuments.

Using advanced methods of preservation with 3D scanning, we’re able to tell the histories of our shared traditions like never before with storytelling in virtual and augmented reality. Through our partnership with the Giza Project at Harvard University, we enable researchers to tell the narratives of Pyramids and Giza Necropolis both in a VR headset for classrooms around the world and on-site in Giza in AR. This channels recent technologies with narrative storytelling techniques brought to life from the original makers of the tombs we narrate themselves. Now the imagination of the archaeologists and researchers that work in Giza can visualize these monuments as they would’ve appeared millenia previously--where only the foundations of many structures remain to this day. The lecture will feature interactive demos to explore the history of the Pyramids, the Tomb of Meresankh III, and the Sphinx and Dream Stela of Thutmose IV, developed for the Giza Project as well as feature previews of upcoming work of archiving historic sites in Cairo and Luxor with ARCE.

While many are stuck in doors, digital recording in archaeology has a unique opportunity to present heritage sites around the world to a public in quarantine. Building on work in virtual education from Harvard affiliates such as Rus Gant (Visualization Lab) and Matt Cook (Harvard Libraries), virtual tourism of heritage sites connects an isolated public to its shared histories and traditions while acting as a gateway to deeper engagement with the archaeology of each heritage site that is digitized. This lecture discusses methodology and available technologies for archaeological recording as well as digital narratology constructed through each platform, particularly where the physical transitions to the virtual in museum spaces and on-site in the Near East.

Numérisation de l’Index Chronologicus Chartarum établi par Benjamin Guérard dans son édition du Cartulaire en 1857.
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