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Forgeries and Networks (ForNet): data transformations

by Jaap Geraerts, Henry Keazor, Demival Vasques Filho, Rebecca Welkens and Thorsten Wübbena

“Members are obliged to keep the Association’s printed matter carefully and secretly. They also undertake to return all printed matter to the Executive Board if they leave the Association and to ensure that the printed matter is returned to the Executive Board in the event of their death.”1

This clear call for secrecy and discretion can be found as a kind of prologue in issues of the so-called ‘Mittheilungen des Museen-Verbandes’, which were published from 1899 to 1939.2 They were distributed by the “International Association of Museum Officials in Defence Against Counterfeiting and Improper Trade Practices” (“Internationaler Verband von Museumsbeamten zur Abwehr von Fälschungen und unlauterem Geschäftsgebaren”). The project “Forgeries and Networks (ForNet) – The Mittheilungen des Museen-Verbandes and forgery networks in the 20th century”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), will use this valuable source to reconstruct, visualise and analyse the networks of relationships and the strategies of the actors involved at the time as well as the routes taken by the forgeries and ensure that the data compiled in the project is made available to the public. This blog post, highlights the creation of the dataset, its transformations and ingest in a graph database, and the creation of networks, as a step towards answering the project’s research questions. „Forgeries and Networks (ForNet): data transformations“ weiterlesen

  1. The original text reads as follows: “[…] sind die Mitglieder verpflichtet, die Drucksachen des Verbandes sorgfältig und geheim aufzubewahren. Sie verpflichten sich ferner, im Falle ihres Ausscheidens aus dem Verband die sämtlichen Drucksachen an den Vorort zurückzugeben, sowie dafür Sorge zu tragen, daß im Falle ihres Todes die Drucksachen an den Vorort zurückgegeben werden.”, example: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.35249#0070 []
  2. Available as a digital copy at Heidelberg University Library, https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.33011, based on the collection held in the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/kunstbibliothek/home/ []

Talking About Muslims in Middle French: The Potential of Word-to-Vector Models for Studying Semantic Relationships in Medieval Languages

by Kimberly Lifton

Medieval vernaculars are notoriously tricky for digital humanists to work with because they lack standardized spelling. Especially when using out-of-the-box libraries and software, most Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques simply do not work well for medieval languages. However, word-to-vector models have the capacity to handle noise like spelling variants when trained on a significant number of words. As part of my PhD project, which examines the representations of Muslims in textual sources during the rise of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, I have created custom word-to-vector models using Middle French texts. These models capture the constellations of Muslim representations in Middle French texts at the word level. My methodology considers the exploratory potential of word-to-vector models for shaping research questions in a process that Gabor Mihaly Toth has aptly described as “semantic wanderings.”1
„Talking About Muslims in Middle French: The Potential of Word-to-Vector Models for Studying Semantic Relationships in Medieval Languages“ weiterlesen

  1. Gabor Mihaly Toth, “Women in Early Modern Handwritten News: Random Walks and Semantic Wandering in the Medici Archive,” Journal of Digital History 3.2 (2024). https://journalofdigitalhistory.org/en/article/jnkqqTTKW8km []

EuroCarto 2022 – presenting DigiKAR to the international cartographic community

Dealing with uncertainty and capturing the underrepresented

by Jaap Geraerts

Since I started my project on the schism in the Catholic Church in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic in the summer of 2019, I have been creating a dataset that comprises the information contained in lists of baptisms, burials, and marriages. This information enables me to trace the movement of Catholics to another, competing Catholic Church in the context of the schism. Consider, for example, Henricus Verbruggen and Maria Blomevelt. They baptised their first two children in a mission station that was part of the Church of Utrecht but had their third and last child baptised in the Roman Catholic Church (see Fig. 1). „Dealing with uncertainty and capturing the underrepresented“ weiterlesen