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Geohumanities III: analysing early modern mobility through birth and apprenticeship letters

By Monika Barget

In the winter term 2020/2021, Jaap Geraerts and I worked with students in the Mainz MA programme “Digitale Methoden in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften” (“Digital Methods in the Humanities and Cultural Studies”) to create a digital edition of early modern birth and apprenticeship letters. The edition includes records in French and Latin as well as German and highlights people’s cross-border mobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. „Geohumanities III: analysing early modern mobility through birth and apprenticeship letters“ weiterlesen

Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode IV: Detecting OCR transcription errors

by Markus Müller

In the last episode, we built a pipeline to convert a diplomatic transcription into normalized Latin text. The code works fine as long as the diplomatic transcription is correct. But what happens if the transcription contains errors or, even worse, if the printer in the 16th century misspelled a word? – Right now, nothing would happen at the moment because our pipeline cannot detect these errors. This is a problem because as soon as we start comparing two editions of the same text to check for censorship (and that’s where we are going!), the slightest difference between the two texts may be interpreted as censorship. Can we solve this problem? – Yes, we can!

„Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode IV: Detecting OCR transcription errors“ weiterlesen

Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode III: Normalizing 16th century raw text

by Markus Müller

Visiting a museum as a kid, I sometimes wondered why I could hardly read anything in the medieval or early modern books and manuscripts displayed in the exhibition. Even after I learned Latin in school, the situation did not improve. I was not aware that people in former centuries used a lot more abbreviations than today, especially in Latin texts. As long as paper (or parchment) was very expensive, scribes and printers tried to save as much space as possible. Therefore, a sentence like “In principio fecit deus caelum et terram” could be abbreviated as “In prīcipio fecit de celū ťrā” (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth” — the first verse of the Bible). You may have noted that these abbreviations worked differently than abbreviations like “WWW” or “U.S.” that we are familiar with today, and it would be nice if they could be resolved automatically with a Python script.

„Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode III: Normalizing 16th century raw text“ weiterlesen

Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode II: Let Python speak to Transkribus

by Markus Müller

In the first episode of this miniseries, I explained how to use OCR with Transkribus to create a diplomatic transcription from images of 16th century Latin prints. However, the resulting text is full of abbreviations and may contain transcription errors. In both cases, Python scripts could help to normalize the text and to detect possible errors.

An indispensable prerequisite for pimping the Transkribus workflow with Python is flawless access to the data stored on the Transkribus server. It would not make much sense to manually download the data, then run some Python scripts on the command line, and finally upload the data again manually, especially when we talk about hundreds of pages to be processed. This episode will show how to download and upload transcriptions from and to the Transkribus server using Python. (Basic to intermediate knowledge of Python is required.)

„Uncovering censorship in the 16th century with Transkribus and Python. Episode II: Let Python speak to Transkribus“ weiterlesen

Games for the humanities / religious studies – scarce or simply hard to find?

by Monika Barget

Recently, I have more extensively explored serious games for teaching and research communication in the humanities. In a workshop aimed primarily at religious studies scholars, I intended to address analogue board games as well as hybrid and exclusively digital games. And apart from games I myself had used or contributed to, I hoped to present other examples in different languages. Especially in the field of hybrid and digital humanities games, however, my search retrieved few results. This post summarises the vivid discussion with participants that followed my invited talk “Seriously, games?” in the #digitalDonnerstag workshop series hosted by Arbeitskreis Mittelbau und Nachwuchs der Deutschen Vereinigung für Religionswissenschaft e.V. (AKMN). „Games for the humanities / religious studies – scarce or simply hard to find?“ weiterlesen

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

LinkedArt: exploring network analysis in art history

by Sophia Renz and Vanessa Tissen

The beginning

It all started with the seminar on network analysis in the summer semester of 2020. After learning about the basics of network theory and building networks in Python ourselves, the teachers Aline Deicke and Demival Vasques Filho asked us students to work in groups to develop a project combining our individual humanities backgrounds with network analysis. We are specialists in art history, which we wanted to include in the project. On top of that, the IEG DH Lab provided us with funds and support to further explore the application of network analysis in the field, e.g. whether art history datasets are available and to what extent they are usable or which art historical analyses or topics have already been done. The research project was kept relatively open, so we were able to look at the subject matter first. Tasks and questions developed during the following research. „LinkedArt: exploring network analysis in art history“ weiterlesen

DH fun on the road: 3D models from your photos using photogrammetry

A How-to have fun with DH on the road by generating 3D models from photos using Structure From Motion Photogrammetry

by Sarah Lang

The Digital Humanities have such a huge inventory of digital methods that it is pretty hard to keep up with the learning of new methods while working with others just recently learned. Shifting academic work into free time can be annoying, but learning new things in a fun way – may keep the leisure factor. This is why I wanted to use this blog post to share a fun way making first steps in 3D while beeing on the road – be that a holiday or conference travel. „DH fun on the road: 3D models from your photos using photogrammetry“ weiterlesen

Managementbedarf in Forschungsprojekten der Digital Humanities

Präambel: Dieser Text ist ein kollektives Dokument, das keine zuordenbare Autorschaft hat. Die Entstehungsgeschichte dieses Textes geht zurück auf eine Lehrveranstaltung im Sommersemester 2020 zu Projektmanagement in den Digital Humanities im Masterstudiengang „Digitale Methodik in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften“ an der JGU und Hochschule Mainz. Ausgehend von ausgewählter Literatur und der Leitfrage, welcher Managementbedarf in Forschungsprojekten der Digital Humanities entsteht, haben die Studierenden individuelle Ausarbeitungen angefertigt. Die einzelnen Texte der knapp zwanzig Beiträge wurden dann von den Dozenten auf Ebene der Argumente in ihre Teile zerlegt, zu einem einzigen Text zusammengesetzt und nur geringfügig redigiert, um den Lesefluss zu sichern. Dieser Mash-Up-Text entspricht dem Wesen der Digital Humanities – iterativ, kumulativ, kollaborativ. „Managementbedarf in Forschungsprojekten der Digital Humanities“ weiterlesen