Integrating library data into an authority file: The challenges of MARC XML and inconsistent transcription practices

a guest post by Till Grallert

A recent Twitter post from my former colleague Anne Klammt made me aware of a recent relaunch of “Zeitschriftendatenbank” (ZDB), the portal for periodical holdings in German (and Austrian) libraries.

Part of the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, DNB), the website looks great and provides a lot of data-driven functionality, such as maps and timelines of holdings. The display language of the website itself, though not the bibliographic data, can be toggled between German and English. This is a welcome nod to international users and will certainly increase the visibility of this important portal. However, it must be noted that unfortunately the dataset of bibliographic data is not as accessible as the interface. Languages written in scripts other than Latin are provided in a variety of inconsistent transcriptions into Latin script for mostly historical technical reasons. This is not the fault of ZDB per se but it will prevent communities from the Global South from finding and accessing their own cultural heritage, which for various reasons are held by institutions in the Global North. This is especially relevant for Arabic material, as I will elaborate in the section on transliterations below.
„Integrating library data into an authority file: The challenges of MARC XML and inconsistent transcription practices“ weiterlesen

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

Text zu XML mit Python auf Basis des „Bomber’s Baedeker“

von Felix Bach und Cristian Secco

Die Transformation von digitalisierten Druckwerken von einer Bilddatei zur maschinenlesbaren XML-Datei ist für zahlreiche Methoden der Digital Humanities ein wichtiger Schritt in der Datenaufbereitung. In diesem Beitrag präsentieren wir einen Ansatz auf Basis eines Python-Skripts am Beispiel eines Werkes mit einer besonderen Binnenstruktur: Der Bomber’s Baedeker war ein „Reiseführer“, welcher von der Royal Air Force genutzt wurde, um während des 2. Weltkrieges deutsche Industriestandorte anzugreifen. „Text zu XML mit Python auf Basis des „Bomber’s Baedeker““ weiterlesen

Doing Digital History with Python I: reading (messy) XML & JSON data

by Monika Barget

During our DH brownbag lunches at the IEG, colleagues have repeatedly asked us if we could recommend Python packages for digital history. We have therefore set up a list of packages we at the IEG DH Lab are using for the analysis of text (stored, for instance, in XML/TEI or JSON formats), the modelling of historical networks, or the creation of interactive maps.

The list Python for digital history is based on our personal experiences and, though by no means exhaustive, may serve as an appetizer for “Doing Digital History with Python”. In a series of blog posts, we will try and introduce you to some of the packages mentioned through case studies from current IEG research.

Today’s post covers the extraction of data from XML and JSON files with xml.etree.ElementTree, lxml, json(5) and beautifulsoup(4) as reading structured text is often a starting point of digital history projects. „Doing Digital History with Python I: reading (messy) XML & JSON data“ weiterlesen

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