oconnoat / clarinExploringHistory

Clarin Exploring History Talk

#Outline

1. Brief introduction to Cendari

2. Results of User Trials and User-centric workshops

   1. What do users think they need?
   2. The difference between what users say they want, what they are interested in, and what they want from others.

3. Results of the Data Archive Interactions

   1. Establishing what is there
   2. Full text is rarely available

4. Results of NLP to help humanists

   1. Domain tuning
   2. Language

5. Results of Infrastructure approaches, and unification challenges

   1. Data Soup
   2. Data API
   3. Knowledge

6. Conclusions

   1. Archival Research Guides
   2. Note taking environment

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#Abstract This talk will give an account of some of the challenges and successes associated with the Cendari Project’s approach to leveraging Natural Language Processing and other Software Infrastructure to research in Historical Archives. Cendari takes a particular focus on collaboration between Information Experts, Technological Experts and Domain Experts. These different constituencies of users have significantly different perception of the available features, the potential value and perhaps even the merits of adopting NLP in Humanities Scholarship.

Cendari is developing a set of flexible infrastructural services designed to support historical inquiry. This includes, from a natural language processing perspective, tasks such as information extraction for entity recognition, entity-driven search and annotation and sharing of research results.

The project has manifested as different tools which are applied to user environments such as a Virtual Note-taking tool, and Archival Research Guides as well as support services for identity, access and provenance.

This talk will discuss results in four areas:

1. The results of user trials and user-centric querying of humanists
2. The results of data and archival interactions and the creation of an archival guide
3. The results of nlp work to assist humanists
4. The creation of infrastructural architecture to leverage services and test cases in different historical domains, particularly in the overall EU context

Of key importance in Cendari have been:

1. The End Users’ needs and requirements.
   • for non-technical users, they are often not aware of what is possible
   • for technologists, they are often not aware of what is useful
2. The available data
   • Archive descriptions
   • Full Text
   • Metadata at different levels
3. The limitations and requirements of specific technologies
   • Natural Language and dialect
   • Assumptions about time or format (eg calendar)
   • Normalisation, consistency and variation over time

The project has reached approximately the half-way mark, and in addition to discussing these concrete outcomes, it would be our objective to present opportunities for collaborative investigation, mutual application of technology and other knowledge sharing opportunities across the Nedimah network, and with the CLARIN project in particular.

The talk will include some details of specific results an findings, as well as overall results of how the process of joining different research communities has evolved.

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#Text of Call:

An international workshop will take place at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, and is the joint effort of two major Europe-wide initiatives: CLARIN (Common Language Resource and Tools Infrastructure) and NeDiMAH (Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities). Applications are invited from those you would like to attend, or present a paper.

The goal of the workshop is to demonstrate how the application of language technology has produced a new understanding of texts in different fields of Humanities. The proliferation of digital resources in the Humanities is leading to the elaboration of new methods, concepts, and theories by means of which researchers can query and interpret large-scale textual collections. The workshop will bring together researchers who already apply language technology, and those who would like to learn about the current state of art in this new and evolving area. The organizers invite researchers (especially early career scholars) who plan to apply language technology but do not already have the necessary skills and technical background. The second main goal of the workshop is to enhance exchange of experiences, disseminate know-how, and to explore potential future collaborations.

/Keynote speaker/: ProfessorTony McEnery(ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science http://cass.lancs.ac.uk/ , Lancaster University). Other speakers to be confirmed.

If you would like to participate, you have until 3 September 2014 to apply for a place. Please complete this simple online form (http://bit.ly/explorehistory), where you are asked for some details and a short statement of the reasons for your interest in participating. Thanks to generous funding from NeDiMAH and CLARIN, participation will be free of charge, and funds will be available to reimburse travel and accommodation expenses for a number of participants. NeDiMAH is funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF).

If you would like to submit a proposal to give a presentation at the workshop on your research results, please send it by email [e-mail]:[e-mail] mailto:[e-mail] 17:00 CET on Friday 3rd September 2014. Proposals for presentations should be 400-500 words in length. This is not essential for participation, and if you do not submit a presentation, you will still have a chance to give a short presentation of your work, or to ask questions. Proposals should focus on research results, not descriptions of projects, resources or methods.

Please get in touch if you have any questions about the event.