This means the Pundit team will be presenting the tool to semantically annotate text to an international crowd of linked open data professionals in Montréal. During the summit in June, the winner will be picked out of four finalists.

The Pundit tool is being developed by the Italian company Net7 as part of the DM2E project. It enables users to annotate web pages and create structured data. The annotations can be collected in notebooks and shared with others to create collaborative structured knowledge. Annotations span from simple comments to semantic links to the Web of Data (as Freebase.com and Dbpedia.org), to fine granular cross-references and citations.

The video was produced by Net7 and Elena D’Ettole, with the support of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Many thanks for all the support and votes for Pundit.

This month, we have finished the first operational version of our DM2E model (v1.0), a specialisation of the EDM for handwritten manuscripts. The ontology has been developed within Work Package 2 with a lot of input from others in the project. Especially results of extensive mapping workshops with our data providers were integrated into the model. Metadata of various formats like TEI, EAD and MARC21 was analysed and used to create new classes and properties that specialise the current EDM.

 Screenshot from the DM2E model representation on Neologism.

How to get the DM2E model?

You can find the specification of the model…

… as a pdf file and in the owl ontology, which can both be downloaded from the documents section

… as well as an html representation on Neologism via the dm2e schema namespace: http://onto.dm2e.eu/schemas/dm2e/1.0/

For more information, please write to julia.iwanowa (at) ibi.hu-berlin.de or evelyn.droege (at) ibi.hu-berlin.de

We are glad to get your feedback or to hear from your own modelling experiences!

Earlier this year we put out a call to humanities academics and technologists to see if they could come up with innovative ideas for small technology projects that would further humanities research by using open content, open data and/or open source.

We’re very pleased to announce that the winners are Dr Bernhard Haslhofer (University of Vienna) and Dr Robyn Adams (Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London). Both winners will receive financial support to help them undertake the work they proposed and will be blogging about the progress of their project. You can follow their progress via the DM2E blog.

Award 1: Semantic tagging for old maps… and other things

The first Award goes to Dr Bernhard Haslhofer of Vienna University. His project will involve building on an open source web application he has been working on called Maphub.

Dr Haslhofer told us a little bit about the inspiration for his project:

“People love old maps” is a statement that we heard a lot from curators in libraries. This combined with the assumption that many people also have knowledge to share or stories to tell about historical maps, was our motivation to build Maphub.

In essence Maphub is an open source Web application that, first of all, pulls out digitized historical maps from closed environments, adds zooming functionality, and assigns Web URIs so that people can talk about them online. It also supports two main use cases:

(i) georeferencing maps by linking points on the map to Geonames locations; (ii) commenting on maps or map regions by creating annotations. While users are entering their comments, Maphub analyzes the entered text on the fly and suggests so-called semantic tags, which the user accepts or rejects.

Semantic tags appear like “normal” tags on the user interface, but are in fact links to DBpedia resources. In that way, the user links her annotations and therefore also the underlying historical map with resources from two open data sources. Besides consuming open data during the annotation authoring process, Maphub also contributes collected knowledge back as open data by exposing all annotations following the W3C Open Annotation specification. In that way, Maphub supports people in a loop of using and producing open data in the context of historical maps.

Dr Haslhofer looks forward to seeing how collaborations will blossom between these various web annotation systems:

We believe that people also love other things on the Web and that Web annotation tools should support semantic tagging as well. Therefore, we will make it available as a plugin for Annotorious. Annotorious is a JavaScript image annotation library that can be used in any Website, and is also compatible with the Open Knowledge’s Foundations’s Annotator.

Annotorious and Maphub have common origins and the Open Humanities will support us in unifing parallel development streams into a single, reusable annotation tool that works for digitized maps but also for other media. We will also conduct another user study to inform the design of that function for other application contexts.

Award 2: Joined Up Early Modern Diplomacy: Linked Data from the Correspondence of Thomas Bodley

The second award goes to Dr Robyn Adams of Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London. The project will re-purpose the open resource that Dr Adams has been building with a team of others: the Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley.

The project will use ‘additional’ information that was encoded into the digitisation of early modern letters that took place at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. In the initial incarnation of the project this data which included biographical and geographical information contained within letters was not used (although it was encoded).

Dr Adams told us a little bit about what she plans on doing with the money from the Awards:

With the prize funding from the Open Humanities Awards, we propose to mine the data that was generated but not fully used in the first phase of the project. This data is a rich source of biographical and geographical information, the visualization of which evokes the complex and diverse texture of the late sixteenth-century European diplomatic and military landscape. Bodley’s position in The Hague as the only English representative on the Dutch Council of State put him at the centre of a heterogeneous nexus of correspondents a time long before the Republic of Letters burgeoned in the subsequent century.

The project will interrogate three data fields within the larger data set of Bodley’s diplomatic correspondence in order to generate visualizations; the network of correspondents and recipients, and the people and places mentioned within the letters. These visualizations will be incorporated into the project website, where they will enhance and extend the knowledge derived from the existing corpus of correspondence. The visualizations, which will have scope to be playful while drawn from scrupulous scholarship, will offer an alternative pathway for scholars and the interested public to understand that in this period especially, the political, university and kinship networks were fundamental to advancement and prosperity.

“In mapping the relational activity between data sets,” Dr Adams went on, “I hope to further illuminate and reanimate Bodley’s position within the Elizabethan compass. Furthermore, I hope to demonstrate that fruitful routes of enquiry can result if scholars commit to going the extra mile to encode and record data in their research that may not have immediate relevance to their own studies.”

We offer our heartiest congratulations to the both Dr Haslhofer and Dr Adams both of whom will be presenting their work at the forthcoming Web as Literature conference at the British Library.

The Pundit tool is being developed by the Italian company Net7 as part of the DM2E project. It enables users to annotate web pages and create structured data. The annotations can be collected in notebooks and shared with others to create collaborative structured knowledge. Annotations span from simple comments to semantic links to the Web of Data (as Freebase.com and Dbpedia.org), to fine granular cross-references and citations. For more information about the tool you can watch this video:

During this day, we will work with the rich illuminated medieval manuscript collection that has been made openly available by the National Library of the Netherlands.

We will start the day with a series of presentation about the tool and the possibilities of it for humanities research. After lunch we will work with Pundit and see how it can help us answering research questions in a collaborative way. This session is being led by one of the lead-developers of Pundit and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

The program:

• 10:00-10:30 – coffee and registration
• 10:30-12:00 – Presentations.
  • Welcome and introduction to manuscript collection
  • Introduction into the potential of Linked Open Data in the humanities
  • Introduction into Pundit
• 12:00-13:00 – Lunch
• 13:00-16:00 Pundit hands-on workshop
• 16:00- 17:00 Feedback session and goodbye

Important information

• Date: Thursday 23d of May
• Time: 10:00 – 17:00
• Where: National Library of the Netherlands, Den Hague (click here for a map)
• Attending the event is free, but places are limited. Please sign up for the event using this form.

If possible, please bring your own laptop. We have a few desktop computers available at the library

To get an idea what Pundit is about, have a look at this new video:

Any coder, developer (bring your javascript/html skills!) or designer is welcome, along with anyone (skilled or not!) interested in knowing what Pundit is, how to customize it or use it for your digital library project, or adapt it to help your daily workflow.

This free event aims to bring together software developers, scholars and all kind of users to try to steer Pundit’s roadmap following crowdsourced suggestions and ideas, building useful and interesting proof of concepts or pure hacks.

An initial plenary brainstorming session will determine what the hackers will (try to) develop during the two days. A non-technical workshop will run alongside the coding, a sort of Pundit users meeting or focus group. In the end, a final meet-up on the afternoon of the 4th will be open to all, to see what hackers hacked!

Some ideas to get you started:

• connect more linked data providers (VIAF? dbpedia.de/it/es? .. your own!)
• automatic entity extractor improvements
• general user interface
• image annotation User Interface improvements
• general annotation model: OA compliancy
• visualizations (edgemap/politics/ …. lodlive? d3?)
• ASK User Interface (annotations, notebooks, ..)
• ASK general public search

.. or bring your use case and let’s hack it together!

Want to join us? Fill up this form.

For any information, pundit@netseven.it

Taking place on 10th June 2013 and hosted by the British Library the event will bring together leading digital humanists and cultural heritage professionals and will feature a keynote from Ted Nelson the inventor of hypertext.

Attendance is free, but places are limited. Sign-up here to guarantee yourself a place.

The programme includes:

• A keynote by the inventor of hypertext, Ted Nelson
• A dedicated Digital Humanities panel on modelling the humanities with Professor Stefan Gradmann (KU Leuven), Dr Tobias Blanke (Kings College London) and Dominic Oldman (Research Space, British Museum)
• The European Digital Library and Linked Open Data with a presentation from Antoine Isaac
• Hands-on workshops with DM2E’s flagship tool, Pundit, for semantically annotating and linking texts and images

More information on the event can be found here.

We are excited to announce the first ever Open Humanities Awards. The are €15,000 worth of prizes on offer for 3-5 projects that use open content, open data or open source tools to further humanities teaching and research. Whether you’re interested in patterns of allusion in Aristotle, networks of correspondence in the Jewish Enlightenment or digitising public domain editions of Dante, we’d love to hear about the kinds of open projects that could support your interest!

Why are we running these Awards?

Humanities research is based on the interpretation and analysis of a wide variety of cultural artefacts including texts, images and audiovisual material. Much of this material is now freely and openly available on the internet enabling people to discover, connect and contextualise cultural artefacts in ways previously very difficult.

We want to make the most of this new opportunity by encouraging budding developers and humanities researchers to collaborate and start new projects that use this open content and data paving the way for a vibrant cultural and research commons to emerge.

Who can apply?

The Awards are open to any citizen of the EU.

Who is judging the Awards?

The Awards will be judged by a stellar cast of leading Digital Humanists:

• Professor Stefan Gradmann, Humboldt University
• Dr Susan Schreibman, Trinity College Dublin
• Professor Andrew Prescott, Kings College London
• Professor David Robey, University of Oxford
• Dr Melissa Terras, University College London
• Nicole Coleman, Stanford University Humanities Center
• Dr Laurent Romary, INRIA

What do we want to see?

The Mapping the Republic of Letters project is a great example of what is possible with humanities data

We are challenging humanities researchers, designers and developers to create innovative projects open content, open data or open source to further teaching or research in the humanities.

For example you might want to:

• Start a project to collaboratively transcribe, annotate, or translate public domain texts
• Explore patterns of citation, allusion and influence using bibliographic metadata or textmining
• Analyse and/or visually represent complex networks or hidden patterns in collections of texts
• Use computational tools to generate new insights into collections of public domain images, audio or texts

You could start a project from scratch or build on an existing project. For inspiration you can have a look at the open-source tools the Open Knowledge Foundation has developed for use with cultural resources.

As long as your project involves open content, open data or open source tools and makes a contribution to humanities research, the choice is yours!

Who is behind the awards?

The Awards are being coordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation and are part of the DM2E project. They are also supported by the Digital Humanities Quarterly.

How to apply

Applications are open from today (13th February 2013). Go to openhumanitiesawards.org to apply. The application deadline is 12th March 2013, so get going and good luck!

More information…

For more information on the Awards including the rules and ideas for open datasets and tools to use visit openhumanitiesawards.org.

Comments were taken on the current draft of the co-authored paper on the scholarly domain which will is being readied for publication.

Christian Morbidonni of Net7 updated the group on the progress that was being made with Korbo and Pundit. Demoing fantastic integrations of Pundit with LODLive and notebook functionalities, as well as improvement to the genera user experience.

Alois Pilcher of Bergen University took the stage to present the plans for the up-and-coming “Wittgenstein Incubator” in which scholars will use Pundit to annotate Wittgenstein’s Brown Book via Wittgenstein Source in order to gain further user feedback on the technical development of the annotation tool. More to follow very soon on this blog.

The day was rounded off with a brainstorming session on further modelling of the scholarly domain. A detailed look at was taken at the various meanings of modelling as Professor Gradmann honed in on the concept of modelling that stands at the heart of much of the DM2E Advisory Board’s work on this project:

OWLIM-SE

OWLIM is a family of semantic repositories, RDF database management system, implemented in Java, delivering full performance through both Sesame and Jena, robust support for the semantics of RDFS, OWL 2 RL and OWL 2 QL, best scalability, loading and query evaluation. More information about OWLIM is available at http://www.ontotext.com/owlim.

In the cultural heritage domain OWLIM powers the SPARQL end point of the British Museum, it was selected as the semantic repository of choice by the Yale Center of British Art, and Europeana SPARQL end point hosted at Ontotext , which allows access to the entire Europeana collection in EDM (close to 1 billion RDF statements) in a reason-able view, which employs inference and provides 4 times more (close to 4 billion) statements available to retrieve, is also powered by OWLIM.

DM2E aims at developing tools to enable as many providers as possible to get their data into Europeana, and to stimulate the creation of new tools and services for re-use of Europeana data in the Digital Humanities. OWLIM will provide a solid, scalable and powerful backend to allow the project to meet its objectives. In DM2E OWLIM will be used as a backend to the annotation tools KORBO and PUNDIT, developed by Net7, and as an overall data integration repository which will carry experiments with the semantic data produced during the project.

We are very excited about the possibilities Ontotext will add to DM2E and are looking forward to working together.

_{Stefan Gradman presents the Scholarly Domain Model during the All-WP meeting in the Austrian National Library}

The morning started with a presentation from all the Work Packages and was followed by more specific presentations about the tools being developed in the project.

WP1 – Content providers

The different content providers of DM2E have finished their first requirements report for WP2 and will continue delivering the digitised content and metadata to the project. In early January the Wittgenstein Incubator will start where a group of scholars will work on Wittgenstein’s Brown Book, being provided by the University of Bergen (WAB)

WP2 – Interoperability Infrastructure

In WP2, many important progress has been made in the last six months. The goal of WP2 is to create a workflow for memory institutions to easily convert their metadata into EDM ready data. First, Evelyn Dröge from the Humboldt University in Berlin presented the work they have been doing on developing an improved version of the European Data Model (EDM) and how they have worked on developing an EDM specification for manuscripts.

WP3 – Digital Humanities

Stefan Gradman of the Humboldt University and leader of the project, presented the talk that he gave at the Leipzig Digital Humanities Seminar earlier in November. Here, he gave an extensive introduction into DM2E and its possibilites. He also presented the Scholarly Domain Model and how it will the change the way research is being done in the humanities.

WP4 – Community and Dissemination

Sam Leon of the Open Knowledge Foundation presented the numerous activities that have been organised in the last six months and also announced the upcomming Open Humanities Scholarship Awards.