Simone Fonda receives the LODLAM award in Montreal

The prize is awarded each year to projects, data visualizations, tools, mashups, meshups, and all types of use cases that “Create demonstrable use cases that leverage Linked Open Data in libraries, archives and museums.”

See [the Pundit video submitted at LODLAM and other introductory videos](http://www.thepund.it/introductory-videos/).

Pundit had to compete with an [incredibly strong set of other projects and tools](http://summit2013.lodlam.net/2013/06/19/lodlam-challenge-finalists-for-your-consideration/), which makes us extra proud of winning this award.

A big thank you goes to all the developers, scholars, content providers and community members who supported Pundit over the last years and helped growing the tool to this moment. Without the invaluable feedback this would not have been possible.

Pundit is open-source and [AGPL](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html), if you are a developer and you want to be updated on how Pundit evolves … or put your ideas on the table, [this google group](https://groups.google.com/d/forum/thepundit) might be of interest.

**Fight for Europeana and Europeana Network and Projects future funding**

From 2015 onwards, Europeana’s funding is to come from the European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). However, in early February 2013, a massive budget cut for this scheme was proposed (see e.g. [http://euobserver.com/news/118998](http://euobserver.com/news/118998)), taking the budget for broadband and digital services from 9 billion euros to just 1 billion.

Europeana and the related projects many of you create and run cost currently 30 million euros per year. We will not get this amount but should fight for as much as we can to continue to develop and deliver real European added value to the citizens of Europe. We are in direct competition with other programmes in health, justice and safer internet, which were also relying on CEF. If we lose the funding, much of the hard work we have all put in will be wasted.

Many of you responded to our recent request to send letters about the cut in the CEF budget to your MEPs, to national contacts in Brussels and to your own government ministers. Europeana is now being asked to make its case for funding under the revised guidelines for CEF, which should be issued at the end of May.

Everyone; partners, projects, network members can help via the #AllezCulture campaign to win the hearts and minds of the politicians and policy makers and get across our messages about the importance of digitised, accessible culture for social, economic and unity reasons.

**What can you do now?**

1. Please use the leaflet** [‘Europeana – the case for funding’](http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/858566/0/AllezCulture+leaflet)** in anyway you can to promote our message. Translate, distribute, publish and blog the document or its messages to your network and contacts,

2. Tweet about the messages: **Europeana supports economic growth; Europeana connects Europe; Europeana makes Europe’s culture available to everyone** using our dedicated hashtag[#AllezCulture](https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%23AllezCulture&src=typd), **and** retweet our messages under** [#AllezCulture](http://bit.ly/17mnbL7)**.

This week we will launch the **#AllezCulture** Facebook Group, which will keep you up to date with the campaign and provide more ideas of further actions you can take to support us. And you can use it to keep us up to date with what you have done or by sending an email to[AllezCulture@europeana.eu](mailto:AllezCulture@europeana.eu) Knowing what you are doing means we can use your efforts to inspire others.

**Background & previous activity**

At the end of March, the European Commission requested a letter from the European Foundation be sent to Neelie Kroes outlining our proposals for funding under CEF. [Read our letter to Neelie Kroes](http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/6e0bef93-491d-4bdd-8bb9-be06261d4d4c). Madam Kroes then requested a meeting with Europeana.

At the end of February, Bruno Racine also sent a letter of support to the Commission. [Read Bruno Racine’s letter](http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/2e0aa1bb-f5ca-4166-86b3-504b7dc86c28).

So far, 31 Europeana Network Members from 17 different European countries have sent 200+ letters to national Members of the European Parliament, national contacts in Brussels and/or national governments.

Know your facts – read this [factsheet](http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/c878ddbd-204e-4f70-b375-d80416f13f5b) detailing how Europeana will work under the CEF – this knowledge forms the basis for your arguments for supporting Europeana’s funding bid.

There is a Europeana Steering Group of Europeana Board member volunteers:

Ms Anne Bergman-Tahon, Federation of European Publishers
Mr Bruno Racine, BnF, Chair Europeana Foundation
Mr Daniel Teruggi, INA
Mr Jan Muller, FIAT/IFTA
Ms Kristiina Hormia, LIBER
Mr Nick Poole, Collections Trust, Chair Europeana Network

This Steering Group is responsible for providing the business case for funding within the next 6 weeks and for guiding the #AllezCulture campaign.

After a word of welcome by Joris Pekel of the Open Knowledge Foundation he gave an introduction into open humanities research. With the network technology we have and the digitisation efforts of the cultural heritage institutions we have the potential to realise this vision of a world in which all human knowledge is freely available for everyone, a world in which scholarly discourse is unimpeded across borders and across languages.

By openly sharing not only our final papers, but also our annotations, micro-observations, notes etcetera, we allow everybody to take our data and re-use and improve them, benefiting research as a whole.

After this talk, Ed van der Vlist, curator of [medieval manuscripts](http://manuscripts.kb.nl) gave an overview of the various digitised collections of the National Library and what their plans are for the coming years. At the moment, the ‘[data services](http://www.kb.nl/banners-apis-en-meer/dataservices-apis)’ of the National Library are offering a number of open datasets for anybody to re-use without any restrictions. In the coming period more will be added.

Simone Fonda, lead developer of the Pundit annotation tool at Net7, then gave an extensive introduction about the Pundit tool.

After installing the bookmarklet which allows the user to annotate any page on the web, the scholars annotated a page from the medieval manuscript collection. To see their annotations, install the [Pundit Bookmarklet](http://thepund.it/bm/den_haag), go to [this page](http://www.kb.nl/en/web-exhibitions/highlights-from-medieval-manuscripts/signs-of-the-zodiac) and activate Pundit by clicking the bookmarklet.

Simone had prepared a couple of [exercises](http://thepund.it/exercises.php) which allowed the participants to explore all functionalities of the tool. The feedback they gave is incredibly valuable for further development of the tool and will be implemented into future version of Pundit.

All together this was a useful workshop for both the participants and the DM2E consortium as a whole and helped to further explore the potential of the web of open data and digital tools in humanities research.

With special thanks to the people at the National Library of the Netherlands for all their help to make this a successful day.

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](http://thepund.it) is being developed by the Italian company [Net7](http://www.netseven.it/) 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](http://freebase.org) and [Dbpedia.org](http://dbpedia.org)), to fine granular cross-references and citations.

The video was produced by [Net7](http://netseven.it/) and [Elena D’Ettole](http://www.elenadettole.com/), with the support of the [Open Knowledge Foundation](https://okfn.org/).

Many thanks for all the support and votes for Pundit.

[The Pundit tool](http://thepund.it) is being developed by the Italian company [Net7](http://www.netseven.it/) 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](http://freebase.org) and [Dbpedia.org](http://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](http://manuscripts.kb.nl/introduction) 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](https://plus.google.com/111353982163615086176/about?hl=en))
– Attending the event is free, but places are limited. Please sign up for the event [using this form](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/forms/d/1aZN_P_xpMmsLpjy05KuzrA0FhRyX-EcxHYIVw32r9ng/viewform).

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](http://goo.gl/bErOa).

For any information, [pundit@netseven.it](mailto: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](http://webasliterature.org/) to guarantee yourself a place.

**The programme includes:**

– A keynote by the inventor of hypertext, **[Ted Nelson](http://hyperland.com/)**
– 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](http://thepund.it), for semantically annotating and linking texts and images

More information on the event can be found [here](http://webasliterature.org).

####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](http://collection.britishmuseum.org/Sparql), it was selected as the semantic repository of choice by the Yale Center of British Art, and [Europeana SPARQL](http://europeana.ontotext.com) 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](http://korbo.muruca.org/) and [PUNDIT](http://www.thepund.it), developed by [Net7](http:///www.netseven.it), 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.

[Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein) (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. In 1999, his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) was ranked as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy by the Baruch Poll, standing out as ‘…the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specialisations and philosophical orientations’.


In 2009, WAB created the online platform [Wittgenstein Source](http://wittgensteinsource.org/) (1) which gives open access to 5,000 pages of manuscripts and typescripts from the [Wittgenstein nachlass](http://wab.uib.no/wab_nachlass.page/), including the Brown Book corpus. The Brown Book was dictated by Wittgenstein to students in Cambridge in 1934-35 as a summary of his philosophy at that time. One aspect of the book is the introduction of ‘language games’ which shed light on the complexity of our language. The Brown Book was revised several times; Wittgensteinsource includes both the typewritten dictation and the last revision in Wittgenstein’s own hand, which led to the Philosophical Investigations.

A group of scholars will gather around Wittgenstein Source in order to address their questions to the Brown Book. In order to achieve this, they will make use of the [Pundit platform](https://dm2e.eu/first-release-of-pundit-and-korbo-ready-for-testing/), which is being developed within the DM2E project. The platform allows scholars to access the Brown Book easily and to create semantic annotations of particular relevance. Through the platform, they will also be able to interact and comment on each other’s views and questions.

WAB will provide the texts as well as an ontology which can be used as the backbone for scholarly annotation and interaction on these texts.(2) This ontology will include names for the single texts (on a remarks level), the persons and works referred to, text-genetical relations, but also terms for subject entries, and, moreover, properties which allow scholars to express argumentative relations between single annotation statements.

The Wittgenstein pilot has an important experimental aspect as it will demonstrate to what extent humanities scholars are willing to migrate research and argumentation activities to a digital environment, and highlight the challenges and limitations they experience as well as the new opportunities this kind of working makes available to them.

Notes

(1) 2009 A. Pichler, in collaboration with H.W. Krüger, D.C.P. Smith, T.M. Bruvik, V. Olstad, and A. Lindebjerg (eds.): Wittgenstein Source Bergen Text and Facsimile Edition. In: Wittgenstein Source. (N) Bergen: WAB, Wittgenstein Source. [http://wittgensteinsource.org/](http://wittgensteinsource.org)

(2) 2012 A. Pichler & A. Zöllner-Weber: Towards Wittgenstein on the Semantic Web. In: Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts. pp. 318-321. (D) Hamburg University Press. [http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/towards-wittgenstein-on-the-semantic-web/](http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/towards-wittgenstein-on-the-semantic-web/)