Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana

On Friday the 30th of December, all the Work Packages of the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana project gathered in Vienna to discuss the results of the last 6 months.

_{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)

Ewelina Rockenbauer – WP1 from DM2E

####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.

Evelyn Droege – EDM specification for DM2E from DM2E

Kai Eckert from the University of Mannheim, now leading WP2, made a number of proposals how the improved EDM should be further developed in order to make it as usable as possible for both the user, as well as the memory institutions.

Kai Eckert – A Linked Data based Infrastructure for DM2E from DM2E

Konstantin Baierer presented the ingestion tool OmNom he has been working on. The tool will make it easier for memory institutions to turn their metadata into RDF by oploading it in OmNom.

Konstantin Baierer – OmNom from DM2E

Finally Nasos Drosopoulos of the National Technical University of Athens presented the work they have done on MINT, a web based platform that implements aggregation workflows.

Nasos Drosopoulos – MINT DM2E from DM2E

####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.

Beyond Infrastructure – Stefan Gradmann (Leipzig Digital Humanities Seminar, 7th November 2012) from DM2E

Christian Morbidoni of Net7 presented the current status of Pundit, the semantic annotation tool they are developing and explained how the Wittgenstein pilot will make use of their toolset.

Christian Morbidoni (Net7) – WP3 from DM2E

####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.

Work Package 4 (Month 6-11 Review) from DM2E

It was good to see that all deliverables were achieved and especially the recent work of WP2 with the mapping of metadata into the new EDM was very impressive. In early 2013, DM2E will start with the testing of several of the tools being developed during the Wittgenstein pilot.

In the second week of November, several members of the DM2E project were present at the annual EVA/MINERVA digital heritage conference in Israel. During this two day conference a couple of presentations and a hands-on workshop was given.

During the plenary session on the Tuesday, Dov Winer, scientific leader of Judaica Europeana and content provider to DM2E, presented the importance of digitised heritage heritage for research in the digital humanities.

On Wednesday morning, Sam Leon of the [Open Knowledge Foundation](http://www.okfn.org) gave a high level overview of the activities in DM2E.

Sam Leon – Introduction to DM2E from DM2E

In the afternoon, the Open Knowledge Foundation organised an [OpenGLAM](http://www.openglam.org) workshop together with several partners like Wikimedia Israel and Creative Commons Israel. Around 30 participants from cultural heritage institutions in Israel attended the workshop where legal issues around open cultural data were discussed. A more detailed report can be found on the [OpenGLAM blog](https://openglam.org/2012/11/21/openglam-workshop-in-jerusalem/).

We have had very positive feedback from the participants and a lot of interest in contributing to the project was established. The idea of cultural material being used for scholarly research is very appealing and complies to the mission statement of almost every cultural institution.

**Where?**: Guys Campus, Hodgkin Building, London, SE1 1UL

**When?**: 21st-22md November

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The Open Humanities Hack was the first Digital Humanities hack organised jointly by the the [Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E)](https://dm2e.eu), [DARIAH](http://dariah.eu), the [Open Knowledge Foundation](https://okfn.org) and [Kings College London Department of Digital Humanities](http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/index.aspx), .

A group of 15 people gathered in the grand confines of the Large Committee Room at Kings College London, Guys Campus.

The principle of the day was simple: bring a mix of researchers, data providers and coders together to hack on new open-source applications developed by the DM2E project, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Kings College Digital Humanities Department.

After a short round of presentations of open-source tools for working with open cultural data the groups started brainstorming what they were going to work on.

#Hack Results

##ReclineJS Timeliner EHRI

The [Timeliner](http://timeliner.reclinejs.com/) is an open-source tool based on the JavaScript Library [ReclineJS](http://okfnlabs.org/recline/). It makes it easy to create visually compelling timelines from Google Spreadsheets. An example of the kind of timelines is one I made earlier this week on Medieval Philosophers is [here](http://timeliner.reclinejs.com/?backend=gdocs&url=https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Al6mO9_3Hr2PdGZnRjEwUWxOekhreTNNZEFEMWRZbkE%23gid=0#explorer). If you’re a medievalist, and you think we’ve missed anyone, update the [Google Spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Al6mO9_3Hr2PdGZnRjEwUWxOekhreTNNZEFEMWRZbkE#gid=0) here to update the timeline.

The Timeliner group, led by Mike Bryant, were working with the [European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Project {EHRI)](http://www.ehri-project.eu/) database currently with 700 test records in it of Neo4J database that contains harvested archival collections descriptions about the Holocaust.

A prototype of the Timeliner was developed locally that allowed our team to pull data out of the EHRI database into JSON and package it up to be sent to the Timeliner.

Below is a screencast of what the Timeliner team were up to

Timeliner with EHRI from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo. 

What was exciting about this group’s work was it was an attempt to use the Timeliner as a resource discovery tool. The [EHRI](http://www.ehri-project.eu/) team are going to start integrating Timeliner in their front-end, so that users can browse and search for Holocaust related archival collections through the Timeliner.

One of the ideas that came out of this groups work for further development for the hack would be to allow Timeliner to not only show information about where the archival collections is but also about where the objects within it relate to.

##Semantically annotating the Walters Museum Manuscripts

The second group used [Pundit](http://thepund.it), a powerful annotation tool being developed as part of [DM2E](https://dm2e.eu), to semantically annotate facsimile images of manuscripts. Simone Fonda a developer from Net7 the company behind Pundit, opened the hack with a presentation on the current state of the tool:

 

The set out to [annotate a number of digitised facsimile images from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore](http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/Data/WaltersManuscripts/W533/data/W.533/sap/W533_000261_sap.jpg) by dividing up each written line of the manuscript regions defined by automatically generated polygons.

The polygons that were generated then needed to be associated with a JSON annotation giving the line number, to which comments and transcriptions could then be attached in Pundit. On Day 2 the group also experimented with using OCR for the regions of the image that were picked out further.

The work that group were doing could ultimately be used for transcribing manuscripts which is an important objective as part of the [DM2E](https://dm2e.eu) project and will be taken forward there.

##Visualising Dark Star

The final group formed around the idea of analysing and visualising narrative in works of art.

They used [Contextus](http://contextus.net/) the front-end of a triple-store that stores data about events in literary works and the characters involved.

The first task was to pull the data out of the triple-store via a SPARQL query, this data was then loaded into a database by one of the team. The group chose John Carpenter’s film “Dark Star”.

The team then used D3 JS to visualise the events as a scatter graph. Along the X-axis you can see the numbered events of Dark Star, and along the Y-axis the characters involved in the play.

As a follow up the team are building a script to pull data from the Contextus database so that it can automatically be visualised in D3.

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#More to Come

The two-days were a great success and pave the way for more Humanities Hackdays. Stay tuned on the [Open Humanities mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-humanities) for updates about forthcoming hack days. You can see what other people had to say about it via the dedicated Twitter hashtag #HumantiesHack.

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#Tools and Data Used on the Day

More information on the tools and data used at the hack can be found in below (powered by [Listify](http://okfnlabs.org/listify/)):

We are pleased to announce that the DM2E project is a partner in the [Minerva Digital Heritage conference](http://www.digital-heritage.org.il/index.html) in Israel taking place from 13th-14th in Jerusalem.

The programme has now been published [here](http://www.digital-heritage.org.il/Program2012.html) and includes presentations from the [National Library of Israel](http://web.nli.org.il/sites/nli/english/Pages/default.aspx), the [AGORA project](http://www.project-agora.eu/), [Judaica Europeana](http://www.judaica-europeana.eu/) and a hands-on workshop for using [Pundit](http://thepund.it/) and [Korbo](http://korbo.muruca.org/) organised by the Net7 team. There will also be a workshop on legal barriers to openly licensing metadata and content from [Creative Commons Israel](http://creativecommons.org.il/), the [GLAM-Wiki project](http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM) and the [Open Knowledge Foundation](https://okfn.org).

If you would like to find out more about the conference, visit the [website](http://www.digital-heritage.org.il/index.html).

Last week the [Open Knowledge Festival](http://okfestival.org/) took place in Helsinki. Over 1000 participants from the world over took part in a week of workshops, hackdays and keynote addresses on all aspects of the open knowledge movement.

One of the major topic streams at the Festival was the [Open Cultural Heritage](http://okfestival.org/open-cultural-heritage/) stream that consisted of three days of activities bringing developers, open evangelists and digital humanists together for a series of talks, workshops and coding sprints.

[Net7](http://www.netseven.it/), leaders of DM2E Work Package 3, and the developers behind DM2E’s Digital Humanities tool stack which includes [Pundit](http://thepund.it/) and [Korbo](http://korbo.muruca.org/) were a key part of the three days of activities.

On Tuesday, Net7 led a session at the Cultural Hackday for building add-ons and extensions to Pundit, DM2E’s open-source semantic annotation tool.

First off the team created an add-on to Pundit that allowed for the visualisation of annotations using the [Edgemaps](http://mariandoerk.de/edgemaps/) visualisation engine.

 

Second the team integrated the new Europeana Linked Data API with Pundit, allowing users to easily refer to one or more of the 20 million metdata records [now made available under a the Creative Commons public domain dedication tool](https://blog.okfn.org/2012/09/17/the-revenge-of-the-yellow-milkmaid-cultural-heritage-institutions-open-up-dataset-of-20m-items/).

Net7 also had the opportunity to present a demo of their tool at the [OKFestival Open GLAM workshop](https://openglam.org/) working on top of digitised Finnish texts. [Open GLAM](https://openglam.org) is a component of the DM2E project aimed at encouraging more galleries, libraries, archives and museums to open up more of their digitised content and metdata for use in teaching and research.

For more information on DM2E and Net7 at OKFest see the Net7 [dedicated webpage](http://thepund.it/okfest.php) with prototypes and presentations from the festival.

From 17th till the 22nd of September, the Open Knowledge Foundation will organise the very first [Open Knowledge Festival](http://okfestival.org/) in Helsinki. This will be a full week of participatory sessions, keynote lectures, workshops, hackathons and satellite events. Next to a [cultural and scientific hackday](http://okfestival.org/open-culture-and-science-hackday/), the OpenGLAM initiative organises a full day workshop about open cultural data for Finnish cultural heritage institutions. During this workshop, we will investigate and discuss the various possibilities and obstacles of opening up your cultural data as an institution. Together with various partners like [Wikimedia Finland](http://fi.wikimedia.org/wiki/Etusivu), [OpenCultuurData](http://www.opencultuurdata.nl/about/), and [Creative Commons Finland](http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Finland) we will continue the discussion how to overcome the barriers to opening up data in the cultural heritage sector.

*The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland*

This workshop aims to enrich and stimulate the discussion on openness within the memory institutions in Finland by supporting the construction of a network with Finnish and foreign memory institutions interested in open content and open access. Meaningful open access is key for promoting open content and legal creative use/re-use of cultural heritage. At the moment there is a need to demonstrate this, by making a showcase of the practical solutions, strategies and the ‘best practices’ in opening memory institutions and their holdings to a wider public.

We invite around 25 representatives from cultural heritage institutions to join us in the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland during this workshop where we will discuss different aspects, opportunities and issues about open data with a wide variety of experts.

For more information and registrations [click here](http://okfestival.org/open-glam-workshop/)

##Program##

– 9:00-9:30 – Coffee & Registration
– 9:30-9:40 – Welcome by The Society of Swedish Literature
– 9:40-9:50 – Introduction by Sanna Martilla (Aalto University)

####Presentations####

– 10:00-10:20 – The Open GLAM initiative: an introduction to open data in the cultural heritage space by Joris Pekel & Sam Leon (Open Knowledge Foundation)
– 10:20-10:40 – “Common Challenges, Common Solutions. Working Together Towards Openness” – Experiences of opening up content in Denmark by Merete Sanderhoff (Statens Museum for Kunst, The National Gallery of Denmark)
– 10:40-11:00 – [Pundit](http://thepund.it): Re-using cultural heritage data in the scholarly domain (Net7)
– 11:00-11:10 – Coffee
– 11:10-11:30 – An introduction to open licensing by Creative Commons
– 11:30-11:50 – Wikimedia and cultural heritage in Finland by Tommi Kovala & Ulpu Pajari (Wikimedia Finland)
– 11:50-12:15 – Discussion
– 12:15-13:00 – Lunch break

####Case Studies####

– 13:00-13:20 – Open Cultural Data Initiative (NL) by Nikki Timmermans (Knowledgeland) and Maarten Brinkerink (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)
– 13.20-13:40 – “Finna – Opening Access to Cultural Heritage and Scientific Information” by Aki Lassila (The National Library of Finland&The National Digital Library)
– 13.40-14:00 – “Big Ideas – Small Steps. Towards an Open Archive” by Tove Ørsted (The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland)

####Workshop####

– 14:00-15:00 Break-out sessions where we discuss the various experiences and issues of the participants. Hosted by Sanna Marttila & Mariana Salgado
– 15:00-15:30 – Wrapping up & ending the workshop
– 15:30-16:00 – Transport to main venue (Aalto University, Arts)
– 16:00 – Keynote [Michael Edson](http://okfestival.org/guest-speakers/)

To attend this workshop participants will need an OKFestival week or day pass which can be [purchased here](http://okfestival.org/early-bird-okfest-tickets/). If you are planing to attend, please register for the workshop using [this form](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AurHTw6DN0vNdGxOTmx6eDdTMG1OMnhxUW0zdWE2bEE). For additional questions and comments, feel free to send an email to joris.pekel [at] okfn.org