Newsletter November 2012

Dear all,

We are happy to announce the second Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana newsletter. In this, we will give an overview of all the events around the DM2E
project in the last three months. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to [email protected]

Also, make sure to follow @DM2Europeana for the latest updates.

In this newsletter

* Wittgenstein pilot about to start
* Open Humanities Awards
* DM2E ingestion prototype
* OKFest
* Pundit new release (0.13 – Pumpkin)

Wittgenstein pilot about to start

After finishing the Requirements Report in August, content providers within WP1 have continued converting their metadata to the new EDM Specification currently called EDM+ within the DM2E project. This is now well on the way and the preparations of the Wittgenstein pilot have started.

During this pilot a group of scholars will begin working on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Brown Book as it is made available to DM2E by the Wittgenstein Archive at the University of Bergen (WAB). They will gather around wittgensteinsource.org in order to address their
questions to the Brown Book, using linked data software from the DM2E project to collect and annotate the texts of particular relevance. Equally through
software, they will be able to interact and comment each other’s views and questions.

Open Humanaties Awards

At the beginning of 2013, we will call for proposals for the first series of the Open Humanities Awards.
The awards will recognise and support exemplary contributions to humanities scholarship that incorporate open source tools to augment interpretation or
argument.

We will accept proposals for 3-6 month projects that use open source tools, open content and/or open data to address a research question in the
humanities.The projects should be finished by August 2013 in time to present findings at OKFestival 2013.

Examples might include visualisations to show networks of correspondence, understanding patterns of influence between authors and texts or representing and
analysing named entities from texts.

More details to follow in December.

DM2E ingestion prototype

As an important milestone, DM2E prepares a prototype infrastructure to demonstrate the whole process from transformation of data to EDM (RDFization). This
way it can be ingested into DM2E’s annotation suite consisting of the Korbo and Pundit platform. Several experiences from the last month will be
integrated, such as the deep analysis of data structures and mapping to a newly developed data model. Alois Pichler (UIB), editor of the Wittgenstein
manuscripts, contributes digitized texts (TEI). Konstantin Baierer (HU) implements a web application where data can be
uploaded, transformed, and shared online. The prototype is not yet ready for publication but early 2013 a beta version will be released.

OKFest

From the 17th till the 22nd of September, the Open Knowledge Foundation organised the biggest open knowledge festival in the world. More than 100
participants joined one of the 250 different sessions within the 13 different topic streams. One of these streams was about Open Cultural Heritage and
associated with DM2E. Here is a brief overview of what has been achieved.

Hackday with Net7

On the first day of the festival, the Open Knowledge Foundation organised a hackday where programmers, developers, designers, artists and data owners came
together to unlock the potential of the openly licensed cultural data of Finland. There was a wide variety of tools and datasets where the participants
could work on and it was great to see the results people were able to produce in this one day event.

Net7
, leaders of DM2E Work Package 3, led a session at the Cultural Hackday for building add-ons and extensions to Pundit, DM2E’s open- source semantic
annotation tool. In preparation of this, they have set up a dedicated page to keep track of their progress.

First off the team created an add-on to Pundit that allowed for the visualisation of annotations using the Edgemapsvisualisation 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 metadata records

now made available under the Creative Commons public domain dedication tool

.

For more info see: https://openglam.org/2012/10/02/okfest-hackday-results

Workshop with Finnish Cultural Heritage Institutions

On Thursday the OKFN organised together with the Finnish Aalto University a workshop for Finnish cultural heritage institutions where the benefits of open
cultural data were explained and several issues were addressed.

After a word of welcome from the chair of the society, Sanna Marttila from the Aalto
University presented her plans to make more Finnish cultural institutions open up their data and announced “AvoinGLAM”, the Finnish partner network of the
OpenGLAM initiative. Setting up a local group allows them to focus on local issues and opportunities and at the same time engage with a wider European
network.

There were many interesting talks about a variety of topics such as licensing, the participatory museum and Pundit. If you have not done so already, it is
definitely worth it having a look at the different presentations.

For more info see:

https://openglam.org/2012/09/27/openglam-workshop-at-the-okfestival-2

After the workshop, the participants went to the main lecture hall of the festival to listen together with 200 others to the keynote of Michael Edson of
the Smithsonian institute.
Michael talked about the scale and impact that is possible with open models for cultural institutions, and the urgent need in society for these models.

The presentation was recorded and can be viewed here: http://bambuser.com/v/2996119

Pundit new release

The new release of the Pundit platform (0.13 – Pumpkin) includes new features and advancements. A short guide to start trying out Pundit has been published
at http://thepund.it/guide.php.

The Pundit Bookmakletversion has been improved and now better on generic web pages. Grab it at http://thepund.it/client.php. Pundit now supports
image annotations: you can select specific polygonal regions of an image and use it in annotations.

With Pundit, connecting two texts, even from different pages, in now much simpler with the new text-to-text facility.

See it in action at http://thepund.it.

Other News

Stefan Gradman presents at the eHumanities seminar

Around the time this newsletter was finished, Stefan Gradmann presented the scholarly domain paper “Beyond infrastructure! – Further Modelling the
Scholarly Research and Collaboration Domain”. This paper has been authored by members of the
Digital Humanities Advisory Board of DM2E. As soon as the paper is published we will share this on the DM2E mailing list. For an abstract see:

http://www.e-humanities.net/assets/seminar/2012/seminar on nov07th.pdf

Jonathan Gray piece on Data Blog about Europeana release

On September 12th, Europeana opened up data on 20 million cultural items

Jonathan Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation looked at the significance of today’s release of open data from Europeana in his article published by the
guardian.

The article can be found here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/sep/12/europeana- cultural-heritage-library-europe

OKFN at SXSW

The Open Knowledge Foundation has been invited to join a panel during the annual South by Southwest conference. Sam Leon will join an international panel
that will explore the many ways in which cultural heritage institutions are sharing content, what people are doing with this content, as well as exploring
some of the thornier issues of open access across borders and institutions.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/4580

Upcoming Events

13-14 November 2012, Minerva Conference Jerusalem

At the Minerva conference in Israel, DM2E partners Net7 and the Open Knowledge Foundation will present in a number of workshops. Together with the Judaica Europeanaproject there will be a workshop on licensing issues and open cultural data. Net7 will demo Pundit and Korbo and the OKFN will present the DM2E project during a lecture on tools for the digital humanities.

http://www.digital-heritage.org.il

21-22 November 2012, Humanities Hack

This London event is the first of a series of hackdays organised for coders and researchers
and intended to nurture research-driven experimentation with existing openly licensed humanities data.

The aim of the hackday is not to produce complete applications but to experiment with methods and technologies to investigate these data sets so that at
the end we can have an understanding of the types of novel techniques that are emerging. We are curating a list of datasets at the moment for use at the
hack, please have a look at them and add any that you think would be good to look at on the day.

It’s set to be a fantastic day with people who have been involved in some of the most exciting open source Digital Humanities projects already signed-up
such as TEXTUS and Pundit. Sign-up form can be found here

Thanks again for your continuing interest in the project, the DM2E team