Digital Media Technology Week 9: XSLT 4

Aims of today’s “Hackathon” Improve your proficiency in XML and XSLT Computer-based research on the basis of secondary data (data produced by others) Possibilities and limitations of XSLT: the language is not “Turing-complete”

Charles Babbage’s Analytic Machine

Artificial Intelligence Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Turing test The Universal Machine Computer can perform any activity which can be caught in an algorithm (state of being “Turing-complete”)

Algorithms Term derived from Muhammad Al-Khwārizmī, who wrote Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa'l-muqabala (”The book on Calculations using the Numbers of the Indians”) Unambiguous description of the steps that need to followed to arrive at a specific result Also see John Searle’s “Chinese Room Argument”

Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines

Do ask for help if you have difficulties! Homework assignment Assignment 2 is online Do ask for help if you have difficulties! Homework assignment <xsl:value-of select="count(body/letter)"/> <xsl:value-of select="count(body/ letter[year < '1900'])"/> <xsl:for-each select="body/letter[ recipient='Sijthoff, Albertus Willem’] "> … </xsl:for-each>

Today’s Seminar Exports from the Short Title Catalogue of the Netherlands Books printed in the Netherlands or in Dutch before 1801. Available as Linked Open Data Ca. 80.000 records Data encoded according to the MODS standard (Metadata Object Description Language)

MODS record <mods> <name type="personal"><namePart>Molière (1622-1673)</namePart> </name> <titleInfo><title>Le Sicilien, ou L'amour peintre, comedie. / By J.B.P. Moliere</title></titleInfo> <language><languageTerm>fre</languageTerm></language> <originInfo> <dateIssued>1674</dateIssued><publisher> Elzevier, Daniel</publisher> </originInfo> <physicalDescription><extent>duodecimo</extent></physicalDescription> <subject><topic>Drama</topic><topic>Poetry</topic><topic>French language and literature</topic></subject> </mods>

‘Big data’ research Number of publications in 16c vs number of publications in 17c Comparison of producti- vity of publishers Number of authors Historical developments in subjects Historical developmentsin formats

XSLT and data processing Strengths Creation of lists Filtering a list Counting the number of items in a list Weaknesses Find the unique values in a list Count the number of items for all these unique values

Today’s Seminar Focus on specific publishers: analyses of the number of publications, languages, subjects, formats XSLT enables you to make lists: the analyses of these data will need to be done using other tools, e.g. Excel Visualisations can be made using SVG

Organisation 13:15 – 15:00: Exploration and anaysis 15:00 – 15:30: Conclusions and preparation of presentation 15:45 – 17:00: Presentation and discussion of research results

Teams 7 teams Useful to assign different roles A programmer A ‘spokesperson’ in charge of making the presentation A project manager

Digital Humanities Focus on the various ways in which the computer can be used to investigate traditional questions in the humanities “things […] that could not be done feasibly without the computational power and storage modern computers provide” (Philip Burns, Day of DH 2013) GIS

3D reconstructions GIS

Social network analysis GIS

Definition It brings computational techniques to bear on traditional humanistic questions It studies the phenomenon of computation from a humanities perspective, and aims to understand the epistemological and the methodological implications of using computers in humanities research

Father Busa’s Index Thomasticus

Differences with traditional research The work is of a practical nature It leads to different (non-textual) forms of output Difficult to make such results count in assessment of scholarly productivity Collaborative form of research New questions? GIS

Big data Three V’s of big data: Volume, Velocity, Variety (Laney) Issues of velocity and volume are not very pressing within the humanities “Complexity Deluge”