1. Digital Media Technology
Week 13: LOD and Course Wrap-up
Peter Verhaar

2. xml
dtd
php
ascii
tei
xslt
mods
erd
css
html
unicode
sql

3. Similarities between technologies
Ontologies: DTD and ERD
Data formats: XML or formats in relational databases
Manipulations: XSLT and SQL

4. Critique of technologies
Critical thinking about tools and techniques: “Critical Digital Humanities”
All techniques also have limitations; they are based on assumptions which may be questioned
XML, for instance, assumes that all texts have a hierarchical structure

5. 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)

6. 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 implications of using computers in humanities research

8. Critical Digital Humanities
cf. Alan Liu “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” or David Berry, The Philosophy of Software
Social and cultural implications of software, cf. Langdon Winner
Effects on the research agenda

9. Differences with traditional research
The work is of a practical nature (‘more hack and less yack’)
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

10. Institutionalisation at LU
Centre for Digital Humanities
Leiden University Centre for Data Science
Centre for Digital Scholarship
GIS

11. Digital Text and Data Processing
Relatively new specialisation
Distant reading; Quantitative analyses of literature
Programming in Perl
Statistical analyses using R
No prior knowledge is needed

12. Individual research projects

13. Seminar 13 december A second ’hackathon’ Based on the same data set
Implemented as a relational database
SQL to analyse the data and to make visualisations

15. BOOK_ID
TITLE
ISBN13 1
To Kill a Mockingbird 2
The Great Gatsby
subject: “Book-ID” Predicate: “hasISBN13” Object: “ ”
subject: “Book-ID” Predicate: “hasTitle” Object: “To Kill a Mockingbird”

16. The Semantic web
Envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines”
RDF-Triples

18. dbPedia

21. STCN SPARQL Endpoint
SELECT * WHERE { ?b dc:publisher ?p. ?p skos:prefLabel "Elzevier, Bonaventura". ?b dc:title ?t }