1. Digital Media Technology
Week 9: XSLT 4

2. 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”

3. Charles Babbage’s Analytic Machine

4. 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”)

5. 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”

6. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines

7. 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>

8. 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 records
Data encoded according to the MODS standard (Metadata Object Description Language)

9. MODS record <mods>
<name type="personal"><namePart>Molière ( )</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>

10. ‘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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

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

16. 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

17. 3D reconstructions
GIS

18. Social network analysis
GIS

20. 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

21. Father Busa’s Index Thomasticus

23. 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

24. 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”