Concepts in Motion is hosting a series of online seminars on data formats, tools, and best practices for working with data relevant to the history of ideas. In particular, in this series we will have experts discussing the managing of authority records, identifiers for persons, timelines, and works, as well as infrastructures on which to clean and enrich these data.
Upcoming DaDriH Seminars:
October 8, 2024
15:00 PM (CEST)
90 Minutes
Speakers: Ylva Söderfeldt, Andrew Burchell, Julia Reed & Maria Skeppstedt
Title: Topic timelines for enabling close and distant reading of discursive shifts
Topic modelling is a popular method for identifying properties of and tracking development over time in historical source corpora. Since it is an unsupervised model, it is suited for identifying ideas and themes that are not previously known to the researcher, which sets them apart from methods such as a plain full-text search or keyword frequency measures. However, identified topics presented in the form of a list of significant words often carry only limited value in building a historical argument due to their remoteness from the original source and the uncertainty around their generation. In a project about the development of patient organisations and their ideas about disease in the 20th century, we are applying a recently developed time line extension of the topic modelling tool Topics2Themes. This generates a timeline visualisation of when which topics appear and how frequently they appear in a particular corpus, in our case member newsletters and magazines issued by European patient organisations. The user can zoom in to get a more detailed view of the timeline, and also click on interesting sections of the timeline to reach the texts that the topics appear in, and hence shift immediately between distant and close reading. In our project, we work in an interdisciplinary team to generate topic timelines for each of the periodical publications we study and use them to select sections of the corpus for close reading. The extension hence makes it possible to perform analyses of shifts in medical reasoning, political outlooks, and organisational priorities that take place in a voluminous source material and over a long time period. In our paper, we will present concrete cases of how the timeline visualisation enables research in the history of ideas that require both overviews of large source corpora and close reading that attends to the individual historical texts.
Zoom Link:
https://uva-live.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUld-ygpj0sGtOmcY6nSJCFGu8qpATKkcgx
Previous DaDriH Seminars:
October 27, 2023
14:00 PM (CEST)
90 Minutes
Speaker: Chiara Latronico
Title: Lessons and recommendations in data practices from the Golden Agents project
Chiara Latronico (Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld & Geluid) will highlight her experience in working with bibliographic data in the Golden Agents project. In this seminar, she will discuss with us linked data standards, models, and tools, with special attention to RDF. Bring your questions to the seminar for a live Q&A session.
November 7th, 2023
15:00 PM (CET)
90 Minutes
Speaker: Nicola Ruschena
Title: Turin Enhanced Philosophy Tree
Nicola Ruschena (University of Turin) is working on his PhD project at the North-Western Italian Philosophy Consortium (FINO). This project aligns with the ‘Turin Enhanced Philosophy Tree’ (TEPT) project at the University of Turin. TEPT seeks to develop shareable resources for the reconstruction of socio-institutional historical networks (such as supervisor-student genealogies). Nicola will present his project and will share with us his progress in developing a shareable research infrastructure for data collection and analysis, designed for historians of philosophy and science.
Speaker: Veruska Carretta Zamborlini
Title: Ontologies for Philosophers: Lessons and Recommendations
Veruska Carretta Zamborlini (Department of Computer Science, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Brazil) is an ontology specialist and Semantic Web expert. Veruska has worked on the Golden Agents project together with last seminar’s speaker Chiara Latronico. In this seminar, she will share with us valuable lessons learned in this project, and discuss with us the application of ontologies in research in (the history of) philosophy.
Bring your questions to the seminar for a live Q&A session with both speakers.
November 21st, 2023
15:00 PM (CET)
90 Minutes
Speakers: Martin Korenjak & Stefan Zathammer
Title: NOSCEMUS
Martin Korenjak & Stefan Zathammer (University of Innsbruck) talk about the realization of NOSCEMUS, a dataset encompassing 993 Latin scientific works written by 854 authors. Our speakers will share technical details about the development of NOSCEMUS, and provide insight into its conceptualization. Bring your questions to the seminar for a live Q&A session.
December 7, 2024
15:00 PM (EST)
90 Minutes
Speaker: Leon van Wissen
Title: Lessons and recommendations: LOD and Cultural Heritage Data
Leon van Wissen (Universiteit van Amsterdam/DSC) is a data engineer working with cultural heritage data in CREATE and GLOBALISE, and previously in the Golden Agents project. In this session Leon will share experiences and best practices relevant to working with Linked Open Data and the implementation of ontologies. Bring your questions to the seminar for a live Q&A session.
Februari 15th, 2024
15:00 PM (CET)
90 Minutes
Speaker: Daniele Morrone
Title: TheSu XML
Daniele Morrone (KU Leuven) presents his work on TheSu XML, an XML annotation schema designed for digitally analyzing, indexing, and mapping ideas and their contexts of expression in various sources. TheSu (‘Thesis Support’) XML is tailored to aid research in the history of ideas, philosophy, science, and technology.
Zoom Link:
https://uva-live.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEvdequpzstHdVS8EOCOxRIgretBkI2Hl26
April 11th, 2024
15:00 PM (CEST)
90 Minutes
Speakers: Eugenio Petrovich & Sander Verhaegh
Title: EDHIPHY: Enriching Data for the History of Philosophy through Mention Indexing
EDHIPHY (Enriched Data for the HIstory of PHilosophY) is a relational database developed in the context of the ERC project “Exiled Empiricists” for studying the history of Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century with quantitative methods. EDHIPHY combines data from several sources (JSTOR, WikiData, ProQuest, and manually collected datasets) and enriches them via mention extraction, a technique that identifies and extracts mention of philosophers from the full-text of journal articles and links them to specific philosophers. EDHIPHY in its current version includes circa 23.000 articles published in 12 philosophy journals between 1890 and 1979, from which >1mln mentions to circa 10.000 philosophers were extracted. Precision estimates of mention linking indicate that 82-91% of the mentions in EDHIPHY are linked to the philosopher that is actually mentioned in the text. In addition to mention links, EDHIPHY includes also gender, birth year, PhD dissertation metadata, and career data for several of the philosophers covered. It thus enables historians of philosophy to produce multi-dimensional quantitative analyses of Anglo-American philosophy over a century. In this talk, Eugenio and Sander present EDHIPHY and the technique of mention extraction and linking they developed; then, they will offer a short demonstration of EDHIPHY’s potential for historical studies, with a case study on the impact on American philosophy of the migration of European intellectuals in the United States between 1930 and 1960.
Zoom Link:
https://uva-live.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pdeypqDMqGdSW59QPXLTskI2ejle0ByyY
July 16th, 2024
15:00 PM (CEST)
90 Minutes
Speaker: Stefan Hessbrüggen-Walter
Title: “Early Modern Dissertations in French Libraries” (EMDFL): Some Lessons Learned
Stefan Hessbrüggen-Walter (University of Münster): “I will discuss the compilation of a data set derived from approx. 56000 catalogue records of early modern dissertations in French libraries. I will briefly outline the relevance of these data for a better understanding of the genre as such and its role in the historiography of early modern knowledge, but the main focus of the talk will be methodological: topics to be covered include e. g. the derivation of specialist data sets from generalist catalogue data rather than bibliographies of historical prints, the heterogeneity in the usage of particular catalogue fields (e.g. the place of publication), or the limits of ‘reconciliation’, the process of matching names and unique identifiers for the named entities. I will conclude with some general reflections on the notion of ‘metadata quality’ and how it evolves in the context of using metadata as research material (‘collections as data’).
Zoom Link:
https://uva-live.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwpde6orDstHtyxhFlTjoCQplOtw4RWgyWF
CONCEPTS IN MOTION 