Sometime in the second century CE, Pausanias of Magnesia (modern-day Turkey) wrote the Description of Greece. Ostensibly a tour of the places to see on the Greek mainland, the Description also provides historical accounts related to the topography through which Pausanias moves. Little attention has been given to how these building blocks of…[Read more]

My CHASE-funded PhD in Classical Studies at the Open University, in which this survey played a crucial role, investigated Linked Ancient World Data usability. The survey took place during April-May 2018 and was aimed at anyone involved in Ancient World research, with any level of digital expertise. Questions related to participants’ experiences of…[Read more]

This article provides a short history of the methods and tools developed by the Pelagios initiative: a series of seven projects dedicated to linking digital historical resources based on the geographic places to which they relate and refer. The first section of the article situates the work within the wider field of semantic and geospatial…[Read more]

Reflections on artist Trevor Paglen’s (ab)use of the JAFFE dataset

The article contains a historical account and commentary on Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford’s unauthorized use of the JAFFE dataset.

Twenty-five years ago, my colleagues Miyuki Kamachi and Jiro Gyoba and I designed and photographed JAFFE, a set of facial expression images intended for use in a study of face perception. In 2019, without seeking permission or informing us, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen exhibited JAFFE in two widely publicized art shows. In addition, they…[Read more]

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

El presente artículo es un sucinto repaso del devenir histórico y tecnológico de PhiloBiblon, uno de los proyectos pioneros en las Humanidades Digitales aplicadas al estudio de las fuentes primarias de las literaturas hispánicas e ibéricas escritas durante la Edad Media y el Renacimiento. La historia del proyecto tiene como hilo conductor las dife…[Read more]

The historical view of Switzerland’s nature and landscape has been defined by artworks describing a ‘visual topography’ of the Alpine country long before the emergence of a broader touristic interest for Switzerland across Europe. Paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs depicting alpine landscapes, natural monuments, picturesque villa…[Read more]

Cultural heritage institutions have a great deal to gain from deeply engaging in the networked environment. They have poured many resources in the digitization of their collections for the benefit of their audiences, from students to experts, who want to have access to more online material of a higher quality. The current landscape of cultural…[Read more]

This is a short demonstration accompanying a poster with the same title, which can be found at: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:31987 A longer video introducing the study, along with additional materials, can be found at: https://um.web.ox.ac.uk/lohengrin

Presentation of some aspects of the BUDA platform at the LinkedPasts IV conference in Mainz. The BUDA platform is a Linked Open Data platform for Buddhist studies, focusing mostly on Bibliography, Prosopography and Geography.

This poster presents findings from a recent survey of Ancient World researchers, which sought to identify research methods associated with the use and production of digital resources in general and with Linked Data in particular. It illustrates the results of the survey using graphs and charts, accompanied by a brief explanation of the methodology…[Read more]

In 1838 Thomas Mulledy, S.J. signed his name to an agreement selling the 275 enslaved persons who resided on Jesuit-owned estates in Southern Maryland to Louisiana. The sale served as the culmination of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus’s fraught experience with slaveholding in the colonial and early national period. While much h…[Read more]

From 1852 the Hôtel Drouot was the space where the French auctioneers (Commissaires-Priseurs) – who held a stately sanctioned monopoly – organized their auctions. By processing data from the art auction catalogue repertory by Frits Lugt and the extended version Art Sales Catalogues Online, it is possible to map the networks of art marketing at…[Read more]

Much of the rhetoric around the future of scholarly communication hinges on the “open” label. In light of Elsevier’s recent acquisition of bepress and the announcement that, owing to high fees, an established mathematics journal’s editorial team will split from its publisher to start an open access alternative, Jefferson Pooley argues that the sch…[Read more]

This reply to “The Curious Absence of Economic Analysis at the Federal Communications Commission” (Faulhaber, Singer, & Urschel, 2017) makes three claims. First, we document the paper’s undisclosed origins as a white paper commissioned by an advocacy group with deep ties to the telecommunications industry. Second, we describe two of the authors’…[Read more]

Linked Data techniques were applied to data about the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) projects, in order to retrieve information about the production and use of digital data by projects relating to the Ancient World [poster presentation].

This article considers the use of semantic web technologies in the context of everyday historians. It deduces from theoretical considerations needs for the actual implementation of a digital edition. It explains some of the basic concepts of the semantic web more extensively than necessary for the digital humanities scholar already familiar with…[Read more]

Project Abstract: Ancient Mesopotamia, birthplace of writing, has produced vast numbers of cuneiform tablets that only a handful of highly specialized scholars are able to read. The task of studying them is so labor intensive that the vast majority have not yet been translated, with the result that their contents are not accessible either to…[Read more]