A blog post by Christian Thomas (CLARIN-D, BBAW)

Book: Alexander von Humboldt, Henriette Kohlrausch: Die Kosmos-Vorlesung an der Berliner Sing-Akademie. Edited by Christian Kassung and Christian Thomas. Berlin: Insel Verlag, 2019.
(insel taschenbuch 4719, ISBN 978-3-458-36419-1) Publisher’s landing page: https://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/die_kosmos-vortraege-alexander_von_humboldt_36419.html.

Background: Alexander von Humboldt’s legendary ‘Kosmos-Lectures’

Alexander von Humboldt’s legendary ‘Kosmos-Lectures’ in 1827/28 at the Berlin Sing-Akademie – then the city’s largest lecture hall, today’s seat of the Maxim Gorki Theater – are regarded as a decisive moment in the history of scientific popularization. In the winter of 1827/28, approximately one thousand Berliners and guests from abroad attended the 16 consecutive lectures. Humboldt gave a vast overview on the state of scientific knowledge of his time, spanning astronomic, geographic, geological and biological topics, but also the cultural and social spheres in an encompassing ‘portrait of nature’ (“Naturgemälde”). The audience represented a broad spectrum of the learned society and interested laymen including – following Humboldt’s explicit invitation – women, who were still excluded from Prussia’s universities until the end of the 19^th century. Since the lectures were never published by Humboldt himself, the elaborate notebooks several of his auditors kept that were preserved in different archival and private holdings in Germany, Poland, Turkey and Norway, become even more valuable as authentic documents of this important moment in the history of science.

The recently published volume Die Kosmos-Vorlesung an der Berliner Sing-Akademie, edited by Christian Kassung and Christian Thomas, presents, for the first time in a printed edition, the reliable and complete text of this lecture series. The edited primary text was corrected on the basis of

The CLARIN-D centre “Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals” (BAS) in Munich applied for a Google Research Credit Grant and was honoured with the award. From now on, a greater amount of processing power for the automatic transcription of audio-visual speech data will be made available for the users. We congratulate Florian Schiel and his colleagues at the BAS on being awarded the Google research prize, which includes a prize money of 5,000 dollars. The funding started on January 1st, 2020.

What are Google Research Credit Grants?

The US-based technology company Google has got a large division called “Google Cloud Processing” (GCP), which offers several KI-applications as (fee-based) web services. In this division, the programme “GCP Education” is located. This programme allows students to apply for so-called “credits”, which can be used for GCP applications. Researchers, too, can apply for small grants (so-called “research credits”) with their project proposal. There is no application deadline, as applications can be handed in on a running basis. Further information on the application process can be found here: https://edu.google.com/programs/credits/faqs/?modal_active=none#research-credits 

Usage Scenarios of Google Services at the BAS

The BAS WebServices use, among other things, the Google Cloud Automatic Speech Recognition for the fully-automated annotation of audio-visual data (cf. services “ASR” and “Pipeline”). To provide their users with more processing power in this field, Florian Schiel applied for a Google “research credit grant”. He decided to put a thematic focus on the development of the BAS WebServices and the integration of Google Cloud applications.

BAS users benefit from the award

Since the awarding on January 1st, 2020, users of the BAS WebServices have been able to use about 1,7 million seconds of automatic transcription each

The closing event of the CLARIN-D working groups (WGs) took place on November 14th, 2019, in the “Neue Aula” of the University of Tübingen. More than 20 participants came together in the representative rooms of the university in order to have a final discussion about the WGs’ long-lasting participation in CLARIN-D: Since the start of the project, CLARIN-D has cooperated closely with researchers from various disciplines, and for that reason it has always been of great importance for the project to include the input from the working groups. They have served as initiators in the communities and have, for instance, drawn up curation projects. Among the guests of the closing event, one could find the leaders of the WGs, their staff as well as former members, the representative of the funding organisation, Dr. Maria Böhme (DLR), and the leaders of the CLARIN-D centres. The event was looking both ways, offering a retrospective on the work of the WGs with the possibility of future collaborations in other contexts: The WGs’ work is highly relevant as well as community driven and the needs of the users are growing steadily, so that they will in all likelihood be continued elsewhere and with a new label. 

After Thorsten Trippel (WG 6, Tübingen) had welcomed the participants, members of the WGs offered their perspective on the past and the future of the WGs in four different talks: Cathleen Kantner, leader of WG 7 (Social Science), spoke about the characteristics of infrastructures in general and, in the following, about the establishment of research infrastructures in the digital humanities in the context of highly innovative research projects. She emphasized that such developments included current research

Text by Charlotte Hartungen.

What started as a five days conference with four workshops in 2009, celebrated the 10^th anniversary this year. We are talking about the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture and Technology” (ESU) at the University of Leipzig.

You can summarize the ESU with some numbers and data. During the eleven days the ESU took place (23.07.-02-08.2019), 92 students, young scholars, researchers, members of different Universities and others interested in the large field of the Digital Humanities came to Leipzig to join one of the eleven workshops offered this year. Of the eleven workshops, four were supported by CLARIN ERIC and offered by experts from the CLARIN-D environment.
These were, namely, Andreas Witt who offered the workshop ‘Compilation, Annotation and Analysis of Written Text Corpora. Introduction to Methods and Tools’, Bernhard Fisseni who offered the workshop ‘Searching Linguistic Patterns in Text Corpora for Digital Humanities Research’, Christoph Draxler who offered the workshop ‘All About Data – Exploratory Data Modelling and Practical Database Access’, and Janos Borst and Felix Helfer who offered the workshop ‘An Introduction to Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing - Applications and Implementation’.

The participants from over 30 countries who could apply for six different scholarships had to choose one or two workshops consisting of a total of 18 sessions or 36 teaching hours. In addition to workshops, 14 posters presentations and 12 project presentations were offered by the participants themselves. This was an opportunity for students and young scholars to present their research in a scientific setting and to get feedback and tips through the presence of experts.

The ESU is also always

In July 2019, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published a new standard which contributes to describing language-related research data in a significant and sustainable way during archiving. The Standard ISO 24622-2 "Component Metadata Specification Language" standardizes procedures for defining a schema for descriptions tailored to requirements of specific types of research data.

When research data is archived, information about the data is collected and made available in a way that allows other researchers to find the data and to assess the relevance of the data from the description. In addition, potential users can get an idea of how they could incorporate this data into their own research and use it to answer research questions of their own. These descriptions are called metadata.

Experience shows that due to differences in the types of research data and research questions, it is very difficult to find an all-encompassing, universal pattern - or schema - according to which these descriptions can be created. For instance, the description of psychological experiments (number of test persons, research question, free and bound variables, recording system, etc.) are described in a different way than collections of texts for grammatical investigations or for the creation of word embeddings (number of "words", language, length of texts, source of texts, age of texts, authors, etc.). Despite their long tradition, libraries for books have a variety of metadata formats, e.g. Dublin Core, MARC 21, PREMIS, MODS. Many metadata schemas have some fields - also called data categories - that resemble each other, as well as some areas where they differ. In order to enable both an adequate description of research data and the utilisation of similar metadata

Text by Linda Brandt

The international summer university for digital humanities, which has already been running for 9 years, was held at the University of Leipzig from 17.07.-27.07.2018. It was organised by a team lead by Elisabeth Burr, Professor for French, francophone and Italian linguistics. Every year students, postdocs, PhD students and professors meet there for 11 days to attend DH-related seminars, lectures and excursions, as well as to gain an insight into the history of the city of Leipzig. This year the event was attended by more than 100 participants from over 30 countries, who were able to learn and gain experience together in the framework of the ESU.

This was the second time that I participated in the event, so it was also a nice reunion with many familiar faces. Many of the other guests had already been in Leipzig multiple times, which in itself speaks for the Summer School and its organisers. The academic program was designed with great variety. There were presentations from participants about their own projects, for example from Simon Gabay from the University of Neuchâtel about “A catalogue of 17^th century French autograph manuscripts” and from Giovanni Pietro Vitali from the Université de Poitiers in France about “Rethinking Rome as an Anthology: The Poeti der Trullo's Street Poetry”. On top of this there were many lectures from different professors on offer, such as Gimena del Rio Riande from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, who spoke about “Digital Humanities and Humanidades Digitales” in South America. Another professor was Ray Siemens, Professor for “Humanities Computing” at the Victoria University in Canada, who lectured about “Open Social Scholarship, in Real Terms”. As such

My name is Viviana Pezzullo and I am one of the participants of the European Summer University in Digital Humanties, recipient of the CLARIN-D Fellowship. I would love to publicly thank CLARIN-D for having given me the opportunity to take part in such an amazing experience that has allowed me to improve my project and to meet young scholars from all over the world.

For the two weeks, I joined Dr. Carol Chiodo's and Lauren Tilton's workshop titled Hands on Humanities Data. This workshop has been such a perfect fit for the project on which I am currently working: a digital collection of letters exchanged during the 1940s belonging to the Badia family. Thanks to my instructors now I have a better understanding of how to organize my data and how to make a better use of them. The first week focused on understanding what kind of data one is dealing with and how to use Google Sheets to work collaboratively. After having discussed my method with my peers and Dr. Chiodo and Dr. Tilton, I realized all the unintentional mistakes that I have carried out throughout my whole recollection of data. Therefore, I had the opportunity to improve my cluttered data set.

The second week focused on the tools that one could use not only to study the data but also to showcase it. For instance, our group has discovered Voyant, which I consider an impressive tool for anyone who wants to approach text analysis but who is not familiar yet with Python or R. Furthermore, I learned how to create a timeline (by using TimelineJS) and a map (by using Carto and StoryMap), which I will definitely

SHORT TEXT, GREAT EXPERIENCE:
a two-week story about ESU in Digital Humanities in Leipzig University

By Cecília Magalhães - August 3th, 2018. 

The city of Leipzig was, in the two last weeks of July, the perfect stage for productive academic practices, concerning the Digital Humanities field. In this period, the "European Summer School in Digital Humanities", hosted by the University of Leipzig, offered a variety of workshops with distinct approaches, about textual and data analysis, XLM-TEI schemas, Data visualisation and so on. Further, the event was branded by international talks which, beyond of reinforcing some topics of the technical and theoretical subjects already practised in class, reminded us of the importance of actively taking part, as digital humanists, in the academic, political and social discussion into the global DH community.

In this panorama, I took part in the "Hands-on Humanities Data Workshop - Creation, Discovery and Analysis", led by Lauren Tilton (University of Richmond, USA) and Carol Chiodo (Princeton University, USA). The classes were focused, initially, on introducing the concept of data in its complexity and diversity. More than that, we discussed how to handle multiple data by critically selecting and working with combined tools and platforms. Text analysis, text mining, topic modelling, mapping, networks analysis, data visualisation were topics which were presented through fascinating examples of projects in DH.

What is DH? Hands-on first class with Carol Chiodo. Photo Credit: Cecília Magalhães

I have been investigating the interactional component of the LdoD Archive (PORTELA & SILVA, 2018, ldod.uc.pt), a digital edition based on the textual fragments of Fernando Pessoa's unfinished book, the Book of Disquiet. This platform creatively enhances the users' reading, editing and writing practices through

Learning how to do Stylometry with style at the European Summer University in Digital Humanities 2018 in Leipzig

I was honored to attend the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture and Technology” at the University of Leipzig in July 2018 as a CLARIN-D Fellow. During the two weeks, some hundred students and teachers from all over the world attended and taught workshops on various topics in Digital Humanities, ranging from Project Management to Reflected Text Analysis and from XML-TEI to Computer Vision. I participated in the workshop on Stylometry, a method to study the similarities and differences between (literary) texts that is often used for authorship attribution, that is, to answer questions such as who is Elena Ferrante and whether Robert Galbraith is actually J.K. Rowling.

In the workshop, I learned how to use the stylo package in R and became familiar with concepts such as Delta and Manhattan Distance as well as oppose() and rolling.classify(). Although stylometry is based on statistics and the stylo package is written in the programming language R, the workshop is suitable also for beginners as the stylo package has a graphic interface just like any computer software and the teachers explain the mathematical equations behind the statistical analyses. 

The workshop – like the whole Summer University ­– was very intensive, meaning that there was much to be learned in a short amount of time, but also that I got to return home having gained skills that will allow me to do my own stylometric analyses. Additionally, the workshop contained a small, yet important, sidenote to learn how to generate data visualizations using software such as Gephi and jMol. It was great to learn about suitable

A little About Me

My name is Erdal Ayan. I am an Academic Assistant in Herder Institut, Marburg, Germany. I have also been a master student in Informatics at Philipps University Marburg since September, 2017. Nowadays, I am working on data visualization, big data processing, text analysis and corpus building in scope of my study and workload at my institut. I am very curious about building up corpora for educational and research purposes.

Special Thanks to Supporters

Actually, I did not know about the summer university in Leipzig until I get an informative email from the head of my department, Barbara Fichtl, who also deserves special thanks by me. :) I want to thank CLARIN-D for providing me with fellowship, organizing committee of European Summer University for accepting me and administration of Herder Institut, Marburg for supporting me to take part in the workshop and academic activities during my stay in Leipzig. I do not want to forget to thank Prof.Dr.Elizabeth Burr and her hard working assistants for their efforts to welcome and host us for almost two weeks time in Leipzig.

About the Workshop and My Experience

From 17.07 to 27.07.2018 I participated in the workshop titled “Word Vectors and Corpus Text Mining with Python” in scope of “Culture & Technology” - The European Summer University (ESU) in Digital Humanities in Leipzig. The workshop was organized and held by an expert on digital humanities and arts and a PhD candidate, Eun Seo Jo from Stanford University, USA. I should mention that I have learned a lot more than what I expected beforehand. The content and scope of the course was extensively focusing on processing large scale texts, common concepts