Invited talk given at the final CEDAR symposium about the interaction between (social) history, language technology, and semantic web.
https://socialhistory.org/en/events/final-cedar-mini-symposium
Connector Corner: Accelerate revenue generation using UiPath API-centric busi...
The domain as unifier, how focusing on social history can bring technical fields together
1. The domain as unifier, how focusing on social
history can bring technical fields together
Marieke van Erp
marieke.van.erp@vu.nl
2. About me
• Researcher in the Computational Lexicology &
Terminology Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Language Technology + Semantic Web
• Collaborations with humanities, cultural heritage &
information professionals in CATCH, EU FP7 & CLARIAH
projects
image source: http://www.bsbstaalbouw.nl/previews/2010/11/9/media_210_49423_media_210_49423_w600.jpg
4. Language Technology
• aims to research & develop tools to extract information
from text
• information retrieval, machine translation, deep reading
• majority of the datasets in the field are ‘current’
newspaper texts
• researchers are interested in finding out how their tool
behaves in a different domain
5. Semantic Web
• aims to create a machine readable Web
• knowledge modelling, formats, knowledge
representation, data sharing
• Linked Open Data cloud provides entry point to many
structured data sources
• many more users could benefit from Semantic Web
technology
6. (Social) History
• interested in:
• people
• events
• many historians are interested in dealing with:
• larger text corpora
• quantitative methods
image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/York_Pioneers'_social_re-union_St_George's_Hall,_Toronto,_March_3,_1911_(HS85-10-23694).jpg
8. • Goal of the project: interlink Rijksmuseum and Sound and Vision
collections through events
• Digital Hermeneutics (History)
• Recognise events and participants in object descriptions (Language
Technology)
• Model events and Narratives (Semantic Web)
• Van Den Akker, C., Legêne, S., Van Erp, M., Aroyo, L., Segers, R., van
Der Meij, L., Van Ossenbruggen, J., Schreiber, G., Wielinga, B., Oomen,
J. and Jacobs, G., 2011, June. Digital hermeneutics: Agora and the
online understanding of cultural heritage. In Proceedings of the 3rd
International Web Science Conference (p. 10). ACM.
12. Not only useful for historians
• http://www.newsreader-project.eu
• http://www.understandinglanguagebymachines.org/stories-and-world-views-as-a-
key-to-understanding-language/
• http://www.cltl.nl/projects/current-projects/visualizing-uncertainty-and-perspectives/
13. • How can computational tools help in analysing digitised
biographies (History)
• Extract person names & information about persons from
text (Language Technology)
• Model relationships between them (SemWeb)
21. Going forward
• What questions would you like to answer with Language Technology &
Semantic Web?
• What awesome tools & skills do you have?
• What datasets do you have?
• How do you like your coffee?
image source: http://www.independent.ie/incoming/article31308951.ece/ALTERNATES/h342/tea.jpg