Melissa Terras

• MA H of Art and Eng Lit, MSc IT, DPhil Engineering
• Professor at University of Edinburgh

Background Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies are integral to developing sophisticated digital infrastructures. Ownership and stakeholder input are critical for creating AI systems that are both innovative and accountable. This paper examines READ-COOP ( https://readcoop.eu ), the first platform cooperative to devel...

Artificial Intelligence represents a suite of capabilities that every industry is currently having to reckon with: the creative industries are not exempt and may be one of the areas most affected by this sudden technological shift. As recently as 2020 the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre judged “[d]irect applications of AI in creative...

Purpose This paper focuses on image-to-text manuscript processing through Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), a Machine Learning (ML) approach enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI). With HTR now achieving high levels of accuracy, we consider its potential impact on our near-future information environment and knowledge of the past. Design/methodo...

To what extent do Digital Humanities (DH) platforms support access to diverse user cohorts? We take, as a case study, the Automated Text Recognition (ATR) platform Transkribus and its Transkribus Scholarship Programme (TSP), which provides free processing credits to eligible users. Using a mixed methods approach we address the following questions:...

The way in which consumers engage with, utilise, or discard the technologies in their lives is constantly being reassessed and changed. This paper questions what role the emergent “right to repair” could play in resolving issues posed by the increasing ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT). The right gives consumers the ability and freedom to fi...

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology is now a mature machine learning tool, becoming integrated in the digitisation processes of libraries and archives, speeding up the transcription of primary sources and facilitating full text searching and analysis of historic texts at scale. However, research into how HTR is changing our information en...

Digital approaches to Jewish Studies allow collecting data from multiple sources. This enlarges the picture, makes our understanding of historical experiences more complete, and triggers further research questions. This chapter compares samples of artworks from digital online collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Russian...

When the pandemic began to affect the performance world, both festival artists and producers started to adopt creative approaches to moving their work online. In the study presented here, we focus on the 2020 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which offered a unique opportunity to understand how performers coped with the enforced switch to digital. Underpi...

In February 2011, Google launched its Google Art Project, now known as Google Arts and Culture (GA&C), that currently hosts approximately six million high-resolution images of artworks from around the world, with an objective to make culture more accessible. We demonstrate that GA&C has experienced dramatic growth in recent years and includes artwo...

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it technically possible for digital assets to be owned and traded, introducing the concept of scarcity in the digital realm for the first time. Resulting from this technical development, this paper asks the question, do they provide an opportunity for fundraising for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM),...

Purpose To date, there has been little research into users of the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013. This paper addresses that gap by presenting key findings from the AHRC-funded Digital Library Futures project. Its purpose is to present a “user-centric” perspective on the potential future impact of the digital collections...

How can digitised assets of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums be reused to unlock new value? What are the implications of viewing large-scale cultural heritage data as an economic resource, to build new products and services upon? Drawing upon valuation studies, we reflect on both the theory and practicalities of using mass-digitised herit...

We propose a bias-aware methodology to engage with power relations in natural language processing (NLP) research. NLP research rarely engages with bias in social contexts, limiting its ability to mitigate bias. While researchers have recommended actions, technical methods, and documentation practices, no methodology exists to integrate critical ref...

We propose a bias-aware methodology to engage with power relations in natural language processing (NLP) research. NLP research rarely engages with bias in social contexts, limiting its ability to mitigate bias. While researchers have recommended actions, technical methods, and documentation practices, no methodology exists to integrate critical ref...

The data foci of digital humanities are texts, images and objects. While the use of digital methods in the text-oriented disciplines is currently widely established and standardized , a scope of digital methods related to images and other visual objects and basing on vision rather than close reading remains-despite various attempts-essentially undi...

A large literature addresses the processes, circumstances and motivations that have given rise to archives. These questions are increasingly being asked of digital archives, too. Here, we examine the complex interplay of institutional, intellectual, economic, technical, practical and social factors that have shaped decisions about the inclusion and...

The successful transmediation of books and documents through digitization requires the synergetic partnership of many professional figures, that have what may sometimes appear as contrasting goals at heart. On one side, there are those who look after the physical objects and strive to preserve them for future generations, and on the other those inv...

Although multispectral imaging (MSI) of cultural heritage, such as manuscripts, documents and artwork, is becoming more popular, a variety of approaches are taken and methods are often inconsistently documented. Furthermore, no overview of the process of MSI capture and analysis with current technology has previously been published. This research w...

The successful transmediation of books and documents through digitization requires the synergetic partnership of many professional figures, that have what may sometimes appear as contrasting goals at heart. On one side, there are those who look after the physical objects and strive to preserve them for future generations, and on the other those inv...

How will a content-based recommender system be perceived by museum visitors? How will it transform visitor experience, and how can we adapt recommender systems to meet the needs of users in the museum domain? In this paper, we demonstrate the implementation of a content-based recommender system to generate personalised museum tours within the UCL G...

This paper reflects upon the growing expectation for HCI research projects to collaborate closely with partners in industry and civil society. Specifically, we suggest that this type of engagement is often prefigured around the agendas, needs and capacity of diverse research partners, which researchers must then carefully negotiate. We explore this...

Purpose: In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining momentum in the cultural heritage sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine OpenGLAM from the perspective of end users, identifying barriers for commercial and non-commercial reuse of openly licensed art images. Design/methodology/approach: Following...

This work presents defoe, a new scalable and portable digital eScience toolbox that enables historical research. It allows for running text mining queries across large datasets, such as historical newspapers and books in parallel via Apache Spark. It handles queries against collections that comprise several XML schemas and physical representations....

Multispectral (MSI) imaging of historical documents can recover lost features, such as text or drawings. This technique involves capturing multiple images of a document illuminated using different wavelengths of light. The images created must be registered in order to ensure optimal results are produced from any subsequent image processing techniqu...

Purpose An overview of the current use of handwritten text recognition (HTR) on archival manuscript material, as provided by the EU H2020 funded Transkribus platform. It explains HTR, demonstrates Transkribus , gives examples of use cases, highlights the affect HTR may have on scholarship, and evidences this turning point of the advanced use of dig...

This article is a discussion of how digitizing and disseminating Orphan Works in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector could have the potential to significantly reframe collections across audiences and institutions in the United Kingdom and across the world. Orphan Works (those works protected by copyright and for which the...

Although the digital humanities have traditionally been conceived as a text-based discipline, both digital visualization techniques as well as visual analysis are increasingly used for research in various humanities disciplines. Since there are several overlaps in epistemic cultures of visually oriented and digitally supported research in art and a...

This white paper reports on the findings of the Digital Library Futures project (2017-2019), which investigates the impact of Non-Print Legal Deposit (NPLD) on academic legal deposit libraries and their users in the United Kingdom. It argues that discussions of NPLD have paid too little attention to user behaviour and requirements, and that it is n...

Although studies have demonstrated that OpenGLAM provides numerous benefits to participant institutions, such as the dissemination of collections and increased sponsorship opportunities (Kapsalis, 2016; Kelly, 2013), the movement’s adoption remains limited. For museums and galleries, the fear of losing image fees, poses as one of the main barriers...

This edited collection provides a timely account of the social, institutional and user impacts of e-legal deposit. Since legal deposit regulations were introduced in the United Kingdom and Germany in the 17th Century, societies have benefitted from the systematic preservation of our written cultural record by a small number of trusted national and...

This article presents the findings of a web survey designed to better understand the expectations and use of digital editions of texts. The survey, modelled upon a detailed analysis of 242 projects, recorded 218 complete responses, shedding light on user requirements of digital editions. Specifically, the survey indicates that issues of data reuse,...

Ever since the Rijksmuseum pioneered the OpenGLAM movement in 2011, releasing to the public domain images of artworks in its collection, several other museums have followed its lead, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Finnish National Gallery. Although studies have demonstrated that OpenGLAM provides numerous benefits to museums, rang...

How is academia portrayed in children's literature? This Element ambitiously surveys fictional professors in texts marketed towards children. Professors are overwhelmingly white and male, tending to be elderly scientists who fall into three stereotypes: the vehicle to explain scientific facts, the baffled genius, and the evil madman. By the late tw...

We compare the scope of museum digitization in the Russian Federation, a country with diverse cultural heritage and over 2,300 museums, with the scope of digitization in Europe as measured by the Enumerate Survey of 355 museums from twenty European countries initiated by the Collections Trust, UK, in 2011. Our article shows that the reach and scope...

There is great practical and scholarly interest in the identification of pigments in works of art. This paper compares the effectiveness of the widely used Raman Spectroscopy (RS), with hyperspectral imaging (HSI), a reflectance imaging technique, to evaluate the reliability of HSI for the identification of pigments in historic works of art and to...

In the last decade significant resources have been invested for the digitisation of the collections of a large number of museums and galleries worldwide. In Europe alone, 10 million EUR is annually invested in Europeana (Europeana 2014). However, as we gradually move on from “the start-up phase” of digitisation (Hughes 2004), revenue generation and...

Evaluating and Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections - edited by Lorna Hughes November 2011

Cambridge Core - General - Digital Humanities in Practice - edited by Claire Warwick

Cambridge Core - General - Evaluating and Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections - edited by Lorna Hughes

This rapid development and testing project captured data from multiple digital imaging techniques to try to see texts in papyrus mâché mummy mask cartonnage layers. Prior studies by other scholars destroyed the masks to access the papyri, denying future researcher access to the primary historical artefacts. This international, multidisciplinary pro...

This report presents the CrossCult digital datasets of the four project pilots.It contains a description of the methods and data structures used to semantically model and ingest the digital resources of the pilots into the CrossCult Knowledge Base following the semantics of the CrossCult Upper-level ontology, a set of examples of semantic enrichmen...

This paper presents the Upper-level Ontology and the other ontological schemas and vocabularies that we used to model the semantics of the “world” of CrossCult and its four pilots. It consists of two documents: a report describing the rationale and structure of the ontology and a PDF file containing the definitions of the classes and properties of...

Ancient Egyptian mummies were often covered with an outer casing, panels and masks made from cartonnage: a lightweight material made from linen, plaster, and recycled papyrus held together with adhesive. Egyptologists, papyrologists, and historians aim to recover and read extant text on the papyrus contained within cartonnage layers, but some metho...

In recent years, important research on crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage sector has been published, dealing with topics such as the quantity of contributions made by volunteers, the motivations of those who participate in such projects, the design and establishment of crowdsourcing initiatives, and their public engagement value. This article a...

The general broadening in recent years of what counts as legitimate learning has included an interest in objects, including those from curated collections such as artefacts, natural history specimens and archival items, which may have complex cultural or scientific meaning in their own right. A more sophisticated interaction with objects has be...

Хрестоматия включает статьи, рекомендуемые для ознакомления с историей возникновения термина «цифровые гуманитарные науки» и перехода к нему от термина «гуманитарная информатика». Рассматриваются различные точки зрения относительно содержания термина и обсуждается его значение. Хрестоматия будет полезна не только студентам и специалистам, но и всем...

Librarians have been consciously adopting metaphors to describe library concepts since the nineteenth century, helping us to structure our understanding of new technologies. As a profession, we have drawn extensively on these figurative frameworks to explore issues surrounding the digital library, yet very little has been written to date which inte...

How can digital methods be used to conceptualize historical research projects, including their teams, approaches, methods, and outputs? What methodologies can be used to synthe- size and analyze archival records, workshop plans, photographic evidence, and oral histories? This co-authored paper describes an ongoing effort by a collaborative group* t...

Purpose Since its launch in 2007, research has been carried out on the popular social networking website Tumblr. The purpose of this paper is to identify published Tumblr-based research, classify it to understand approaches and methods, and provide methodological recommendations for others. Design/methodology/approach Research regarding Tumblr w...

Although there has been a drive in the cultural heritage sector to providing large-scale, open data sets for researchers, we have not seen a commensurate rise in humanities researchers undertaking complex analysis of these datasets for their own research purposes. This paper reports on pilot project at University College London (UCL), working in co...

Цифровые гуманитарные науки начинают привлекать все большее внимание в университетской среде. Сейчас в мире сотни центров цифровых гуманитарных наук, эта дисциплина становится частью учебной программы на уровне бакалавриата и магистратуры. И все же термин «цифровые гуманитарные науки» часто оспаривается. Данная хрестоматия включает важные статьи, к...

The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable the Irish Society is a major surviving historical record of the estates of the county of Londonderry (in modern day Northern Ireland). It contains key data about landholding and population in the Irish province of Ulster and the city of Londonderry and its environs in the mid-17th century, at a time of soc...

This article presents the theoretical background to a wider project that is attempting to increase our understanding of the impact and uses of large-scale digitization, being undertaken by the first author at University College London with the working title ‘What is the impact of large-scale digitization upon researchers and the information sector?...

Since the earliest days of hypertext, textual scholars have produced, discussed and theorised upon critical digital editions of manuscripts, in order to investigate how digital technologies can provide another means to present and enable the interpretative study of text. This work has generally been done by looking at particular case studies or exa...

This volume presents the state of the art in digital scholarly editing. Drawing together the work of established and emerging researchers, it gives pause at a crucial moment in the history of technology in order to offer a sustained reflection on the practices involved in producing, editing and reading digital scholarly editions—and the theories th...

How best can humanities researchers access and analyse large-scale digital datasets available from institutions in the cultural and heritage sector? What barriers remain in place for those from the humanities wishing to use high performance computing to provide insights into historical datasets? This paper describes a pilot project that worked in c...

The paper reviews the meaning and development of digital humanities giving the examples of work published in various DH areas. The paper discusses what using these technologies means for the humanities, giving recommendations that can be useful across the sector. This is the paper published from Melissa Terras' professorial lecture at University Co...

University College London (UCL) owns a large corpus of the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Until recently, these papers were for the most part untranscribed, so that very few people had access to the corpus to evaluate its content and its value. The corpus is now being digitized and transcribed thanks to a large number o...

Since 2009, Ada Lovelace Day1 has been held in October as a celebration of the first computer programmer, in order to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and math. While working with Charles Babbage, another nineteenth-century inventor, Lovelace (1815–52) identified the significance of his Analytical Engine (a machine th...

This chapter describes a highly collaborative project in digital humanities, which used tools and expertise from a diverse range of disciplines: medical physics, image science, and conservation. We describe this collaboration through three examples: the use of phantoms taken from medical physics, a historically accurate model of parchment degradati...

Digital imaging technology can now produce detailed and trustworthy surrogates of historical documents. Leveraged by technological improvements in imaging and image processing, humanities scholars have been able to image, analyse, and recover more information from historical documents than was previously possible. Multispectral imaging has been uti...

Crowdsourcing (the harnessing of online activities and behaviour to complete large-scale computational tasks) has been recently adopted in the cultural and heritage sectors to improve the quality of, and widen access to, online collections. Within Digital Humanities there have been attempts to crowdsource more complex tasks traditionally assumed to...

http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/suppl_1

This article describes the development and application of an innovative tool, Text Re-use Alignment Visualization (TRAViz), whose aim is to visualize variation between editions of both historical and modern texts. Reading different editions of a text empowers research in literary studies and linguistics, where one can study a text's reception or fo...

Multispectral imaging—a method for acquiring image data over a series of wavelengths across the light spectrum—is becoming a valuable tool within the cultural and heritage sector for the recovery and enhancement of information contained within primary historical texts. However, most applications of this technique, to date, have been bespoke: analys...

Structured Abstract Purpose . This paper situates the activity of digitisation to increase access to cultural and heritage content alongside the objectives of the Open Access movement. It demonstrates that increasingly open licensing of digital cultural heritage content is creating opportunities for researchers in the arts and humanities for both...

Many digital humanities-taught programmes aim to engage undergraduate and postgraduate humanists with computational methods and practices (Hirsch, 2012; Cohen and Scheinfeldt, 2013). It is relatively rare, however, to routinely engage computer scientists with the needs, methods, and worldview of historians, literature scholars, librarians, and rela...

Introduction Since the 1970s, the gallery, library, archive and museum sector has promoted and encouraged digitization – the conversion of analogue into digital information – to increase access to cultural heritage material through various incarnations of digital media. Indeed, it is now expected by both users and professionals that institutions sh...

The course INSTG008 Digital Resources in the Humanities (hereafter DRH) is an obligatory course for students on the DH MA/MSc and an optional course for students on other programmes offered by the Department of Information Studies, UCL. Here we explore an exercise developed for the course that aims to foster integrative learning via an object-based...

The data presented here is a set of 2,800 multispectral images of an actual parchment, taken before and after a set of degradation procedures that were designed to match the most likely types of damage which may occur over the lifetime of parchment documents. It is presented here as a source for the digitisation and digital imaging community to all...

Organizational scholars have studied learning processes within and across organizational boundaries. In this paper, we introduce the concept of extra-organizational learning to explain the mechanisms that enable learning among external individuals who are not bound to the focal organization by an employment contract and yet their tasks benefit the...

Although there is a lot of digitised cultural heritage content online, it is still incredibly difficult to source good material to reuse, or material that you are allowed to reuse, in creative projects. What can institutions do to help people who want to invest their time in making and creating using digitised historical items as inspiration and so...