This editorial introduces the special issue on “Digital Humanities & Film Studies: Analyzing the Modalities of Moving Images,” which contains a total of eight exciting contributions. Moreover, this editorial aims to highlight the complementary disciplinary perspectives on the computer-aided analysis of moving images, which are important prerequisites to better understand and situate a common DH perspective.

In the cities of Richmond, Virginia; Charleston South Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Baltimore, Maryland, this dissertation endeavors to find out what can be learned about the archaeology(s) of Black memory(s) through Africological Epistemic Visual Storytelling (AEVS); their silences, their hauntings, their wake work, and their healing? This project is concerned with elucidating new African memories and African knowledges that emerge from a two-tier Afrocentric analysis of Eurocentric cartography that problematizes the dual hegemony of the colonial archive of public memory and the colonial map by using an Afrocentric methodology that deploys a Black Digital Humanities research design to create an African agentic ritual archive that counters the colonial one. Additionally, this dissertation explains the importance of understanding the imperial geographic logics inherent in the hegemonically quotidian cartographies of Europe and the United States that sanction white supremacist narratives of memory and suppress spatial imaginations and memories in African communities primarily, but Native American communities as well. It is the hope of the primary researcher that from this project knowledge will be gained about how African people can use knowledge gained from analyzing select monuments/sites of memorialization for the purposes of asserting agency, resisting, and possibly breaking the supposed correctness of the colonial map. / African American Studies

To overcome the limitations of structural XML mark-up, graph-based data models and graph databases, as well as event-based ontologies like CIDOC-CRM (FORTH-ICS 2018) have been considered for the creation of digital editions. We apply the graph-based approach to model charter regests and extend it with the CIDOC-CRM ontology, as it allows us to integrate information from different sources into a flexible data model. By implementing the ontology within the Neo4j graph database (Neo4j 2018) we create a sustainable data source that allows explorative search queries and finally, the integration of the database in various technical systems. Our use case are the charters from the St. Katharinenspital, a former medieval hospital in Regensburg, Germany. By analysing charter abstracts with natural language processing (NLP) methods and using additional data sources related to the charters, we generate additional metadata. The extracted information allows the modelling of cross-document interdependencies of charter regests and their related entities. Building upon this, we develop an exploratory web application that allows to investigate a graph-based digital edition. Thereby, each entity is displayed in its unique context, i.e., it is shown together with its related entities (next neighbours) in the graph. We use this to enhance the result lists of a full-text search, and to generate entity-specific detail pages.

Bien que la globalisation culturelle laisse supposer qu'il soit possible de produire et de recevoir de façon égalitaire des informations partout dans le monde, les cartes du savoir sont en réalité caractérisées par un déséquilibre énorme. Le projet analyse ce phénomène en s’appuyant sur l‘exemple du transfert trilatéral de la littérature académique africaine en France et en Allemagne depuis les années cinquantes. D’une part, le but principal de ce projet est de relever la quasi totalité des livres et recueils universitaires en sciences sociales et humaines rédigés par des intellectuels africains et publiés dans des maisons d’édition allemandes et françaises. D’autre part, l’analyse des résultats quantitatives est basée sur une approche macro-perspective en s’appuyant sur les études qualitatives sur le sujet préexistantes. L’analyse quantitative et la classification des résultats ainsi que leur interprétation permettent actuellement d’obtenir des connaissances étonnantes, non seulement sur des continuités et discontinuités dans la publication de la littérature universitaire en provenance d’Afrique sur une période d‘environ soixante ans, mais également sur les profils géographiques, thématiques et temporels des maisons d’édition ainsi que sur leurs préférences personnelles, éditoriales et linguistiques. Grâce à la collection de données, le filtrage, le traitement ultérieur et la visualisation, nous pouvons alors comprendre quelle « Afrique scientifique » a finalement été transmise et importée, pour la période définie (1950-2012), à ces deux marchés du livre. Cette approche permet d’envisager de nouvelles hypothèses et interprétations pour l’analyse de la circulation du savoir africain, à l’instar des publications en sciences sociales et humaines. Une approche établie pour la recherche sur le franchissement culturel des frontières constitue le concept de transfert culturel. Pour ce travail, le concept fournit des approches théoriques et pratiques essentielles. En combinant différentes méthodes pour lesquelles les « digital humanities » ont été de plus en plus souvent sollicitées, l’approche méthodologique va vers une reconstruction complète du transfert, en utilisant aussi bien les analyses quantitatives que qualitatives. / Even though international interconnectedness and globalization evoke the idea of being able to produce and receive knowledge equally all over the world, the maps of knowledge are unevenly distributed on a global scale. My dissertation project analyses this phenomenon by examining the trilateral, multidimensional transfer of African academic literature to Germany and France since the 1950s.The research interest of this project is to determine and organize the entire spectrum of publications from the social sciences and the humanities written by African authors and published in German and French publishing houses. The quantitative analysis on a macro level is based on already existing qualitative studies in the field. The quantitative analysis and the classification of the results give valuable knowledge about continuities and discontinuities in the publication of African academic literature over the span of six decades (1950-2012). The research further examines and elaborates upon geographical, thematic, and temporal profiles of the publishing houses as well as their personal, editorial, and linguistic preferences. By means of collecting, filtering, processing, and visualizing the data, it is possible to find out what kind of “academic Africa” has finally reached the two national book markets. This approach helps to identify new hypotheses and interpretations concerning the circulation of African knowledge in general through the specific example of academic literature from the social sciences and the humanities. Providing important theoretical and practical approaches for this project, the concept of cultural transfers is an established approach for analysing cultural border crossings between countries and regions. The methodological approach combines different methods and, for the data processing, includes examples from the digital humanities to realize an all-embracing reconstruction of the entire transfer process in both a quantitative and qualitative sense.

Virtuelle 3D-Modelle finden in den historischen Disziplinen in zweierlei Art Verwendung. Zum einen dienen diese zur Erfassung und Digitalisierung existierender historischer Objekte. Daneben dient die Erstellung von virtuellen 3D-Rekonstruktionen der Nachbildung nicht mehr existierender Objekte und Strukturen. Während technische Abläufe beider Ansätze ebenso wie methodische und wissenschaftstheoretische Aspekte in der Fachliteratur häufig und umfassend thematisiert werden, ist eine Frage nach sozialen Aspekten und sozialer Interaktion im Kontext derartiger Vorhaben bisher unbeleuchtet geblieben. Ziel der Arbeit stellt dar, eine Bandbreite und Relevanz von Aspekten der Kooperation als „Zusammenarbeit mit gemeinsamem Ziel, gegenseitiger Abstimmung, planvollem Vorgehen sowie Vorteilen für alle Akteure“ (Hagenhoff, 2004) im Kontext derartiger geschichtswissenschaftlicher 3D-Modellierungsvorhaben mittels sozialwissenschaftlicher Methoden zu beleuchten. Dabei zielt eine Darlegung auf unterschiedliche Skalierungen von Kooperation ab – angefangen bei einer Wissenschaftslandschaft über Kooperationsstrukturen bis hin zu einer Betrachtung von spezifischen Kooperationsphänomenen und -strategien innerhalb von Arbeits- und Erstellungsprozessen.

Virtuelle 3D-Modelle finden in den historischen Disziplinen in zweierlei Art Verwendung. Zum einen dienen diese zur Erfassung und Digitalisierung existierender historischer Objekte. Daneben dient die Erstellung von virtuellen 3D-Rekonstruktionen der Nachbildung nicht mehr existierender Objekte und Strukturen. Während technische Abläufe beider Ansätze ebenso wie methodische und wissenschaftstheoretische Aspekte in der Fachliteratur häufig und umfassend thematisiert werden, ist eine Frage nach sozialen Aspekten und sozialer Interaktion im Kontext derartiger Vorhaben bisher unbeleuchtet geblieben. Ziel der Arbeit stellt dar, eine Bandbreite und Relevanz von Aspekten der Kooperation als „Zusammenarbeit mit gemeinsamem Ziel, gegenseitiger Abstimmung, planvollem Vorgehen sowie Vorteilen für alle Akteure“ (Hagenhoff, 2004) im Kontext derartiger geschichtswissenschaftlicher 3D-Modellierungsvorhaben mittels sozialwissenschaftlicher Methoden zu beleuchten. Dabei zielt eine Darlegung auf unterschiedliche Skalierungen von Kooperation ab – angefangen bei einer Wissenschaftslandschaft über Kooperationsstrukturen bis hin zu einer Betrachtung von spezifischen Kooperationsphänomenen und -strategien innerhalb von Arbeits- und Erstellungsprozessen.

This dissertation thesis deals with the application of the concept of information distance to the social network data analysis. We consider this data as recorded acts of social action. As such, they express certain attitudes, values and intentions. We introduce a formula for calculating the Normalized Social Distance and, based on the series of case studies, we prove the usefulness and validity of this approach. The application of formal mathematical and computer science techniques to massive data records of human action in social network environments is enabled by the change brought by new media and the associated technological advancement. This change is accompanied by a gradual transition of research methods in the humanities, referred to as the onset of digital humanities. This approach is characterized by the application of quantitative methods in the field of humanities and the discovery of new data areas useful for analyses. In case of social media data, the differentiation between quantitative and qualitative methods is no longer valid. A good example is also this thesis, in which information theory specifically combines the methods of a traditional social network analysis and the Goffman's frame analysis of human action. Keywords Information distance, Normalized Social Distance, Kolmogorov...

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how six different art museums are working on digitizing their collections, and how they are made available to the public. To answer the purpose, three research questions were formulated; how the museums work with digitization, what is digitized and which programs and guidelines are used, and how the digitized material is made available to the public on the websites. The museums examined in this thesis are Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Palace Museum Taiwan in Taipei and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Prior to the study, previous research on digital humanities, digitization in museums, and the role of museums and their approach to digital collections, were studied. The theoretical framework used in the analysis consists of theories regarding “New media” and digital humanities, theories about “The museum process” and Actor-network theory, ANT. The method used is qualitative content analysis and semiotic image analysis of the museum websites. The results and analysis show that the museum websites differ in terms of design, functions, user-friendliness and collection content. In addition, the museums use different guidelines and software programs in the digitization process of their collections, although there is some overlap. The analysis shows that the Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian and the National Palace Museum Taiwan are the museums in the study that have made the most progress with digitizing their collections and using interactive elements on their websites. The museum with the least developed digitization work is Moderna Museet, whose search page is the simplest and most standardized in comparison with the other museum websites.

Whereas past and current digital projects in ancient language studies have been concerned with the annotation of linguistic elements and metadata, there is now an increased interest in the annotation of elements above the linguistic level that are determined by context – like figurative language. Such projects bring their own set of problems (the automatisation of annotation is more difficult, for instance), but also allow us to develop new ways of examining the data. For this reason, we have attempted to take an already annotated database of Ancient Egyptian texts and develop a complementary tagging layer rather than starting from scratch with a new database. In this paper, we present our work in developing a metaphor annotation layer for the Late Egyptian text database of Projet Ramsès (Université de Liège) and in so doing address more general questions: 1) How to ‚tailor-make’ annotation layers to fit other databases? (Workflow) 2) How to make annotations that are flexible enough to be altered in the course of the annotation process? (Project design) 3) What kind of potential do such layers have for integration with existing and future annotations? (Sustainability)

This thesis investigates cognition and knowledge in a rich selection of late medieval Florentine commonplace books (zibaldoni) and diaries (ricordanze) with a special focus on Giovanni Rucellai’s Zibaldone Quaresimale. In Chapter Two a new methodology, named Mental Model Framework in History (MMFH), is elaborated. By studying mental processes such as categorisation and decision making, MMFH enables us to study cognition in historical documents. The dissertation is based on a computer-assisted analysis described in Chapter Three . This has brought together a number of technologies (Natural Language Processing, Semantic Web, Text Encoding Initiative) and used them according to the interpretative goals of the MMFH. Chapter Four investigates the knowledge-constructing practice of late medieval Florentines, and concludes that commonplace books and diaries were tools of information management and knowledge transmission. The core chapters study four domains of thinking: space, time, agency and perception. Chapter Five analyses social recognition and judgement in Renaissance Florence and reveals how a new ethical thought took shape, one that prepared the transition to capitalism. By applying decision and game theory, Chapter Six examines horizontal friendship, a bond that functioned as an informal but risky social insurance in Florence. Chapter Seven studies how Florentines used superlatives to construct a hierarchy of the world, with Florence on the top. This was the manifestation of a fierce competition within and outside the walls of Florence, competition that strongly influenced the social and physical environment of the city. By studying selection, periodisation and causal reasoning, Chapter Eight pinpoints the gradual secularisation of the conception of time. The thesis concludes that the late medieval revolution in information culture marked by the gradual transition from an overwhelmingly oral culture to an increasingly literate culture produced quantitative and qualitative changes in human thought. This largely contributed to the birth of modern thought, and to the late medieval transformation of the social and physical environment.