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The Prosopographic Database of German Engineers 1825–1970 contains a multitude of biographical information. Given a set of research interests by collaborating historians, this paper discusses the steps undertaken (1) to extract engineering subjects from unstructured text entries in the database accompanied with geospatial and temporal information, (2) to adapt existing visual representations to facilitate exploratory analyses, and (3) to design a visual interface to support the interactive composition of engineering branches from engineering subjects to enable the comparative analysis of geospatial-temporal developments in engineering. Usage scenarios outline the benefit of the proposed visualizations for modern prosopography research.

Various time-based visualization techniques have been designed to support the temporal analysis of data collections. While quantities play a secondary role in traditional timelines that reserve space for each individual data item to be observed, time graphs rather display quantitative information and they provide interaction means to filter for a subset of the data. Timages is a hybrid approach that enhances quantitative time graphs with qualitative information in an infographic-style. By (1) scaling thumbnails of data items dependent on relevance to the observed topic and by (2) time-dependent positioning these thumbnails inside a temporally aligned area with a novel space-filling strategy, the most relevant items in the entire data collection as well as predominant data items of certain time ranges are instantly seizable without the need to interact with the time graph.

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Computer science and the humanities seem to belong to two opposite sides within the spectrum of scientific methods and research. In the domain of digital humanities, however, formalization and hermeneutic interpretation have to be integrated. As will be argued in this article, this integration provides a fundamentally new challenge to both disciplines. In particular, researchers from the humanities want to be sure that using the tools provided by computer science (big data, machine learning, etc.) do not change insights in any non-expected way. However, even if this could be partially secured, it cannot be achieved in general for most of the research practices. As will be demonstrated in the context of digital editions in musicology, it is impossible to design technology in a neutral or context-free manner. Due to the interests of different actors and institutions, numerous design conflicts arise where the implementation of requirements violates other, equally valid demands. To balance these conflicting requirements invariably brings some bias to the overall design. Thus, it is important to develop a strategy for identifying potential influences as well as the impact of design decisions throughout the whole process of developing tools and infrastructures. The paper presents an approach for hypotheses driven design of digital tools and infrastructures from a computer science point of view, placing great emphasis on supporting mutual understanding and ensuring a transparent design process.

Currently, the qualitative spectrum of methods in the philological sciences is being substantially expanded, with far-reaching implications, through the integration of the empirical, quantitative, and evaluative possibilities of the Digital Humanities. The example of the planning and establishment of „Kallimachos,“ the Center for Philology and Digitality (ZPD) at the University of Würzburg, demonstrates how a research center in the field of interplay between the humanities and cultural studies, digital humanities, and computer science can bring about a surge of change by providing in-depth insights into each other‘s subjects and ways of thinking. It not only brings with it a new view of the epistemological interests of philology, its questions, its canon, and its key concepts, but also makes computer science aware of the ‚recalcitrance‘ of humanities subjects and thus confronts it with new tasks. The ZPD is the result of a systematic reflection on the digital transformation of philology, with its traditional focus on editing and analyzing, in order to advance this development both in terms of content and methodology. For example, the formation of linguistic conventions in speaking and writing about music in 19th-century composers‘ texts and in music journals would be an ideal subject for the application of digital methods of analysis and the development of new research questions based on them. Research networks that jointly develop and rethink methods on the level of data structures across disciplines are likely to be a proven means of preserving our own discipline in the future, even if this may occasionally be a relationship borne more by reason than by love.

Opening Up Scholarship in the Humanities: Digital Publishing, Knowledge Translation, and Public Engagement considers the concept of humanistic, open, social scholarship and argues for its value in the contemporary academy as both a set of socially oriented activities and an organizing framework for such activities. This endeavour spans the interrelated areas of knowledge creation, public engagement, and open access, and demonstrates the importance of considering this triad as critical for the pursuit of academic work moving forward—especially in the humanities. Under the umbrella of open social scholarship, I consider open access as a baseline for public engagement and argue for the vitalness of this sort of work. Moreover, I suggest that there is a strong connection between digital scholarship and social knowledge creation. I explore the knowledge translation lessons that other fields might have for the humanities and include a journalist–humanist case study to this end. I also argue for the value of producing research output in many different forms and formats. Finally, I propose that there are benefits to explicitly popularizing the humanities. In sum, this dissertation speculates on past, current, and future scholarly communication activities, and proposes that such activities might be opened up for wider engagement and, thus, social benefit. / Graduate

Digital text collections are increasingly important, as they enable researchers to explore new ways of interacting with texts through the use of technology. Various tools have been developed to facilitate exploring and searching in text collections at a fairly low level of granularity. Ideally, it should be possible to filter the results at a greater level of granularity to retrieve only specific instances in which the researcher is interested. The aim of this study was to investigate to what extent detailed metadata could be used to enhance texts in order to improve retrieval. To do this, the researcher had to identify metadata that could be useful to filter according to and find ways in which these metadata can be applied to or encoded in texts. The researcher also had to evaluate existing tools to determine to what extent current tools support retrieval on a fine-grained level. After identifying useful metadata and reviewing existing tools, the researcher could suggest a metadata framework that could be used to encode texts on a detailed level. Metadata in five different categories were used, namely morphological, syntactic, semantic, functional and bibliographic. A further contribution in this metadata framework was the addition of in-text bibliographic metadata, to use where sections in a text have different properties than those in the main text. The suggested framework had to be tested to determine if retrieval was indeed improved. In order to do so, a selection of texts was encoded with the suggested framework and a prototype was developed to test the retrieval. The prototype receives the encoded texts and stores the information in a database. A graphical user interface was developed to enable searching in the database in an easy and intuitive manner. The prototype demonstrates that it is possible to search for words or phrases with specific properties when detailed metadata are applied to texts. The fine-grained metadata from five different categories enable retrieval on a greater level of granularity and specificity. It is therefore recommended that detailed metadata are used to encode texts in order to improve retrieval in digital text collections. Keywords: metadata, digital humanities, digital text collections, retrieval, encoding / Thesis (DPhil (Information Science))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Information Science / DPhil (Information Science) / Unrestricted