The opportunistic librarian: A Leuven confessionDemmy Verbeke

Libraries and DH

acrl.ala.org/dh

(Posner 2013)

Why the Digital Humanities?

(Spiro 2011; Vandegrift – Varner 2013)

1. Provide wide access to cultural information

2. Enhance teaching and learning3. Transform scholarly communication4. Make a public impact5. Enable manipulation of data

Leiden University Library (1610)

Joe & Rika Mansueto Library, University of Chicago

Saltire Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University

The collaboration triangle

Humanities research

Information technology

Information manageme

nt

DH

R&D in libraries(Nowviskie 2013, Nowviskie 2014)

“When a library can both support basic digital scholarship needs through distributed

services and create a critical mass of staffing and intellectual energy in something like a

center (however conceived), it has set the conditions for the advancement of

knowledge itself, through the fulfillment of research desires yet unknown, un-

expressed.” (Nowviskie 2014)

Centre of expertise for:

PlagiarismCopyright

Open AccessDigital

Humanities

Academic Bibliography &

Institutional Repository

Reference librarians

A library supporting research

Institutional context

since November 2011: DH Task Force, Arts Faculty (vice dean of research, faculty librarian, head of the faculty’s computer department, research support officer of the faculty, and all interested researchers)

2014: 3 new academic positions: Tenure track professor in DH (Arts Faculty), Computer Science for DH (Department of Computer Science), Human-Media Interaction (Institute for Media Studies)

2015: Advanced Master in Digital Humanities

A library supporting DH

White paper “Digital Humanities en/in KU Leuven bibliotheken“ of the Library Council of the Humanities and Social Sciences Group

(February 2013)

intention to focus on: digitisation projects supporting relevant grant applications partnering in DH projects, from inception to

completion (and beyond) providing training in DH tools playing an expert role in the field of scholarly

communication

Project example

Portable Light Dome (“Mini-dome”)

www.arts.kuleuven.be/info/ONO/Meso/digitalisatie

Project example

RICH - Reflectance Imaging for Cultural Heritage

www.illuminare.be/rich_project

Project example

Europeana Photography

www.europeana-photography.eu

Project example

OCR/NER for 17th-, 18th- and 19th-C Dutch books

Funding: SUpport action Centre for CompEtEnce in Digitisation (

www.succeed-project.eu)

Team: Digitisation services of University Library (Diewer van der

Meijden, Mark Verbrugge, Bruno Vandermeulen) LIBIS (Sam Alloing) Arts Faculty Library (Demmy Verbeke) Student workers (Jolien Berckmans, Els Meskens)

Support:• INL (Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie)

KU Leuven & succeedgoals

End goal: integration of OCR in digitisation workflow at

KU Leuven integration of NER in digitisation workflow at

KU Leuven

Specifically: learn from digitising textual material with a

view to OCR (rather than as a representation of the book as physical object)

understand OCR possibilities learn how to enrich textual material with NER develop workflows, identify infrastructure

problems, etc.

KU Leuven & succeedcorpus

13 books from the pretiosa collection of the Gulden Librije:

- translations from Latin- monolingual Dutch (so without Latin original)- books with comparable, simple typefaces (no Gothic)- books that have not been digitized yet

Augustinus, Stad Gods (1876-8); Augustinus, Belydenis (1741); Boëthius, Vertroostinge der wysgeerte (1703);

Horatius, Over de dichtkunst (1866); Horatius, Hekeldichten en brieven (1728); Nepos, Leevens van doorlugtige mannen

(1796); Nepos, Leeven der doorluchtige veld-ooversten (1726); Ovidius, Treur-digten (1814-5); Ovidius, Treur-

gesangen (1692); Seneca, Christelycke Seneca (1705); Tacitus, Vande ghedenkwaerdige geschiedenissen der

Romeinen (1645); Vergilius, Wercken (1737); Vergilius, Aeneis (1662)

KU Leuven & succeedtools

ABBY Finereader Engine SDK 11 – OCRUser Pattern Trainer of ABBY Finereader – train OCRIMPACT historical lexicon for Dutch, integrated as a FineReader external dictionary – improve OCR

Aletheia – build ground truth

ocrevalUAtion – compare OCR results NER tool for Europeana Newspapers – NERNE Attestation Tool – manually correct NERNERT – build training & test set

Conclusion

“This is one of the great opportunity spaces that the Digital Humanities

opens up, giving archivists, librarians, and curators a chance to not simply enlarge but completely re-envision

their communities, publics, and missions.”

(Burdick et al. 2012, 48-49)

References

@viroviacumdemmy.verbeke@arts.kuleuven.

be

Anne Burdick and others, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012)Christian Clausner, Stefan Pletschacher and Apostolos Antonacopoulos, ‘Efficient OCR Training Data Generation with Aletheia’, in Proceedings of the 11th International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS2014) <www.primaresearch.org/www/assets/papers/DAS2014_Clausner_OCRTrainingDataGeneration.pdf>William A. Kretzschmar and William Gray Potter, “Library Collaboration with Large Digital Humanities Projects,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25, no. 4 (2010): 439–445 <doi:10.1093/llc/fqq022> Bethany Nowviskie, “Skunks in the Library: A Path to Production for Scholarly R&D,” Journal of Library Administration 53, no. 1 (2013): 53–66 <doi:10.1080/01930826.2013.756698>Bethany Nowviskie, “Asking for It,” 2014 <http://nowviskie.org/2014/asking-for-it>Miriam Posner, “Digital Humanities and the Library: A Bibliography,” 2013 <http://miriamposner.com/blog/?page_id=1033>Jennifer Schaffner and Ricky Erway, “OCLC Research Report: Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?,” 2014 <www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2014/oclcresearch-digital-humanities-center-2014-overview.html>Ben Showers, “Does the Library Have a Role to Play in the Digital Humanities?,” 2012 <http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/02/23/does-the-library-have-a-role-to-play-in-the-digital-humanities>Lisa Spiro, “Why the Digital Humanities?,” 2011 <http://digitalscholarship.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/dhglca-5.pdf>Micah Vandegrift and Stewart Varner, “Evolving in Common: Creating Mutually Supportive Relationships Between Libraries and the Digital Humanities,” Journal of Library Administration 53, no. 1 (2013): 67–78 <doi:10.1080/01930826.2013.756699>