EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure) supports the use of digital tools that can assist in the research of Holocaust and refugee related topics. In a continued effort to make these tools as accessible as possible so that researchers who have no experience with digital tools will consider trying new ways of using their data, this GitHub-based lesson showcases the use of entity match tools when dealing with geographic data.
Many Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) face difficulties sharing their collections metadata in standardised and sustainable ways, meaning that staff rely on more familiar general purpose office programs such as spreadsheets. However, while these tools offer a simple approach to data registration and digitisation they don’t allow for more advanced uses. This blogpost from EHRI explains a procedure for producing EAD (Encoded Archival Description) files from an Excel spreadsheet using OpenRefine.
The Fortunoff Visual Search is a tool for both data visualisation and collection discovery from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Tesimonies. This blogpost demonstrates the Visual Search tool in the Fortunoff Video Archive, including the search and filtering interface, as well as interpreting the resulting visualisations
This blog discusses the applicability of services such as automatic metadata generation and semantic annotation for automatic extraction of person names and locations from large datasets. This is demonstrated using Oral History Transcripts provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
In the late 1930s, just before war broke in Europe, a series of chaotic deporations took place expelling thousands of Jews from what is now Slovakia. As part of his research, Michel Frankl investigates the backgrounds of the deported people, and the trajectory of the journey they were taken on. This practical blog describes the tools and processes of analysis, and shows how a spatially enabled database can be made useful for answering similar questions in the humanities, and Holocaust Studies in particular.
OpenCV is a very popular, free and open source software system used for a large variety of computer vision applications. This article is intended to help you get started in experimenting with OpenCV using an example of face detection in images as a case study.
This blog post from EHRI introduces 'quod' (querying OCRed documents), a prototype Python-based command line tool for OCRing and querying digitised historical documents, which can be used to organise large collections and improve information about provenance. To demonstrate its use in context, this blog takes the reader through a case study of the International Tracing Service, showing workflows and the steps taken from start to finish.
Topic modelling is a technique by which documents within a corpus are clustered based on how certain groups of terms are used together within the text. The commonalities between such term groupings tend to form what we would normally call “topics”, providing a way to automatically categorise documents by their structural content, rather than a more metadata-based knowledge system. Using resources held with EHRI's collections, this notebook offers learners an introduction to 'LDA' topic modelling using Python in a step-by-step guide.
In this lecture from the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH), Jeffrey Schnapp outlines the main questions which Knowledge Design is concerned with. Schnapp provides an overview of the current situation of boundaries between libraries, museums, archives, and the classroom becoming growing porous. Additionally, he explores the role of knowledge in Digital Humanities, and which methods and tools are ideal for efficient knowledge extraction.
Polifonia is a H2020 project that aims at harmonising diverse information sources in the landscape of musical heritage and scholarship. The challenges are many, from data management, to knowledge organisation and dissemination barriers. In this talk, an ontology driven strategy to organise, share, and interact with the wealth of music data on the web, is presented. This include solutions to engage with scholars and lay persons, with an emphasis on data visualisation and storytelling.
This video presentation from Clare Lanigan at the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) on the 'Archiving Reproductive Health' project, and discusses archival activism more broadly. In particular she gives a demonstration of the current collections available through the archive, provides details of how items were compiled, and also discusses the more pastoral and welfare issues for archival staff when dealing with items relating to political or social activism.
This webinar is a lively discussion of archival collections containing rich material relating to Dublin, ranging from 'ghost signs' that illustrate the hidden history of Dublin's commercial past, historical collections on key events in our shared history like the 1916 Rising, community-based films that showcase the contemporary social history of the city, photographs that provide insight into the fascinating heritage of communities like the Dublin Port docklands, and much more.
