Architectural Digital Humanities student projects

In the context of our ArchiMediaL project on Digital Architectural History, a number of student projects explored opportunities and challenges around enriching the colonialarchitecture.eu dataset. This dataset lists buildings and sites in countries outside of Europe that at the time were ruled by Europeans (1850-1970).

Patrick Brouwer wrote his IMM bachelor thesis “Crowdsourcing architectural knowledge: Experts versus non-experts” about the differences in annotation styles between architecture historical experts  and non-expert crowd annotators. The data suggests that although crowdsourcing is a viable option for annotating this type of content. Also, expert annotations were of a higher quality than those of non-experts. The image below shows a screenshot of the user study survey.

Rouel de Romas also looked at crowdsourcing , but focused more on the user interaction and the interface involved in crowdsourcing. In his thesis “Enriching the metadata of European colonial maps with crowdsourcing”  he -like Patrick- used the Accurator platform, developed by Chris Dijkshoorn. A screenshot is seen below.  The results corroborate the previous study that the in most cases the annotations provided by the participants do meet the requirements provided by the architectural historian; thus, crowdsourcing is an effective method to enrich the metadata of European colonial maps.

Finally, Gossa Lo looked at automatic enrichment using OCR techniques on textual documents for her Mini-Master projcet. She created a specific pipeline for this, which can be seen in the image below. Her code and paper are available on this Github page:https://github.com/biktorrr/aml_colonialnlp

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Kickoff meeting Mixed Methods in the Humanities projects

Last week, the Volkswagen Stiftung-funded “Mixed Methods’ in the Humanities?” programme had its kickoff meeting for all funded projects in in Hannover, Germany. Our ArchiMediaL project on enriching and linking historical architectural and urban image collections was one of the projects funded through this programme and even though our project will only start in September, we already presented our approach,  the challenges we will be facing and who will face them (our great team of post-docs Tino Mager, Seyran Khademi and Ronald Siebes). Group picture. Can you spot all the humanities and computer science people?Other interesting projects included analysing of multi-religious spaces on the Medieval World (“Dhimmis and Muslims”); the “From Bach to Beatles” project on representing music and schemata to support musicological scholarship as well as the nice Digital Plato project which uses NLP technologies to map paraphrasing of Plato in the ancient world. An overarching theme was a discussion on the role of digital / quantitative / distant reading methods in humanities research. The projects will run for three years so we have some time to say some sensible things about this in 2020.

 

 

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ArchiMediaL proposal granted by Volkswagen Stiftung

Volkswagen stiftung letterI received a good news letter from Volkswagen Stiftung who decided to award us a research grant for a 3-year Digital Humanities project named “ArchiMediaL” around architectural history. This project will be a collaboration between  architecture historians from TU Delft,  computer scientists from TU Delft and VU-Web and Media. A number of German scholars will also be involved as domain experts. The project will combine image analysis software with crowdsourcing and semantic linking to create networks of visual resources which will foster understanding of understudied areas in architectural history.
From the proposal:In the mind of the expert or everyday user, the project detaches the digital images from its existence as a single artifact and includes it into a global network of visual sources, without disconnecting it from its provenance. The project that expands the framework of hermeneutic analysis through a quantitative reference system, in which discipline-specific canons and limitations are questions. For the dialogue between the history of architecture and urban form this means a careful balancing of qualitative and quantitative information and of negotiating new methodological approaches for future investigation.

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