Agora at Web Science

Posted on April 14, 2013 by chielvdakker

Agora will be presenting at Webscience13 with the paper “From Information Delivery to Interpretation Support: Evaluating Cultural Heritage Access on the Web”. A first draft of the program is now available.

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International Conference Tangible Pasts? Questioning Heritage Education

Posted on March 8, 2013 by chielvdakker

Susan and Chiel will be presenting at the International Conference Tangible Pasts? Questioning Heritage Education in Rotterdam, June 6-7, 2013. The program and the abstracts of the papers can be found here.

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Agora Project Review

Posted on December 13, 2012 by mvanerp

Today, Agora is presenting the project results to the International Scientific Advisory Board of the CATCH program. The slides give a comprehensive overview of the project so far.

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Studiedag Digitale Geschiedenis

Posted on December 6, 2012 by chielvdakker

On Januari 7 2013, Chiel van den Akker will be presenting a paper at the Studiedag Digitale Geschiedenis (Worskshop Digital History), organised by the Royal Dutch History Society (KNHG) and Huygens ING. The program and abstracts of the papers can be found here.

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Slides History as Dialogue

Posted on September 17, 2012 by chielvdakker

The slides of Chiel van den Akker talk “History as Dialogue” at the Digital Humanities Congress 2012 in Sheffield, 6-8 Sept. can be viewed on slideshare and on the DH Sheffield website.

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Dial E for Events

Posted on September 11, 2012 by laroyo

Last week Lora Aroyo gave a keynote “Dial E for Events” at the i-semantics2012 conference. The focus of the talk were events and an approach, based on the theory that the disagreement among humans about events constitute a natural state, where we can harness this disagreement through crowdsourcing to bring a new kind of meaning to events.

Objects, like people, locations, and various other types of named entities, are often easy to detect in language and present on the semantic web. Without events, however, they lack meaning. Assigning roles to objects in events is a step towards bringing them meaning, but the detection and representation of events is much harder than for objects; they are typically not named and humans have difficulty identifying them and distinguishing their boundaries, as well as linking and ordering them consistently. Many event-centric approaches in NLP have attempted to “fix” the problem of human disagreement regarding events by over-specifying their semantics for isolated tasks, but this leads to brittleness and lack of coverage.

Here are the slides:

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Results first user studies: focus group and secondary school pupils

Posted on July 31, 2012 by mvanerp

Master’s student Ardjan van Nuland has finished his master’s project in the context of the Agora project that was focused on the user perception of the Agora platform and interface. He conducted interviews with people with a Dutch-Indies background in order to get their take on sharing their memories of historical events on a digital platform. He also did a user study at a secondary school to see how the current Agora demo might help them in their search for historical knowledge.

His results are positive in the sense that the focus group definitely sees a place for digital platforms in sharing their memories and preserving their stories. We were also pleasantly surprised that they already seem to be building narratives around objects, something that is very much in line with the way we would like to offer context to objects. The secondary school pupils liked the demo in the sense that it is a much more active way to work on a topic than to listen to an instructor or read it from a book, but the interface is far from optimal.

Ardjan’s studies gives us some good insights into how we can improve the demo and connect with various user groups to ensure that the Agora platform will indeed become an ‘Agora’ where different communities come together to learn about and discuss objects and their historical contexts. His thesis describing his studies in detail can be found here.

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Research Visit to Eurecom

Posted on July 31, 2012 by mvanerp

Two weeks ago Agora team member Marieke visited the Eurecom research lab in France to discuss ideas for entity recognition and event presentation. We have collaborated before with them on the organisation of the DeRiVE workshop and we thought to take this one step further. They are currently doing some very interesting things with Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation through their NERD project, which also happens to be one of the focus points of Marieke’s research at the moment in order to automatically generate event descriptions from text. No tangible results yet, but some very fruitful code and data exchange.

Here is also a slideshow of the context and current status of Agora as presented by Marieke:

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History as Dialogue

Posted on July 10, 2012 by chielvdakker

Chiel will be presenting a paper on “History as Dialogue” at the Digital Humanities Congress at the University of Sheffield, 6-8 September 2012. The abstract of the paper reads thus:

History as Dialogue

 “The goal [of digital history] is not to displace argument, synthesis, interpretation, and understanding in favor of a celebration of infinite possibility, but to broaden the participation in a dialogic process of engagement, questioning, and reflection on answers.” __Michael Frisch1

It is indisputable that the virtual reconstruction of Rome, the real time simulation of the Apollo 11 flight, and the searchable archive of social life in early modern London, are important and exciting means of presenting history with the use of new media. However, these genres are not digital alternatives to academic history writing.

For a long time, the book has been history’s medium and the monograph its genre. The monographic narrative, however, no longer seems appropriate in a digital environment. I will argue that the dialogue as a genre is the most likely candidate to achieve online what the monograph aimed at before: providing a comprehensive synthesis of the past. This online dialogue might develop out of the already existing discussion networks.

Two arguments will be put forward. 1) What is regarded as typical of digital media – it is variable, interactive, dynamic, collaborative, and consisting of hypertext – is in agreement with the online dialogue. 2) Historical monographs provide panoramic interpretations of part of the past. Such historical understanding can also be achieved by means of an online dialogue.

This second argument allows me to partly criticize the supposed rapprochement between the sciences and the humanities in digital humanities. Admittedly, there might be such rapprochement on the level of methods of analysis, however, on the level of understanding and writing, the sciences and the humanities will remain distinctive realms of thought.

1. Cohen, Frisch, Gallagher, Mintz, Sword, Taylor, Thomas III, and Turkel, “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History”, Journal of American History Vol. 95 no. 2 (2008) 452-491.

 

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Agora Slides CMN’12 May 26-27

Posted on June 3, 2012 by chielvdakker

Slides Agora CMN’12

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