Venue: Trinity College Dublin
Date: 4-8 July 2011
The call for applications for the Summer School has closed.
We can no longer accept applications.
Sponsors:
The Digital Humanities Observatory and Trinity College Dublin are delighted to announce a five day summer school, ‘From Metadata to Linked Data’, a joint Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) COST (Interedition) training school. Through the generosity of the IRCHSS and COST, there is no registration fee. The organisers encourage applications from a variety of subject areas: especially the various disciplines of the humanities, computer science, and the digital humanities.
The Training School and will feature seminars in the morning and hands-on workshops in the afternoon by scholars in the field including Tobias Blanke (Kings College London), Owen Conlan (Trinity College Dublin), Shawn Day (Digital Humanities Observatory), Jennifer Edmond (Trinity College Dublin), Alex O'Connor (Trinity College Dublin), Geoffrey Rockwell (U of Alberta), Susan Schreibman (Digital Humanities Observatory), and Joris van Zundert (Huygens Instituut).
The week will be dedicated to exploring the theories, methods, and tools to create a technology-enabled, distant approach to reading. Distant reading, a term coined by the Stanford-based literary critic, Franco Moretti, relies on computational methods to generate abstract models to ‘read’ large textual corpora. In his 2006 article entitled ‘What do you do with a Million Books’, Greg Crane gave the digital humanities community a shorthand for reading in the modern age. His article points toward a number of exciting possibilities for a paradigm shift in humanities scholarship but realising this ambition has proven more difficult than theorising it.
This summer school will bring together a group of interdisciplinary experts to explore solutions to distant reading. The methods to be explored offer the potential to interconnect the knowledge embedded in cultural heritage materials by relating people, places and events across documents and collections so researchers can interrogate them. This technology offers unprecedented power to investigate textual material to begin to realise the vision of distant reading. Attendees must bring a laptop for afternoon exercises.
Hotel Accommodation
We have arranged special rates for Summer School attendees at the following. Please note that in the case of the D4, reservations must be made prior to 2 May 2011:
D4Hotels (www.d4hotels.ie)
+353 (0)1 4373 444
Approximately 15 minutes walk from Trinity College.
€49.00/night for room only in Ballsbridge Inn, 3 Star
€55.00/night for room only in Ballsbridge Towers, 3 Star Deluxe
€60.00/night for room only in D4 Berkeley, 4 Star
*Add a full Irish Breakfast for €10.00/person per day
*Rate valid from 3-9 July 2011 inclusive.
Quote 'Metadata to Linked Data Summer School' in order to receive the group rate. Note: all reservations must be made in advance of Monday, 2nd May 2011 in order to guarantee the rates listed above.
Buswell's Hotel (www.buswells.ie)
+353 (0)1 614 6500
Approximately 5 minute walk from Trinity College.
€110.00/night for single occupancy in a double-room
€92.00/night for single room
*Rates include Full Irish Breakfast, Service Charge and VAT.
Room rates are as of January 2011 and are subject to increase at the discretion of the hotel, therefore we cannot guarantee that summer school attendees will be able to avail of these rates.
Application Instructions (including bursaries)
Applicants may also apply for one of the bursaries being generously funded by the COST Action Interedition and the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences. Up to 20 bursaries for Early Stage Researchers in Europe have been awarded. The deadline for applications has passed.
To apply for bursaries, candidates must be:
* an emerging scholar, which is defined by the ESF as someone who has not been in an established position for more than five years, with exceptions for parental, medical, and national service leaves. The ESF notes that ‘students, post-doctorate researchers and lecturers within 5 years of appointment would be amongst those included in this definition’.
* affiliated to an institution in a country in which ESF has a member organisation <see http://www.esf.org/about-us/80-member-organisations.html>
There is no registration fee for the summer school. Bursaries will be awarded in two categories: €300 for Irish delegates and up to €600 for delegates outside Ireland. Expenses will be reimbursed after the event.
Summer School Programme
Day 1: Introduction to Markup and Metadata
Focuses on the principles of XML and markup from a variety of perspectives (including semantic, structural markup, and markup for geospatial and temporal codepoints). Students will be introduced to a variety of standards, such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), geospatial markup standards KML/GML, and the processes of geoparsing from existing locational references. Standards-based techniques will extend into use of emerging methods of tree maps and flow graphs.
Day 2: From Text to Textual Data
Explores the the essential phases and characteristics of work flows pertaining to the curation of text as digital data. An overview of existing tools for digital curation will be provided (such as eLaborate, Versioning Machine, GATE, TextGrid, CollateX). This overview of workflows and tools for the creation of textual data will be followed by an introduction to computational approaches of text and text analysis: what does it mean to shift from a book oriented view on humanities research to a data oriented view.
Day 3: Generating Textual Data
Based on the results of day two, participants will dig deeper into the details of generating textual data using text and data mining techniques. Participants will learn methods to algorithmically create textual data while critically evaluating existing tools, methods, and solutions as well as their future potential. They will gain insights on how generic services need to be modified to serve the needs of humanities research. Finally, we will investigate how to generate output can be reused in the emerging web of data.
Day 4: Linked Data, Ontology and RDF
Workshop participants will learn the principles of Ontology and its practical application in digital humanities research through the use of Linked Data and the Semantic Web. They will learn how to work with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and its associated tools. Participants will also learn to expose the knowledge represented in TEI encoded documents learned in Day I to the Linked Data world, thus facilitating the linking of many collections of digital humanities material.
Day 5 Lessons Learned
Summer School Round Up: Lessons learned and discussion of roadmap for future research and collaboration.
For more information about the Summer School, please fill up the contact form and we will be back in touch.
This summer school is being offered in conjunction with the DARIAH network
