Volume 58, Issue 2 - Computer Science in Humanities / Guest Editor: Manfred Thaller

Markup in the form of tags is often embedded into documents to describe formatting structures and other features, as in HTML on the Web. But in the humanities, the use of embedded markup for the transcription of historical documents leads to problems in the representation of overlapping features, and subjective variation in the use of different markup tags for the same features compromises interoperability of the transcriptions. “Standoff” techniques, in which the markup and the text it describes are stored separately, can help alleviate these problems. “Standoff properties” is a technique for recording textual properties that do not conform to a context-free grammar, and can freely overlap. This allows a divide-and-conquer approach to markup, whereby sets of markup properties can record different aspects of a text, which can then be recombined as needed. Despite these advantages, standoff techniques are usually considered impractical when both the underlying text and its markup are subject to change. To circumvent this problem, this paper describes a practical algorithm for updating a set of standoff markup properties separately from the text.

We introduce a new text technology, called Wikidition, which automatically generates large scale editions of corpora of natural language texts. Wikidition combines a wide range of text mining tools for automatically linking lexical, sentential and textual units. This includes the extraction of corpus-specific lexica down to the level of syntactic words and their grammatical categories. To this end, we introduce a novel measure of text reuse and exemplify Wikidition by means of the capitularies, that is, a corpus of Medieval Latin texts.

This article gives an overview of design considerations for a handwriting search engine based on pattern recognition and high-performance computing, “Monk”. In order to satisfy multiple and often conflicting technological requirements, an architecture is used which heavily relies on high-performance computing, interactivity, and a Posix file-access model for the scientific programmers. The resulting system is able to handle billions of image files, in the order of petabytes of storage capacity, with a single mount point. Monk is operational since the year 2009.

Motivated by the demand for robust character extraction from ancient documents with Script in 3D like cuneiform tablets, we are developing curvature based filter algorithms using integral invariants. While previous work was focused on analyzing 3D-models i. e. irregular triangular meshs in ℝ 3 , we introduce a fast, efficient adaption for edge detection in raster images. It is an alternative to the Canny edge detector algorithm and other complex algorithms using first and second order derivative filters. Our approach consists of two steps using (i) zero-crossings of volume integral invariants and (ii) surface integral invariants to discard false positives introduced by noise. The runtime of these Dual Integral Invariants (DII) is comparable with Difference of Gaussian filtering and it is independent of the number and length of edges. An additional benefit is the constant execution time as line tracing is not necessary. As the proposed algorithm has no smoothing included it preserves smaller features than recent variants of the Canny edge detector. We use artificial data sets with and without a known amount of noise to validate the accuracy of our method in comparison with operators supplied by the OpenCV library. The equidistant spacing of raster images allows fast estimation of the integral invariants based on filter masks like Roberts, Scharr and Kirsch. We show the results on well-known standard test images and synthetic data.

Information management systems aimed at fully exploiting imperfect temporal data require advanced data modelling and data querying facilities. In this paper, we study how novel computational intelligence techniques can help to develop such facilities. More specifically, we describe how possibility theory can be used to model and handle the uncertainty that is inherent to vague, linguistic time specifications in a mathematically sound way. These mathematical time representations can then be stored in a database and advanced query evaluation techniques, for adequately coping with the represented uncertainty, can be used. Medieval charters are a typical example of documents on which related temporal information is often imperfect. To show the applicability of our technology, we illustrate how the development of the Diplomata Belgica database, a database describing medieval charters, can benefit from this novel technology. The added-value of the technology for future research in the humanities, in our case medieval history, is demonstrated by means of several illustrative query examples.

As practitioners of an historical discipline, archaeologists are in general, interested in guessing how ancient objects, buildings and/or landscapes were produced and used in the past from the object's visual appearance and material properties. In the pursuit of this general goal, archaeologists act as detectives looking for material cues (mostly visual) that may allow the discovering of social actions that may have happened in the past. This investigation can be made intuitively, but also formally, in which case we need computational tools and techniques to 1) extract necessary information from visual and non-visual data, 2) data processing to evaluate relevant relationships between different items at different spatial and temporal scales, 3) build appropriate models that can be used to provide explanatory hypothesis about the human past. In this paper I review the nature of archaeological problems and suggest computational techniques and methods that can be useful in solving these kinds of questions. Emphasis is made on modern classification and clustering techniques (neural networks, for instance), and computational simulation approaches.

The Internet is one of the main communication platforms of our society. In many countries, communication contents and patterns are surveilled aiming to identify, punish or block undesired ideas. I focus with my research on fully decentralized and secure communication platforms which cannot be surveilled or switched off, on Android-based wireless mesh networks which support local communication that do not pass through the Internet, as well as on concepts for Internet-based democracy. My contributions aim for a practical usability in form of prototypes and software provided to potential users.