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The analysis of variance in complex text traditions is an arduous task when carried out manually. Text alignment algorithms provide domain experts with a robust alternative to such repetitive tasks. Existing white-box approaches allow the digital humanities to establish syntax-based metrics taking into account the spelling, morphology and order of words. However, they produce limited results, as semantic meanings are typically not taken into account. Our interdisciplinary collaboration between visualization and digital humanities combined a semi-supervised text alignment approach based on word embeddings that take not only syntactic but also semantic text features into account, thereby improving the overall quality of the alignment. In our collaboration, we developed different visual interfaces that communicate the word distribution in high-dimensional vector space generated by the underlying neural network for increased transparency, assessment of the tool's reliability and overall improved hypothesis generation. We further offer visual means to enable the expert reader to feed domain knowledge into the system at multiple levels with the aim of improving both the product and the process of text alignment. This ultimately illustrates how visualization can engage with and augment complex modes of reading in the humanities.

For the past two years, researchers from the visualization community and the digital humanities have come together at the IEEE VIS conference to discuss how both disciplines can work together to push research goals in their respective disciplines. In this paper, we present our experiences as a result of this collaboration.

Our paper explores ways in which contemporary scholarly practices in the digital humanities (DH) can utilize archival documents as “raw” material for analytical and digital storytelling purposes. We argue, on the one hand, that there is an interpretative potential in uncurated documents that DH practices can unlock, and on the other hand, that the archival appraisal process needs to be attentive to such scholarly reuse and the data/information value of documents. After a review of the types of collections held by New York University Abu Dhabi, and a review of the history of archival appraisal theory, we present some case studies drawing on Wrisley’s undergraduate teaching in DH using primary documents from and about the Gulf region (a small fold-out simplified map of Abu Dhabi Island, a 1940 German large format map of North-East Africa, a British travel narrative in Arabia from 1933, and Abu Dhabi phone directories from the 1970s). In the end, we argue for the strong collaboration between the archivist and the digital humanist for building and using archival collections. Notre article explore les façons dont les pratiques universitaires contemporaines dans le domaine des humanités numériques peuvent utiliser les documents d'archives comme matière “brute” à des fins d'analyse et de narration numérique. Nous soutenons, d'une part, qu'il existe un potentiel d'interprétation dans les documents non traités que les pratiques des humanités numériques peuvent débloquer et, d'autre part, que le processus d'évaluation archivistique doit être attentif à cette réutilisation scientifique et à la valeur des données/informations des documents. Après avoir passé en revue les types de collections détenues par l'université de New York à Abu Dhabi et l'histoire de la théorie de l'évaluation des archives, nous présentons quelques études de cas s'inspirant des enseignements de David Wrisley en Humanités Numériques à l'aide de documents primaires provenant de la région du Golfe et la concernant (une petite carte simplifiée dépliante de l'île d'Abu Dhabi, une carte allemande grand format de l'Afrique du Nord-Est de 1940, un récit de voyage britannique en Arabie de 1933 et des annuaires téléphoniques d'Abu Dhabi des années 1970). Au final, nous plaidons pour une collaboration étroite entre l'archiviste et l'humaniste du numérique pour la constitution et l'utilisation des collections d'archives. تسعى هذه الورقة إلى استكشاف السُبل التي يمكن من خلالها للممارسات البحثية المعاصرة في مجال العلوم الإنسانية الرقمية أن تستخدم الوثائق كمادة «خام» لأغراض التحليل والسرد القصصي الرقمي. وترى الورقة، من جهةٍ، أن ثمة إمكانية تفسيرية في الوثائق غير المنسَّقة بحيث تستطيع الممارسات البحثية في مجال العلوم الإنسانية الرقمية كشفها والتعرف عليها. وترى الورقة، من جهةٍ أخرى، أن عملية التقييم الأرشيفي (archival appraisal) يجب أن تراعي تكرار الاستخدام البحثي وقيمة الوثائق بناءً على ما بها من بيانات/معلومات. وبعد مراجعة لأنواع المجموعات المحفوظة لدى «جامعة نيويورك أبو ظبي»، ومراجعة لتاريخ نظرية التقييم الأرشيفي، تُقدِّم هذه الورقة بعض دراسات الحالة المستمدة من نموذج تدريس رسلي (Wrisley) للمرحلة الجامعية في مجال العلوم الإنسانية الرقمية باستخدام وثائق أولية من منطقة الخليج وعنها (خريطة مطوية صغيرة ومبسطة لجزيرة أبو ظبي؛ وخريطة ألمانية كبيرة الحجم لمنطقة شمال شرق إفريقيا ترجع إلى عام ١٩٤٠؛ وسرد قصصي لرحالة بريطاني في شبه الجزيرة العربية يرجع إلى عام ١٩٣٣؛ ودليل هاتف أبو ظبي من فترة سبعينات القرن العشرين). وأخيراً، تدعو الورقة إلى تعاون وثيق بين المختصين في مجال الحفظ والتوثيق والمختصين في مجال العلوم الإنسانية الرقمية من أجل إعداد واستخدام مجموعات المحفوظات.

Medieval textuality is characterized by instability in text structure and length that varies according to the text tradition. This instability in the versions, otherwise known as “mouvance”, is characterized by dialectal difference, traces of orality, the modification of wording and even the rewriting and rearrangement of large parts of the text. To help humanities scholars in the exploratory analysis of such complex text collections, the visual analytic system iteal was initially proposed. The system aligns similar phrases on a line-level on the basis of string similarity and word n-grams. We propose an extension of this system that replaces the parameter-based approach with an automatic one using word embeddings thereby adding a semantic component. The benefit of the new visualization system is shown through a comparison of different versions of medieval French texts. Additionally, a domain-expert compared the parameter-based approach with the approach based on word embeddings to outline the similarities and differences in the alignments.

This article describes research done on language and script variation in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Beirut, Lebanon. It discusses how the cityscape itself became an archive for researchers and how digital humanities’ (DH) methods were used to capture and analyze patterns in written language found in public space. It also discusses the DH project, Linguistic Landscapes of Beirut (LLB) at the heart of this research and the benefits and challenges of its two core methods: mobile data collection for documentation of linguistic diversity and geospatial visualization. The article argues that knowledge production in non-Western locations such as Beirut is both impacted and enriched by the complex political and social environment. This research, carried out with under-resourced infrastructures and at the frontiers of DH practice in the Arab world, blended theory, practice and pedagogy, ultimately illustrates that context profoundly changes computational research. Cet article décrit des recherches effectuées sur la variation de la langue et de l’écriture dans le paysage linguistique (LL) de Beyrouth, au Liban. Il explique la façon dont le paysage urbain lui-même est devenu une archive pour les chercheurs et celle dont les méthodes des humanités numériques (DH) ont été utilisées pour capturer et analyser les modèles du langage écrit dans l’espace public. Il aborde également le projet DH, Paysages linguistiques de Beyrouth (LLB) au cœur de cette recherche et les avantages et les défis de ses deux méthodes principales : la collecte mobile de données pour la documentation de la diversité linguistique et la visualisation géospatiale. L’article soutient que la production de connaissances dans des endroits non occidentaux comme Beyrouth est à la fois influencée et enrichie par un environnement politique et social complexe. Cette recherche, menée avec des infrastructures sous-financées et aux frontières des pratiques des humanités numériques dans le monde arabe, mêlant théorie, pratique et pédagogie, illustre finalement que le contexte change profondément la recherche informatisée.

This essay addresses emerging open scholarly practices in transnational contexts, in particular in the Eastern Arab countries. It also describes some of the larger contours of the globalization in higher education in the regions of Middle East/North Africa (MENA) and Asia. Drawing upon work in the field in Lebanon and the Gulf States, it discusses some of the opportunities and challenges for open scholarship in the region, notably a gap in knowledge infrastructure. Finally, it argues that an important opportunity has emerged for the region’s globally connected institutions of higher education to shape and enact new knowledge environments.

This article addresses the transmission of a mid-eleventh century Arabic compilation of Hellenic wisdom, al-Mubashshir Ibn Fātik’s Mukhtār al-Ḥikam wa-maḥāsin al-kalim, into medieval European languages. It documents new archival evidence for the scope of this textual tradition. The combination of digital textual and archival evidence provides important clues for building hypotheses for an expanded reception history of the Arabic text in Europe. Using corpora built in three languages—Castilian, Latin and French—it leverages stylometric analysis to explore the discursive communities in which the translations may have emerged and where they took on new meanings. The article puts medium-scale stylometry into practice in the field of comparative literature and translation studies for the exploration of large text collections, and suggests how quantitative methods could be deployed in translingual corpus-level literary research. It also argues for the use of stylometry at early stages of literary historical research to discover new paths of inquiry.

This article pursues the idea that within interdisciplinary teams in which researchers might find themselves participating, there are very different notions of research outcomes, as well as languages in which they are expressed. We explore the notion of the software prototype within the discussion of making and building in digital humanities. The backdrop for our discussion is a collaboration between project team members from computer science and literature that resulted in a tool named TopoText that was built to geocode locations within an unstructured text and to perform some basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks about the context of those locations. In the interest of collaborating more effectively with increasingly larger and more multidisciplinary research communities, we move outward from that specific collaboration to explore one of the ways that such research is characterized in the domain of software engineering—the ISO/IEC 25010:2011 standard. Although not a perfect fit with discourses of value in the humanities, it provides a possible starting point for forging shared vocabularies within the research collaboratory. In particular, we focus on a subset of characteristics outlined by the standard and attempt to translate them into terms generative of further discussion in the digital humanities community.

Scholars in inter-disciplinary fields like the Digital Humanities are increasingly interested in semantic annotation of specialized corpora. Yet, under-resourced languages, imperfect or noisily structured data, and user-specific classification tasks make it difficult to meet their needs using off-the-shelf models. Manual annotation of large corpora from scratch, meanwhile, can be prohibitively expensive. Thus, we propose an active learning solution for named entity recognition, attempting to maximize a custom model’s improvement per additional unit of manual annotation. Our system robustly handles any domain or user-defined label set and requires no external resources, enabling quality named entity recognition for Humanities corpora where such resources are not available. Evaluating on typologically disparate languages and datasets, we reduce required annotation by 20-60% and greatly outperform a competitive active learning baseline.

This article attempts to identify the different styles employed by Christine de Pizan in all of her works using empirically based stylometric analysis. The results, at once heuristic but also statistically significant, suggest as well that besides Christine de Pizan, other medieval French authors such as Jean de Meun, Froissart and Gerson, have at least two, if not more, stylometric footprints. The methods employed and the ramifications of the results are discussed briefly as well.

Textual criticism consists of the identification and analysis of variant readings among different versions of a text. Being a relatively simple task for modern languages, the collation of medieval text traditions ranges from the complex to the virtually impossible depending on the degree of instability of textual transmission. We present a visual analytics environment that supports computationally aligning such complex textual differences typical of orally inflected medieval poetry. For the purpose of analyzing alignment, we provide interactive visualizations for different text hierarchy levels, specifically, a meso reading view to support investigating repetition and variance at the line level across text segments. In addition to outlining important aspects of our interdisciplinary collaboration, we emphasize the utility of the proposed system by various usage scenarios in medieval French literature.

The subject of this article is Rabee Jaber’s novel Amerika (2009) recounting the migration of a group of Syro-Lebanese to the United States on the eve of the First World War. It demonstrates how metafictional techniques—ironic narrator figures, flashbacks, dream-like scenes—allow Jaber to address the fine, yet shifting, line between fiction and history in the accounts of Arab migrations to the Americas. The article explores the creative rewriting of an essential intertext for Jaber, Kafka’s Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) and asserts that the novel’s reflective uncertainty pervades both the way that a historical past can be represented and the way that the past is presented to a contemporary Lebanese audience. The article concludes by suggesting that the contrast between the two main characters, Martā Ḥaddād and Alī Jābir, is not only indicative of distinct kinds of migration, but, more abstractly, points to contrasting ideas about reading and writing the past.

This chapter begins with a plea to discard the claim that al-Nuwairī al-Iskandarānī's historical writing was marked by an aberrant and excessive personal involvement, and in particular, by tdispensablet digressions. It shows that historical writing in the Kitāb al-Ilmām illustrates the catastrophe which befell the city interwoven with fragments of Islamic cultural memory, relating it to other such losses in the century preceding the life of the author, as Mamluk society regained the lands of Palestine from the crusaders and mourned from a distance the slow loss of cities from the borderlands of the chaotic Taifa kingdoms of al-Andalus. The Kitāb al-Ilmām obviously does not share with Mezieres or Machaut the master narrative of a renewed tradition of crusade in the fourteenth century as the reason for the attack on Alexandria. Keywords: al-Andalus; al-Nuwairī al-Iskandarānī's; Alexandria; historical writing; Islamic cultural memory; Kitāb al-Ilmām; Mamluk society; Palestine

The rewriting of verse romances into prose was a common literary practice at the court of Burgundy in the fifteenth century. The prologues of many Burgundian prose romances put forth the idea that they are updating language; that is, earlier medieval texts can no longer be read on account of their antiquated language. The act of translation is also ideological in as much as it reactivates the use value of texts, integrating into them ideas and concepts, foreign to their original form, yet dear to a new audience. Translating these texts allows power to invent new identities for itself and to insert itself, retroactively, into a past of glorious ancestors. To assert that Jehan Wauquelin's prose romances written for the court milieu in Burgundy shift the focus away completely from spirituality and sanctity in favor of secular power altogether would be erroneous. Keywords: Burgundian ideologies; Jehan Wauquelin; medieval texts; prose translations; secular power