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This is a presentation given at the European Archaeology Association Conference 2023 in session 603 - Replicable Archaeology: looking for workflows and data management strategies fostering data reuse and methological transferability in archaeological science. 

Digital Scholarly Platform for the in-progress editing within the GreekSchools project.

Within the ERC AdG 885222-GreekSchools we aim to manage the edit of multiple papyrologic texts: diplomatic and literary editions and the corresponding apparatuses and their translations. To endow scholars with automatic consistency and coherence of editorial choices and to support the whole editing process, we leverage Domain Specific Languages (DSLs): a formal language definition in a bounded domain. Digital text editing can be handled in multiple ways depending on the editorial purpose. We identify four possible editing approaches to digital textual scholarship: (1) word processor; (2) structured text (e.g. XML); (3) GUI-centric; (4) domain specific language (DSL). Each of them has pros and cons. In particular we analyse five dimensions: familiarity, compactness, completeness, data elaboration support, and the need of technical training. With familiarity we refer to how much the scholar can avoid shifting his established working paradigm/environment. Compactness is the ratio between quantity of information and formalisation size. Completeness refers to the information the content represents. The capability to extract or deduce information from the data is addressed by data elaboration support. Finally, we consider important to evaluate the amount of technical training for text editing. For example, structured texts grant completeness of information, while requiring extensive technical training. In this context only the DSL approach encompasses all these dimensions while the other approaches compromises on some of them. We propose a DSL-based editor that will support and improve the editing workflow in the context of the ERC project.

Rich metadata is important for data discovery and reuse. Further, the use of standardized values - from community-developed vocabularies and from identifier services for people, organization, grants, and other real-world entities - can further improve human and machine understanding of the data. However, building support for the broad range of existing vocabularies directly into repository software can take significant initial and ongoing effort and potentially limit the flexibility to adopt new vocabularies over time. In the open source Dataverse software project, we’ve explored a light-weight, plug-in approach to adding this functionality. With this design, the logic related to specific vocabularies and services is isolated in components that know nothing about Dataverse’s internals which opens the door to their reuse in other repositories and to shared maintenance. This paper introduces the design and discusses working examples that integrate with external identifier and vocabulary services.

The TEITOK REST API lets you interact with your corpus remotely - to upload documents in various formats - automatically converted to TEI/XML; to render search results; to run an NLP pipeline on the server; or download the content of corpus document, treat that content locally with local NLP tools or manual annotation tools, and then upload the results back to the server, where the new or corrected annotations will be incorporated into the original TEI/XML document without destroying any of the potentially complex annotations already in the document.

The use of digital visual media in everyday work is nowadays a common practice in many different domains, including Cultural Heritage (CH). Because of that, the presence of digital datasets in CH archives and repositories is becoming more and more relevant. However, the correct management of these assets, specialized and often complex, it's not always trivial, especially for communities of users lacking specific training. In these cases, systems enabling assisted data publishing may be a solution. The Visual Media Service (VMS) is a web-based platform that enables the easy publication of complex visual media assets, specifically targeting the CH domain. It allows users to upload high-resolution images, relightable images, and 3D models, transforming them into an efficient format for interactive web visualization. VMS is an end-to-end solution able to support the entire publishing process, from data uploading to presentation customization. To expand its adoption in the CH community, the ARIADNEplus project aimed at enhancing its features, providing innovative services for archaeological data management. This paper introduces the VMS 3D configurator, a new tool designed to improve the visual organization of 3D archaeological datasets in the VMS. The configurator guides content creators through a multi-step wizard, offering customization options for 3D models presentations. The configurator consists of five different configuration stages, each providing specific customization features, such as model orientation, appearance, scene navigation, viewer interface, and annotation of points of interest. In addition to providing a detailed description of all the configuration possibilities, the paper will also discuss uses, limitations, and potential developments of the 3D configurator, and of the entire platform too, highlighting the value of VMS as a tool for publishing, exploring, and disseminating CH data. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 Programme (H2020-INFRAIA-2018-2020) under the Grant Agreement n. 823914 (H2020-INFRAIA-2018-1 "ARIADNEplus" project) and under the COST Action n. 18128 (CA18128 "SEADDA" Saving European Archaeology from the Digital Dark Age).

This set of posters brings together complementary disciplinary perspectives on working with cultural heritage data from the European project "In/Tangible European Heritage – Visual Analysis, Curation and Communication" (InTaVia). GREGOR POBEZIN: OPEN CHALLENGES IN TRADITIONAL BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH: NOVEL APPROACHES TO BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH WITH INTAVIA Among the many factors that distinguish biography, we can perhaps most readily point to two that, while usually helpful and indeed essential to biographical studies, can also be important obstacles: tradition and structure. As a noble historiographical genre with a long tradition, biography inevitably produces its texts along structural guidelines. This structure may not be a problem for scholars of cultural or political history - theirs is the task of querying, questioning and imagining: in various languages and across multi-varied texts. But even historians can sometimes ask too little and imagine too much - or vice versa. For example, three biographical entries (Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Deutsche Biographie, Slovenska biografija) about Pier Paolo Vergerio the Younger (1498-1565) all cover the all major events along an almost identical timeline. However, while one omits almost all of Vergerio’s literary production, the other concentrates on his contacts with protestants, as if life before his apostasy never existed. Tradition gets in our way. Technological advancements have had limited success (searching for Vergerio in Europeana will yield little success) - so far. For wider biographical research, a comparative platform seems a tool sorely needed, since it will finally render the comparative reading of numerous multivariate texts, the visualizing of essential data and asking relevant questions beyond the limitations of narrative structure. MATTHIAS SCHLÖGL: ON BUILDING A TRANSNATIONAL, MULTIMODAL KNOWLEDGE GRAPH InTaVia aims at bringing together different kinds of cultural data. To do so, the InTaVia Knowledge Graph (IKG) is built using structured biographical data on cultural actors from four European National Biographies as a base layer (Austria, Finland, The Netherlands, and Slovenia) – which have been converted using the IDM-RDF (https://github.com/InTaVia/idm-rdf). Second level layers enrich the biographical base layer with data on related cultural heritage objects, institutions, and places from reference resources such as Wikidata and Europeana. Currently the IKG contains data on around 300.000 distinct persons from various periods who had an impact on the history of European countries in one way or another. However, the IKG has to tackle several problems: for example, the source data is quite unbalanced with respect to the level of detail and structure; the sources contain biased data in various forms (e.g. gender bias, “national myths", …). This poster gives an overview of the InTaVia System Architecture, presents some statistical analyses on the structure and problems of the IKG and shares the "lessons learned" when integrating large historical secondary data sources. FLORIAN WINDHAGER, JOHANNES LIEM & EVA MAYR: VISUAL-ANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURAL INFORMATION The cultural knowledge graph IKG can be a rich integrative resource for multi-faceted research but is challenging to access for people without technical skills or prior knowledge on the structure and kinds of information available. To overcome these barriers, InTaVia develops a visualization-based interfaces for the visual search, analysis and communication of linked cultural information. Different visual analytical perspectives (for temporal, spatial, but also relational and categorical information related to the cultural entities in the IKG) support researchers to gain an overview on the structured data available, to see patterns from a distant reading perspective, and to identify interesting pieces of cultural information for close reading. For example, a humanist researcher can search for a cultural actor and will easily find a range of relevant cultural resources: biographical texts, related actors and related objects. They can then select entities of interest and analyze their movements over time, see cultural objects related to biographical events. By making transparent also the provenance of the information, this interface allows to compare and synoptically see different biographies on the same actor. Our poster walks visitors through the architecture of the visualization-based interface and we offer a demo how to use the developing platform it for searching, analysing, and communicating cultural information. The project InTaVia has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101004825.

MP4. Oral presentation at the International Burney Conference, Montreal (June 2023). This research is part of the Horizon 2020 project called "Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences"(OpeRaNew) ID 892230 within the ERC programme Horizon 2020 MSCA-IF-2019. The PI is Francesca Saggini. See CORDIS website at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/892230