• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
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Changes in atmospheric parameters, such as temperature, precipitation and relative humidity, as well as sea level rise, flooding and storm surge, can aggravate the chemical, biological and mechanical degradation of cultural heritage leading to loss of cultural value. Despite the growing body of research that examine the impacts of climate change on cultural heritage, mainly focused on producing climate change risk maps at the European scale, there is an absence of data, information and assessment methods available to incorporate climate change into preservation frameworks and management practices from government policy level down to the practice in the field. This study investigated the vulnerability and adaptation of cultural heritage sites in Europe. An indepth qualitative analysis of data collected through semi-structured interviews with academics, members of governmental institutions and managers of heritage sites experts in cultural heritage preservation was undertaken and complemented with the analysis of academic literature, management plans, policies and grey literature. The investigated peer-reviewed literature wassynthesized and depicted in diagrams that can help in the understanding of climate change impacts on cultural heritage. An integrated vulnerability assessment methodology was developed and tested in three European UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS) to help site managers and decision-makers to understand the vulnerabilities of cultural heritage to climate change impacts and to allow the incorporation ofclimate change risk assessment into the management of heritage sites. Furthermore, the perceptions of experts involved in the management and preservation of cultural heritage were investigated, specifically on their awareness and understanding of the impacts of climate change on heritage assets, on the adaptation of cultural heritage to climate change, and on the mitigation of climate change in the cultural heritage field, in Europe. This research highlights the lack of dissemination of the outcomes of scientific research to managers of cultural heritage in the context of vulnerability assessment and adaptation to climate change impacts. A better understanding of what needs to be provided and prioritized for adaptation to take place and in its strategic planning is derived from this analysis. Adapting cultural heritage to climate change can be possible only if strong actions both from research and government will be taken to overcome the barriers identified in this investigation. 

L’étude a testé l’hypothèse selon laquelle les carrières abandonnées améliorent la diversité floristique locale contrairement à la perception générale selon laquelle l’exploitation des carrières impact négativement la biodiversité. Pour y parvenir, un inventaire a été effectué dans 30 placettes carrées (30 m x 30 m) dont 16 installées dans la végétation des carrières abandonnées et 14 dans des formations naturelles adjacentes (sites de référence). Les indices de diversité (Richesse, Chao1, Chao2, Jack1, Jack2, Shannon et Équitabilité) ont été estimés et comparés entre les deux types d’écosystème. Les résultats montrent que la diversité floristique ne diffère pas significativement entre les deux écosystèmes. Toutefois, la richesse spécifique est plus importante au niveau des sites de référence (62 espèces de plantes) qu’au niveau des carrières (55 espèces de plantes). Une forte similarité floristique (50% à 90%) a été aussi relevée entre les deux écosystèmes. La flore des deux écosystèmes est majoritairement composée des Fabaceae (39,3 % à 40,8 %). On retient que les carrières abandonnées n’ont pas impacté la diversité floristique locale existante comme espéré. Ceci est probablement dû à l’absence de différentiation de niche après excavation qui mérite d’être investigué par des études futures.

ATRAS journal is a peer-reviewed journal, published twice a year by the Faculty of Letters, Languages and Arts at Dr Moulay Tahar University, Saida-Algeria. A group of professors and researchers who have experience and knowledge in various disciplines review and evaluate the submitted papers.ATRAS promotes scientific studies in the field of foreign language teaching and learning approaches, methodologies, and methods in a variety of areas.

Die Präsentation „Mit ChatGPT Texte schreiben: Prompting-Methoden für Historiker:innen“ zielt darauf ab, den Teilnehmenden ein tiefes Verständnis über die Funktion und Anwendung von generativen KI-Textgeneratoren zu vermitteln. Zunächst werden Lernziele definiert, wie das Erlangen einer Intuition über die Funktionsweise generativer KI und das Verständnis ihrer Grenzen in der Textproduktion. Die Präsentation fokussiert auf populäre Textgeneratoren wie OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini und Anthropic Claude. Zu den Grundlagen gehören Erklärungen darüber, wie ein Sprachmodell auf Benutzereingaben reagiert und Text generiert. Hier wird das Beispiel von GPT-3 herangezogen, um zu illustrieren, wie solche Modelle trainiert und ausgeführt werden. Es folgt ein Abschnitt über die Möglichkeiten der Interaktion mit Textgeneratoren, wobei auf die Bedeutung klarer und präziser Kommunikation hingewiesen wird. Ein wesentlicher Bestandteil der Präsentation ist die Einführung eines fiktiven Charakters namens Jason, der als metaphorische Repräsentation eines generativen KI-Modells dient. Jason symbolisiert die Stärken und Grenzen von KI-Modellen in der Texterstellung und Interaktion. Es werden konkrete Beispiele für das, was Jason kann und nicht kann, angeführt, wie das Schreiben kurzer Texte und das Unvermögen, zwischen Fiktion und Realität zu unterscheiden. Die Präsentation schliesst mit detaillierten Anleitungen zum effektiven Prompting und interaktiven Übungen. Sie bietet auch eine Liste von Ressourcen für weiterführende Informationen und eine umfassende Bibliographie. Insgesamt ist die Präsentation eine gründliche Einführung in die Nutzung generativer KI für Textproduktion, speziell ausgerichtet auf die Bedürfnisse von Historiker:innen.

Invited keynote for the Making Meaning 2024: Collections as data conference at the State Library of Queensland on 8 March 2024. Evolutionary Innovations: Collections as Data in the AI era ‘Collections as data’ describes the movement to publish open data from museum, library and archive collections that began in the noughties. The benefits of machine learning for better discoverability and research with digitised/born digital collections are alluring. And the popularity of generative AI - and an increased awareness of the biases it reinscribes - has focused attention on responsible computational access to collections - but what does this mean in practical terms? Mia will share examples from the British Library and the Living with Machines data science project.

Presentation for NWO NAC, 7th & 8th of March, 2024 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Abstract: Age-depth models are fundamental tools in all geohistorical sciences. They assign ages to stratigraphic positions, which is necessary to estimate rates of past environmental change and timing of past events. Methods to estimate age-depth models commonly use simplified parametric assumptions on the uncertainties of tie points. The distribution of time between tie points is estimated using simplistic assumptions on the formation of the stratigraphic record (e.g., that sediment accumulation follows a Poisson process). As a result, they cannot incorporate evidence from complex empirical data or expert knowledge (e.g., from sedimentary structures such as erosional surfaces or from basin models), leaving important sources of information un- or underused. We present two non-parametric methods to estimate age-depth relationships from complex sedimentological and stratigraphic data, which are implemented in the admtools package for R Software. As use cases, we 1. construct age-depth models for Devonian strata in the La Thure section, Belgium, using sedimentation rates constrained by cyclostratigraphic methods. 2. use measurements of extra-terrestrial 3He from ODP site 690 (Maud Rise, Weddell Sea) to construct age-depth models for the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum. These examples show how complex sedimentological and stratigraphic information can be combined into age-depth relationships that accurately reflect uncertainties of available data and expert knowledge.

We are now living in an amazing period of scientific advancements, of investigation and discovery, archaeology is no exception to this. With easy access to research papers, maps, diagrams and photographs, it has become more and more apparent that some, if not most, of the older structures we find follow a set of rules. A specific matrix of design that is not accidental, nor is it the result of nearly, if not simultaneous, independent, localized developments in engineering and architecture, that happen to be the same or extremely similar.

The Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz (AdW) produces a number of critical editions of cultural heritage, which become increasingly multimodal over long funding periods of 12 or more years. Historical dictionaries, for example, turn to include geodata and statistics, image archives gain contextualisations and 3D reconstructions, and letter collections require annotations as well as digitised archive records. In addition, the Linked Open Data paradigm defines common formats to make (and keep) the editions' content available in, and federated search providers specify their additional APIs to support. Last but not least, digital editions should be accessible by default rather than as an exception. To address such challenges, the AdW has tried to produce a fixed set of edition-related extensions for the content management system TYPO3 for several years now – with limited success. They were spread across multiple versions of the platform, hard to combine, and difficult to maintain as they were designed for one project and then heavily adapted for another without further documentation. In this talk I will outline the process of redesigning and rewriting this software stack. The Cultural Heritage Framework 2 (CHF) is a toolkit for web apps that enable users to edit and publish cultural heritage data. Instead of abstract user stories, which have proven useful for the development of individual editions, the CHF was rebuilt based on media ecology theory. In this process, the software is seen as an entity in relation with various other human and non-human entities which can be grouped into media ecosystems. The product needs to be designed in a way that allows it to ‘survive’ and be seen as a good-faith actor in various such ecosystems, including (but not limited to) academic editorial teams, frequently changing and often inexperienced maintainers, mobile web browsers, content aggregators, and users with accessibility needs. Compared to previous attempts, this analysis led to a different feature set including an adaptable and atomic user interface, embedded JSON-LD metadata, semantic main classes, standardised search functionality, an import/export mechanism, integrated user documentation, and extensive developer documentation. Through interlocking and coherent components for specific data types, projects using the software may now add functionality as they grow or change focus over time. All components feature interfaces to edit the data by reusing features of the TYPO3 platform, but also allow importing data from other systems that a project may use or exporting the data to TEI XML or triple stores. The talk focuses on the practical application of media ecology theory in the CHF, which is not yet common in Digital Humanities software. It specifically dives into the consequences of evaluating accessibility software, its users, and entities with more limited requirements as one ecosystem instead of a single user story: accessibility needs to be observed not just on the level of content consumption but also on the levels of data analysis and production.

The poster was presented at the TRACE conference of 2019 held in San Leucio-Caserta, Italy.