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Welcome to the wiki of the course Foundation of Digital Humanities (DH-405).

Contact

Professor: Frédéric Kaplan

Assistants: Alexander Rusnak, Tristan Krach

Rooms: Wednesday (CM1110) and Thursday (BC03)

Links

• Moodle
• Framapad
• Projects

Summary

This course gives an introduction to the fundamental concepts and methods of the Digital Humanities, both from a theoretical and applied point of view. The course introduces the Digital Humanities circle of processing and interpretation, from data acquisition to new understandings and services. The first part of the course presents the technical pipelines for digitising, analysing and modelling written documents (printed and handwritten), maps, photographs and 3d objects and environments. The second part of the course details the principles of the most important algorithms in particular deep learning approaches (for document analysis and image generation) and knowledge modelling (semantic web, ontologies, graph databases). The third part of the course focuses on platform management from the points of view of data, users and bots. Students will practise the skills they learn by engaging in a class-wide collective project.

Plan

Part I : Concepts

Week 1 : What are Digital Humanities?

12.09 :

(2h) Welcome and Introduction to the course

• FDH-0 (1h) Introduction to the course and Digital Humanities, structure of the course. Introduction to Framapad and Slido with a simple exercise. Principle of collective note talking and use in the course. State of the Digital Humanities at EPFL, in Switzerland and in Europe.

13.09 :

(4h) What are Digital Humanities? What is their object of study?

• FDH-1-1 (1h) What Are Digital Humanities : Digital Humanities, Digital Studies, Humanities Computing and Studies about Digital Culture. Digital Humanism vs. Digital Humanities. Why digital methods tend to dissolve traditional disciplinary frontiers. A focus on practice. Translation issues.
• FDH-1-2 (1h) Digital Humanities as a field : Big Data Digital Humanities vs Small Data Digital Humanities. The 3 circles. Exercise on relationship between elements in Digital Culture schema.
• FDH-1-3 (2h) Big Data of the Past. Data acceleration regime. Inferred Patterns. Redocumentation. Fictional Spaces.

Week 2 : Patrimonial Capitalism and Commons

18.09 :

• FDH 1-4 Patrimonial Capitalism (1h) Introduction to the DH circle linking the digitisation of sources, their processing, their analysis, visualisation and the creation of societal value (insight, culture) leading ultimately to the digitisation of new sources. Presentation of some sustainable DH circles (genealogy, image banks). Patrimonial capitalism and the risk of monopolistic companies. Parallelism with the race for sequencing the Human Genome.

• FDH 1-5 The Commons (1h) What are the commons ? What is the public domains ? History and evolution. Copyright overreaching. Frontal collision. Governing with the commons.

19.09 :

• FDH 1-6 Anatomy of a large-scale project (1h) Venice Time Machine. European Time Machine.
• Past projects presentation.
• FDH 1-7 Projects. See also Projects PDF of 2023 Projects

Part II : Pipelines

Week 3: Digitisation

25.09 :

• FDH 2-1 No Class or Venice Data presentation (tbc)

26.09 :

• (2h) FDH 2-2 Introduction to the Digitization Process. The Story of Google books. Document digitization as a problem of conversion of dimensions. Digitization is logistic optimization. Alienation. Digitization on demand.

• (2h) Document Structure. General presentation of the pipeline. Content and Structure. Circulation. Standards. Open Annotation Data Model. Shared Canvas. IIIF. Synchronic patterns and diachronic homology.

Week 4: Writing Systems and Text Encoding

2.10 :

(2h) FDH 2-3 : Writing Systems

3.10 :

- (2h) FDH 2-4 : Text Encoding

• (2h) Projects presentations. 5' per project with max 3 slides. Fill out the group table before the course. You can find a group using the framapad.

Week 5: Text Processing and Understanding

9.10 :

(2h) FDH 2-5 Text Processing : Diachronic and synchronic analysis. n-grams, TF-IDF, Topic Modeling, Word Space Models and Word embeddings (2h)

10.10 :

(2h) FDH 2-6 Text Understanding : Close, surface, distant and machine reading, Information extraction, Named Entities, Resources, Large-Scale Projects (2h) Work on Project (2h).

Week 6: Images

16.10 :

(2h) FDH 2-7 : Image systems.

17.10 :

(2h) FDH 2-8 : Image processing (2h) Work on project.

(FDH 2-9 : Image understanding not done this year)

Week Off

23.10 :

No course

24.10 :

No Course

Week 7: Maps

23.10 :

(2h) FDH-2-10 Map systems

24.10 :

(2h) FDH-2-11 Map processing (2h) Work on project

Week 8: Architecture and Objects

30.10 :

(2h) FDH-2-12: Architecture and Object Systems.

31.10 :

(2h) FDH-2-13: Architecture and Object Processing: Modelling vs Sampling : Model-based Procedural methods. Architectural grammars. Class I and Class II elements. The question of realism. (2h)Work on project

Part III : Knowledge modelling and processing

Week 9 : Semantic modelling

6.11 :

- (1h) FDH-3-0 Summary of the concept viewed so far and introduction to part 3

- (1h) FDH-3-1 Semantic modelling. RDF, Metaknowledge

7.11 :

(2h) FDH 3-2 Universal Ontologies

- Work on project (2h)

Week 10 :Constraints and Rule systems

13.11 :

(2h) FDH 3-3 Rule systems, simulations and parallel worlds

14.11 :

Midterm presentation (10%)

-- Project plan and milestones deliverable on the Wikipage of each project (10%)

Time	Project name
10:20-10:40	Group 9
10:40-11:00	Group 8
11:00-11:20	Group 7
11:20-11:40	Group 6
11:40-12:00	Group 5

Time	Project name
13:15-13:35	Group 2
13:35-13:55	Group 3
13:55-14:15	Group 4
14:15-14:35	Group 1

Week 11 : Non conceptual knowledge systems and topological data science

20.11 :

(2h) FDH 3-4 Non conceptual knowledge systems

21.11 :

(2h) FDH 3-5 Topological data science

Part IV : Platforms

Week 12 : Data, User and Bot Management

27.11 :

(2h) Data Management  : FAIR principle, Creative Commons, Data Management models, Sustainability, Right to Forgotten. Management of uncertainty, incoherence and errors. Iconographic principle of precaution

28.11 :

(2h) User Management : Part I: Persona. Part II: Motivation and onboarding dynamics. Three case studies: Twitter. Quora. Wikipedia. Part III: "Wisdom" of the crowds. Collectivism vs Liberalism. Open source as a form of liberalism for engineering. The ambiguous of fork. Part IV: The "power" of the crowds. Mechanical Turk. Crowdflower. Crowdfunding.

(2h) Bot Management : Three case studies on bot management : Twitter, Wikipedia, Google.

Final Week : Project Presentation

-- Due: GitHub repository (10%)

-- Due: Report writing (40%)

(2h) Final project presentation (20%)

Resources

• Gallica
• Feature matching tutorial
• Feature matching code
• Wiki Syntax
• Introduction to Rhino and Grasshopper

Assessment and Notation grid

• (Group work) 2 oral presentations (30%)
  • 1 midterm presentation of the project (10%)
  • 1 final discussing the project result (20%)
• (Group work) Written deliverables (Wiki writing) (20%)
• (Group work) Quality of the project (30%)
• (Individual work) Exam on Course Content (20%)

2 collective oral presentations (30%)

Midterm presenting the project planning (10%)

10' max presentation + 5' questions

Notation grid :

• The presentation contains a planning (4)
• + 0.5 The slides are clear and well presented
• + 0.5 The oral presentation is dynamic and fluid
• + 0.5 The planning is realistic.
• + 0.5 The students answer well to the questions

Final discussing the project result (20%)

10-15' for presentation and 5-10' for questions

Notation grid :

• The presentation presents the results of the project (4)
• + 0.5 The slides are clear and well presented
• + 0.5 The oral presentation is dynamic and fluid
• + 0.5 The results are well discussed
• + 0.5 The students answer well to the questions

Written deliverables (Wiki writing) (20%)

• Project plan and milestones (5%) (>300 words)
• Motivation and description of the deliverables (5%) (>300 words)
• Detailed description of the methods (5%) (>500 words)
• Quality assessment and discussion of limitations (5%) (>300 words)

The indicated number of words is a minimal bound. Detailed description can in particular be extended if needed.

Production (30%)

• Quality of the realisation 20%
• Code deliverable on github 10%

Exam on Course Content (20%)

• A series of questions on the course to ensure the core concepts are understood.