The advent of optical character recognition software has created an explosion of online texts available for readers. Witness the success of the Google Books initiative that has already scanned and digitized around 25 million books. But texts written in ancient Greek including some of the most seminal books in the human library – Plato, Galen, Aeschylus, the early founders of Christianity and others – have been largely left out of that online revolution. Bruce Robertson is working to correct that shortfall. The head of the Department of Classics at Mount Allison University has created an initiative to digitize Greek texts and make them available to scholars online. He is using the ACENET computer network to create a database featuring some of the most important writings of the Greek world. Robertson’s work will contribute to a field called corpus linguistics, the study of language based on large collections of day to day language stored in computerized databases. Developing and modifying open source optical character recognition software, Robertson has created a digital database of around 10 million raw words with about seven million edited words. “We’re working mainly on text from the period of around 700 B.C. to around 300 A.D.,” he says. It’s not a simple matter of running text through a scanner and converting it into text files. With difficult accent marks and unusual fonts, ancient Greek texts are notoriously difficult for OCR software to read. “We couldn’t apply off-the-shelf OCR software,” says Robertson. “We needed to get large-scale OCR working on these texts.” But commercial OCR engines powerful enough to do the job were too expensive. In 2011 Robertson and his team turned to the ACENET system instead. “ACENET has some really cool features,” he says. Robertson has also created a website to edit raw OCR data, generating new training data. While he admits that computers aren’t typically thought of as tools of the classicist, Robertson says that they are essential for his work. “Computers are an ideal tool for working with ancient texts.” Robertson has maintained a fascination with computers since high school when he hooked his television set up to a Commodore 64 that his parents gave him. He went on to complete his PhD dissertation at the University of Toronto on the subject of Greek names and has used computers as part of his work since the beginning. “If you can learn ancient Greek you can learn to use a high-level programming language like Python,” he says.
Showcase Tag: Historical Research
Mining William Blake
If he were alive today William Blake would have been a multimedia artist, says Acadia University English professor Jon Saklofske. After all, the great British poet and visual artist left a complex and vast body of work ranging from the romantic to the surreal. “Blake was an inventor,” says Saklofske. “He would have realized that computers are important tools and I think he would have made good use of them.” Saklofske certainly is making good use of the technology. He is an active participant in the emerging field of digital humanities – the practice of applying computer technology in various ways to the study of the humanities. He’s using it for his ongoing research into the works of Blake, but he’s gone much further than that, creating a digital online tool called NewRadial that helps scholars conduct and share online research. “People have been digitizing works of literature and art like crazy for the last 15 years,” says Saklofske. “Now it’s time for us to start doing something with these vast digital collections.” Saklofske’s interest in online research began when he started using the William Blake Archive, a web-based multimedia source featuring the works of Blake. “It’s a great site, but there are limitations,” he says. “The interface didn’t allow me to do everything I wanted to do.” He began working on an alternative interface, a modified way of accessing and participating in the Blake Archive – one that would allow more detailed search parameters and user participation. He dubbed the online platform “NewRadial” and immediately extended it beyond the study of Blake to work with other online multimedia collections. NewRadial has proved to be a huge boon to Saklofske’s research. For example, he’s used it to study Blake’s artistic representations of the Biblical Leviathan. “Blake drew Leviathan as a coiled serpent,” he says. “NewRadial allows me to collect other representations of Leviathan during Blake’s time and compare them with Blake’s work.” The platform also promotes open social scholarship as other researchers are able to create their own collections, leave marginal comments or start a comment stream. “By integrating diverse and often isolated online resources through something like NewRadial, we can look at 500 years of written culture and understand how the way we tell stories, use language and express our worldview has changed and evolved over the centuries. It’s a very effective tool.” By getting involved with ACENET, Saklofske was able to move NewRadial off of the small Macintosh server that it originally resided on and make it faster and more powerful. ACENET also opened his eyes to new possibilities for the technology and for the field of digital humanities. Digital humanities is a broad field and one that a lot of traditional humanities scholars still have a hard time taking to, according to Saklofske. “There is still a noticeable divide between computer science and the arts. A lot of the time the efforts of Compute Canada tend to be directed toward science, but there is really a lot that can be done in the study of the arts as well. Computers are changing the way we do research and communicate that research with each other and a broader public. William Blake was very much about thinking beyond the box, in the same way that computers are allowing us to think beyond the page.”
Freud, Joyce and the Power of Big Data
It doesn’t take long for the audience to sense that Unconscious in the Sistine Chapel isn’t a typical stage play. For one thing there are no props or scenery pieces. Instead, the backgrounds, including the elaborate artwork of the Sistine Chapel, are created using interactive projected lighting technology. A hologram of sorts. As the play unfolds, the audience realizes that this is a conversation about the power and influence of big data, using big data processes to create the action. David Clark, an Associate Professor of Media Arts at NSCAD University, is one of the creative minds behind the landmark play. “The play is an exploration of big data,” he says. “It asks the question whether we can extract physical data from artifacts in history. Clark is no stranger to this kind of production. His award-winning multimedia projects have appeared at venues including Sundance, the SIGGRAPH Computer Conference, Transmediale in Berlin, and the Museum of Moving Images in New York. But he admits that Unconscious in the Sistine Chapel is unlike anything he’s worked on before. “There are a few things we’re inventing,” he says. “We’re doing things like using interactive props. For example, when an actor picks up a pair of binoculars and starts scanning the horizon with them, the projection of what he is seeing can be seen by the audience.” At the core of the technology is the “holodeck” of the Sistine Chapel, an effect created using a networked eight projector array. The new technology also lights the actors with body position tracking technology. Daniel Oulton is the creative technologist and programmer who is designing the body position tracking technology. The play is a piece of speculative fiction about a chance encounter in 1905 between psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, author James Joyce and their companions in the Sistine Chapel. The action is interspersed with scenes of two modern characters; Phoebe, an archivist with a romantic view of history, and Phil, an investor working on a project that uses virtual reality environments reconstructed by data mining to re-animate history. Through the course of the play, it becomes clear that the interaction between Freud and Joyce is a manifestation of Phil’s project. Michael MacKenzie is the author of Unconscious in the Sistine Chapel. “He’s an early innovator of virtual technology in theater,” says Clark. “My involvement began two summers ago when Michael workshopped the play. We started talking about using a large amount of technology to convey ideas about big data and history.” ACENET is providing support for the project by sponsoring Unconscious in the Sistine Chapel through its Advanced Research Computing Sponsorship Program. The organization is also providing technical consultation to the project. “We were able to connect with the ACENET Data Cave at Saint Mary’s,” says Clark. “They provided a lot of technical advice.” The play will debut at the new Halifax Central Library’s O’Regan Hall. The production has been designed specifically for the library space. “We’ve scaled O’Regan Hall to the dimensions of the Sistine Chapel,” says Clark. “The challenge will be to develop the production for other theatre companies.” Despite the technical innovations, the real purpose behind the play is to get people talking, says Clark. “We’re hoping this will stimulate conversations about the power of big data.”
Digitizing History
Josh MacFadyen is the first MacFadyen in several centuries not to farm. And that, in a sense, is what’s led to his life’s work as an associate professor in the Applied Communication, Leadership and Culture (ACLC) program at the University of Prince Edward Island and a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in geospatial humanities. MacFadyen studies the environmental history of Canada, with a focus on Atlantic Canada. He’s specifically interested in food systems and how humans, and even animals, have fed themselves over time and how they stayed warm in a world before fossil fuels. “And that could have some applications for how we might right [things] going forward,” he says, referring to perhaps novel ways to tackle climate change by learning from the past. MacFadyen was trained as an historian, but over time, because he was using a lot of technology in his work, he became a digital historian. “Digital historian is just a fancy way of saying we use spatial analysis, geographic information systems, and other digital tools related to large datasets such as historical Censuses to understand questions of how general land use and energy systems have changed, and how we’ve arrived at the modern world,” he says. He says Atlantic Canada is the right place to be for his studies as it still has large areas that are predominantly agricultural, though that is gradually changing. For example, the move away from farming isn’t limited to his family. In fact, it’s long been a trend on the island, which has seen a 20 per cent decrease in farmland in the last 20 years. It’s a fact he’s considering in his field of study. He uses Census data to get a granular look at such trends and he uses remote sensing — everything from aerial photos and satellite, to light detection and ranging (LiDAR) —to dig deeper. “The sources I’ve been able to use most consistently are aerial photos —we’ve got the whole province covered right back to 1935,” he says, and adds that he has used that data to develop products that would be useful to historians. His current is a portal for exploring maps, atlases, aerial photos and geospatial data related to the history of Prince Edward Island that resides at projects.upei.ca/geolab. To develop these tools, MacFadyen has used the services of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada through ACENET by participating in workshops and training modules for the humanities and social sciences. “They’re just tremendous,” he says of the workshops and networking. “I just thought ‘Wow, what a great way to join this regional, highly skilled and very active group of people who are trying to create resources for the humanities and social sciences in Atlantic Canadian universities.’ They’re offering these regular training modules, and some are specifically for us.”