KNAW Humanities Cluster, Digital Infrastructure

This paper presents project 'Alfalab'. Alfalab is a collaborative framework project of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and was launched in 2009. The paper explores interfaces for interaction between research questions, tools and data, and infrastructures. It explains how Alfalab supports the very heterogeneous heuristics and data sources used in the humanities research community, while also creating solutions that are integrated into e-science infrastructure initiatieves (e.g. CLARIN). One case of interface development, the GISLab virtual research environment, is described in greater detail.

Political (editorial) cartoons often capture the Zeitgeist of society and convey a message. Increasingly, historians study them to understand commentaries of past events or personalities. Visual culture as an academic subject could be greatly enhanced if this information can be digitally archived. We employ crowdsourcing to obtain valuable metadata by guiding volunteers' feedback using an online survey with 31 targeted questions. We provide intellectual access to a set of about 300 cartoons of a single creator spanning over multiple years in a highly interactive search engine.

The application of a computer-assisted, three-dimensional reconstruction procedure for serial sections to embryonic rat hearts during the period of cardiac looping and compartmentation is described. The procedure relies on immunohistochemical staining for the introduction of selective contrast and on episcopic and diascopic images of each of the sections for alignment and correction of compression due to sectioning. Episcopic (reference) images are taken from the embedding block just before the cutting of a slice and are still aligned and undeformed. Diascopic images are taken from the sections after immunohistochemical processing and, hence, contain selective contrast but are deformed and no longer aligned. The three-dimensional images are visualized as shaded voxel models.This approach allowed the unequivocal delineation of the developing myocardium and the inspection of its changing architecture both from the outside and from within. Furthermore, it allowed a quantification of my...

Two classic theories of direction vision, one by Hering, the other by Wells, are expressed in mathematical form and compared. The Hering disparity field differs considerably from the Wells disparity field, but if both are scaled for the change of acuity with eccentricity their differences are much more subtle. This explains why it is hard to determine which theory predicts direction perception best, although the tests favour Hering's theory. It is proved that Wells's construction (his rule 3) follows directly from his first two rules and Aguillonius's assumption that the horopter in the fixation plane is a frontoparallel line. Wells's theory is clearly outdated and does not mesh well with modern three-dimensional geometry of binocular vision, which Hering's theory does. Moreover, Wells inextricably mixes distance and direction vision right from the start, whereas Hering properly treats the two-dimensional manifold of directions and the depth-gauging principles separately. The use of terms such as 'Wells-Hering' rules should be discouraged and both Wells and Hering should be remembered separately for their clearly distinct and independent contributions. The work of Hering is still relevant to modern theory and praxis of binocular vision. The extension of Hering's approach to vertical disparities is treated for stimuli in frontoparallel planes. It is shown that acuity-scaled verticaldisparity information sampled at a single glance is below resolution beyond about arm's length. It can only be used if eye movements are allowed. Throughout, the simplest derivations of the geometrical relations that it was possible to find are given, so that the review of binocular geometry might also be of some didactical use. Finally it is indicated in which direction it might be necessary to modernise the concept of binocular correspondence.

The application of a computer-assisted, three-dimensional reconstruction procedure for serial sections to embryonic rat hearts during the period of cardiac looping and compartmentation is described. The procedure relies on immunohistochemical staining for the introduction of selective contrast and on episcopic and diascopic images of each of the sections for alignment and correction of compression due to sectioning. Episcopic (reference) images are taken from the embedding block just before the cutting of a slice and are still aligned and undeformed. Diascopic images are taken from the sections after immunohistochemical processing and, hence, contain selective contrast but are deformed and no longer aligned. The three-dimensional images are visualized as shaded voxel models. This approach allowed the unequivocal delineation of the developing myocardium and the inspection of its changing architecture both from the outside and from within. Furthermore, it allowed a quantification of myocardial volume. Because standardized and hence comparable views of three different stages were generated, changes in the shape of the cardiac loop, the atria, and the ventricles as well as changes in the position of the atrioventricular canal and interventricular foramen could be accurately described. Characteristic changes in the position of both the right ventricle and the atrioventricular canal that are essential for the formation of a correctly functioning four-chambered heart could be observed. These changes in shape occur while the myocardial size increases dramatically.

Comparative historical research on the the intensity, diversity and fluidity of public discourses has been severely hampered by the extraordinary task of manually gathering and processing large sets of opinionated data in news media in different countries. At most 50,000 documents have been systematically studied in a single comparative historical project in the subject area of heredity and eugenics. Digital techniques, like the text mining tools WAHSP and BILAND we have developed in two successive demonstrator projects, are able to perform advanced forms of multilingual text-mining in much larger data sets of newspapers. We describe the development and use of WAHSP and BILAND to support historical discourse analysis in large digitized news media corpora. Furthermore, we argue how text mining techniques overcome the problem of traditional historical research that only documents explicitly referring to eugenics issues and debates can be incorporated. Our tools are able to provide information on ideas and notions about heredity, genetics and eugenics that circulate in discourses that are not directly related to eugenics (e.g., sport, education and economics).

In this chapter, which is based on [7-9], we report on work on the generation, refinement and use of sentiment lexicons that was carried out within the DuOMAn project. The project was focused on the development of language technology to support online media analysis. In the area of media analysis, one of the key tasks is collecting detailed information about opinions and attitudes toward specific topics from various sources, both offline (traditional newspapers, archives) and online (news sites, blogs, forums). Specifically, media analysis concerns the following system task: given a topic and list of documents (discussing the topic), find all instances of attitudes toward the topic (e.g., positive/negative sentiments, or, if the topic is an organisation or person, support/criticism of this entity). For every such instance, one should identify the source of the sentiment, the polarity and, possibly, subtopics that this attitude relates to (e.g., specific targets of criticism or support). Subsequently, a (human) media analyst must be able to aggregate the extracted information by source, polarity or subtopics, allowing him to build support/criticism networks etc. [1]. Recent advances in language technology, especially in sentiment analysis, promise to (partially) automate this task. Sentiment analysis is often considered in the context of the following two tasks:

In this chapter, which is based on [7–9], we report on work on the generation, refinement and use of sentiment lexicons that was carried out within the DuOMAn project. The project was focused on the development of language technology to support online media analysis. In the area of media analysis, one of the key tasks is collecting detailed information about opinions and attitudes toward specific topics from various sources, both offline (traditional newspapers, archives) and online (news sites, blogs, forums). Specifically, media analysis concerns the following system task: given a topic and list of documents (discussing the topic), find all instances of attitudes toward the topic (e.g., positive/negative sentiments, or, if the topic is an organisation or person, support/criticism of this entity). For every such instance, one should identify the source of the sentiment, the polarity and, possibly, subtopics that this attitude relates to (e.g., specific targets of criticism or suppo...

LINKS stands for 'LINKing System for historical family reconstruction' and is a software system to link nominal data from the Dutch archives and ultimately reconstruct historical individuals and families. We present the background and philosophy of this matching system and explain its data structure and functioning. Currently the core data of the LINKS system consists of indexed civil certificates. These certificates are available from 1812 — the start of the Dutch Vital Registration — until the year they are confidential based on privacy laws. For more than 20 years, thousands of volunteers have been working to build this index, which contains not only the names of newborn, married and deceased persons, but also the names of their parents, places of birth, ages and sometimes their occupational titles. The software system LINKS includes the standardization of all input before linking, nominal record linkage procedures and identification of all unique persons involved in the ...