The CENDARI infrastructure is a research-supporting platform designed to provide tools for transnational historical research, focusing on two topics: medieval culture and World War I. It exposes to the end users modern Web-based tools relying on a sophisticated infrastructure to collect, enrich, annotate, and search through large document corpora. Supporting researchers in their daily work is a novel concern for infrastructures. We describe how we gathered requirements through multiple methods to understand historians’ needs and derive an abstract workflow to support them. We then outline the tools that we have built, tying their technical descriptions to the user requirements. The main tools are the note-taking environment and its faceted search capabilities; the data integration platform including the Data API, supporting semantic enrichment through entity recognition; and the environment supporting the software development processes throughout the project to keep both technical partners and researchers in the loop. The outcomes are technical together with new resources developed and gathered, and the research workflow that has been described and documented.
The project aims to assist the process of conducting transnational and comparative studies of into the Holocaust by bringing together in an online portal https: portal.ehri-project.eu descriptions of archival material across a geographically dispersed and fragmented archival landscape @cite_9 . In this, Its principle goal is related to data collection, integration, and curation.
@cite_9
2093183149 2106311500 300178524 2748382489
In this article we present our ideas for an integrating activity for archival research on the Holocaust. We analyse how we can improve Holocaust-related collection descriptions for research, which we will make available online, and how EHRI provides travel grants for transnational access to existing infrastructures in Holocaust research. Both approaches help us overcome that Holocaust-related material is geographically dispersed and address the challenges for historical research stemming from the way documentation on the Holocaust has been attempted up to now. We have chosen to implement the EHRI integrated information resource using graph databases. With their emphasis on relationships, graph databases are particularly well suited for historical research in particular and humanities research in general. We analyse the architecture and implementation details of this novel approach and show how graph databases integrate with traditional ways of searching and browsing historical collections. This way, we su... This paper presents a research dataset of historical newspapers comprising over 500 page images, uniquely representative of European cultural heritage from the digitization projects of 12 national and major European libraries, created within the scope of the large-scale digitisation Europeana Newspapers Project (ENP). Every image is accompanied by comprehensive ground truth (Unicode encoded full-text, layout information with precise region outlines, type labels, and reading order) in PAGE format and searchable metadata about document characteristics and artefacts. The first part of the paper describes the nature of the dataset, how it was built, and the challenges encountered. In the second part, a baseline for two state-of-the-art OCR systems (ABBYY FineReader Engine 11 and Tesseract 3.03) is given with regard to both text recognition and segmentation layout analysis performance. The World Wide Web is becoming a source of information for researchers, who are more aware of the possibilities for collections of Internet content as resources. Some have begun creating archives of web content for social science and humanities research. However, there is a growing gulf between policies shared between global and national institutions creating web archives and the practices of researchers making use of the archives. Each set of stakeholders finds the others’ web archiving contributions less applicable to their own field. Institutions find the contributions of researchers to be too narrow to meet the needs of the institution’s audience, and researchers find the contributions of institutions to be too broad to meet the needs of their research methods. Resources are extended to advance both institutional and researcher tools, but the gulf between the two is persistent. Institutions generally produce web archives that are broad in scope but with limited access and enrichment tools. The design of common access interfaces, such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, limit access points to archives to only URL and date. This narrow access limits the ways in which web archives can be valuable for exploring research questions in the humanities and social sciences. Individual scholars, in catering to their own disciplinary and methodological needs, produce web archives that are narrow in scope, and whose access and enrichment tools are personalized to work within the boundaries of the project for which the web archive was built. There is no way to explore a subset of an archive by topic, event, or idea. The current search paradigm in web archiving access tools is built primarily on retrieval, not discovery. We suggest that there is a need for extensible tools to enhance access to and enrichment of web archives to make them more readily reusable and so, more valuable for both institutions and researchers, and that annotation activities can serve as one potential guide for development of such tools to bridge the divide. With its seemingly limitless scope, the World Wide Web promises enormous advantages, along with enormous problems, to researchers who seek to use it as a source of data. Websites change continually and a high level of flux makes it challenging to capture a snapshot of the web, or even a cross-section of a small subset of the web. A web archive, such as those at the Internet Archive, promises to store and deliver repeated cross-sections of the entire web, and it also offers the potential for longitudinal analysis. Whether this potential is realized depends on the extent to which the archive has truly captured the web. Therefore, a crucial question for Internet researchers is: ‘How good are the archival data?’ We ask if there are systematic biases in the Internet Archive, using a case study to address this question. Specifically, we are interested in whether biases exist in the British websites stored in the Internet Archive data. We find that the Internet Archive contains a surprisingly small subset, about 24 , of the webpages of the website that we use for our case study (the travel site, TripAdvisor). Furthermore, the subset of data we found in the Internet Archive appears to be biased and is not a random sample of the webpages on the site. The archived data we examine has a bias toward prominent webpages. This bias could create serious problems for research using archived websites.