The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-based Resources

Data and its technologies now play a large and growing role in humanities research and teaching. This book addresses the needs of humanities scholars who seek deeper expertise in the area of data modeling and representation. The authors, all experts in digital humanities, offer a clear explanation of key technical principles, a grounded discussion of case studies, and an exploration of important theoretical concerns. The book opens with an orientation, giving the reader a history of data modeling in the humanities and a grounding in the technical concepts necessary to understand and engage with the second part of the book. The second part of the book is a wide-ranging exploration of topics central for a deeper understanding of data modeling in digital humanities. Chapters cover data modeling standards and the role they play in shaping digital humanities practice, traditional forms of modeling in the humanities and how they have been transformed by digital approaches, ontologies which seek to anchor meaning in digital humanities resources, and how data models inhabit the other analytical tools used in digital humanities research. It concludes with a glossary chapter that explains specific terms and concepts for data modeling in the digital humanities context. This book is a unique and invaluable resource for teaching and practising data modeling in a digital humanities context.

Julia Flanders is a Professor of Practice in the Northeastern University Department of English and the Director of the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. She also directs the Women Writers Project and serves as editor in chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal of digital humanities. Her apprenticeship in digital humanities began at the Women Writers Project in the early 1990s and continued with work on the development of digital humanities organizations such as the Text Encoding Initiative, CenterNet, and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. She has served as chair of the TEI Consortium, as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and as Secretary of ADHO. She has also taught a wide range of workshops on text encoding and served as a consultant and advisor on numerous digital humanities projects. Her research interests focus on data modeling, textual scholarship, humanities data curation, and the politics of digital scholarly work. She is the co-editor, with Neil Fraistat, of the Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship.

Fotis Jannidis is Professor for computational literary studies at the University of Würzburg in Germany. In the 1990s, he was mainly interested in digital editions and became co-editor of the digital edition The Young Goethe in His Time (1999) and of the critical edition of Goethe's Faust (beta 2016ff.). He was involved in the development of TextGrid, a framework for digital editions, and is involved in DARIAH, a large European infrastructure project for the digital humanities. His recent work focuses on a corpus-based history of the German novel, creating several corpora and creating, evaluating and applying computational methods for the analysis of collections of literary texts. He also manages a B.A.-/M.A.-program for Digital Humanities. His research interests focus on data modeling and computational literary history including stylometry. He is co-editor, with Hubertus Kohle and Malte Rehbein, of Digital Humanities: Eine Einführung (2017).