Digital Humanities Lab presents READ-IT tool with international partners
At the SHARP Conference 2022, the Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) recently presented the results of the international READ-IT project. With the Horizon2020 grant of 250,000 euros the DHLab built an advanced interface for this project.
READ-IT (Reading Europe Advanced Investigation Tool) is a large-scale study of reading culture in Europe from the 18th century to the present. The READ-IT consortium consists of roughly twenty digital humanists, human & social sciences scholars and computer researchers from 6 different countries. Together they built tools, methods and a vocabulary that makes it possible to investigate on a large scale the reading practices and reading experiences of Europeans of that time.
What makes this research project unique is the innovative method that the researchers used. They looked for new ways of collecting data, such as crowdsourcing and web-crawling. In addition, they worked with linked open data (RDF) and on linking and reusing pre-existing datasets.
Advanced interface
Within the DHLab, former team leader José de Kruif and developers Julian Gonggrijp, Berit Janssen and Jelte van Boheemen built an advanced and user-friendly interface for the project that enables the analysis of the history of reading. Before, it was an incredible amount of work for researchers to collect the right information about how a particular book in the 18th century for example was received. This interface allows a researcher to annotate and link resources, and to search based both on the text and the annotations. This makes it possible to search for records of specific types of reading experiences, for example experiences from a specific demographic group or about a particular literary genre. The interface is also linked to a machine learning tool from the partner in Rennes (IRISA), which automatically annotates named entities with each newly uploaded source. This can help researchers find suitable places for further manual annotations.
About SHARP
SHARP is an annual conference that brings together scholars from across the world to share and discuss the latest research relating to book history. The theme of the SHARP conference of 2022 that took place in Amsterdam from 11 to 15 July 2022 was ‘Power of the written word’.