After some time of summerly hibernation, our blog is back! But we weren’t hiding in a cave. We already wrote about our Madrid Summer School and about taking part at the 2nd Linguistic Linked Open Data Datathon.
After that, POSTDATA was at the LaTeCH-CLFL Workshop in Vancouver. LaTeCH-CLFL merges ACL‘s Computational Linguistics for Literature workshop, which started in 2012, with the Language Technologies for Cultural Heritage workshop, which was the annual event for ACL’s SIGHUM (Special Interest Group for the Humanities) since 2007.
We presented work by Pablo Ruiz, Clara Martínez et al on the automatic detection of enjambment in Spanish, see paper and slides. This work was a collaboration with the LATTICE lab at the ENS in Paris. Enjambment is a poetry device which results from a mismatch between syntactic and metrical structure, and natural language processing tools are useful for its automatic analysis. We also got the chance to listen to work on other great topics relevant for the computational study of poetry and other genres.
After that, we were at Digital Humanities 2017 in Montreal. Within pre-conference events, we took part at meeting European Research Council Session: Funding Opportunities for Digital Humanities. This session was organized by the ERC in order to promote their funding schemes internationally. Besides a description of the grant program by Sebastian Winkler from the ERC, short interventions took place from three ERC-funded projects involving computational applications in the humanities: FilmColors, RECIRC and our project, POSTDATA.
In the main session, Mariana Curado Malta presented a long paper by Mariana Curado Malta et al, called A Common Conceptual Model for the Study of Poetry in the Digital Humanities. The conceptual model underlies poetry annotation
in the European poetry, having as context Elena Gonzalez-Blanco’s European Research Council Starting Grant (POSTDATA
project). The model addresses the representation of the variability in which different poetic traditions formalize their analyses, aiming at the
implementation of interoperability between them in the Linked Open Data ecosystem. Besides this work, we also presented a short paper, called Distant Rhythm: Automatic Enjambment Detection on Four Centuries of Spanish Sonnets, by Pablo Ruiz and collaborators.
It was an intense week “in the quiet & still air of delightful studies”, as the John Milton inscription on the exterior of McGill’s Redpath library reads—see picture below
The POSTDATA common conceptual model was created for achieving interoperability between concepts used in the poetic traditions of different European countries, as formalized in different poetry databases. The map shows the origin of those databases.
John Milton inscription at McGill’s Redpath Library: “Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet & still air of delightful studies.