Category: Blog

At the Cologne Center for eHumanities we rely on plenty of open source components: programs, libraries, frameworks and so on. Having so many useful components available is great, but we do not want to be just passive users. We are eager to contribute back to the open source community.

In 2014/2015 we started a conscious effort to develop in the open and to be good open source citizens. Here is a small selection of things we have done so far. This is just the beginning.

Our own DH projects

A selection of our most recent projects, including some that are still in progress, are publicly available on our GitHub space: https://github.com/cceh/.

Reusable libraries

Some of the code we produce could be useful to other researches, so we extracted them from their main project and released them as separate projects. Do you need to filter, extract and publish bibliographic records from your Zotero collection? pybibgen^[1] may be what you need. Do you want to automate eXist-db tasks using Gulp? gulp-exist^[2] does just that.

Improvements to other projects

Giving back is important. Contributing bug fixes and new features is the best way to say thank you to an open source project. In 2015 and 2014 we contributed to many established projects we used. Our aim is to make the project even better for all other users. For example we provided a new way to generate IDs to Artefactual’s AtoM that made ingestion of millions of records a matter of seconds instead of hours, while generating better URLs at the same time ^[3]. We also reported other small problems and features ^[4,5,6,7,8]. In Saxon we pointed out two problems that once fixed made some XSLT run an order of magnitude faster ^[9,10,11,12]. We also produced detailed problem reports with test cases to eXist-db ^{[13,14,15,16]}, Chromium ^[17] and other development tools ^[18,19,20].

These were our contributions for 2015. Let’s see what awaits us in 2016.

1. https://github.com/cceh/pybibgen
2. https://github.com/olvidalo/gulp-exist
3. https://github.com/artefactual/atom/pull/187
4. https://github.com/artefactual/atom/pull/32
5. https://github.com/artefactual/atom/pull/41
6. https://github.com/artefactual/atom/pull/54
7. https://projects.artefactual.com/issues/7026
8. https://projects.artefactual.com/issues/6785
9. https://saxonica.plan.io/boards/3/topics/6209
10. https://saxonica.plan.io/issues/2489
11. https://saxonica.plan.io/boards/3/topics/6256
12. https://saxonica.plan.io/issues/2565
13. https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/issues/362
14. https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/issues/426
15. https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/issues/712
16. https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/issues/811
17. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=565225
18. https://mailman.uni-konstanz.de/pipermail/basex-talk/2015-February/008185.html
19. https://github.com/toggl/toggldesktop/pull/1196
20. https://github.com/davidswelt/zot_bib_web/issues/1

We are very pleased to announce the programme of the second DiXiT convention to be held in Cologne, 15-18 March 2016, ‘Digital Editions: Academia, Cultural Heritage, Society’. Registration is now open!

With a great variety of excellent speakers from various fields the programme comprises sessions on Critical Editing, Building Communities, Cultural Heritage, Social Editing, Funding and Publishing. A large amount of new and current editing projects will be presented during a dedicated poster session. The core programme is preceded by intensive workshops on Publishing Models and Editing beyond XML. Special events will take place in the evening at interesting local venues.

Please find below an outline of the programme. Visit our convention website for abstracts and further details at:

Convention 2

Registration is open & free of charge at:

Convention 2 – Registration Form

Early registration is recommended since places for several events are limited.

*** PROGRAMME ***

TUESDAY, 15 March 2016

Workshops, 11 am – 4:30 pm

Future Publishing Models for Digital Scholarly Editions
– Michael Pidd (University of Sheffield)
– Anna-Maria Sichani (Huygens Institute for History of the Netherlands)
– Paul Caton (King’s College London)
– Andreas Triantafyllidis (thinking(dot)gr / vivl(dot)io)

Digital Editing beyond XML
– Fabio Ciotti (University of Roma Tor Vergata)
– Manfred Thaller (University of Cologne)
– Desmond Schmidt (University of Queensland)
– Fabio Vitali (University of Bologna)
– Domenico Fiormonte (University of Edinburgh)

Opening Keynote, 5 pm

Claire Clivaz (University of Lausanne)
Multimodal literacies and continuous data publishing : ambiguous challenges for the editorial competences

WEDNESDAY, 16 March 2016

Critical Editing I, 9 – 11 am

Andreas Speer (University of Cologne)
Blind Spots of Digital Editions: The Case of Huge Text Corpora in Philosophy, Theology and the History of Sciences

Mehdy Sedaghat Payam (SAMT Organization for Research in Humanities, Iran)
Digital Editions and Materiality: A Media-specific Analysis of the First and the Last Edition of Michael Joyce’s Afternoon

Raffaella Afferni, Alica Borgna, Maurizio Lana, Paolo Monella, Timothy Tambassi (Università del Piemonte Orientale)
‘But What Should I Put in a Digital Apparatus’ – A Not-So-Obvious Choice: New Types of Digital Scholarly Editions

Building Communities, 11 am – 1 pm

Monica Berti (University of Leipzig)
Beyond Academia and Beyond the First World: Editing as Shared Discourse on the Human Past

Timothy L. Stinson (North Carolina State University)
The Advanced Research Consortium: Federated Resources for the Production and Dissemination of Scholarly Editions

Aodhán Kelly (University of Antwerp)
Digital Editing in Society: Valorization and Diverse Audiences

Cultural Heritage, 2 – 4 pm

Hilde Boe (The Munch Museum, Oslo)
Edvard Munch’s Writings: Experiences from Digitising the Museum

Thorsten Schassan (Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel)
The Influence of Cultural Heritage Institutions on Scholarly Editing in the Digital Age

Dinara Gagarina, Sergey Kornienko (Perm State University)
Digital Editions of Russia: Provincial Periodicals for Scholarly Usage

Poster Slam & Session, 4 – 6 pm

Museum Lecture, 7 pm
Location: Museum Kolumba

Helene Hahn (Open Knowledge Foundation, Berlin)
OpenGLAM & Civic Tech: Working with the Communities

followed by a reception & guided tour

THURSDAY, 17 March 2016

Social Editing & Funding, 9 – 11 am

Ray Siemens (University of Victoria)
The Social Edition in the Context of Open Social Scholarship

Till Grallert (Orient-Institut Beirut)
The Journal al-Muqtabas Between Shamela.ws, HathiTrust, and GitHub: Producing Open, Collaborative, and Fully Referencable Digital Editions of Early Arabic Periodicals – With Almost No Funds

Misha Broughton (University of Cologne)
Crowd-Funding the Digital Scholarly Edition: What We Can Learn From Webcomics, Tip Jars, and a Bowl of Potato Salad

Publishing, 11 am – 1 pm

Mike Pidd (University of Sheffield)
Scholarly Digital Editing by Machines

Anna-Maria Sichani (Huygens Institute for History of the Netherlands)
Beyond Open Access: (Re)use, Impact and the Ethos of Openness in Digital Editing

Alexander Czmiel (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities)
Sustainable Publishing: Standardization Possibilities For Digital Scholarly Edition Technology

Licenses, 2 – 4 pm

Walter Scholger (Graz University)
Intellectual Property Rights vs. Freedom of Research: Tripping Stones in International IPR Law

Wout Dillen (University of Antwerp)
Editing Copyrighted Materials: On Sharing What You Can

Merisa Martinez (University of Borås), Melissa Terras (University College London)
Orphan Works Databases and Memory Institutions: A Critical Review of Current Legislation

Club Lecture/DiXiT meets Cologne Commons, 7 pm
Location: Stereo Wonderland

Ben Brumfield (Independet Scholar, Texas)
Accidental Editors and the Crowd

Frank Christian Stoffel (Cologne Commons)
My 15 min. fame with creative commons

followed by a live performance by Grüner Würfel Drehkommando

FRIDAY, 18 March 2016

Critical Editing II, 9 – 11 am

Charles Li (University of Cambridge)
Critical Diplomatic Editing: Applying Text-critical Principles as Algorithms

Vera Faßhauer (University of Frankfurt)
Private Ducal Correspondences in Early Modern Germany (1546-1756)

Cristina Bignami, Elena Mucciarelli (University of Tübingen)
The Language of the Objects: ‘Intermediality’ in Medieval South India

Closing Keynote, 11 am

Arianna Ciula (University of Roehampton)
Modelling Textuality: A Material Culture Framework

The Thomas-Institute at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Cologne invites applications for four full-time positions as Research Associates, one of which in Digital Humanities, three in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin Philosophy, starting May 1, 2016.

The Thomas-Institute conducts a long-term project of critical editions of the writings on Natural Philosophy by the Arabic philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rušd, 1126–1198) and his immediate predecessor Avempace (Ibn Bāǧǧa, c. 1070–1139): “Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin Reception of Aristotle’s Philosophy of Nature”. The project will produce a total of 18 critical editions of the preserved Arabic original texts and their medieval Hebrew and Latin translations, which will be published both in print and as digital editions. Starting in 2016, the project is scheduled to run for 25 years, and has received funding for the entire period of its duration from the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. Directors: Prof. Dr. Andreas Speer, Jun.-Prof. Dr. David Wirmer.

The Digital Humanities position assigned to this project has the task
* to evaluate existing editing tools and to adapt them to the needs of the present project;
* to assist the editors in the encoding in XML/TEI of complex editorial findings;
* to implement ― on the basis of an existing framework (http://dare.uni-koeln.de/) ― solutions for the display of the critical apparatus;
* to contribute to the development of an TEI schema for edition meta-data;
* to further develop the technical framework with a view to standardized technologies and sustainability.

Appointment requirements are: either a university degree (Master) in computer science and a good knowledge of questions and methods used in the humanities, especially in edition philology or a university degree (Master) in a field related to the subject-matter of the edition project and in-depth knowledge in informatics. Eligible candidates should demonstrate an excellent knowledge of XML/TEI, XML-databases, XML editors and their customization, other XML-related standards and web technologies. In addition, some experience in the creation of print masters is desirable.
For further information see: http://ukoeln.de/F1JI1

Applicants for the positions in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin Philosophy should be competent in more than one area. Appointment requirements are: a university degree and PhD in a field related to the subject-matter of the edition project (e.g. History of Philosophy, Classical Philology, Oriental Studies, Jewish Studies, etc.). Eligible candidates should demonstrate an excellent knowledge of either Arabic, Hebrew, or Latin, working knowledge of at least one of the other languages, and close familiarity with Medieval philosophy. The appointed editors are expected to work independently but in close collaboration with their colleagues.
For further information see: http://ukoeln.de/KYP7X

The University of Cologne is an equal opportunities employer. Applications of women are thus especially encouraged; applications of disabled persons will be given preferential treatment to those of other candidates with equal qualifications. Candidates should submit a cover letter that describes their research, two letters of recommendation, and a current curriculum vitae. To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by 1st of March 2016. Please send your documents to:

Averroes Edition
Thomas-Institut
Universitätsstraße 22
50923 Köln

For additional information please contact david.wirmer@uni-koeln.de.

Am Donnerstag, 17. Dezember, veranstaltet das CCeH eine Weihnachtsfeier, zu der alle Kolleginnen und Kollegen, Freunde und Verwandte herzlich eingeladen sind.

Die Feier startet um 18 Uhr in den Räumen des CCeH, Universitätsstr. 22, Dachgeschoss. Für Getränke und Speisen wird ebenso gesorgt sein wie für einen Kicker und jahresendzeitstimmungsvolle Hausmusik, dargeboten von der House-Formation “CC(eH) Catch”.

Merry X-mas!

Goldene Promotion Dr. Paul Otto Samuelsdorff

50 Jahre Computerlinguistik in Köln
25 Jahre Sprachliche Informationsverarbeitung

Programm, 4. Dezember 2015, 16-18:00 Uhr

Jürgen Rolshoven: Einführung

Andreas Speer: Goldene Promotion Dr. Paul Otto Samuelsdorff

Paul Otto Samuelsdorff: Genesis der Computerlinguistik

Pause (ca. 15 Min.)

Guido Mensching: De quel problème les ordinateurs ne trouvent-ils pas la solution?

Hörsaal C, Hörsaalgebäude
Albertus Magnus Platz
50923 Köln