Open Seminar “Season for Digital Humanities”

“Season for Digital Humanities” seminar will take place on November 21-22, 2023 in Poznan. During the seminar Poznan-based partners of the project’s consortium – Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan University of Technology, Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center – will present the results of their work. The seminar will be divided into two parts: Dariah.lab infrastructure presentation (in particular its components related to Wielkopolska province) and demonstration of its laboratories.

The event is open to public. The invitation is addressed to the entire academic community associated with the humanities in its broadest sense and the development of technologies for the humanities, as well as music librarians, archivists, lyricists, translators, students, learners, enthusiasts of new technologies and digital humanities, the community of the city of Poznan and the surrounding area.

More information is available on the Seminar page.

We invite you to join us!

DARIAH-PL Project Final Conference

 The final conference of the DARIAH-PL project will take place on October 18-19, 2023 in Poznań.  The event will provide an opportunity to summarise the project’s three-year implementation and present its results. Participants will  learn about the solutions and resources developed in different areas of the arts and humanities, as well as about Dariah.lab infrastructure integrating these solutions.

The conference programme includes a number of sessions grouping presentation of the related elements of Dariah.lab:

• Digitisation of cultural resources
• Art research and musicology
• Cultural data
• Literary research
• Collection and analysis of language resources
• Universal tools

All sessions will be streamed live on the PSNC YouTube channel. We invite you to follow the event.

Digital documentation of Palace in Turew 

High-quality digital photography equipment purchased for Dariah.lab has already found its first application. It was used by the team from PSNC’s News Media Department to produce digital documentation of the baroque palace in Turew –  former residence of Chłapowski family, now owned by the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

The entire complex, located in Turew in Kościan community, includes, in addition to the historic palace, also a chapel and park. It used to be a model estate of the Chłapowski family and a cradle of new ideas related to concept of organic work. The Institute is working on a plan to use the palace-park complex as an artistic and research space.

The digital documentation of the palace includes photographs of dozens of palace rooms, taken both during the day with natural light and at night with artificial light, photogrammetric models of several works of art located on the palace grounds and scans of inventory cards. In total, the documentation work resulted in a collection of several hundred photographs.

Three-dimensional photogrammetric models created from photographs reflect the texture of objects being modeled quite accurately, making it possible to recreate reality in virtual space. The documentation of the palace and chapel in Turew  will be used to generate visualisations which will be available for virtual tours.

The process of documenting Turew palace was an opportunity to test the equipment and templates purchased for Dariah.lab and to develop good practices. The results will also aid planing of the complex use as an artistic and research space.

It is worth noting that the digital photography service offered at Dariah.lab,  will provide documentation that meets the FADGI (Federal Agencies Digital Guidlines Initiative) guidelines for the digitisation of cultural heritage images and materials.

“Kaliszanin” – digital collection of a XIX-century periodical on Researcher’s Desk

On June 22,  Adam Asnyk Municipal Public Library in Kalisz hosted celebration of an event which was important to the community of museologists and  librarians in Kalisz – acquisition and digitization of the 19th century periodical “Kaliszanin”. The journal is a valuable source of knowledge about the XIX century city for historians, bibliologists and genealogists.

Purchase of ‘Kaliszanin. Newspaper of the City of Kalisz and its Surroundings” issues from the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg and its processing was carried out by a team from the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University. A complete set of issues published in the Russian annexation between 1870 and 1892, includes 2288 items, each 4  pages long on the average, which gives a total of approximately 9152 image files with digitally reproduced pages measuring ca. 30 x 43 cm.  Digital reprints of the newspaper are already available in the Wielkopolska Digital Library.

The collection will be further processed using methods and tools developed for the study of historical  texts within the framework of the so-called Researcher’s Desk. It is a comprehensive system for the analysis of linguistic and literary sources. Processing includes, among others, so-called OCR, i.e. acquiring a textual contents of the individual issues of the periodical, text annotation using linguistic analysis tools, semantic analysis and binding of the identified concepts in consolidated description systems (dictionaries, thesauri, ontologies). Researcher’s Desk  is a part of Dariah.lab infrastructure.

The ceremony, organized at the Municipal Public Library in Kalisz by its director Robert Kuciński, provided an opportunity for the participants to learn about the role regional press played in the 19th century from a presentation delivered by professor Jerzy Borowczyk . Professor Bogdan Hojdis presented the history of of the “Kaliszanin” collection acquisition from the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, and Adam Cankudis from UAM introduced the participants to the technical issues of the acquisition and processing of the collection, carried out as part of the work on Researcher’s Desk.  It was also an opportunity to present the DARIAH-PL project and the Dariah.lab infrastructure.  

Acquiring, developing and providing access to “Kaliszanin” periodical is an example of an endeavour made possible by tools and services available in Dariah.lab.

Digital Infrastructure in Art Research

On 13 June 2023, Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences hosted a conference ‘Digital Infrastructure in Art Research”. The goal of the conference was to present results of the work carried out by the Institute in DARIAH-PL project, in the Source Laboratory and the Automated Enrichment Laboratory of Dariah.lab infrastructure.

The conference programme included presentations on the use of modern technologies in art research in general,  acquisition and development of high-quality data for field ethnomusicology, research on  the history and culture of Polish Jews, or the development of digital Catalogue of Art Monuments in Poland. A separate session was devoted to the subject of music data enrichment tools.

Dariah.lab Poland – Together for Cultural Heritage

As in previous years, DARIAH-PL project will be presented at DARIAH Annual Event. This year, the event will take place in Budapest on June 6 – 9, 2023. The main theme is: „Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data?”

This time, there will be an entire session dedicated to the project, entitled „Dariah.lab Poland – Together for Cultural Heritage”. It will take place on June 8 at 4:00 pm and will consists of three presentations.

1. Non-invasive technologies for discovering cultural heritage

Dariah.lab’s approach to building infrastructure for source data acquisition, creating a network of local centres of competence and mobile laboratories, storing and sharing data. Using examples of interdisciplinary projects, we will show application of modern hardware infrastructure in the fields not traditionally associated with the use of advanced equipment, such as history, archaeology, ethnology or literary or linguistic sciences, etc.

2. From Music Information Retrieval to neuroscience of sound

Music is an essential part of human culture and tradition. Dariah.lab provides a computer infrastructure to support the research of (ethno)musicologists in music transcription, timbre analysis or interactive digitization of sheet music documents. We will show examples of the infrastructure as well as methods and tools for studying sound perception by humans, e.g. skin conductance, HRV or EEG

3. Harmonising cultural heritage: vocabularies, data quality and Linked Open Data

How Dariah.lab team is working towards harmonisation of Polish cultural heritage through developing workflows for processing textual resources (segmentation, extraction), improving semantic interoperability of vocabularies and fostering better organisation of knowledge bases of the main Polish providers.

Hope to see you there.

Source Laboratory Meeting at the Institute of Art

On February 1, 2023, a meeting dedicated to tools and services created by the Institute of Art teams took place at the headquarters of the Institute in Warsaw. The meeting was attended by the coordinators of the Source Laboratory: Maciej Głowiak and Dominik Purchała. On behalf of the Institute dr Dorota Piramidowicz and dr Agata Lipczik presented the status of the DARIAH-PL project activities and the infrastructure purchases made.

Dr Jacek Jackowski presented MobiLab – a mobile sound and image laboratory which enables recording of artistic events and acquisition of regional folk music content as part of cultural and ethnomusicological field research throughout Poland. MobiLab equipment includes high-quality microphones of various types, cameras, recorders, disks, complete cabling, and a computer with software for reconstructing and mastering sound recordings. MobiLab has already started its mission at the end of 2022.

In the Sources Laboratory, the Institute will also make available two valuable resources.

“Catalog of Monuments of Art in Poland”, presented by dr Marcin Zgliński, will include digital versions of approximately 200 volumes of a series published since 1951. It is based on an inventory of all art monuments outside museums and private collections (architecture and movable equipment) and is an intermediate form between a detailed topographical inventory and a catalogue. The repository will enable a search through the digitized and verified content  from all published volumes.

“Unique Visual Materials for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Judaism in the Former Poland“, presented by dr Piotr Lasek, is a collection of materials documenting  presence of Jews in Poland. It includes photographic and drawing documentation, created before the Second World War, produced by Polish organizations and institutions involved in the protection and inventory of art monuments (Towarzystwo Opieki nad Zabytkami Przeszłości, Wydział Zabytków Towarzystwa Straży Kresowej, Centralne Biuro Inwentaryzacji Zabytków Sztuki, urzędy okręgowych konserwatorów zabytków). The entire resource will be digitized and made available online.

Dariah.lab and Dariah Inspire presentation at TRIPLE 2023 conference

TRIPLE 2023 conference was held in Bonn on February 1-3, 2023. TRIPLE (Transforming Research through Innovative Practices for Linked Interdisciplinary Exploration) is a European project that develops a multilingual GoTriple platform for searching scientific information (publications, projects or data) in the humanities and social sciences, since 2019.

During a poster session, Dr. Tomasz Hoffmann (PSNC) and Marta Blaszczyńska (IBL PAN) presented Dariah.lab and Dariah Inspire – platform for sharing knowledge about projects, tools, people and institutions working on Dariah.lab or related to digital humanities (Dariah.lab: Interdisciplinary Collaboration of Humanities and Technology). They also took part in a panel discussion on interdisciplinary cooperation between humanists and IT specialists in large infrastructure projects. The discussion prompted the participants to share their experiences, challenges and methods adopted in joint work.  It also allowed them to learn about problems and solutions encountered by other teams in similar projects.

Source Laboratory Working Groups Meeting at AMU

On November 30, 2022, a meeting of the Source Laboratory working groups was held at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. During the meeting, university teams coordinated by Prof. Katarzyna Klessa presented laboratories created for the project and talked about organization and progress of their work.

Prof. Maciej Karpinski and Dr. Ewa Yarmolovich-Novikow of the Department of Multimodal Communication, presented Dariah.lab MULTICO Laboratory, just before its official inauguration. The laboratory was established primarily, though not exclusively, to create a MultiCo multimodal corpus. The corpus will contain audiovisual recordings from public media and from studio recording sessions, along with synchronous transcription of the verbal layer of speech and its prosodic properties, annotation of gestures and facial expressions, and relevant metadata.

Dr. Kamila Kludkiewicz discussed work related to the Audiovisual Archive of the Faculty of Art Sciences, which is a database of scans of documents, photographs, graphics and sound recordings. The archive  will be available to the users of Dariah.lab infrastructure, in the form of a web service.

The last laboratory, presented by Prof. Piotr Podlipniak of the Institute of Musicology, was the infrastructure for study of music, speech and gesture perception, along with a set of archival music data and procedures for their acquisition. The laboratory is located in the building of the Faculty of History of the Adam Mickiewicz University on the Morasko campus.

Source Laboratory coordinators,  Dominik Purchała of the Warsaw University Center for Digital Competence and Maciej Głowiak of Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, also participated in the meeting.

Dariah.lab Laboratory Coordinators Meeting

On December 1-2, 2022, coordinators of all Dariah.lab laboratories was held at PSNC in CBPIO.  The purpose of the meeting was to summarize work results for each of the five laboratories, to discuss plans for the final year of the project, in particular integration of the solutions developed in the project, and to begin efforts to formulate so called workflows.

Workflow is a scenario for executing a task using different components of the infrastructure, located in different laboratories, to achieve a specific goal. The scenarios will be examples of the use of Dariah.pl and, at the same time, a form of documentation of the infrastructure, showing its potential. They can also serve as examples of so-called “best practices” for conducting research in a given area of digital humanities.