DH2013 Abstracts

The abstracts for Digital Humanities 2013 at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln have been posted. Some standouts:

Network analysis

• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: Unsurprisingly, this fascinating project is making a showing at DH2013. Their abstract is a wonderfully concise explanation of the value of this project, and they describe very ambitious-sounding plans for eventually expanding their scope beyond the Dictionary of National Biogrpahy.

• Preliminaries: The Social Networks of Literary Production in the Spanish Empire During the Administration of the Duke of Lerma (1598-1618): I really wish I could see this one, as the authors are asking questions very similar to my exploration of artist networks described by existing structured art historical databases. They deal with characterizing the interaction (or conspicuous separation) of different neighborhoods, and even individuals, in their network model.

• Extraction and Analysis of Character Interaction Networks From Plays and Movies: The authors offer several possible ways to characterize narrative structure in plays and movies by analyzing networks of character interactions, from Hamlet to Charlie’s Angels.

Art History

(surprise, just 7 abstracts in the art history topic out of a total 236!)

• Not Exactly Prima Facie: Understanding the Representation of the Human Through the Analysis of Faces in World Painting: Face-detection is one of the better-developed branches of computer image recognition (obviously). The authors describe an interesting process of abstracting clusters of similar facial feature sets from a base of 22,000-odd images. It will be interesting to see if and how these clusters map onto existing histories of style. However I am rather more confused how this new, interesting abstraction will, in their words, move art history “beyond the generalizations supported by the notions of ‘style’, ‘genre’ and ‘national history’”

• Evaluating Natural Light in Historic Structures through Digital Simulation: These authors are interested in the capability of simulation to tell us about natural light effects in future buildings - I hope everyone visiting this poster asks them about lighting analysis with digital reconstructions of historic buildings! What might natural lighting have been like in the Baths of Caracalla?

• Reverse Image Lookup, Paintings, Digitisation, Reuse: If you google image search a bunch of London National Gallery images, where do they go? I’m glad to see they have found evidence that openly disseminating images drives visitors to the source website of the museum - hopefully a good argument for more open access initiatives like those at the National Gallery of Art and the Rijksmuseum.

GIS

• A Clear Temporal GIS Viewer and Software for Discovering Irregularities in Historical GIS and Issues in Spatio-Temporal Technologies for the Humanities and Arts: I’m glad to see a few panels addressing challenges in visualizing dynamic geographic information using current software.