@misc{Dritsou2022,
title = {The Greek Landscape of Digital Humanities Initiatives},
author = {Vicky Dritsou},
url = {https://www.casalini.it/retreat/web_content/2022/presentations/dritsou.pdf
https://youtu.be/YViAk77Vfoc},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-04-05},
abstract = {Over the last decade the Greek landscape of digital humanities has undergone considerable reframing. At the time of intense digitization, a significant number of cultural heritage institutions from across the country digitized and documented their collections, making them available online or locally for use by both specialists and wider audiences. This wave of digitization projects by Greek libraries, archives, museums, universities, ministry ephorates and publishers, have been instrumental in fostering the growth of major research and teaching resources online, as well as in providing the foundations for national digital infrastructures. The transformative effect of digitization and, more recently, of academic-led initiatives (projects and infrastructures) on Greek scholarship has appeared as the aftermath of increased access to primary and secondary resources, facilitated management of data, and enhanced reuse of digital cultural assets. Digital tools have not only transformed our engagement and interaction with the past, but they have also reshaped arts and humanities research, prompting a new community of digital humanists within, across and beyond Greece. Focusing on the example of APOLLONIS, the Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation, this talk will present the challenges and the significant shifts the Greek landscape of digital humanities has been going through over the last years.},
howpublished = {Presentation at Fiesole Retreat 2022, Athens, April 5},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Dritsou2020,
title = {Integrating archival materials for the study of the turbulent Greek 40s},
author = {Vicky Dritsou and Maria Ilvanidou and Isidora Despotidou and Vicky Liakopoulou and Karmen Vourvachaki and Panos Constantopoulos},
url = {https://zenodo.org/record/4271531},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.4271531},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-11-12},
abstract = {Humanities researchers often need to study heterogeneous digitized archives from different sources. But how can they deal with this heterogeneity, both in terms of structure and semantics? What are the digital tools they can use in order to integrate resources and study them as a whole? And what if they are unfamiliar with the methods and tools available? Towards this end, DARIAH-EU[1] and CLARIN[2] research infrastructures already support researchers in exploiting digital tools. Specific use case research scenarios have also been developed, with the PARTHENOS SSK[3] being a successful example. In this paper we describe our related (ongoing) experience from the development of the Greek research infrastructure APOLLONIS[4], where, among others, we have focused on identifying and supporting the workflows that researchers need to follow to perform specific research studies while jointly accessing disparate archives. Using the decade of 1940s as a use case, a turbulent period in Greek history due to its significant events (WWII, Occupation, Opposition, Liberation, Civil War), we have assembled (digitized) historical archives, coming from different providers and shedding light on different historical aspects of these events. From the acquisition of the resources to the desired outcome, we record the workflows of the whole research study, including the initial curation process of the digitized archives, the ingestion, the joint indexing of the data, the generation of semantic graph representations and, finally, their publication and searching. After the acquisition of the heterogeneous source materials we perform a detailed investigation of their structure and contents, in order to map the different archive metadata onto a common metadata schema, thus enabling joint indexing and establishing semantic relations among the contents of the archives. The next step is data cleaning, where messy records are cleaned and normalized. Natural Language Processing methods are then exploited for the extraction of additional information contained in the archival records or in free text metadata fields, such as persons, places, armed units, dates and topics, which enhance the initial datasets. The outcome is encoded in XML using the common schema and ingested into a repository through an aggregator implemented using the MoRE[5] system. A joint index based on a set of basic criteria is generated and maintained, thus ensuring joint access to all archival records regardless of their source. In addition, an RDF representation is generated from the encoded archival data, enabling their publication in the form of a semantic graph and supporting interesting complex queries. This is based on a specifically designed extension of CIDOC CRM[6] and a compilation of a list of research queries of varying complexity encoded in SPARQL. Preliminary tests of the entire workflows and the tools used in all steps yielded very encouraging results. Our immediate plans include full scale ingestion and indexing of the material from a number of archives, producing the corresponding semantic graph and streamlining the incorporation of new archives.

[1]DARIAH-EU, https://www.dariah.eu/
[2]CLARIN, https://www.clarin.eu/
[3]PARTHENOS Standardization Survival Kit (SSK), http://www.parthenos-project.eu/portal/ssk-2
[4]APOLLONIS Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation, https://apollonis-infrastructure.gr/
[5]MoRE Aggregator, http://more.dcu.gr/
[6]CIDOC CRM, http://www.cidoc-crm.org/},
howpublished = {Presentation at Scholarly Primitives - DARIAH Annual Event 2020},
note = {Honorable mention},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Constantopoulos2019b,
title = {From publications to knowledge graphs},
author = {Panos Constantopoulos and Vayianos Pertsas},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-11-12},
howpublished = {Talk at World Health Organization Global Technical Meeting 2019, Seoul, 12-14 Nov.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Constantopoulos2019,
title = {From the catalogue to the virtual information space},
author = {Panos Constantopoulos},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-08-24},
abstract = {Libraries have always been knowledge vaults, serving as indispensable infrastructure for research, education, and an array of important social functions. With time, sophisticated knowledge organization systems have been developed that support the access to the content of libraries. Effectively, these systems reflect our perception of various domains of knowledge through agreed, yet evolving, organizational schemes. The contents of libraries also undergo an important evolution: not only do the documents of knowledge become increasingly digital, they also come at widely different media and levels of granularity, from books, to articles, to images, tables, datasets, video, audio, etc., each independently identified. In addition, the entanglement of research processes with information processes becomes tighter in digital environments. In this talk we will review, in the context of these trends, the potential for knowledge access and integration offered by ontology-driven semantic graph indexing. We will also try to show that a wider margin for effective knowledge access is enjoyed when data- and process- oriented approaches are combined, especially in view of the increasing ability to use automatic knowledge extraction and indexing techniques. Libraries are thus facing the opportunity and challenge to create connected information spaces rendering, as close as possible, the rapidly evolving body of knowledge.},
howpublished = {Invited talk at IFLA World Library and Information Congress, Athens, 24-30 Aug.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Ilvanidou2019,
title = {And The First One Now Will Later Be Last, For The Times They Are A-changin': Modeling Land Communication In Roman Crete},
author = {Maria Ilvanidou},
url = {https://dev.clariah.nl/files/dh2019/boa/0632.html},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-07-11},
abstract = {The present contribution has a twofold aim: on the one hand it will seek to demonstrate how the use of digital tools and methods enabled the reconstruction of the road network in Crete, Greece during the Roman period (1st century BCE - 4th century CE), while on the other hand it will showcase how the rapid developments in digital tools often deems research in the field of the Humanities outdated or obsolete. Back in 2005, when I first started working on digitally modeling land communication in Roman Crete, the puzzle I was trying to put together was looking for the bits and pieces of relevant and useful information within a variety of diverse and scattered sources: ancient written sources (like, for example, Strabo’s Geography and Stadiasmus Maris Magni , an ancient Roman periplus detailing the ports on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea), archaeological evidence (paved road remains, bridges, miliaria, i.e. Roman milestones, and Roman sites), historical maps (like, for example, the Tabula Peutingeriana , a medieval copy of an itinerarium pictum, i.e. a painted itinerary, showing the layout of the road network of the Roman Empire, and Venetian maps of Crete), travel literature (15th-20th century travelers’ accounts) and topography (largely my own surveys).

Material heterogeneity and diversity of information and data collected called for sophisticated modeling; that is, an information schema that would capture and document any determinant detail, and, when implemented, be able to facilitate correlation and answer my research questions: which settlement types (for example cities, sanctuaries, farmsteads) were connected through the road network, what were the distances between them, how long it took to travel and by what means of transportation (e.g., by foot, horseback, mules, etc.), which route was followed by which traveler and for what purpose, do the routes mentioned by different travelers change across time, how accurate or credible is the information provided by ancient sources with regard to distances between settlements, what parameters affected the course of the route and the planning of the road, to what extend Cretan topography determined the route direction, what were the local topographic characteristics that affected transportation on the island, and can we reconstruct the original trace of the Roman road network with the use of digital tools and methods even though the archaeological evidence is scarce and fragmentary? The other challenge was to combine the use of Geographical Information Systems in order to restore visually the spatial data and exploit the GIS functionality to check and assess parameters that affected the planning of the road network in question.

The digital tools that made this endeavor feasible were two. The first one was ArcGIS (ArcView 9.0), a commercial GIS software still largely in use, for the spatial analysis of geographic data. The selection of the second one, the tool that would enable me to manage, store and correlate all historical and archaeological data, has proved more challenging and changed over the years. From MS Access, for the implementation of a relational database, back in 2005, to BetaCMS, an open source web-based content management platform, which used XML schema definitions to represent content, in 2010. The BetaCMS, later called Astroboa, was developed by a Greek IT company, Beta Concept, and allowed fast and easy modeling, storing and querying of all data, thus providing what it seemed to be, at the time (2010), a suitable alternative to switch into. The alternate and combined use of both systems (GIS and database) allowed for a long and intriguing iterative process from which a network of optimal paths emerged as a result. This enabled me to propose a reconstruction of the original trace of the public road network connecting the major cities and settlements of Roman Crete, and in specific cases test it against field trip data, with very promising results.

Such an initiative as the integration, connection and modeling of complex data on Roman road networks in the digital domain was indeed quite innovative in 2005. Had this venture been undertaken manually, i.e. without employing any digital methods or tools, it would undoubtedly have taken longer and it would most probably not been as accurate. Correlating the data so that they become meaningful and usable for my analysis and making more realistic calculations over geographic space, could not have been performed as efficiently relying on analogue methods alone. However, an analogue approach would still have been up to date and re-usable, unlike my 2005 and 2010 end-results. Sustainability of my Roman roads modeling project has proven to be a great challenge, as BetaCMS is not supported any longer, while ArcGIS is not an open source tool. Therefore, one could argue that, what the digital so generously offered my work, it has taken it back rather fiercely.

In this short presentation I will be going through my methodology and results of the Roman Crete land communication modeling and will be raising questions as to their usefulness, curation, re-usability and sustainability as well as the implications to Humanities research, also looking into the prospect of the employment of current innovative digital methods and tools that are available openly. While there is a considerable number of studies regarding digital preservation strategies and planning on an institutional level (e.g. libraries and archives), my intention is to address those very issues from the individual scholar’s perspective.},
howpublished = {Short paper presentation at DH2019 Conference, Utrecht University 9-12 July},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Pertsas2019,
title = {From Research Articles to Knowledge Graphs: Methods for ontology-driven knowledge base creation from text},
author = {Vayianos Pertsas and Panos Constantopoulos},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-03-13},
abstract = {Understanding and extracting knowledge contained in text and encoding it as linked data for the WEB is a highly complex task that poses several challenges, requiring expertise from different fields such as conceptual modeling, natural language processing and web technologies including web mining, linked data generation and publishing, etc. When it comes to the scholarly domain, the transformation of human readable research articles into machine comprehensible knowledge bases is considered of high importance and necessity today due to the explosion of scientific publications in every major discipline, that makes it increasingly difficult for experts to maintain an overview of their domain or relate ideas from different domains. This situation could be significantly alleviated by knowledge bases capable of supporting queries such as: find all papers that address a given problem; how was the problem solved; which methods are employed by whom in addressing particular tasks; etc. that currently cannot be addressed by commonly used search engines such as Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar.
This tutorial addresses the above challenge by introducing the participants to methods required in order to model knowledge regarding a given domain, extract information from available texts using advanced machine learning techniques, associate it with other information mined from the web in order to infer new knowledge and republish everything as linked open data on the Web. To this end, we will use a specific use case – that of the scholarly domain, and will show how to model research processes, extract them from research articles associate them with contextual information from article metadata and other linked repositories and create knowledge bases available as linked data. Our aim is to show how methodologies from different computer science fields, namely natural language processing, machine learning and conceptual modeling, can be combined with Web technologies in a single meaningful workflow.},
howpublished = {Tutorial presented at The Web Conference WWW2019, San Francisco, 13-17 May},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Dallas2017,
title = {DiMPO - a DARIAH infrastructure survey on digital practices and needs of European scholarship},
author = {Costis Dallas and Claire Clivaz and and Nephelie Chatzidiakou and Jurij Hadalin and Elena Gonzalez-Bianco and Beat Immenhauser and Maciej Maryl and Gerlinde Schneider and Walter Scholger and Toma Tasovac and Ingrida Vosyliute},
url = {https://www.conftool.net/aiucd2017/index.php?page=browseSessions&print=head&form_session=2},
year = {2017},
date = {2017-01-25},
abstract = {In 2015, the Digital Methods and Practices Observatory (DiMPO) Working Group of DARIAH-EU conducted a European survey on scholarly digital practices and needs, which was translated into ten languages and gathered 2’177 responses from humanities researchers residing in than 20 European countries. A project website is in preparation: http://observatory.dariah.eu (opening in January 2017). The summary of the main results is to be launched at the end of 2016 in a highlights report, presently being translated into the diverse languages of the team (French, German, Greek, Polish, Serbian, Spanish and perhaps more). The survey, the first of its kind in Europe, is a perfect case of multiculturalism and multilingualism, as well as transcultural and transnational collaboration and communication, in full alignment with the 2016 topic of the EADH day. In the next edition - scheduled for 2017 - we envisage the incorporation of questions specific to certain regions or countries so as to address the diversity of different cultural contexts.
Our presentation will also underline the main results of the survey with the aim of encouraging debate on the current state of digital practice in the humanities across Europe, and to get vital feedback for the preparation of the next survey. The survey questionnaire consists of twenty-one questions designed to be relevant to researchers from different European countries and humanities disciplines. The main focus is on of specific research activities, methods and tools used by the researchers. After filtering and normalizing the dataset, the results were statistically analyzed using descriptive statistics, although simple tests of two-way association were also performed, to assess the relationship of particular responses to the respondents’ country of residence, discipline, academic status and other relevant factors. In addition to the consolidated European results, six national detailed profiles have been produced, namely for Austria, Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia and Switzerland. The findings suggest that the use of digital resources, methods, services and tools is widespread among European Humanities researchers. Used across the scholarly work lifecycle from data collection to publication and dissemination. Results add to our understanding of how users of digital resources, methods, services and tools conduct their research, and what they perceive as important for their work. This is important to ensure appropriate priorities for digital infrastructures, as well as activities and strategies for digital inception, which will shape future initiatives regarding the diverse communities of researchers in the arts and humanities.
Ultimately, the analysis of digital practices can provide original data and information to strengthen our understanding of how humanists work, and of Humanities proper. Stanford University defines the humanities “as the study of how people process and document the human experience. Since humans have been able, we have used philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to understand and record our world”. Understanding the needs of humanists, the main purpose of the DiMPO European survey, is a sine qua non condition to ensure that the fundamental purpose of the arts and humanities continues to be served in the digital era.},
howpublished = {Presentation at the 6th AIUCD Annual Conference, Rome: Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Benardou2016,
title = {Do you remember the first time?: Case Studies on digital content reuse in the context of Europeana Cloud},
author = {Agiatis Benardou and Vicky Garnett and Eliza Papaki},
url = {https://www.hrionline.ac.uk/dhc/2016/paper/84},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-09-01},
abstract = {This poster presents work on documenting user needs in the Humanities and Social Sciences as illustrated through Case Studies in the context of the Europeana Cloud ‘Unlocking Europe’s Research via the Cloud’ project. Conducted as part of a wider methodological effort including desk research, expert fora and a web survey, methodology and findings of actual use of innovative digital tools and services will be visually represented. This work will form the basis of the Europeana Research Case Studies which will seek to gather and process an evidence-based record of the information practices, needs and scholarly methods in the respective communities.},
howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Congress},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Schreibman2016,
title = {dariahTeach: online teaching beyond MOOCs},
author = {Susan Schreibman and Agiatis Benardou and Claire Clivaz and Matej Durco and Marianne Huang and Eliza Papaki and Stef Scagliola and Toma Tasovac and Tanja Wissik},
url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/292},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-07-11},
abstract = {Over the past few years innovation in the online teaching landscape had centred around MOOCs. The rhetoric around MOOCs has moved from an open platform providing free access to high-quality educational resources for millions around the world, to a for-profit model working with businesses to train prospective employees for today’s jobs (Manjoo, Selingo) #dariahTeach is adopting a different model in the production, dissemination, and promotion of high-quality, freely-available educational resources in DH for third-level. This paper will present the results of preliminary research carried out through a user study, a workshop on open educational resources, module, and platform design.},
howpublished = {Paper presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Benardou2016,
title = {Playing With Cultural Heritage Through Digital Gaming: The New Narrative of the ARK4 Project},
author = {Agiatis Benardou and Alexandra Angeletaki and Nephelie Chatzidiakou and Eliza Papaki },
url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/184},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-07-11},
abstract = {ARK4 aimed at investigating new paths of disseminating archival content using technology in order to create an interactive dialogue with the general public (Galani 2003, Tonta 2008), create engagement with collections and support learning (Prensky 2005). The project started with a pilot study, through a series of educational workshops already established by the institutions involved and a digital game to supplement the workshop design in which specific interactive digital platforms were explored by students. In its new phase, ARK4 will develop an interactive web platform incorporating all different types of digital gaming produced and also new content drawn from digital collections provided by the partners and Europeana repository. In this poster we illustrate the impact of digital technology gaming in the field of the contemporary museum and cultural heritage practice using empirical evidence collected from educational workshops held by the project ARK4. This is a project that is initiated by the NTNU University library in Trondheim, in collaboration with the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C. in Athens, Greece and financed by the National Library of Oslo, Norway and NTNU.},
howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Papaki2016,
title = {Curating Community: Building a Communications Strategy For The European Association For Digital Humanities},
author = {Eliza Papaki and James O’Sullivan and Antonio Rojas},
url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/279},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-07-11},
abstract = {This poster will seek to illustrate the enhanced communications presence of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) since 2014, and measure the impact of its action in building a community of geographically-dispersed members. It will outline the strategies undertaken by the EADH in furthering its communications initiative, for which a number of Communications Fellows have been activated on the organisation’s communications policy in an effort to promote the work of digital scholars across the European region. Accounts of this activity will be further contextualised by theoretical discussion on the evolution of social media and Web-based communications across academia.},
howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Benardou2016,
title = {Reflecting On And Refracting User Needs Through Case Studies In The Light of Europeana Research},
author = {Agiatis Benardou and Alastair Dunning and Stefan Ekman and Vicky Garnett and Caspar Jordan and Ilze Lace and Eliza Papaki },
url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/329},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-07-11},
abstract = {This poster presents work on documenting user needs in the Humanities and Social Sciences as illustrated through Case Studies in the context of the Europeana Cloud ‘Unlocking Europe’s Research via the Cloud’ project. Conducted as part of a wider methodological effort including desk research, expert fora and a web survey, methodology and findings of actual use of innovative digital tools and services will be visually represented. This work will form the basis of the Europeana Research Case Studies which will seek to gather and process an evidence-based record of the information practices, needs and scholarly methods in the respective communities.},
howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Benardou2016d,
title = {Scholarly Research Activities and Digital Tools: When NeMO met FLOSS},
author = {Agiatis Benardou and Valentine Charles and Nephelie Chatzidiakou and Panos Constantopoulos and Costis Dallas and Ana Isabel González Sáez and Sergiu Gordea and Lorna M. Hughes and Themistoklis Karavellas and Gregory Marcus and Leonidas Papachristopoulos and Vayianos Pertsas },
url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/180},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-07-11},
booktitle = {Digital Humanities 2016},
abstract = {While there has been a significant investment in the development of digital tools that can be used in the humanities, information about their use is frequently located in disciplinary silos, with little transfer of knowledge about the features of specific tools that make them valuable for research across the humanities. This poster shows the collaboration between two initiatives, the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO) and the EuropeanaTech FLOSS Inventory Task Force. The aim was to carry out research in order to align the FLOSS Inventory against the Activity Types in NeMO, the Ontology of Digital Methods for the Humanities developed by the Digital Curation Unit (DCU), IMIS-ATHENA R.C with the ESF Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH).

The FLOSS Inventory is an effort undertaken by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and EuropeanaTech to raise awareness of, share access to, and improve the overall status of Open Source software available for cultural heritage developers internationally. The Inventory contains over 200 well-documented, active and relevant OS tools and is actively updated and maintained.

NeMO provides a conceptual framework for representing scholarly practice in the Humanities. This is the main output of NeDiMAH, a Network that ran from 2011- 15 and brought into collaboration 16 countries to document the practice of Digital Humanities across Europe in a series of Methodological Working Groups. Building on earlier expertise in digital taxonomies for the digital humanities, NeDiMAH facilitated a research project carried out by DCU, building upon earlier work on scholarly activity modeling in projects including DARIAH, EHRI and Europeana Cloud. NeMO is a formal ontology which enables the representation and codification of scholarly work by providing a controlled vocabulary of interrelated concepts. NeMO offers a flexible tagging system through a taxonomy of Activity Types, structured in five hierarchies that correspond roughly to scholarly primitives (Unsworth, 2000), and incorporates existing taxonomies and related work such as TadiRAH, Oxford ICT, and DH Commons.

The research teams working on FLOSS and NeMO collaborated to map each tool in the FLOSS inventory against NeMO Activity Types. According to the structure established by NeMO, scholarly research practices are divided into five core Activity Types within a scholarly research lifecycle: acquiring, communicating, conceiving, processing and seeking, which encompass narrower terms accounting for further detail and specialization. This study allows the integration of the information about tools gathered by FLOSS into a uniform conceptual framework for expressing knowledge about scholarly work. By doing so, it also validates the ability of the NeMO ontology to act as a sound framework for the conceptual representation of digital tools and services in one important area of the humanities. This mapping enables the categorisation of available tools according to the function they serve, and could permit researchers in the Humanities - even those without a technical background - to consult an authoritative list of tools covering their needs according to the type of activity they wish to undertake. Availability and the role that each tool can play in the research practice may increase its overall use by the community. The representation of the FLOSS Inventory using NeMO adds value to digital research, and the visualization of categorization ratios it provides facilitates an important debate about software development trends, probing the question whether development is weighted towards software tools that address researchers’ needs, a major topic of research in Research Infrastructures across Europe and beyond.},
howpublished = {Poster presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Constantopoulos2016,
title = {Contextualized Integration of Digital Humanities Research: Using the NeMO Ontology of Digital Humanities Methods},
author = {Panos Constantopoulos and Lorna M. Hughes and Costis Dallas and Vayianos Pertsas and Leonidas Papachristopoulos and Timoleon Christodoulou },
url = {http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/134},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-07-11},
abstract = {The advent of digital infrastructures for arts and humanities research calls for deeper understanding of how humanists work with digital resources, tools and services as they engage with different aspects of research activity: from capturing, encoding, and publishing scholarly data to analyzing, visualizing, interpreting and communicating data and research argumentation to co-workers and readers. Digitally enabled scholarly work, and the integration of digital content, tools and methods, present not only commonalities but also differences across disciplines, methodological traditions, and communities of researchers. A significant challenge in providing integrated access to disparate digital humanities (DH) resources and, more broadly, in supporting digitally-enabled humanities research, lies in empirically capturing the context of use of digital content, methods and tools. This paper presents recent and ongoing work on the development of NeMO, an ontology of digital methods in the humanities, and its deployment for the development of a knowledge base on scholarly work.

Several attempts have been made to develop a conceptual framework for DH in practice. In 2008, a project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the AHRC ICT Methods Network, based at King’s College, London, developed a taxonomy of digital methods in the arts and humanities. This was the basis for the classification of over 200 digital humanities projects funded by the AHRC in the online resource arts-humanities.net. This taxonomy was subsequently modified by Oxford University as the basis for the classification of digital humanities initiatives at the University ( Digital Humanities at Oxford). Other initiatives to build a taxonomy of Digital Humanities include TaDiRAH and DH Commons. From 2011 to 2015 the European Science Foundation funded the Network for Digital Humanities in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH). This Network was established to develop a better understanding of the practice of DH across Europe, and ran over 40 activities structured around key methodological areas in the humanities (digital representations of space and time; visualisation; linked data; creating and using large scale corpora; and creating editions). Through these activities, NeDiMAH gathered a snapshot of the practice of digital humanities in Europe, and the impact of digital methods on research. A key output of NeDiMAH is NeMO: the NeDiMAH Ontology of Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities. This ontology of digital methods in the humanities has been built as a framework for understanding not just the use of digital methods, but also their relationship to digital content and tools. The development of an ontology, rather than a taxonomy, stands in recognition of the complexity of the digital humanities landscape, the interdisciplinarity of the field, and the dependencies that impact the use of digital methods in research.

NeMO was developed by the Digital Curation Unit (DCU), IMIS-Athena Research Centre, in collaboration with NeDiMAH, as a conceptual framework capable of representing scholarly work in the humanities, addressing aspects of intentionality and capturing the diverse associations between research actors and their goals, activities undertaken, methods employed, resources and tools used, and outputs produced, with the aim of obtaining semantically rich structured representations of scholarly work. It is grounded on earlier empirical research through semi-structured interviews with scholars from across Europe, which focused on analysing their research practices and capturing the resulting information requirements for research infrastructures. Its intellectual foundations lie in earlier work of the DCU on conceptualizing and modelling scholarly activity in the arts and humanities, conducted within the Preparing DARIAH, DYAS / DARIAH-GR, and EHRI projects, and manifested in the Scholarly Research Activity Model (SRAM), an ontological representation of scholarly information activity drawing from cultural-historical activity theory and process modelling, and compatible with CIDOC’s Conceptual Reference Model ( CIDOC CRM, ISO 21127:2006).

Architecturally, NeMO adopts a three layer structure, spanning from abstract/general to concrete/special concepts, to provide a flexible framework suitable to the multidisciplinarity of DH. Its top tier concepts (Actor, Activity, Object) provide a general reasoning frame, and function as semantic links to reference ontologies such as CIDOC CRM. These abstract notions are specialized in the second layer by way of domain-specific concepts covering every aspect of scholarly work: Methods employed in activities of various degrees of complexity or taught in Courses, Tools used, Information Resources taken as input or produced as output, Groups/Organizations or Persons participating in various roles, Goals addressed, Topics covered, etc. Furthermore, in this second layer, several semantic relations capturing the context of the aforementioned core concepts allow for modeling scholarly work through four complementary perspectives: (1) Process-related, centered around the concept of Activity and capturing temporal and spatial aspects; (2) Methodological, centered around the Method concept and capturing "how" aspects; (3) Agency-related, centered around the Actor and Goal concepts and capturing "who" and "why" aspects; and (4) Resource-related, centered around the Information Resource concept and covering "what" aspects of scholarly work.

Ιn the third layer of NeMO, fine-grained notions supporting domain-specific detailed descriptions are represented as specializations of second layer concepts. Respective vocabularies are organized as SKOS thesauri. More specifically, controlled vocabularies of lexical terms are structured hierarchically under the concepts of ActivityType, MediaType, InformationResourceType, TopicKeyword, ActorRole, SchoolOfThought and Discipline, which are specializations of the Type concept of the second layer, and are used for characterization/classification in parallel to ontological classification. The role of these taxonomies is, thus, twofold: (1) as a vocabulary of terms that can be used for flexible tagging of the objects of interest; (2) as entry points for the alignment, or mapping, of terms from NeMO to terms from other existing taxonomies. The latter enables integration with related work, as well as effective use of these taxonomies as documentation instruments or entry points for content in NeMO knowledge bases. For instance, the ActivityType taxonomy is organized in five hierarchies roughly corresponding to Unsworth's "cholarly primitives", and offers a flexible tagging system for modelling the intentionality of actors, scope adherence of activities, or purpose of use of tools and methods. On the other hand, mappings through broader/narrower term relations from the ActivityType terms to terms of other method taxonomies, including TaDiRAH, Oxford ICT and DH Commons, allow using those taxonomies transparently within NeMO.

The development of NeMO contributes to the work of the Digital Methods and Practices Observatory Working Group of DARIAH (DiMPO), as well as of Europeana Research within the Europeana Cloud project, providing an intellectual foundation for the analysis of evidence on arts and humanities scholarly activities and needs with regard to digital resource access across Europe. The relevance of the ontology to the DH community was validated through interviews and web surveys, to elicit information needs and patterns in working practices among humanities researchers, as well as two workshops in which these patterns were explored through use cases contributed by researchers. The evidence collected demonstrates that NeMO addresses adequately the knowledge representation needs manifested there. A variety of complex associative queries articulated by researchers in these workshops were also collected, demonstrating the potential of NeMO as an effective mechanism for information extraction and reasoning with regard to the use of digital resources in scholarly work; queries were encoded in SPARQL, a language appropriate for exploiting the serialization of NeMO in RDF Schema (RDFS), thus highlighting the benefits of its potential use as a knowledge base schema.

A prototype implementation of the above functionalities provides an easy to use demonstration of NeMO's potential. Users can articulate queries in structured English, without prior knowledge of any specific query language, using an intuitive user interface offering dynamic feedback of suggestions based on the conceptual schema. Input to the knowledge base is also supported by the same mechanism, guiding the user according to relations and classes provided by the model. A use case will be presented by way of example.

In sum, NeMO offers a well-founded conceptualization of scholarly work, which can function as schema for a knowledge base containing information on scholarly research activity, including goals, actors, methods, tools and resources involved. NeMO can thus be useful to researchers by (a) helping them find information on earlier work relevant for their own research; (b) supporting goal-oriented organization of research work; (c) facilitating the discovery of yet uncharted paths with regard to resources, tools and methods suitable for particular contexts; and, (d) promoting networking among researchers with common interests. Additional benefits for research groups include support for better project planning by explicitly representing links between goals, actors, activities, methods, resources and tools, as well as assistance for discovering methodological trends, future directions and promising research ideas. Furthermore, for funding organisations, research councils, etc., NeMO can (a) provide a bird’s eye view of funded scholarly activities; (b) enable the systematic documentation of research projects; (c) support evaluation of proposals, monitoring and control of project work, and validation of project outcomes.

Planned improvements include the development of mechanisms for providing recommendations based on semantically related instances and for the semi-automatic population of the knowledge base, as well as specialization of core classes and addition of new terms in Type taxonomies to reflect developments in DH scholarship.},
howpublished = {Paper presented at the 2016 Digital Humanities Conference},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Gavrilis2016,
title = {A data integration infrastructure for archaeology},
author = {Dimitris Gavrilis and Eleni Afiontzi and Johan Fihn and Olof Olsson and Sebastian Cuy and Achille Felicetti and Franco Niccolucci},
url = {https://caa2016a.sched.com/event/6RvV/s11-12-a-data-integration-infrastructure-for-archaeology},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-03-30},
abstract = {Most infrastructure projects, both recent and ongoing, involve a data aggregation task in order to bring together the heterogeneous information one expects to see in a typical EU landscape. The main reason for this is the plethora of technologies, standards, languages and practices that is found in the EU. Data aggregation typically includes the homogenization of heterogenous data through some kind of process that includes: ingestion, normalization, transformation and validation processes. The European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims at true integration of data by modelling the underlying domain and providing the technical framework for automatic integration of heterogeneous resources.

This infrastructure, comprises of a set of heterogeneous technologies such as: a metadata aggregator, including a set of enrichment and data integration micro-services, an RDF store with reasoning capabilities (through SPARQL), and a powerful indexing mechanism. The output of this process is published to a portal which can provide useful information to a variety of potential users ranging from simple visitors to domain researchers.

The data integration services can mine for links among resources, link them together and against language resources such as vocabularies. Complex records can be split into their individual components, represented, enriched and stored separately while maintaining their identity using semantic linking. These individual components are represented in the underlying model (ACDM) and include agents, language resources, datasets, collections, reports, databases, etc. Each integrated resource is assigned a URI and is published in RDF. This practice enables knowledge mining, semantic queries and reasoning engines which are provided within the project (e.g. SPARQL engine and Jena).

The technical infrastructure has been developed using various programming languages such as Java, PHP, Javascript, it is distributed spanning multiple virtual machines and brings together different established technologies and components. The portal is based on the Laravel PHP framework and uses ElasticSearch search engine to collect and browse through the data. Both the technical infrastructure and the portal will be presented and demonstrated in more detail.
},
howpublished = {Presentation at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference (CAA 2016) },
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Gavrilis2016b,
title = {A catalog for archaeological resources},
author = {Dimitris Gavrilis and Franca Debole and Nicola Aloia and Christos Papatheodorou and Carlo Meghini},
url = {https://caa2016a.sched.com/event/6RwX/s11-06-a-catalog-for-archaelogical-resources },
year = {2016},
date = {2016-03-30},
abstract = {The European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims to develop an infrastructure to aggregate, enrich, integrate and make available the data and services so far developed by the international archaeology research communities. The project enriches and integrates data resources – such as descriptions of datasets, collections, metadata schemas, vocabularies, etc. - and services in order to create a universally accessible shared knowledge base for the archaeology domain.

In the context of Ariadne a crucial concept to integrate and manage different resources is the catalog, or registry. The catalog of Ariadne lists and describes what is available from the project partners, and more generally the whole community of archaeologists, to identify, through refined search mechanisms, the candidate resources for integration. Data registries is in effect a well-known data organization and management approach that provides an environment in which datasets, collections, metadata schemas and vocabularies along with their mappings would be hosted and described by a common schema. Actually, the data registries enhance the accessibility and re-usability of the (research) data.

This paper presents the data model of the Ariadne catalog named Ariadne Catalog Data Model (ACDM) that extends the existing data registry standards. The central notion of the model is the class ArchaeologicalResource, specialized in the classes: (i) DataResource, whose instances represent the various types of data containers (e.g. collections, GIS, datasets) owned by the ARIADNE partners and lent to the project for integration; (ii) LanguageResource, having as instances vocabularies, metadata schemas, gazetteers and mappings (between language resources); (iii) Services, whose instances represent the services owned by the Ariadne partners and lent to the project for integration. The paper presents the aggregation service that is based on the ACDM model and enables the partners to upload huge volumes of metadata to the Catalog as well as the main functionalities of the Ariadne portal (http://ariadne-portal.dcu.gr/).},
howpublished = {Presentation at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference (CAA 2016) },
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Benardou2015,
title = {Cultural Heritage in an interactive landscape: User experience workshops at Norwegian Museum of Technology and Sciences, Norway, and the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C., Greece},
author = {Agiatis Benardou and Alexandra Angeletaki and Eliza Papaki},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-09-01},
abstract = {In this paper we seek to investigate the impact of digital technology applications in the field of the contemporary museum and cultural heritage practice using data from workshops held in the last 4 years at our 3D laboratory in Trondheim as well as in the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C., in Athens.

Digitization of cultural heritage collections, gaming and interactive use of cultural information on the Web has established digital heritage as a new field of theory and practice, but has also created new challenges and opportunities. Users seem to be increasingly involved in the digital landscape of their immediate interest field. Different kinds of devices have been used effectively in public spaces such as museums. Our main question is whether the use of technology by a wider range of specialists has created a new set of relations between them. Does a digital visit realize itself differently in an immersive cultural landscape where the person visiting a site or an exhibition is active in seeking knowledge?

Our paper is based on workshops organized in collaboration with museums and schools in Norway and Greece. In our study we analyze data on how school children interact, work and learn in the context of educational workshops, through observation, discussions, and direct surveys, interviews of the students, system log-files and performance tests. The broader impact of the study contributes to the discussions on issues pertaining to educational activities from the users’ perspective.
},
howpublished = {Paper presented at the 2015 EAA Glasgow Conference},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Garnett2015,
title = {Exploring user requirements through the use of digital tools in Humanities and Social Sciences’ research in the light of Europeana Research},
author = {Vicky Garnett and Caspar Jordan and Ilze Lace and Eliza Papaki},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-06-01},
abstract = {This poster reports on work conducted during 2013 in the context of the project Europeana Cloud ‘Unlocking Europe’s Research via the Cloud’. Its purpose is to present the methodology followed in documenting actual use of innovative digital tools and services in the Humanities and Social Sciences research communities illustrated in three main Case Studies in the disciplines of Education, Art History and Sociology, further complemented by satellite cases.},
howpublished = {Poster presented at the First Early Career Digital Humanities Conference, King’s College London},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Angelis2015,
title = {Documenting and reasoning about research on ancient Corinthia using the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO)},
author = {Stavros Angelis and Agiatis Benardou and Nephelie Chatzidiakou and Panos Constantopoulos and Costis Dallas and Lorna Hughes and Leonidas Papachristopoulos and Eliza Papaki and Vayianos Pertsas},
url = {http://nemo.dcu.gr/resources/usecases/UseCaseCAA2015.pdf},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-04-01},
abstract = {Analyzing and modeling research processes is a major component of the endeavor of understanding and charting the digital humanities practice, which broadly involves content, tools and methods. The need for a formal model of scholarly research activity was identified as early as the preparatory phase of DARIAH. An evidence-based model based on grounded theory analysis of researcher interviews was proposed, subsequently validated, and extended in EHRI (Benardou et al., 2013). This work is now taken forward in NeDiMAH, through development of the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NeMO). NeMO is CIDOC CRM - compliant, and represents explictly dimensions of agency (actors and goals), process (activities and methods) and resources (information resources, tools, concepts) in scholarly research. It incorporates existing relevant taxonomies of scholarly methods and tools (TaDIRAH, Oxford ICT, DHCommons, CCCIULA-UPF and DiRT) through appropriate mappings a semantic backbone of NeMO concepts. It thus enables integration of different perspectives, vocabularies and documentation on scholarly methods and practice (Hughes et al. forthcoming).

This paper introduces NeMO, applies it on the documentation of scholarly research conducted in the course of a synthetic study of the social and economic history of Classical Corinthia (Benardou 2007), and discusses how NeMO can support both a structured documentation of, and reasoning about, archaeological and historical research practice. The case study concerns the functions of the urban centre of Corinth as part of its surrounding countryside. It addresses Corinthian society throughout the 5th century BC. On the basis of geographical and temporal parameters, it examines settlement patterns and networks, and relates them with cultural and economic factors. Using NeMO, we demonstrate how research activities of specific types, organized in methodological steps, use, produce and curate specific information resources as they are carried out with specific methods and tools. Our study highlights the importance of overall goals and research questions in shaping scholarly process. Generation of semantic paths connecting concepts in NeMO enables support for associative queries and reasoning about the research activities, methods followed, and their context. Indexing terms are drawn from taxonomies incorporated in NeMO. This work contributes to methodological reflexivity, better understanding of the research process, and improved communication on research methods in archaeology. Future work includes the streamlining of interaction processes using NeMO and semantic publishing of related information.
},
howpublished = {Paper presented at the CAA 2015 Conference},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}

@misc{Papachristopoulos2014,
title = {Φιλολογία και Ψηφιακές Ερευνητικές Υποδομές: Από τη Θεωρία στην Πράξη},
author = {Leonidas Papachristopoulos and Nephelie Chatzidiakou},
url = {http://www.lis.upatras.gr/events/?event_id_1=25},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-10-01},
abstract = {Στο πλαίσιο των Ευρωπαϊκών ερευνητικών έργων Preparing DARIAH και DARIAH καθώς και στο εθνικό έργο υποδομής ΔΥΑΣ (Δίκτυο Υποδομών για την Έρευνα στις Ανθρωπιστικές Επιστήμες), η Μονάδα Ψηφιακής Επιμέλειας (Ερευνητικό Κέντρο «ΑΘΗΝΑ») διενήργησε ποιοτική και ποσοτική έρευνα με αντικείμενο την κατανόηση και ανάλυση των ερευνητικών πρακτικών των ερευνητών στις Ανθρωπιστικές Επιστήμες προκειμένου να εξάγει συμπεράσματα και να ιεραρχήσει τις πληροφοριακές ανάγκες του χρήστη (User Requirements) τις οποίες οι μελλοντικές ψηφιακές υποδομές καλούνται να εξυπηρετήσουν. Στην εν λόγω παρουσίαση, θα προσεγγίσουμε στοχευμένα το ζήτημα των ερευνητικών πρακτικών της κοινότητας των φιλολόγων και κατ’ επέκταση θα επιχειρήσουμε να καθορίσουμε με μεγαλύτερη ασφάλεια τις πληροφοριακές ανάγκες της συγκεκριμένης ερευνητικής κοινότητας. },
howpublished = {Παρουσίαση στην Ημερίδα Ψηφιακές Τεχνολογίες και Νεοελληνική Φιλολογία, Πανεπιστήμιο Πατρών},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}