DH Workshop “From Digitization to Knowledge”

Monday, 11 July 2016 | 7:00 to 16:00

Sara Tonelli will be part of the organizing committee of the workshop “From Digitization to Knowledge: Resources and Methods for Semantic Processing of Digital Works/Texts“. The workshop will be co-located with the Digital Humanities conference 2016.

Motivation

One of the consequences of the digital revolution is the gradual, but inexorable availability of all kinds of text in a machine-readable format. Libraries around the world scan their collections. Newspapers offer their articles on the web. Governments put their archives and laws online. A large part of what the human mind has produced: Literature, essays, encyclopedias, biographies, etc., is, or will be, accessible in a computerized form in a wide variety of languages. Within a few years, we can predict that (nearly) all text ever produced by humanity will be available in digital form: Either born digital or digitized from books, newspapers, archives, etc.

While digitization is well underway, turning the information contained in these texts into exploitable knowledge in the information society has become a major challenge as well as a major opportunity. IBM Watson and Googles knowledge graph are recent and spectacular achievements that show the significance of knowledge extraction from text. IBM Watson is a system that can answer questions in the US Jeopardy quiz show better than any human being. One of its core components is the PRISMATIC knowledge base consisting of one billion semantic propositions extracted from the English version of Wikipedia and the New York Times, while Googles knowledge graph is based on a systematic extraction of millions of entities from a variety of sources. Such technologies are defining the information age, and they have the potential to bring a much higher degree of sophistication to distant-reading methodology in digital humanities, enabling large-scale access to text content.