• Jonathan Hogg

University of Liverpool

Dr Hogg has been working as General Editor of the Open Access e-textbook project Using Primary Sources (UPS) for almost three years.

Funded by JISC as part of the ‘institution as e-textbook creator’ project, UPS will contain 29 chapters based on historical themes, and will appear on the online Biblioboard platform alongside a print version published by Liverpool University Press in 2017.

Most chapters utilise newly digitised archival materials from the University of Liverpool’s own collections. The chapters suggest ways that students might integrate such materials into their written work, while also encouraging the development of advanced research skills.

This paper will include a demonstration of the first online version of UPS.

The talk will conclude with some thoughts on:

• Undertaking a project of this size, with reflections on the benefits and opportunities of collaborations of this kind, as well as the challenges involved.
• Working with e-textbook software, practical issues, and how to encourage innovation. What might the future of academic books look like?
• On-going evaluative work with students, academics and other university staff in relation to the e-textbook. How do we know how effective it is, or will be, as a teaching resource?
• Potential contributions to knowledge in this area of pedagogy, specifically student learning and engagement in relation to Digital Humanities, and research-led teaching and learning in relation to the discipline of History.  

• Sinai Rusinek

University of Tel Aviv

In the Digital Humanities, Network Analysis has been used to study first and foremost historical relations. Edges in these networks often represent social relations, or more abstract relations such as citation or co-appearance in a document. In most cases the nodes are human actors. More recently, Network Analysis software has been found helpful to also model texts and relations between them, as in the Stylo package for computational stylistics, which enables exporting results as edges for a network analytic study.

In the proposed presentation I wish to share the process and results of a short term scientific mission (STSM) undertaken in the framework of COST action “Reassembling the Republic of Letters”, during which I used the Tracer tool, a text reuse detection package developed by Marco Büchler, on the epistolary corpus of the project "Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic". Searching for a way to handle an overwhelming abundance of results, I turned to Network representation of the pairs of text reuse candidates.

This method not only enables assembling and making sense of the results of text reuse detection algorithms and recognizing different types of text reuse - quotes, aphorisms, formulae and factual statements; with attention to module characteristics given by the analysis a way opens  to investigate how those types of text reuse behave in a communicative sphere. In fact, this method could be used in multiple research scenarios where textual phenomena are represented

As I will show, the remaining visualization challenge is to then superimpose the insights gained from the network analysis study of a textual phenomenon on a network - or other model - of the studied corpus.