Paikallisoppaita opastamassa

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Tutkijoiden lisäksi myös paikallisesta historiasta kiinnostuneet ja siitä eteenpäin kertovat ovat kiinnostuneita digitoiduista aineistoista ja käyttöä olisi lisätarinoille tutuilta paikoilta. Tämän takia Digitalia-projektin puitteissa käytiin pyynnöstä esittelemässä https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi -palvelua Mikkelin oppaille, jotka järjestävät Mikkelissä ja lähialueilla kierroksia tarvitsijoille.

Haku nimelläKävimme läpi Digin perustoimintoja ja sitten unohduimmekin hakuun, koska oppailta löytyikin heti hakuideoita paikallisista merkkihahmoista, joista unohduimme etsimään lisätietoja. Fraasihaku, eli nimen tai muun sanaparin laittaminen lainausmerkkien sisään on tässä se helpoin tapa päästä alkuun. Hakuehto

"Ernst Lampen"

vie hakutuloksiin kuten ylläoleva kuva näyttää.

Jos tuntuu , että tarvitsee hiukan enemmän hakuehtoja, tällöin läheisyyshaku voisi olla kelpo valinta. Läheisyyshaussa tiettyjä sanoja etsitään annetun sanaetäisyyden päästä toisistaan, esimerkiksi

"maanviljelijä Virtanen"~20

josta välttämättä ei voi olla aivan varma, missä järjestyksessä sanat ovat etsisi näitä kahta sanaa maksimissaan 20 sanan etäisyydeltä toisistaan – jos näin on , on aika suuri todennäköisyys että ne löytyvät samasta artikkelista.

Henkilöjen nimien haussa tosin kaimoja löytyy usein paljon, joten on hyvä kun hakijalla on tietoa henkilöstä muutoinkin, jolloin hakua voi myös rajata vaikka lehden ilmestymispaikan mukaan tai päivämäärällä jolloin jotakin henkilön elämäntapahtumia on sattunut.

P.S. Digistä löytyy nyt pieniä päivityksiä eri puolille. Tervetuloa kokeilemaan!

Digitalia & Heldig

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Digitalia-projektissa tehtyjä ja tulossa olevia asioita esiteltiin Kimmo Kettusen toimesta Heldig-foorumissa 13.4.2018. Heldig-foorumi on Helsingin yliopiston uudehkon keskuksen tapahtumien sarja, jossa esitellään eri tutkijoita ja heidän alojaan ja tällä kertaa pääsimme esittelemään Kansalliskirjaston aineistoja, joita osa tutkijoista olikin jo aiemmin käyttänyt.

Kimmon esityksessä kerrottiin aineistoista yleensä ja OCR-korjausten eduista suhteessa nimien poimintaa, jossa ollaan jo saatu alustavia lupaavia tuloksia. Ensimmäisenä kohdeaineistona onkin Uusi Suometar, joka on sopivan kokoinen aineisto, jolla löytyy jo moninaisia sivutyylejä, mm. palstamääriä sen julkaisuhistorian aikana, mutta myös henkilöitä ja paikkoja Suomen historian eri vaiheista.

Kokeilu pienellä lehtien joukolla

Heldig-foorumissa esiteltiin myös hiukan avointa dataa, Kansalliskirjaston datakatalogistakin, löytyvien http://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi OAI-PMH ja OpenURL-rajapintojen kautta, jotka, vaikka perinteisiä kirjastorajapintoja ovatkin, soveltuvat myös ohjelmistokehittäjille. Avoin data mahdollistaa erilaisten palvelujen käytön, kuten esimerkiksi http://voyant-tools.org/ , joka mahdollistaa helposti tekstien analysoinnin suoraan selaimessa. Sitä toki jäimme pohtimaan, kuinka suuremmat aineistot parhaiten työkalussa toimisivat, ja työkalun kielivalikoista suomi puuttui vielä, joka vaatii vähän esitöitä, ennen kuin palvelusta saa kaiken irti.

Kolmantena aineistona kävimme myös läpi Verkkoarkistoa, josta näkee yleisessä verkossa tiedot siitä mitä on kerätty ja itse aineiston paikanpäällä vapaakappalekirjastoissa. Keskustelua herätty youtube-aineiston laatu ja valinnat, koska verkkoaineiston määrähän kasvaa tunnetusti koko ajan. Teemakeräykset ovatkin siis tärkeitä tiettyjen tapahtumien tai teemojen keräilyyn. Tutkijoilta tuli myös kiinnostuksen ilmaisuja aineiston hyödyntämiseen tutkimuksessa…

Jos kiinnostaa se kuinka tutkijat aineistoja käyttävät, käy siis katsomassa kevään aikataulua ja mitä kaikkea tutkijat ovat tekemässä.

At DHN18 conference

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Digitalia was well represented in the Digital Humanities i Norden conference, which was held during 7-9.3.2018 in Helsinki.

Results and work of Digitalia was presented for example, in a short paper called: “Creating and using ground truth OCR sample data for Finnish historical newspapers and journals” (paper and slides). This paper was one of the few,  which was given the label of distinguished short paper. Also the notification of the ground truth material got some interests in social media, so maybe we will have others who are interested to improve OCRring methods to experiment with the base data. We got also some ideas on how to improve the data packages, which we can probably improve down the line.

Ongoing work was also visible in the poster session via poster, which describe all of the ground breaking work targeted to make next steps with processing the materials easier. The poster was titled: “Research and development efforts on the digitized historical newspaper and journal collection of The National Library of Finland”. Based on the amount of people who were using newspapers or especially Finnish newspapers, here is opportunity to do good improvements, which benefit many researchers all the way.

All in all whole conference was full of interesting topics and researchers of multiple fields, which shows the vitality of the “digital humanism scene” in Finland, but also in whole of Nordics. There were also many papers of note that related to the National Library of Finland via newspapers or other listed data:

  • Semantic National Biography of Finland  (paper)
  • Digitised newspapers and the geography of the nineteenth-century “lingonberry rush” in Finland. (paper)
  • Sculpting Time: Temporality in the Language of Finnish Socialism, 1895–1917 (paper)
  • Two cases of meaning change in Finnish newspapers, 1820-1910 (paper)
  • Geocoding, Publishing, and Using Historical Places and Old Maps in Linked Data Applications (paper)
  • A long way? Introducing digitized historic newspapers in school, a case study from Finland , which has continued from earlier project. (paper)
  • Local Letters to Newspapers – Digital History Project (paper)

Potentially interesting also for further development were for example, paper about Sentimentatior full title “Sentimentator: Gamifying Fine-grained Sentiment Annotation” (paper), which enables easy creation of learning data of sentences with annotated sentiments with number of predefined sentiment categorization. The talk “The Nordic Tweet Stream: A dynamic real-time monitor corpus of big and rich language data” (paper) utilized social media data and was preparing online tool for access while still keeping in mind the generic open data needs. The recently started Wikidocumentaries project (paper) is a interesting case as it could act as a bridge between local history endeavours and citizen or local scientists.

All in all very thought-provoking conference and it was super exciting that it was in Helsinki, so it was easy to visit by Finnish DH people and naturally from the Nordic countries. Discussions during breaks were lively and gave more details to the background to various  papers and presentations there were.

 

Minihistories workshop at DHN18

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As part of the DHN18 program minihistories workshop was held  at the National Library of Finland. Unfortunately due to multiple reason were were quite few, which meant that we could focus more in depth to the similarities (and also differences between participant countries) with regard to access to data.

For example, we heard that e.g. in Iceland all the newspaper material is available freely online. When comparing to Finland the material until 1929 is available online (by special agreement for this year for the 1918-1929)  and anything more recent is available in the legal deposit libraries in six locations in Finland.

In the workshop we also came up with an idea to expand the usage of wikidata in new ways. As institutions have specific procedures how material is got to the collections , wikis can act as a way to capture the local information, e.g. to wikipedia and even if that is not suitable then via on wiki location where the specific interest area is covered. As discussed there seem to be existing evidence that end-users are already collecting this local information either to social media pages, own websites , so in many different locations.

For the library point of view, our workshop came to conclusion that there is actually four generations of library users (to simplify it greatly).

  1. First generation is the one who wants to use the paper originals and visit the library and reading rooms.
  2. Second generation have or are using the microfilm scanners and access the material in that way
  3. Third generation is the one who utilizes the digital materials , combining and manipulating them
  4. Fourth generation is the maybe digihumanist era, when data is utilized in text and data mining, multiple sources combined in own tools.

We actually tried to think for the 5th generation, is it then when all material is interlinked and accessed, utilizing multiple sources and innovative ways to search. The change of users and ways of utilizing the data is also one way illustrating the changing role of library – different usages requires knowledge in data science, cleaning up, fixing up data in order to ensure that there would be complete sets of information. As there were examples in our workshop that even researcher access to the needed information in digital format can be a challenge (material might not be digitized, or it cannot be shared and can only be used on-site and so forth). For library people this means that there is need to think the role between the contents and research – how to stay in contact with researchers and ensure that materials would be used as much as possible and so that information could be combined from multiple sources. For example wikidata has very good potential to combine different sources e.g. via mixn’match tool, which allows anyone to link matching items, based on insight they have.

As a summary each generation will look at the data in their own way, and find new ways to utilize them, so this is something to wait for.

 

Thanks for all participants, and hopefully everyone enjoys their conference onwards!

 

Collecting clippings from newspapers (DHN18 workshop)

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For the miniature histories workshop, which we are organizing at the DHN18-conference , one crucial, but needed step is also the actual collecting of interesting articles or clipping from a region or place of your interest.

At the http://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi -service there are digitized newspapers, journals and technical ephemera of Finland, where it is possible to see how things have changed in local area, starting all way back from the year 1771. One way to collect useful information is to have it in a bookmark or a blog post, like e.g. the family researchers in Oulu have made for the area-specific theme sections for a specific newspaper. Even more detailed way is to collect a clipping and mark it with specific keywords of local area. In digi case, ‘clipping’ is the electronic version of desired illustration, article or area of interesting information.

In Miniature histories context, these clippings could act as a way to present these small pieces of information in a more united way and add other information that locals might have from the places near-by. Information, which is known, but might not have ended up until newspapers.  Here is a short guide how to create a clipping – it starts via finding the suitable page after which you can login and create a clipping by marking it from the selected page.

 

So, what would be the thing you would like to collect information? Is there a region that could benefit of starting creating miniature histories for it? If so, please join our ‘miniature histories’ to the DHN18-workshop, where we can also collect clippings and think ways how to utilize this information further.