International Journal of Motorcycle Studies

Ran across a call for papers for INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MOTORCYCLE STUDIES CONFERENCE, Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 3-6, 2010 with links to the journal. Biographical statement and an abstract of 150 words by January 15, 2010. Aside from pulling an abstract together, the only serious question is whether to take the Areo or the Buza out to the conference.

DHCS 2009

The 4th annual Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) is fast approaching. This year's festivities are hosted by Shlomo Argamon and his collaborators at the Illinois Institute of Technology, November 14-16. The program is interesting and wide ranging and I am particularly looking forward to the presentations by our keynote speakers. Several of the ARTFL group will be giving presentations at the pre-conference meetings and workshops on Saturday, also know as our "Birds of a Feather" meeting. Clovis and I will be talking about recent work, based in part on two talks, "From Words to Works" and "PAIR/PhiloLine", as well as some of the more recent work on topic modeling. I also prepared a more technical PhiloLogic overview, demonstration, followed by a discussion of database loading and configuration (slides), just in case I need one. The second half should probably be expanded at one point, since I have had many requests for more extensive documentation on loading and configuring databases in PhiloLogic.

Other links: PhiloLine/PAIR installations for ARTFL Frantext and the Encyclopédie.

Plaintext in PhiloLogic

A while back we added a plaintext loader in PhiloLogic at the request of several folks who wanted to work with documents from the Gutenberg Project, Liber Liber and (many) other archives of unencoded or minimally encoded documents. Other use cases for a plaintext loader include direct loading of OCR output and downloading E-PUBs from Google, which can also be converted to TEI as an alternative. I suspect that we will want to retain plaintext loading for implementations of PhiloLogic, since many folks appear to have significant restrictions on accessing materials from various vendors. In a recent blog post, Devin Griffiths described his examination of MONK and ProQuest data, deciding to assemble his own corpus from Project Gutenberg.

Find Installed Perl Modules

Here is a helpful one-liner to find installed perl modules, thanks for Blane Warrene:

perl -MFile::Find=find -MFile::Spec::Functions -lwe 'find { wanted => sub { print canonpath $_ if /\.pm\z/ }, no_chdir => 1 }, @INC'

There is also an interactive function called instmodsh.

Apache PDFBox

We have had a number of PDF oriented projects in the past little while. Richard has brought to my attention an Apache Incubator project, PDFBox, which may be very handy for future work. In addition to the normal goodies one would expect, it supports"Lucene Search Engine Integration". Something to keep in mind.

Textométrie Project

The Textométrie Project is a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary effort to develop an open source and distributed platform for sophisticated, often quantitative, text analysis led by Serge Heiden and his collaborators. There is a useful discussion of the French tradition of textométrie and how this fits into other modes of text processing and mining, along with some recent publications, and links to other software and resources. Alpha code is available on Sourceforge.

OMNIA Project

Our colleagues at the Ecole nationale des chartes are working with other researchers in France on the OMNIA (Outils et Méthodes Numériques pour l’Interrogation et l’Analyse des textes médiolatins) project, a four year effort to develop an interactive encyclopedia of medieval Latin.