Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities

The Intelligent Systems and Data Science team (ISDS) collaborates with academics from Arts and Humanities to promote the application of a broad range of Artificial Intelligence techniques to support humanistic enquiry.

In the EU-funded H2020 project Polifonia (2021-2024), we lead a multi-disciplinary team of OU researchers, collaborating with the Music Department and the Music Computing Lab in building the European Knowledge Graph of Musical Heritage. Our role spans information extraction from unstructured content (texts and music) and developing innovative ways to apply Knowledge Graphs for supporting research in musicology and cultural studies on music.

Our expertise in AI and Web technologies is also applied to the museums’ archives and social media in the EU-funded project SPICE: Social Cohesion, Participation, and Inclusion for Cultural Engagement.
The project researches and develops innovative methods for Citizen Curation. Within SPICE, we develop the Linked Data infrastructure to connect cultural objects, collections, and citizen contributions with a stack of intelligent services for content discovery, analysis, and tracing.

We are also currently working on the EU-funded READ-IT project, a 3-year (2018-2020) interdisciplinary R&D project funded by the Joint Programming Initiative for Cultural Heritage. The aim of the project is to build a unique large-scale, user-friendly, open access, semantically-enriched investigation tool to identify and share evidence about 18th-21st century reading experiences in Europe.

Past initiatives include the Listening Experience Database (LED) project, where we are collaborating with musicologists at the Open University, the University of Glasgow and the Royal College of Music. LED developed an open access database containing over 10 thousands accounts of personal listening experiences. In this project, we capitalize on our experience in Ontologies and Linked Data, as well as our expertise in developing sophisticated processing pipelines. The LED data can be accessed from the Open Knowledge Graph of the Open University. These enable domain experts to identify relevant material in textual corpora, import this material into the database and then access it through a faceted browsing interface. The latter facilitates the specification of complex search queries while at the same time hiding the complexities of database query languages.

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Team

Alessio Antoninis Photo
Alessio AntoniniResearch Associate
Jason Carvalhos Photo
Jason CarvalhoProject Officer - Data Hub Development
Enrico Dagas Photo
Enrico DagaResearch Fellow
Enrico Mottas Photo
Enrico MottaProfessor of Knowledge Technologies
Iman Najas Photo
Iman NajaResearch Associate
Riccardo Palas Photo
Riccardo PalaWeb Developer

News

Event news: The Future and the Past of Reading (18.11.2021), Milano, Italy

Event news: The Future and the Past of Reading (18.11.2021), Milano, Italy

READ-IT members will take part in a workshop, ‘The Future and the Past of Reading. New Research Methods for new Perspectives’ at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, on Thursday 18...

The Open University’s project period ends

The Open University’s project period ends

On 30 September 2021, The Open University’s funded period on the project READ-IT comes to an end. While the project team Dr. Shafquat Towheed (UK Lead), Dr. Alessio Antonini, Dr. Francesca Benatti,...

Conference news: “Reading Popular Culture Offline and Online”

Conference news: “Reading Popular Culture Offline and Online”

READ-IT members Dr. Alessio Antonini, Dr.Francesca Benatti and Prof. Corinna Norrick-Rühl have co-written a paper titled “Reading Popular Culture Offline and Online: Outlining a Comparative Study...

ISDS Team at Semantics 2021

ISDS Team at Semantics 2021

Last week saw the latest edition of the Semantics series of conferences, Semantics 2021, which took place in Amsterdam, Holland. Since 2005, the Semantics conferences provide the main European...

Conference news: “Death and Transmediations: Manuscripts in the Age of Hypertext”

Conference news: “Death and Transmediations: Manuscripts in the Age of Hypertext”

The paper “Death and Transmediations: Manuscripts in the Age of Hypertext” has been accepted, and will be presented at the upcoming ACM HyperText conference (30 August – 2 September 2021). The...

Publication news: “Reconnecting with the evolving journey of reading” (July 2021)

Publication news: “Reconnecting with the evolving journey of reading” (July 2021)

In “Reconnecting with the evolving journey of reading”, READ-IT project PI Prof Brigitte Ouvry-Vial (Le Mans University) and READ-IT team member Dr Alessio Antonini (The Open University) reflect...

Annual SHARP conference ‘Moving Texts: From Discovery to Delivery’ (26-30.07.2021)

Annual SHARP conference ‘Moving Texts: From Discovery to Delivery’ (26-30.07.2021)

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) will meet virtually in Münster, Germany, from July 26 to 30, 2021. Over 400 delegates will be attending to discuss research...

International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature Conference (23-26.05.2021)

International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature Conference (23-26.05.2021)

The Open University READ-IT colleagues Dr. Francesca Benatti and Dr. Alessio Antonini will attend the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature Conference, 23-26 June 2021. They...

READ-IT Dutch chatbot launched (10.03.2021)

READ-IT Dutch chatbot launched (10.03.2021)

The READ-IT project team are delighted to announce the launch of the Dutch version of our chatbot. The chatbot asks you a series of five different prompt questions, to encourage you to share your...

Publications

2020

Antonini, A., Benatti, F. and Blackburn-Daniels, S. (2020) On Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2, 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT'20), Online


Antonini, A. and Brooker, S. (2020) Mediation as Calibration: A Framework for Evaluating the Author/Reader Relation, Proceedings of the 31st ACM HyperText, Orlando, Florida, USA


2019

Vignale, F., Benatti, F. and Antonini, A. (2019) Reading in Europe - Challenge and Case Studies of READ-IT Project, DH2019, Utrecht, Netherland


Antonini, A., Benatti, F., King, E., Vignale, F. and Gravier, G. (2019) Modelling Changes in Diaries, Correspondence and Authors' Libraries to support research on reading: the READ-IT approach, Workshop: Open Data and Ontologies for Cultural Heritage (ODOCH'19) at CAiSE '19, Rome, Italy


Antonini, A. and Lupi, L. (2019) Developing a meta-language in multidisciplinary research projects: the case study of READ-IT, Workshop: W14: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Exploring the Intersection of Philosophy and HCI at CHI 2019, Glasgow, UK


Antonini, A., Mejia, G. and Lupi, L. (2019) All We Do is Stalking - Studying New Forms of Reading in Social Networks, HyperText 2019, Hof, Germany, ACM


2016

Adamou, A., Daga, E. and Isaksen, L. (eds.) (2016) WHiSe 2016 - Humanities in the Semantic Web, Workshop: 1st Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic Web (WHiSe 2016) at 13th ESWC Conference 2016, Anissaras, Greece, 1608, CEUR-WS.org


Mouromtsev, D. and d'Aquin, M. (eds.) (2016) Open Data for Education: Linked, Shared, and Reusable Data for Teaching and Learning Open Data for Education: Linked, Shared, and Reusable Data for Teaching and Learning, Springer


d'Aquin, M. (2016) On the Use of Linked Open Data in Education: Current and Future Practices Open Data for Education: Linked, Shared, and Reusable Data for Teaching and Learning, eds. Dmitry Mouromtsev and Mathieu d'Aquin


2015

Brown, S., Barlow, H., Adamou, A. and d'Aquin, M. (2015) The Listening Experience Database Project: Collating the Responses of the 'Ordinary Listener' to Prompt New Insights into Musical Experience, The International Journal of the Humanities: Annual Review, 13, pp. 17-32, CGPublisher