Social Network Analysis for Historians: Origins, Uses and Challenges

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Event Details:

Date: 29 November 2023

Time: 15 PM – 17 PM (CET)

Speaker: Natalia Maillard Álvarez (Pablo de Olavide University)

Location: University of Trento (Palazzo Paolo Prodi) and online

Room: aula Targetti

Host: Polina Solonets, Manuela Bragagnolo

Contact: dhseminar@lhlt.mpg.de

In this away session of the seminar series ‘Legal History meets Digital Humanities’, that will take place at the University of Trento, we will discuss the use of social network analysis for historical research with Dr. Natalia Maillard Álvarez, who is lecturer in Early Modern History at the Department of Geography, History and Philosophy of the University Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain). In her research, Álvarez focuses on book trade and book circulation during the Early Modern period.

The away session of the seminar is organised as a part of a joint event between Max Planck Partner Group ‘The Production of Knowledge of Normativity and the Early Modern Book Trade’ and the permanent seminar ‘Legal History meets Digital Humanities’ the international workshop ‘From the Age of the Printing Press to the Digital Age: How Knowledge of Normativity is Produced in Books’ (28-29 November 2023).

The seminar will take place in a hybrid format. Registration: https://www.lhlt.mpg.de/events/36094/2077701.

(English) The School of Salamanca presents at DARIAH Annual Event 2023 in Budapest

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Polina Solonets and Maxim Kupreyev,  members of the project team, participated in the poster presentation as a part of the DARIAH Annual Event 2023 taking place on June 6th to June 9th in Budapest. This year the conference topic was ‘Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data?’. Polina and Maxim introduced their approach to sustainable workflow organisation when working on a large scale edition and presented a poster entitled: ‚Sustainable Practices for the Large-Scale TEI Editions at the School of Salamanca Text Collection‘.

„(English) The School of Salamanca presents at DARIAH Annual Event 2023 in Budapest“ weiterlesen

(English) The ‚Assertive Edition‘. Seminar with Georg Vogeler, 25.7.2023

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In the last months, the Salamanca team has joined forces with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt a.M. to set up the Permanent Seminary ‚Legal History Meets Digital Humanities‘. As our own work centers on creating digital editions of the Salamancan authors, we are especially happy that Georg Vogeler from the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz (Austria) followed our invitation and will be our guest on July 25, 2023, 15.00-17.00.

Academic disciplines such as philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence tend to regard the mediality of texts as a matter of secondary importance, because they understand them primarily as a means of discussing concepts and the relations between them, using established terminologies in the debate. For these purposes, philological editing methods appear to be relevant only when there is „substantial“ variance, which means a textual variance that generates different concepts and changes their relationships.
Historians go even further when they want to critically compare the facts reported in the texts. In this case, linguistic variance becomes even less significant. Therefore, Vogeler would like to discuss with the participants of the seminar: a) whether it is also possible to investigate the factual referents behind the linguistic expression in legal history and b) whether the methods he has proposed to capture the level of meaning in texts seem feasible in editing practice.

Georg Vogeler is a historian with an interest in the Late Middle Ages, particularly medieval administrative documents and diplomatics. His research encompasses Digital Scholarly Editing, Semantic Web technologies, Data Modelling, and application of Data Science to the Humanities.

The event is organised in a hybrid mode. Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.de/e/the-assertive-edition-hybrid-event-tickets-667358044877?aff=oddtdtcreator

(English) WE ARE HIRING: Researcher in Political Philosophy, Moral Theology or Similar

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The Salamanca Team is looking for a new researcher to work with us on the forthcoming Dictionary of the Juridical-Political Language of the School of Salamanca. If your expertise is in political philosophy, history of political ideas, philosophy of law, moral theology or similar of the early modern period, we would love to hear from you!

All the details of the position and the application are here:

https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794849/FB08___Philosophie_und_Geschichtswissenschaften

(text in German and English, scroll down for the English version).

If you have any questions concerning the project, the team, the position or the application process, please don’t hesitate to drop a line to Christiane Birr, the project’s coordinator: birr@lhlt.mpg.de. Looking forward to hearing from you!

(English) Word frequencies in the Digital Collection of Sources in the Works of the School of Salamanca.

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The fundamental importance of the School of Salamanca for the early modern discourse about law, politics, religion, and ethics is widespread among of philosophers and legal historians. These early modern texts extend beyond the core authors, and serve to analyze the history of the Salamanca School’s origins and influence, as well as its internal discourse contexts within the context of the future dictionary entries.
Especially on the topic of dictionaries, the idea to test and explore our corpus with modern NLP applications came up in the project a long time ago. We often asked ourselves which lemmas or information we could find with help of a text analysis, and above all how complex this realization would be with our data. Thus, in 2021 we started a natural language processing task (word frequency distribution) by using the Python programming language to explore our corpus and establish groundwork for further text mining. „(English) Word frequencies in the Digital Collection of Sources in the Works of the School of Salamanca.“ weiterlesen

Back to analog: the added value of printing TEI editions

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(Talk given at TEI 2022 conference in Newcastle University, https://zenodo.org/record/7101456)

The topic of this year’s TEI conference and members’ meeting — “text as data” — addressed a growing amount and diversity of textual data produced by the humanities projects. With the increase of data there is also an expanding need for its quality assurance. Several research data projects have already assigned specific teams to tackle the task of standardizing the continuous quality management. I refer, for example, to the task area “Standards, Data Quality and Curation” within the NFDI4Culture consortium, or the KONDA project at the Göttingen State and University Library. The XML data production is in fact a process of a continuous validation, correction, and improvement, involving, inter alia, ODD, RelaxNG, and XML Schemata; custom Python and R scripts; the XSLT, XQuery and Schematron routines integrated into a test-driven development frameworks such as XSpec.

In my talk I addressed a rather unconventional way of testing the TEI data, namely printing it. TEI production workflows frequently presuppose HTML and PDF export, the issue I focused on is the diagnostic value of such prints for the quality control.

„Back to analog: the added value of printing TEI editions“ weiterlesen

(English) Salamanca Colloquium: Luis de Molina on African Slavery

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On Wednesday, May 11, 14.30, we invite all interested researchers to the next Salamanca Colloquium which will focus on “Luis de Molina on African Slavery“.

Jörg Tellkamp (UAM, Mexico City), together with Daniel Schwartz (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): „Luis de Molina on slaves as subjects of rights“

Anne-Charlotte Martineau (CNRS): „Reading Molina’s Disputationes on slavery through an international legal lens“

„(English) Salamanca Colloquium: Luis de Molina on African Slavery“ weiterlesen

(English) The School of Salamanca Text Workflow: From the early modern print to TEI-All.

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Since its beginning in 2013, the Salamanca Project has been developing a text editing workflow based on methods and practices for sustainable and scalable text processing. Sustainability in text processing encompasses not only reusability of the tools and methods developed and applied, but also long-term documentation and traceability of the development of the text data. This documentation will provide an important starting point for future research work. Moreover, the text preparation must be scalable, since the Digital Source Collection comprises a relatively large mass of texts for a full-text digital edition project: in total, it will involve more than 108,000 printed pages from early modern prints in Latin and Spanish, which must be edited in an efficient and at the same time quality-assured manner.

In the following, I will introduce the sequence of stages that each work in the Digital Source Collection goes through, from locating a suitable digitization template in a public library to metadata and the completion of a full text in TEI All format, enriched with the project’s specifications. „(English) The School of Salamanca Text Workflow: From the early modern print to TEI-All.“ weiterlesen

(English) New Publication: “Travelling Scholastics” – The Contribution of Salamanca Scholastics to the Emergence of an Empirical Normative Authority in Early Modern Period

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Text: José Luis Egío

The “discovery” of America, a continent without precedents in the history of the Western culture, had a major impact on the way in which knowledge was produced by European scholars. Topics such as the impact of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century geographical discoveries on early modern Iberoamerican natural history, cosmographical, and medical knowledge and the parallel extension of empiricist imperial techniques in the Iberian monarchies during the sixteenth century have been already well established in historical research. On the contrary, scholars have approached only superficially the way in which other “discoveries” – of peoples, customs, practices, and normativities – affected legal thought.

Analysing in detail the writings of jurists and moral theologians trained at Salamanca or at the recently created Spanish American Universities, José Luis Egío shows in his most recent publication how the experience of the foreign lands became „(English) New Publication: “Travelling Scholastics” – The Contribution of Salamanca Scholastics to the Emergence of an Empirical Normative Authority in Early Modern Period“ weiterlesen

(English) New Publication: „International Law“ according to the Spanish Scholastics (cf. Brill Companion)

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The character of the law of nations is a complex issue for authors of the School of Salamanca. There are debates about the ground of its validity and of its obligatory force. In particular, authors re-worked the just war doctrine, elaborating notions of self-defense, of punishment and of what we would call today humanitarian intervention. However, the discussions did not limit themselves to the single issue of legitimate use of military force: while the Spanish Scholastics identified criteria of such legitimate use, they also ventured to establish sets of precise, substantial norms and rights, both of states and individuals. Thus, topics as the freedom of the seas and certain subjective rights of natural persons, such as the right of access to citizenship, must feature in a discussion of Salmantian notions of the law of nations.

These issues are discussed extensively in a contribution to a collective volume that has appeared recently:

Andreas Wagner: „International Law“, in: Harald Braun, Erik De Bom and Paolo Astorri (eds.): A Companion to the Spanish Scholastics. Leiden: Brill, 2022. https://brill.com/view/title/31552

„(English) New Publication: „International Law“ according to the Spanish Scholastics (cf. Brill Companion)“ weiterlesen