Engineering Historical Memory

From HandWiki
Short description: Digital research tool for primary historical sources


Engineering Historical Memory (EHM)
Type of siteDatabase and search engine for primary historical resources and secondary multi-media references
Launched2007
Founding Editor-in-ChiefDr Andrea Nanetti
Websitehttps://engineeringhistoricalmemory.com/

Engineering Historical Memory (EHM) is an online database in the digital humanities, serving as an open-access research tool for primary historical materials focused on 11th to 15th century Afro-Eurasia.[1][2][3] It adopts computational methods to make historical documents machine-understandable.[4] EHM parses traditional artifacts such as historical maps, travel accounts, chronicles and codices into computer-readable formats, and links them to secondary multi-media references,[5] a process referred to as the "automatic narrative generation".[6] This approach generates cultural narratives and facilitates interaction with the historical artifacts, making them accessible to audiences from various backgrounds.[7]

History

EHM was first theorised in 2007 by researcher Andrea Nanetti when he was a visiting scholar at Princeton University,[8] and the preliminary test results were published between 2008 and 2011.[9] In 2013, the EHM research team was set up in Singapore following Nanetti's professorship at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).[10] Two years later, after receiving several Microsoft research grants, EHM went live on Microsoft Azure.[11] In 2018, the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CoHASS) at NTU Singapore formed the Digital Humanities Research Cluster, as part of which, EHM has been an ongoing interdisciplinary research project led by Nanetti.[12] Partnering with international educational and cultural institutions such as Ca' Foscari University of Venice, University of Florence, Taylor & Francis Group, Delft University of Technology (TUDelft), and SenticNet,[13] EHM has been supported by over 130 scholars and engineers.[14]

Applications

Primary historical materials on EHM are curated into several categories, including maps, travel accounts, chronicles, codices, sites, archival documents, and paintings,[15] such as the Morosini Codex[16][17] (listed under Chronicles) and Pope Gregory X's Privilege for the Holy Monastery of St Catherine of Sinai (listed under Archival Documents).[18]

EHM has been adopted by cultural organisations as an exhibition and research tool in the digital humanities field.[19] An example is the publication of a digital interactive edition of Fra Mauro's Map of the World on EHM, a collaboration project between NTU Singapore and the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana of Venice.[3][20][21] The digitisation process of the map on EHM involved transcribing and geo-referencing the textual content in the 15th-century map, followed by creating semantic annotations to connect the map's content with related secondary data sources.[22] The e-map was subsequently adopted and launched online by Museo Galileo in March 2022 and incorporated into the virtual exhibition "Venezia and Suzhou: Water Cities along the Silk Roads" (online, September-December 2022).[20][23] In 2024, the Fra Mauro's Map of the World application on EHM was awarded the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize (DHMS) by the Medieval Academy of America.[24] [25] Image-Based Video Search Engine is another experimental project under the EHM scope led by the research teams at Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) and NTU Singapore.[26] This ongoing project aims to improve the efficiency of retrieving targeted objects from audio-visuals.

Awards

In 2021, EHM won the GLAMi Awards (MuseWeb Conference - Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums Innovation awards) in the "Resources for Scholars and Researchers" category.[27] In the same year, EHM was a Falling Walls finalist for Science Breakthrough of the Year in the category Social Sciences and Humanities after nominated by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.[28]

In April 2022, the Italian National Commission for UNESCO has selected and sent the EHM project to the organisers of the "Jikji Memory of the World" Award for final evaluation.[29]

In January 2024, the Medieval Academy of America announced its 2024 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize (DHMS) goes to the Fra Mauro's Map of the World application on EHM.[30]

References

  1. ↑ Kaya, Özge Eda (2023-10-28). "Blending Historical Knowledge with Modern Technology: Engineering Historical Memory" (in en). https://www.insidedh.com/post/blending-historical-knowledge-with-modern-technology-engineering-historical-memory. 
  2. ↑ Dean, Kenneth (2025). "Historical GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and the Geography of Religion". in Kong, Lili. Handbook of the Geographies of Religion. Springer International Handbooks of Human Geography. Springer Nature Switzerland. 25 October 2024. p. 1216. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-64811-3_68. ISBN 978-3-031-64811-3. https://books.google.com/books?id=8RE1EQAAQBAJ&dq=Handbook+of+the+Geographies+of+Religion&pg=PR5. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Small, Meredith (2023-06-06). "Why World Maps Still Matter" (in en). Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World. Simon and Schuster. pp. 306–309. ISBN 978-1-63936-420-6. https://books.google.com/books?id=YSCUEAAAQBAJ. 
  4. ↑ Nowotny, Helga (2021). In AI we trust : power, illusion and control of predictive algorithms. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. pp. 113. ISBN 978-1-5095-4881-1. OCLC 1237252446. 
  5. ↑ "Lecture: Prof. Vogel participated in the Conference "La Venezia di Marco Polo: Il Codice Diplomatico Poliano (1288–1380)" | Universität Tübingen". https://uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/philosophische-fakultaet/fachbereiche/asien-orient-wissenschaften/sinologie/aktuelles/newsfullview-sinologieaktuell/article/lecture-prof-vogel-participated-in-the-conference-la-venezia-di-marco-polo-il-codice-diplomatico-poliano-1288-1380/. 
  6. ↑ Bystritskiy, Nikolay (2020). "System Approach for Digital History". ITM Web of Conferences 33 (3002): 8. doi:10.1051/itmconf/20203303002. ISSN 2271-2097. https://www.itm-conferences.org/10.1051/itmconf/20203303002. 
  7. ↑ Pasciuto, Tiziana; Albertoni, Riccardo; Maggi, Roberta; Artese, Maria; Gagliardi, Isabella; Gentilini, Maurizio (2022). "TRAVELLING CULTURE: DEFINE, IMPLEMENT, ENRICH AND DISSEMINATE THE DIGITAL CULTURAL HERITAGE. THE "DIGITXL PROJECT" CASE STUDY". Towards Smart and Inclusive Learning Ecosystem, EDEN Research Workshop Proceedings (Dubrovnik: EDEN Digital learning Europe): 135. https://portalcris.vdu.lt/server/api/core/bitstreams/eec7172d-1750-44a4-828e-cf469759d2a7/content#page=135. 
  8. ↑ "Engineering Historical Memory – Digital Humanities Singapore" (in en-US). 2023-02-01. https://digitalhumanities.sg/2023/02/01/engineering-historical-memory/. 
  9. ↑ "Engineering Historical Memory". https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/dh/project/engineering-historical-memory/. 
  10. ↑ Nanetti, Andrea; Cheong, Siew Ann (2018), Chen, Shu-Heng, ed., "Computational History: From Big Data to Big Simulations" (in en), Big Data in Computational Social Science and Humanities (Cham: Springer International Publishing): pp. 359, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95465-3_18, ISBN 978-3-319-95465-3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95465-3_18, retrieved 2022-08-17 
  11. ↑ Cui, Winnie (2016-01-29). "Bringing together history and data science with Microsoft Azure" (in en-US). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/bringing-together-history-and-data-science-with-microsoft-azure/. 
  12. ↑ Stanley-Baker, M. (2018). "Digital Humanities at NTU." Constellations, 2, 21–24. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
  13. ↑ "SenticNet | Sentic APIs". https://business.sentic.net. 
  14. ↑ "Engineering Historical Memory (EHM) | EADH - The European Association for Digital Humanities". https://eadh.org/projects/engineering-historical-memory-ehm. 
  15. ↑ "Engineering Historical Memory". https://engineeringhistoricalmemory.com/. 
  16. ↑ Molina, Grabiela Rojas (2022-08-11), "Epilogue: Antonio Morosini, the Witness" (in en), Decoding Debate in the Venetian Senate (Brill): p. 208, doi:10.1163/9789004520936_008, ISBN 978-90-04-52093-6, https://brill.com/display/book/9789004520936/BP000007.xml, retrieved 2024-12-12 
  17. ↑ Raines, Dorit (2015). "Tra narrazione storica e banca dati. Riflessioni sull'edizione della cronaca quattrocentesca di Antonio Morosini". Ateneo Veneto 202 (II): 123. https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3678170/1/Ateneo%20Veneto.%20CCII.14.2.%20Raines.pdf. 
  18. ↑ Salvatori, Enrica (2021-09-09). "L'appetito vien mangiando. La never ending digital edition del Codice Pelavicino" (in it). Umanistica Digitale (10): 299–323. doi:10.6092/issn.2532-8816/12577. ISSN 2532-8816. https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/12577. 
  19. ↑ Clini, Paolo; Quattrini, Ramona (2021). "Editorial. Digital Cultural Heritage, arts reproduction and Museums systems. Languages and techniques in a Covid and post-Covid scenario for new forms of heritage against the silence of a fragile culture". SCIentific RESearch and Information Technology 11 (1): 7. doi:10.2423/i22394303v11n1p1. https://iris.univpm.it/retrieve/e18b8791-d15c-d302-e053-1705fe0a27c8/13557-26930-1-PB.pdf. 
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 "The world map of Fra Mauro". https://www.museogalileo.it/en/events-and-news/2252-il-mappamondo-di-fra-mauro-eng.html. 
  21. ↑ "La digitalizzazione fa rivivere la Mappa Mundi di Fra' Mauro" (in it). 2024-11-27. https://nuovavenezia.gelocal.it/cultura-e-spettacoli/2024/11/27/news/mappa_mundi_fra__mauro_camaldolese_digitale-14843650/. 
  22. ↑ Chiang, Yao-Yi; Duan, Weiwei; Leyk, Stefan; Uhl, Johannes H.; Knoblock, Craig A. (2020) (in en). Using Historical Maps in Scientific Studies: Applications, Challenges, and Best Practices. Springer. pp. 18–19. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-66908-3. ISBN 978-3-319-66908-3. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-66908-3. 
  23. ↑ "Evento: Venezia and Suzhou. Water Cities along the Silk Roads - Unive" (in it). https://www.unive.it/data/agenda/1/63816. 
  24. ↑ "2024 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize". https://www.medievalacademy.org/page/WinnerDHMSPrize. 
  25. ↑ Mola, Luca (2024-06-28). La compagnia delle Indie veneziane (in Italian). L'Espresso, 26, p.96.
  26. ↑ van Oort, Max; Hoogeveen, Aron (2022). "Image-Based Video Search Engine". https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3Ab4d3353d-1640-4b95-b191-f47f5dbb81c5. 
  27. ↑ "GLAMi Award Winners – MW21" (in en-US). 2021. https://mw21.museweb.net/glami-award-winners/index.html. 
  28. ↑ "Finalists 2021 | Falling Walls" (in en-US). 2021. https://falling-walls.com/breakthroughyear/finalists-2021/. 
  29. ↑ "Ecco la candidatura presentata dalla Commissione Nazionale Italiana per l'UNESCO per la IX Edizione del Premio UNESCO "Jikji Memory of the World"". 2022-04-28. https://www.unesco.it/it/news/ecco-la-candidatura-presentata-dalla-commissione-nazionale-italiana-per-lunesco-per-la-ix-edizione-del-premio-unesco-jikji-memory-of-the-world/. 
  30. ↑ Chris (2024-01-16). "2024 Medieval Academy of America Publication Prizes" (in en-US). https://www.themedievalacademyblog.org/2024-medieval-academy-of-america-publication-prizes/. 
  • Engineering Historical Memory - Official Site
  • Nanetti, A. (2022). Computational Engineering of Historical Memories: With a Showcase on Afro-Eurasia (ca 1100-1500 CE). Routledge.



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