End of July we participated in the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, which had been on hiatus for the past two years due to the pandemic. Digital Humanities 2022 Tokyo: Responding to Asian Diversity was organized by The University of Tokyo and took place completely online.
In the first presentation in our panel, Historical Research meets Semantic Interoperability: The Documentation System SYNTHESIS and its Application in Art History Research Pavlos Fafalios introduced the SYNTHESIS Cultural Information Management System currently developed as part of the RICONTRANS project: “Russian Icons Transfer – Visual Culture, Piety and Propaganda: Transfer and Reception of Russian Religious Art in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean (16th – early 20th c.)”. SYNTHESIS utilizes the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model ontology developed for cultural heritage as well as an RDF data structure, and incorporates a wide range of functionalities, among them connecting certain types of entities with geolocation services and offering map visualization for them.
Next up, Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Laura Sinikallio, Senka Drobac, Jouni Tuominen, Kimmo Elo, Matti La Mela, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Minna Tamper, Rafael Leal and Joonas Kesäniemi‘s presentation Linked Data Approach for Studying Parliamentary Speeches and Networks of Politicians in Finland 1907-2021 introduced the Finnish Semantic Parliament project, which has created the ParliamentSampo: Parliament of Finland on the Semantic Web portal (planned to be opened up to interested researchers by the end of this year) based on Linked Open Data technology. The video below from the Semantic Computing Research Group is a detailed introduction of the project that aims to enable the work of political scientists and further the transparency of the Finnish political system.
The third and final presentation in the panel was our talk
Developing the Japanese Visual Media Graph: An Open Knowledge Graph for Researchers Working on Japanese Anime, Manga and Otaku Culture by Martin Roth, Magnus Pfeffer and Zoltan Kacsuk offering an overview introduction of the JVMG project, with a special focus on data integration and matching. The full presentation video is available below.
Digital Humanities 2022 was a much awaited opportunity to get a panorama view of all the cutting edge developments in digital humanities projects from around the globe. It was great to see the many projects working with Linked Open Data, and we hope their numbers continue to grow. We thank the organizers for all their hard work, and look forward to the upcoming Digital Humanities conference next year in Graz.