@article {304,
	title = {The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI)},
	volume = {16},
	year = {2012},
	month = {Spring 2012},
	chapter = {19},
	abstract = {{\textquoteright}In October 2010, a group of 20 institutions from 13 European countries and Israel started work on EHRI, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. This four year collaborative project is being funded by the 7th Framework Program of the European Union in the amount of seven million Euro. The goal is to connect Holocaust research centers as well as archival institutions holding Holocaust-related collections.{\textquoteright}},
	url = {http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmchs/documents/bull-2012.pdf},
	author = {Bennett, Giles}
}
@article {1228,
	title = {Understanding memories of the Holocaust{\textemdash}A new approach to neural networks in the digital humanities},
	journal = {Digital Scholarship in the Humanities},
	year = {2019},
	month = {01/2019},
	abstract = {<p>This article addresses an important challenge in artificial intelligence research in the humanities, which has impeded progress with supervised methods. It introduces a novel method to creating test collections from smaller subsets. This method is based on what we will introduce as distant supervision{\textquoteright} and will allow us to improve computational modelling in the digital humanities by including new methods of supervised learning. Using recurrent neural networks, we generated a training corpus and were able to train a highly accurate model that qualitatively and quantitatively improved a baseline model. To demonstrate our new approach experimentally, we employ a real-life research question based on existing humanities collections. We use neural network based sentiment analysis to decode Holocaust memories and present a methodology to combine supervised and unsupervised sentiment analysis to analyse the oral history interviews of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Finally, we employed three advanced methods of computational semantics. These helped us decipher the decisions by the neural network and understand, for instance, the complex sentiments around family memories in the testimonies.</p>
},
	keywords = {Digital Humanities, Holocaust},
	doi = {https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy082},
	url = {https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy082/5280949?redirectedFrom=fulltext},
	author = {Tobias Blanke and Michael Bryant and Mark Hedges}
}
@article {459,
	title = {Intermediating the Human and Digital: Researchers and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure},
	journal = {EHRI Working Papers},
	year = {2013},
	month = {12/2013},
	url = {/sites/default/files/downloads/EHRI working paper_final.pdf},
	author = {Anderson, Sheila and Blanke, Tobias}
}
@article {311,
	title = {Integrating Holocaust Research},
	journal = {International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing},
	volume = {7},
	year = {2013},
	abstract = {In this article we present our ideas for an integrating activity for archival research on the Holocaust. We analyse how we can improve Holocaust-related collection descriptions for research, which we will make available online, and how EHRI provides travel grants for transnational access to existing infrastructures in Holocaust research. Both approaches help us overcome that Holocaust-related material is geographically dispersed and address the challenges for historical research stemming from the way documentation on the Holocaust has been attempted up to now.
We have chosen to implement the EHRI integrated information resource using graph databases. With their emphasis on relationships, graph databases are particularly well suited for historical research in particular and humanities research in general. We analyse the architecture and implementation details of this novel approach and show how graph databases integrate with traditional ways of searching and browsing historical collections. This way, we support more advanced means of access to facts in the documents and enable deep semantically meaningful access to the documents. The innovation of EHRI lies in the combination of digital and non-digital means to integrate existing infrastructures. We believe this might be a model for many related research activities in the humanities.
},
	url = {http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/ijhac.2013.0080},
	author = {Blanke, Tobias and Kristel, Conny}
}
@article {759,
	title = {Developing the collection graph},
	journal = {Library Hi Tech},
	volume = {33},
	year = {2015},
	pages = {610-623},
	doi = {10.1108/LHT-07-2015-0070},
	url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/LHT-07-2015-0070},
	author = {Tobias Blanke and Michael Bryant and Reto Speck}
}
@article {448,
	title = {An Approach to Analyzing Working Practices of Research Communities in the Humanities},
	journal = {International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing},
	volume = {7},
	year = {2013},
	chapter = {105-27},
	abstract = {The need for a firm understanding of the working practices of researchers in the humanities emerges as a prerequisite for the development of effective digital research infrastructures. This paper will focus on the rationale behind the design and implementation of two related studies conducted in the context of two European e-Infrastructures projects, DARIAH and EHRI. Within DARIAH the challenge involved conducting, analysing and understanding research practices of arts and humanities researchers, a largely ill-defined community encompassing a wide spectrum of disciplines. Each of them deals with a variety of objects employing an extensive number of methods. In the context of EHRI, the challenge is slightly different, due to the involvement of a better-defined research community. Holocaust researchers share well-identified objects, common ground on methods, and handle similar setbacks. In this paper we discuss the approach adopted for designing and implementing qualitative user-centric studies aimed at capturing activities, methods, and types of information objects employed by researchers grounded in identified research goals and questions. It addresses both generic and specific entities and processes, and supports the understanding of researchers{\textquoteright} working practices in settings as diverse and wide as DARIAH, or as specialized as EHRI. The outcomes of the analysis of working practices are used in determining user requirements for digital infrastructures to serve the respective research communities.},
	url = {http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ijhac.2013.0084},
	author = {Benardou, Agiatis and Constantopoulos, Panos and Dallas, Costis}
}
@proceedings {578,
	title = {The EHRI Project - Virtual Collections Revisited},
	volume = {8852},
	year = {2014},
	month = {2015},
	pages = {294-303},
	publisher = {Springer},
	address = {Barcelona},
	doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7},
	url = {http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7/page/2},
	author = {Bryant, Mike and Reijnhoudt, Linda and Speck, Reto and Cl{\'e}rice, Thibault and Blanke, Tobias},
	editor = {Aieollo, Luca Maria and McFarland, Daniel}
}
@proceedings {361,
	title = {Defining User Requirements for Holocaust Research Infrastructures and Services in the EHRI Project},
	year = {2012},
	pages = {644-45},
	address = {Toronto, Canada},
	author = {Benardou, Agiatis and Dallas, Costis}
}
@proceedings {310,
	title = {Comparison of named entity recognition tools for raw OCR text},
	year = {2012},
	month = {21September 2012},
	address = {Vienna },
	url = {http://www.oegai.at/konvens2012/proceedings/60_rodriquez12w/60_rodriquez12w.pdf},
	author = {Rodriguez, Kepa Joseba and Bryant, Mike and Blanke, Tobias and Luszczynska, Magdalena}
}
@conference {577,
	title = {{\"U}ber mehrsprachige Metadaten zu den versteckten Quellen: Das Beispiel deutschsprachiger T{\"a}terquellen in der European Holocaust Research Infrastructure},
	booktitle = {DHd-Tagung. Von Daten zu Erkenntnissen: Digitale Geisteswissenschaften als Mittler zwischen Information und Interpretation},
	year = {2015},
	month = {26/02/2015},
	address = {Graz},
	url = {https://www.conftool.pro/dhd2015/sessions.php},
	author = {Bennett, Giles and Vanden Daelen, Veerle}
}
@conference {756,
	title = {Researching the Holocaust in a Digital Age},
	booktitle = {Claremont Wynberg Hebrew Congregation, Cape Town},
	year = {2016},
	month = {28 February 2016},
	author = {Bennett, Giles}
}
@conference {629,
	title = {Presentation of the EHRI Project},
	booktitle = {Annual Database Meeting of the Concentration Camp Memorial Site Archivists},
	year = {2013},
	month = {24/10/2013},
	address = {Dachau},
	author = {Bennett, Giles}
}
@conference {305,
	title = {Information Extraction on Noisy Texts for Historical Research},
	booktitle = {Digital Humanities},
	year = {2012},
	month = {16-22 July 2012},
	publisher = {Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations},
	organization = {Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations},
	address = {Hamburg},
	abstract = {The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI)1 project aims to create a sustainable Holocaust Research Infrastructure that will bring together documentary evidence from dispersed archives for historical research. EHRI involves 20 partner organisations in 13 countries. It aims to provide open access to Holocaust material such as documents, objects, photos, film and art. One of the challenges of the project is that the dispersed archives of interest to EHRI often do not have the means to sufficiently digitise their resources. Even if the resources are digitally available, they remain inaccessible to searching and browsing by researchers.

For EHRI, we investigated how we can use open source OCR infrastructure developed at King{\textquoteright}s College London for the Ocropodium project (Bryant et al. 2010) so that its output can feed the semantic extraction of metadata useful for research discovery and analysis. Current commercial OCR technology does not serve well such specific research interests in historical document collections, as it cannot be easily customised. Most commercial OCR software products are proprietary {\textquoteleft}black boxes{\textquoteright} which provide digitisation staff with little scope for understanding their behaviour and customising parameters under which they run. At the source level, there is a marked reluctance of OCR software manufacturers to allow access to their code even in a collaborative environment.

In the context of Ocropodium, we developed a workflow tool Ocropodium Web Processing (OWP), with which various open source OCR tools can be combined to create the best possible OCR solution for specific document types. The OWP workflow environment is based on the principles of visual programming environments (Cox \& Gauvin 2011). It allows the user to build custom workflows comprised of discrete processes. The workflows need not be purely linear; instead they take the form of a graph, specifically a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The DAG is comprised of connected nodes, which each perform a discrete function. Nodes can be thought of as functions which take one or more inputs and evaluate these to produce a result. Thus, OWP allows archive staff to embed further services beyond OCR. For this paper, we experimented with information extraction (IE) services to semantically enrich archival descriptions. We present our experiments to evaluate how common off-the-shelf IE services behave against potentially noisy OCR{\textquoteright}d texts.

Semantically enriched library and archive federations have recently become an important part of research in digital libraries (Kruk \& McDaniel 2009). Especially so, as research users often have more demands on semantics than is generally provided by archival metadata. For instance, in archival finding aids place names are often only mentioned in free-form narrative text and not especially indicated in controlled access points for places. Researchers would like to search for these locations. Place name extraction from the descriptions might support this. For the future EHRI infrastructure, we want to use IE services to enrich the researchers{\textquoteright} experience. In our experiments, we concentrated on extracting names and places facets, both immensely important for Holocaust research. 

Our experiments demonstrate the principal workflow using IE tools. In our proof-of-concepts, we did not address larger problems of IE from historical texts, which are manifold. As for OCRing, off-the-shelf commercial IE software has often problems with delivering acceptable results here. For the problems of extracting semantic information from low quality textual data, please compare (Packer et al. 2010), while (Warner \& Clough, 2009) describe plans for a larger extraction project from the UK National Archives. Instead of concentrating on improving the IE itself, we were mainly interested in mapping and evaluating the current state-of-the-art. For the presentation at DH2012, we will deliver exact evaluations of using off-the-shelf IE tools against various levels of underlying {\textquoteleft}dirty{\textquoteright} OCR text, commonly encountered in OCRed historical resources.

Even the off-the-shelf IE tools have already delivered encouraging results. For instance, we OCR{\textquoteright}d PDF files of survivor testimonies sent by the Wiener Library,2 an EHRI partner. The documents were typical fairly low resolution (612{\texttimes}790) grey-scale scans of typed documents. Due to the low resolution we needed to do some advanced preprocessing of the images and scaled the images by a factor of four using an anti-aliasing filter to approximate a typical resolution from 300 DPI scan and finally binarised them (converting a colour or grey-scale image to one containing only black and white). After binarisation, additional filters were applied to deskew the images and remove edge noise.

The resulting transcript produced by the open source Tesseract OCR engine (>Smith 2007) was fairly low quality, with around 90\% character accuracy. We ignored further possible improvements by combining Tesseract with more advanced binarisation and pre-processing tools. As said, in this particular experiment, we were interested how standard IE services would react to low-quality textual input. We used the off-the-shelf OpenCalais service by ThompsonReuters to extract semantic information (Goddard \& Byrne 2010). Even this standard setup has proven to produce useful results. OpenCalais proved successful at detecting the presence of a personal name in the transcript, even when the OCR was imperfect. For example, it detected that {\textquoteleft}Dmulaltsr Tappe{\textquoteright} (Dr. Walter Tappe) was a name. It also marked up several instances of places, such as Berlin and Wilmersdorf. Other incorrectly OCR{\textquoteright}d locations such as {\textquoteleft}Slchsischestraeae{\textquoteright} (Schlesisches) were also marked up as places, due to the (correctly OCR{\textquoteright}d) preceding phrase {\textquoteleft}lived in{\textquoteright}. Further semantic data marked up by OpenCalais included positions ({\textquoteleft}lawyer{\textquoteright}, {\textquoteleft}auditor{\textquoteright}, {\textquoteleft}actor{\textquoteright}) and industry terms ({\textquoteleft}food{\textquoteright}). In several OCR transcripts it detected the topic as {\textquoteleft}politics{\textquoteright}. Social tags given included {\textquoteleft}Berlin{\textquoteright}, {\textquoteleft}Geography{\textquoteright} and {\textquoteleft}Geography of Europe{\textquoteright}. We repeated our experiment with other IE tools such as the open source Annie tool from GATE (>Bontcheva et al., 2002) and could further improve our results, especially as we could rely on advanced gazetteers of place and person names of the Holocaust that are based on long-running community projects.3

These initial successful results will mean that we will develop our OCRing of finding aids into a full service in the context of the EHRI project. We think we can thereby significantly enhance the research experience of using historical archives.
References

Bontcheva, K., H. Cunningham, D. Maynard, V. Tablan, and H. Saggion (2002). Developing reusable and robust language processing components for information systems using GATE. In Database and Expert Systems Applications. Proceedings 13th International Workshop. Berlin: Springer, pp. 223-227.

Bryant, M., T. Blanke, M. Hedges, and R. Palmer (2010). Open Source Historical OCR: The OCRopodium Project Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. In M. Lalmas et al. (eds.), Research and advanced technology for digital libraries.  Berlin: Springer.

Cox, P. T., and S. Gauvin (2011). Controlled dataflow visual programming languages. Proceedings of the 2011 Visual Information Communication {\textendash} International Symposium. Hong Kong: ACM. 

Goddard, L., and G. Byrne (2010). Linked Data tools: Semantic Web for the masses. First Monday 15, 1.

Kruk, S. R., and B. McDaniel (2009). Semantic Digital Libraries. Berlin: Springer.

Packer, T. L., J. F. Lutes, A. P. Stewart, D. W. Embley, E. K. Ringger, K. D. Seppi, and L. S. Jensen (2010). Extracting person names from diverse and noisy OCR text. Proceedings of the fourth workshop on Analytics for noisy unstructured text data. Toronto, ON, Canada: ACM.

Smith, R. (2007). An Overview of the Tesseract OCR Engine. Document Analysis and Recognition. Proceedings 9th International Conference. Berlin:Springer, pp. 629-633.

Warner, A., and P. Clough (2009). A Proposal for Space Exploration at The National Archives. 2011. Available: http://ir.shef.ac.uk/cloughie/papers/York2009.pdf},
	url = {http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/information-extraction-on-noisy-texts-for-historical-research/},
	author = {Blanke, Tobias and Bryant, Mike and Speck, Reto and Kristel, Conny}
}
@conference {422,
	title = {European Holocaust Research Infrastructure},
	booktitle = {J{\"u}dische Geschichte digital - Workshop},
	year = {2013},
	month = {13-14 June 2013},
	address = {Hamburg},
	author = {Bennett, Giles}
}
@conference {830,
	title = {EHRI: Results and Future Activities},
	booktitle = {L-HARP Workshop},
	year = {2015},
	month = {11/2015},
	address = {University of Maryland},
	author = {Speck, Reto and Bryant, Mike}
}
@conference {1118,
	title = {Digital Methods in Holocaust Studies: The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure},
	booktitle = {2018 IEEE 14th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science)},
	year = {2018},
	month = {12/2018},
	publisher = {IEEE},
	organization = {IEEE},
	address = {Amsterdam, The Netherlands},
	keywords = {Digital Humanities, Digital Methods, Holocaust},
	url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8588640},
	author = {Daan de Leeuw and Bryant, Mike and Frankl, Michal and Nikolova, Ivelina and Alexiev, Vladimir}
}
@conference {307,
	title = {Creating general-purpose virtual environments for (digital) archival research },
	booktitle = {Digital Humanities },
	year = {2011},
	month = {19-22 June 2011},
	publisher = {Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations},
	organization = {Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations},
	address = {Stanford California },
	abstract = {This paper will present a critical analysis of our attempts to build Virtual Research Environments (VREs) for everyday Humanities research tasks using digital archives. Numerous specialised VREs have been developed for addressing particular tasks in various humanities disciplines. The Silchester VREs addressed data integration in archaeological excavations, the SDM VRE developed services for sharing and annotating manuscripts, while TEXTvre is concerned with TEI-based resource creation. Building on these experiences, gMan addressed the issue of moving beyond support for specific, focused tasks, and instead building services to enable more general-purpose humanities research activities, such as integrating and organising the heterogeneous and often unstructured digital resources, and support for {\textquoteleft}active reading{\textquoteright} processes Brockman et al. 2001 scholarly work in the humanities and the evolving information environment.},
	url = {http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-198.xml;query=hedges\%20blanke;brand=default},
	author = {Blanke, Tobias and Connor, Richard and Hedges, Mark and Kristel, Conny and Priddy, Mike and Simenoni, Fabio}
}
@conference {363,
	title = {Challenges, outcomes and remarks on information practices and user needs in the humanities. The cases of the EU projects DARIAH and EHRI},
	booktitle = {Technothings meeting},
	year = {2011},
	month = {14 May 2013},
	address = {BIOS Athens},
	author = {Benardou, Agiatis}
}
@conference {449,
	title = {Back to our Data - Experiments with NoSQL Technologies in the Humanities},
	booktitle = {IEEE Big Data 2013},
	year = {2013},
	month = {6-9 Oct. 2013},
	address = {Silicon Valley, USA},
	author = {Bryant, Mike and Blanke, Tobias and Hedges, Mark}
}
@inbook {360,
	title = {The Past and the Future of Holocaust Research: From Disparate Sources to an Integrated European Holocaust Research Infrastructure},
	booktitle = {Evolution der Informationsinfrastruktur: Forschung und Entwicklung als Kooperation von Bibliothek und Fachwissenschaft},
	year = {2013},
	pages = {157-77},
	publisher = {Verlag Werner H{\"u}lsbusch},
	organization = {Verlag Werner H{\"u}lsbusch},
	address = {Gl{\"u}ckstadt},
	doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.3249/webdoc-39006},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1405/1405.2407.pdf},
	author = {Blanke, Tobias and Vanden Daelen, Veerle and Frankl, Michal and Kristel, Conny and Rodriguez, Kepa J. and Speck, Reto},
	editor = {Rapp, Andrea and Lossau, Norbert and Neuroth, Heike}
}
