This article discusses the methodological implications of using a #gurational approach to the study of Gaelic games (the Irish sports of hurling and Gaelic football) and their organisation and governance from the late nineteenth century onwards. Following Norbert Elias, we argue that data generation guided by theories, and potentially modifying such theories, are essential components of researc...

Ideally, digital versions of scanned documents should be represented in a format that is searchable, compressed, highly readable, and faithful to the original. These goals can theoretically be achieved through OCR and font recognition, re-typesetting the document text with original fonts. However, OCR and font recognition remain hard problems, and many historical documents use fonts that are no...

ASPI is a project that aims at creating a digital library of historical documents of Italian Psychology and extending it with semantic data. The extension makes it possible to retrieve archival documents not only on the basis of archival metadata, but also according to the connections the documents have with specific activities of researchers, groups and institutions, as well as with more gener...

Restoration plays a very important role in enhancing the degraded noisy images. To enhance the degraded image, the numerous algorithms have been designed. Since image processing algorithms are subjective, not all algorithms that developed will address all type of degradedness. To address specific type of problem the suitable algorithms need to be selected. In this paper a combination of spatial...

Historical data is widely recognized as a rather complex type of data that contains records about multi-layered, context-sensitive entities and can often be represented as a graph. This paper describes the digital edition of the ”Urfehdebücher der Stadt Basel” as an example of how semantic web technologies can offer comprehensive tools in response to the challenges coming with historical data. ...

[1] Three alternate China-wide temperature composites covering the last 2000 years were established by combining multiple paleoclimate proxy records obtained from ice cores, tree rings, lake sediments and historical documents. Five periods of temperature variation can be identified: a warm stage in AD 0–240, a cold interval between AD 240 and 800, a return to warm conditions from AD 800–1400, i...

To elucidate the origins of the endemic fish of Lake Biwa, an ancient lake in Japan, and the role of the lake in the diversification of freshwater fish in western Japan, we established a molecular phylogenetic framework with an absolute time scale and inferred the historical demography of a large set of fish species in and around the lake. We used mtDNA sequences obtained from a total of 190 sp...

Records of sunspot and aurora observations in pre-telescopic historical documents can provide useful information about solar activity in the past. This is also true for extreme space weather events, as they may have been recorded as large sunspots observed by the naked eye or as low-latitude auroras. In this paper, we present the results of a comprehensive survey of records of sunspots and auro...

Large-scale digitization efforts and the availability of computational methods, including text mining and information visualization, have enabled new approaches to historical research. However, we lack case studies of how these methods can be applied in practice and what their potential impact may be. Trading Consequences is an interdisciplinary research project between environmental historians...

This paper reviews current discussion of the issue of just what is lost when a language dies. Special reference is made to the current situation in Laos, a country renowned for its considerable cultural and linguistic diversity. It focuses on the historical, anthropological and ecological knowledge that a language can encode, and the social and cultural consequences of the loss of such traditio...