Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller | The Australian National University (original) (raw)

Papers by Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller

Archives and manuscripts, Nov 30, 2023

Social media posts and unpublished student projects are just two examples of the digital content-... more Social media posts and unpublished student projects are just two examples of the digital content-a type of ephemeral popular culture-produced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collecting this material would provide researchers and analysts with information that is complementary to other data used to report and capture the crisis, such as government policies and scientific documentation. But what are the long-term privacy implications of collecting this material? In this time of privacy paradoxes and the Data Economy, does the responsibility for the ethical use of this data fall onto the archivists and researchers?

2023 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)

BRILL eBooks, Apr 5, 2023

Humanities & social sciences communications, May 5, 2023

As part of a curriculum reform process, The Australian National University (ANU) is introducing a... more As part of a curriculum reform process, The Australian National University (ANU) is introducing a universal undergraduate requirement that responds to decades-long calls for universities to take seriously the development of expertise in the transdisciplinary problem solving required to address the major challenges facing society. Described here are the process and outcomes of the deliberations of the working group tasked with setting parameters for the implementation of this expertise. The working group identified relevant context, including that the requirement has to work for all of the University's 13,000 undergraduate students, allowing them to tailor coursework in transdisciplinary problem solving according to their disciplinary choices, personal interests and career aspirations. The expertise is to be developed in existing and new courses, featuring small classes with flexible interactive delivery and should build on the University's comprehensive coverage of academic disciplines and fields, along with the university's strong track records in transdisciplinary research and education. The working group developed an ANU framework for transdisciplinary problem solving, focused on the following six characteristics: change-oriented, systemic, context-based, pluralistic, interactive and integrative. How these characteristics can be translated into learning outcomes is demonstrated, along with relevant ways of teaching. The working group highlighted two key challenges that those involved in the mechanics of the implementation will have to deal with and proposed a way forward for the first of them. One is for students to be able to readily identify relevant courses. The working group proposed a tag-and-points system, with the 'tag' identifying courses relevant to transdisciplinary problem solving and 'points' indicating the number of characteristics covered and the depth of that coverage. The second challenge is coordination across courses to minimise duplication and maximise the opportunity to keep building skills. The paper concludes by summarising key areas that may be useful to others deliberating on the expertise required for university graduates to effectively contribute to addressing societal challenges, as well as how universities can best foster the development of that expertise.

Routledge eBooks, Jun 30, 2023

Linked Open Data for Digital Humanities

This work-in-progress examines the potential of Open Linked Data applications for Assyriology fro... more This work-in-progress examines the potential of Open Linked Data applications for Assyriology from the multidisciplinary perspective of Web Science. The study focuses on cuneiform material from the ancient Near East, limited to tablets from the Ur III period (c. 2100 BC) as published by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI). The corpus consists of the metadata, transliterations and high-resolution digital images of the original tablets, which were written in antiquity by pressing a reed stylus into wet clay. During the four millennia of the history of script, individual signs underwent typographical changes and semantic shifts as well as being used for writing a number of different, even unrelated, languages. Semantic representations of the polyvalent values of each individual sign are as challenging as the accurate visual representations of this 3D script. The CDLI object records several possible anchoring points for a web of Linked Data. Its database is already an amalga...

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jun 30, 2023

Johann Strauss II wrote Kaiser Walzer (Emperor Waltz), one of his most well-known and frequently ... more Johann Strauss II wrote Kaiser Walzer (Emperor Waltz), one of his most well-known and frequently discussed instrumental works in 1889. The work, composed on the occasion of Austrian Franz Joseph's visit to Prussian Wilhelm II and one year after the Austrian emperor's jubilee, has long provoked the question: which of the two Emperors was the waltz for? Originally titled "Hand in Hand" by Simrock, Strauss' publisher, ostensibly to flatter both emperors, it was first performed in Berlin on 21 October. (Rubey 1994) The original cover of the piano edition bore the illustration of the Austrian Imperial Crown. The work opens with a march, a Prussian nod, but includes three waltzes, a Viennese trademark. In this short presentation we engage with this question using novel digital musicology techniques. Specifically, we employ empirical evidence in the form of performance recordings, audio feature data, score encodings, and collected scholarly discourse drawn from a multi-modal FAIR data corpus generated by the Signature Sound Vienna project (Weigl et al. 2022). Impassioned arguments for the waltz' intended dedicatee have long been made on either side, citing evidence both historical and musical (Endler 1998; Rubey 1994; Ritter 1892; Suchet 2015). It was arranged by both Schoenberg in 1921 to wistfully look back to a bygone Austrian monarchy, and rebranded as part of Nazi propaganda to glorify unified Deutschtum with an added, openly jingoistic text for the third waltz. Musical elements perceived as (stereo)typically Prussian (i.e., "martial": dotted rhythms, heavy downwards beats, percussive snare licks, downwards musical impetus to which a person would march) and Viennese (i.e. "sentimental" / "waltz-like": rubato-filled melodic lines, lightness of sound, early second and late third beats in ¾ time to which a person would waltz) have been cited to support either side of the discussion. Even the extra-musical cultural context is ambiguous and changes over time; films from The Last Emperor to three titled Emperor Waltz give the work varied implications (Lang 2014).

Rethinking Social Media and Extremism

Australian National University, 2018

Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games

Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2020

Contemporary computing devices contain a concoction of numerous hazardous materials. Though users... more Contemporary computing devices contain a concoction of numerous hazardous materials. Though users are more or less protected from these substances, recycling and landfilling reintroduce them to the biosphere where they may be ingested by people. This paper calls on HCI researchers to consider these corporal interactions with computers and critiques HCI's existing responses to the e-waste problem. We propose that whether one would consider eating a particular electronic component offers a surprisingly useful heuristic for whether we ought to be producing it on mass with vanishingly short lifespans. We hypothesize that the adoption of this heuristic might affect user behaviour and present a diet plan for users who wish to take responsibility for their own e-waste by eating it. Finally we propose an alternative direction for HCI researchers to design and advocate for those affected by the material properties of e-waste.

of paper 0462 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherl... more of paper 0462 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019.

This interview forms part of our Humans of AI3SD Series.

Archives and manuscripts, Nov 30, 2023

2023 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)

BRILL eBooks, Apr 5, 2023

Humanities & social sciences communications, May 5, 2023

Routledge eBooks, Jun 30, 2023

Linked Open Data for Digital Humanities

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jun 30, 2023

Rethinking Social Media and Extremism

Australian National University, 2018

Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games

Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2020

This interview forms part of our Humans of AI3SD Series.

La prochaine séance du Caf’E.phe, en partenariat avec EphéNum de l’EPHE, se tiendra le vendredi 2... more La prochaine séance du Caf’E.phe, en partenariat avec EphéNum de l’EPHE, se tiendra le vendredi 27 janvier, de 16h à 18h30 (GMT+1) à la Sorbonne, escalier E, 1er étage, salle Delamarre (D059) :

Registration form: attend to the live broadcast https://goo.gl/forms/ZE2rsia5RBMzXUZY2

- Doğu Kaan Eraslan (doctorant EPHE, PSL)
On the Use of Existing Resource for Ensuring Epigraphic Interoperability of Ancient Texts“

After a quick reminder of the encoding schemes used in major online corpora of ancient languages used in mediterranean region (i.e. M(anuel) d(e) C(odage), C-Atf, Cal code, and EpiDoc), my demonstration will be focused on major common trends for designing the restoration text for being observed by humans. Unfortunately after processing, several problems have been identified, amongst which the retention rate of data. A suggestion to overcame this should be to successively use unicode, svg and Epidoc: Unicode code points to mark geometric signs as a semantic unit; SVG for recreating signs that can be decomposable to the same space delimiting shape; EpiDoc for conserving all that in an actual document.”

- Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller (Australian National University)
De la philologie de l'ancienne Sumer au web sémantique: From the philology of ancient Sumer to the semantic web

“Linked Data and the online publication of data as RDF are becoming increasingly popular among the research methodologies used for ancient world data analyses ranging from geospatial tagging to the reading of ancient languages. This talk will outline the limitations and challenges of existing practices and traditional methods in the philological study of ancient Mesopotamian texts, with a specific focus on the composite texts available from the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature - an online resource, which is no longer actively developed, but continues to grant the public free access to transliterations and translations of around 400 Sumerian inscriptions.

The jargon (acronyms such as RDF, SPARQL, and OWL), pragmatics (triplestores, ontologies, and endpoints), and potential of the Linked (Open) Data online publication paradigm (interconnectedness, improved discoverability, automated inference) will be explained and described in generic terms, with illustrative examples pulled from Sumerology. The talk will outline the necessary practical considerations for engaging with Linked (Open) Data, the benefits of doing so when working with humanities data, and the potential this method of publishing data online has to support, enrich, and diversify the study of ancient languages. Three existing OWL ontologies will also be summarised as part of an evaluative comparison: the CIDOC-CRM (for cultural heritage data), FRBRoo (for bibliographic metadata), and Ontomedia (designed for the representation of fictional narrative).”

Bio :
Dr Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller is a lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the potential of semantic web technologies to support and diversify scholarship in the digital humanities. She has published on the use of Linked Open Data with musicological and library metadata, as well as on the representation of the narrative structure, philological, bibliographical, and museological data of ancient Mesopotamian literary compositions. She also has a number of publications on the role gamification and informal online environments can play in facilitating the learning process.

Quelques récentes publications :
Nurmikko-Fuller, T. (2016) Publishing Sumerian Literature on the Semantic Web. In Proceedings of the 2016 American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) Annual Meeting, San Antonio, Texas, USA, 16 -- 19 November, 2016.

Jett, J., Nurmikko-Fuller, T., Cole, T., Page, K.R., and Downie, J.S., (2016) Enhancing Scholarly Use of Digital Libraries: A Comparative Survey Review of Bibliographic Metadata Ontologies. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2016 (JCDL), Newark, New Jersey, USA, 19 -- 23 June, 2016.

Nurmikko-Fuller, T., and Page, K.R. (2016) The Linked Semantic Network that is Transforming Musicology. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic Web (WHiSe), co-located with the 13th Extended Semantic Web Conference 2016 (ESWC) - Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May 29, 2016.

Nurmikko, T. (2014) Assessing the Suitability of Existing OWL Ontologies for the Representation of Narrative Structures in Sumerian Literature. In Elliott, T., Heath, S. and Muccigrosso, J. (eds). “Current Practice in Linked Open Data for the Ancient World“. ISAW Papers, 7. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University.

Le prochain Caf'E.phe se tiendra le vendredi 24 février, même heure et même salle. Nous accueillerons Emilie Pagé-Perron de l'Université de Toronto et du Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.

Le Caf'E.phe est ouvert à tous les membres PSL, ainsi qu'aux membres des institutions partenaires, néophytes ou experts en humanités numériques. Cependant, nous vous demandons de vous inscrire en adressant un courriel à vanessa.juloux@ephe.sorbonne.fr.

The proposed paper will outline and discuss on-going doctoral research into the interpretation an... more The proposed paper will outline and discuss on-going doctoral research into the interpretation and digital publication of Assyriological data in a machine-readable format. The main data set for this research has been the corpus of literary compositions as published by the electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL, http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/) and the aim, to represent the narrative content of these inscriptions in ways that will facilitate automated inference and the potential future

Our paper outlines the main foci of on-going research into the interpretation and digital publica... more Our paper outlines the main foci of on-going research into the interpretation and digital publication of previously published literary compositions from the ancient Near East, building on existing Assyriological research and benefitting from known online resources. Rather than revolutionise the existing paradigms of Assyriological research, our aim is to outline future developments -namely then representation of literary compositions according to the Linked Open Data publication model and further opening up collections such as published by the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL, http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/) for semantic technologies, knowledge representation and automated inference. This research is innovative in both the spheres of Assyriology and that of the Linked Data community, and when implemented, will undoubtedly contribute to the way that Assyriological data is accessed, interpreted, contextualised and published. This paper will outline the considerations which have been most dominant in the effort to represent Sumerian literary compositions with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM, http://www.cidoc-crm.org/) and Ontomedia (http://www.contextus.net/ontomedia). These issues include the granularity of detail, the parameters for query types and the identification of the unique narrative features of each composition. The representation of the content will open up

Webinar presentation to outline the research behind the poster which won Best Poster at Web Sci'1... more Webinar presentation to outline the research behind the poster which won Best Poster at Web Sci'13 in Paris in May 2013.

Click to see video on slides 6 & 7.

Could we develop a citizen science project for Assyriology? Issues, considerations and a proposed... more Could we develop a citizen science project for Assyriology? Issues, considerations and a proposed model.

American Schools of Oriental Research annual meeting, Boston, November 15-18

From the third millennium BC onwards, the scribes of the ancient Near East generated a large corp... more From the third millennium BC onwards, the scribes of the ancient Near East generated a large corpus of written records. The known 500,000 objects carrying cuneiform inscriptions cover a great number of different types of texts, ranging from administrative records and receipts to love songs, omen readings, astronomical observations, medical texts, political propaganda and more. Mentions of individuals, places and geographical features provide information which can be used to map the ancient world, support prosopographical studies and bring to light the networks which criss-crossed the area known as the Fertile Crescent.

The geospatial representation of Mesopotamia is nothing new: housed at the British Museum is one of the oldest extant geographic maps, of Late Babylonian origin and dated to approximately the mid-first millennium BC. Other ancient documents from the area record the locations of agricultural fields next to named canals and other geographical features, whilst historical narratives track the movements of individuals and armies across genuine and mythological landscapes. Indeed, some major urban centres are only known from literary records and are still to be located by archaeologists – the ancient written documents forming thus the only available source of data. Our research examines the potential of combining these different types of records via Linked Data, harnessing a new technology to shed light on the ancient past.

"Since the decipherment of cuneiform in the 1800s, research in the field of Mesopotamian archaeol... more "Since the decipherment of cuneiform in the 1800s, research in the field of Mesopotamian archaeology has largely developed along two parallel lines of investigation: excavation and philological analysis. Both aspects have relied heavily on off-line, traditional paper-based models of publication and information storage. Since little excavation has taken place in the major southern cities of Mesopotamia in recent decades, this paper focuses exclusively on the recent developments and future directions of the fields of philological and palaeographical research.

Traditional resources have included paper-based documents such as sign lists (Borger, 2004), dictionaries and journal articles. In the last decade, a number of online resources have been created to provide online access to these resources, including (but by no means limited to) dictionaries such as the Pennsylvania Sumerian dictionary (http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/index.html), object records such as the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (http://cdli.ucla.edu/) and text corpora such as the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/index.html). Whilst these resources have much potential in terms of cross-referencing and inter-linking, for the most part, where this occurs, it is in the form of hyperlinks connecting web pages, rather than data. Little has been done thus far in terms of Linked Data, or engaging with semantic technologies.

The Linked Ancient World Data Institute (http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Linked_Ancient_World_Data_Institute), held at ISAW at the University of New York in May 2012, was an opportunity for a small number of specialist to discuss the potential of Linked Data for the field of Assyriology and the ancient world in general. This talk will be an opportunity to share the main points covered at this event, and to facilitate more discussions on the same topic. Viewed from the perspective of Web Science, the aim is to illustrate the ways in which a Linked Data project, co-constituted by technical possibilities and social requirements, could help enrich our datasets.
"

A brief explanation as to work carried out so far (in terms research for MSc Web Science), outlin... more A brief explanation as to work carried out so far (in terms research for MSc Web Science), outlining the structure of a proposed ontology for cuneiform inscriptions and a conceptual model for an expert system.

Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology, 2018

Applying Linked Data techniques to musical metadata can facilitate new paths of musicological inq... more Applying Linked Data techniques to musical metadata can facilitate new paths of musicological inquiry. JazzCats: Jazz Collection of Aggregated Triples is a prototype project interlinking four discrete jazz performance datasets and external sources as references. Tabular, relational, and graph legacy datasets have necessitated different RDF production and ingestion workflows to support scholarly study of performance traditions. This paper highlights critical processes of data curation for digital libraries, including quality assessment of the ingested datasets. In addition, we describe research questions enabled by JazzCats, raise musicological implications, and offer suggestions to overcome current limitations.

Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact, 2022

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 1 has great potential as a teaching and learning tool. The world of Skyri... more Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 1 has great potential as a teaching and learning tool. The world of Skyrim, although sometimes labelled pseudo-medieval, 2 can aim for a level of historical accuracy comparable to many scholarly digital 3D reconstruction projects. These types of projects are now widely accepted as a vehicle for a new way of thinking about old topics, and as a valuable prompt for engaging students. The advantage of using Skyrim is that the historically informed mods 3 can be combined with sophisticated game mechanics to immerse and inspire students in procedural, contestable, and reconfigurable simulations. Through playful exploration, students can investigate the game world and engage with both the historically-informed and fantastical elements. But they can also become designers and investigate historical developments through the creation of new assets, modified game mechanics, and social storytelling. Designing simulations is a further learning experience and Skyrim's Creation Kit is thus also a pedagogical tool. In this chapter we will explore ways in which Skyrim can be used and modified to explain, through play, three related aspects of medieval society: culture, architecture, and landscape. We will then discuss its modding capability and conclude with some suggestions for how future Elder Scrolls games and mods could be leveraged as teaching and learning tools.