links wot caught my eye #5

Digital linguistics, API news and some conferences

• New insights into the 1641 Irish Rebellion revealed (AHRC) and more (Past Horizons) A nice example of what digital analysis of texts now makes possible. As the article says, and quite aside from the interest of the results themselves, doing this sort of analysis would have been a lifetime's work previously. Needless to say, IWM has a large quantity of texts. I'm just itching to see what digital humanists could do with a sample of them - once duly digitised, of course.
• Europeana's API available. This is great news, albeit it not without caveats, chiefly that access is limited to Europeana's network of non-commercial partners (there are about 1500 of them). Although I knew that the issue of data licences for API usage was unresolved after November's plenary I suppose I'd assumed that it must have been fixed. But then, that's no small order: getting that number of data providers to sign up to anything is a massive challenge, and I'm glad that Europeana decided that, rather than letting this hold up the API, they'd launch it for a more limited audience initially and work on the recalcitrant partners. I'd recommend reading David Haskiya's blog post for an informative Q&A on the what and why of the API launch.
  I played with the alpha of the API last year and put together the Mashificator with it, but you can see several other examples of it in use here.
  
• And in more Europeana news, EuropeanaConnect is the geeking heart of #Europeana. It's EuropeanaTech conference in Vienna, October shd be good http://bit.ly/fRH5Df [to plagiarise my own tweet]
• Oh and finally, I see that DISH2011 is in the planning. It will be in December this year and from what I heard of the last DISH in 2009 it should be well worth attending. Keep an eye here for news