Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies

Sander Molenaar

X-MARKUS: Contextual Annotation (COMARKUS) is an annotation platform that facilitates the construction of ontological relations between entities. COMARKUS builds on X-MARKUS: Entity Annotation (ENTMARKUS), the annotation tool that allows users to tag and describe entities in texts. In COMARKUS, users establish and describe relations between entities through a schema that structures data annotated in ENTMARKUS. Entities are dragged from the text and dropped into data fields, and then saved as a cluster of related data. These structured data clusters allow users to interpret the context that is lost when entities are tagged in isolation and extracted from the text.

This workshop will instruct participants in the use of COMARKUS, illustrate how the schema that structures data can be modified to reflect the research designs of different projects, and illustrate how the data can be visualised and analysed.

COMARKUS was originally designed for the annotation of infrastructural events (the construction, renovation, failure, and destruction of city walls, bridges, and roads) and therefore comes with a default schema that describes an ontology of infrastructural events and that regulates how entities populate event fields. The workings of COMARKUS will be explained on the basis of data gathered within the projects ‘The Lives and Afterlives of Imperial Infrastructure in Southeastern China’ (InfraLives) and ‘Regionalizing Infrastructures in Chinese History’ (RegInfra), conceived and led by prof. dr. Hilde De Weerdt. In addition, the workshop will illustrate how the default schema can be modified and participants will be encouraged to develop a schema that reflects the ontological relations between entities in their own research projects. Finally, the workshop offers insight in the analysis and visualization of COMARKUS data clusters.

Prerequisites
It would be great if participants could bring their own primary source material, preferably annotated in MARKUS.