Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities

Location: Belgrade, Serbia
Contact: Irena Marinski (irenamarinski@humanistika.org)

The Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities (BCDH) is a leading Serbian research centre, exploring the use of computational methods in the study of traditional humanities disciplines. Founded in 2008 with a strong focus on data modelling, digital editions, standards-compliant lexicographic resources and the development of training materials, BCDH is forging an infrastructural approach to humanities computing with the goal of making historical, literary and cultural heritage as well as contemporary artistic production accessible, reusable, and open to creative computational interventions.

Services currently offered by the infrastructure:

Based on years of national and international collaborations, BCDH has built an impressive portfolio of tools, services and datasets for exploring, processing and preserving cultural heritage objects. These include, for instance:

• • Raskovnik.org: An advanced platform for querying historical and dialectological dictionaries of the Serbian language

• • Prepis.org: A platform for the transcription and display of Serbian handwritten textual heritage

• • TEI Completer: customizable plugin for setting up and activating remote-driven autocompletions of attribute values in the oXygen XML Editor.

• • TEI Authorizer: Customizable plugin for working with authority files from within oXygen XML Editor

• • еХist Indexer for Algolia: create, upload and incrementally sync local eXist XML indexes with Algolia’s cloud services.

• • Cql-module: provides a CQL (Corpus Query Language) to XML parser for eXist DB

• • Spacy-serbian-pipeline: A pipeline for creating a language model for Serbian in spaCy

• • Cadet: a GUI application for simplifying the workflow to collect assets and train new language models using the spaCy framework

BCDH has experience successfully hosting short-term scientific missions in the COST framework, as well as, more recently, TNA visits in the context of the European Lexicographic Infrastructure (ELEXIS).

Offering

Individualised access on the topic of interest of applicants which are aligned with BCDH’s expertise and offered services. Considering the importance of workflows in ATRIUM, BCDH will specifically offer TNAs with a focus on TEI and XML workflows:

• • Conceptualising and modelling TEI editions with a particular focus on lexicographic datasets

• • Setting up working environments for editing digital editions, including customising XML editors for maximum efficiency and contextualised help

• • Transforming XML data with XSLT, including multi-step XProc-based workflows

• • Publication workflows with TEI Publisher

Selected TNA fellows will be able to interact with experts, study workflows developed and deployed at BCDH, work on their own projects, or conceptualise new projects.