Digital humanities initiatives play an important role in making cultural heritage collections accessible to the global community of researchers and general public for the first time. Further work is needed to provide useful and usable tools to support users in working with those digital contents in virtual environments. The CULTURA project has developed a corpus agnostic research environment integrating innovative services that guide, assist and empower a broad spectrum of users in their interaction with cultural artefacts. This article presents (1) the CULTURA system and services and the two collections that have been used for testing and deploying the digital humanities research environment, and (2) an evaluation methodology and formative evaluation study with apprentice researchers. An evaluation model was developed which has served as a common ground for systematic evaluations of the CULTURA environment with user communities around the two test bed collections. The evaluation method has proven to be suitable for accommodating different evaluation strategies and allows meaningful consolidation of evaluation results. The evaluation outcomes indicate a positive perception of CULTURA. A range of useful suggestions for future improvement has been collected and fed back into the development of the next release of the research environment

In this paper we investigate the accuracy and overall suitability of a variety of Entity Linking systems for the task of disambiguating entities in 17 t h century depositions obtained during the 1641 Irish Rebellion. The depositions are extremely difficult for modern NLP tools to work with due to inconsistent spelling, use of language and archaic references. In order to assess the severity of difficulty faced by Entity Linking systems when working with these documents we use the depositions to create an evaluation corpus. This corpus is used as an input to the General Entity Annotator Benchmarking Framework, a standard benchmarking platform for entity annotation systems. Based on this corpus and the results obtained from General Entity Annotator Benchmarking Framework we observe that the accuracy of existing Entity Linking systems is lacking when applied to content like these depositions. This is due to a number of issues ranging from problems with existing state-of-the-art systems to poor representation of historic entities in modern knowledge bases. We discuss some interesting questions raised by this evaluation and put forward a plan for future work in order to learn more. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Digital libraries and archives; • Information systems → Content analysis and feature selection;

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With the increasing scale of online cultural heritage collections, the efforts of manually adding annotations to their contents become a challenging and costly endeavour. Entity Linking is a process used to automatically apply such annotations to a text based collection, where the quality and coverage of the linking process is highly dependent on the knowledge base that informs it. In this paper, we present our ongoing efforts to annotate a corpus of 17 th century Irish witness statements using Entity Linking methods that utilise Semantic Web techniques. We discuss problems faced in this process and attempts to remedy them.

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Abstract. This paper describes the innovative annotation facilities of the CULTURA portal for digital humaties, which are aimed at improving the interaction of non specialist users and general public with cultural heritage contents. The annotation facilities are comprised by two modules: the FAST annotation service as back-end and the CAT Web front-end integrated in the CULTURA portal.