Prof. Hilde De Weerdt, Dr. Sander Molenaar and Wangzhi Xi presented in a workshop titled Annotating, Analyzing, and Aligning Historical Texts and Images with COMARKUS and IMMARKUS at Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in Columbus, Ohio on March 16, 2025.
This workshop introduces a digital annotation methodology and platforms for annotating and clustering data in texts and images. COMARKUS enables researchers to establish and describe complex relationships between textual entities, thus enriching contextual understanding. IMMARKUS is designed for annotating images, of paintings, archaeological drawings, or historical maps for example. Together, these platforms facilitate comprehensive cross-media comparisons and analysis.
The workshop includes sessions on contextual annotation and its applications to case studies relating to infrastructural history in late imperial China. Dr. Sander Molenaar will explain the development and advantages of COMARKUS. Unlike traditional data models, which often fail to capture relationships and the context of textual entities, COMARKUS enables researchers to document chronological sequences of events. He will demonstrate its application in reconstructing the historical events of bridge constructions and repairs in southeast China, as well as its potential for application in a wider range of historical research. Participants will learn to create entity relationships, customize their own data models, and export contextualized data. Wangzhi Xi will demonstrate techniques for organizing, cleaning, and enriching COMARKUS outputs. She also illustrates how to apply data analysis methods to identify patterns and trends through case studies of the construction and repair of bridges and city walls across different parts of China. Professor Hilde De Weerdt discusses how IMMARKUS enables contextual annotation for image sources. Researchers can annotate image selections, create relationships among annotations, and visualize annotations, image metadata, and relationships in the knowledge graph view. She will discuss how to create compatible data and metadata models across different sources. This workshop aims to provide participants with practical knowledge to effectively use COMARKUS and IMMARKUS in their research to keep track of complex archives or to gain data-driven insights from multimodal annotations.