In the demanding context of the beginning of this year, we have
decided to postpone the submission date of proposals for COMHUM 2022.
The new deadline for submission of abstracts is February 11, 2022.
CALL FOR PAPERS
2nd workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities (COMHUM 2022)
June 9–10, 2022 — University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Special track: character network construction and analysis
At the turn of the 2020s, a defining characteristic of digital
humanities remains the remarkably wide spectrum of viewpoints they
encompass, ranging from a pure engineering perspective applied to
humanities data to the use of well established humanities research
methods to investigate born-digital artifacts. In this framework, the
COMHUM workshop series positions itself as an international forum
primarily devoted to the following research questions: (1) which
computational methods are most appropriate for dealing with the
particular challenges posed by humanities research, e.g., uncertainty,
vagueness, incompleteness, but also with different positions (points
of view, values, criteria, perspectives, approaches, readings, etc.)?
And (2) how can such computational methods be applied to concrete
research questions in the humanities?
The second edition of the COMHUM workshop will take place on June 9
and 10, 2022 at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), unless the sanitary
situation requires organizing the event online. The first day will be
devoted to the specific topic of computational methods for
constructing and analyzing character networks. This topic has
ramifications in a variety of disciplines, including linguistics,
literary analysis, digital humanities, and game studies. It is of
particular interest for a number of research initiatives at UNIL
and in neighboring institutions. COMHUM 2022 will thus be a perfect
opportunity to bring together researchers from different communities
studying character networks using computational and methodologically
explicit approaches, to review the state of the art in this domain and
to sketch its future developments.
In the spirit of the first edition of the COMHUM workshop, the second
day will be open to submissions on any topic pertaining to theoretical
or applied research on computational methods for humanities research
broadly conceived.
The program will consist of invited and contributed talks. The
official language of the workshop is English. Contributions can be
submitted in English or French.
Topics
The topics of the workshop are divided into two tracks. The special
track focuses on formal and computational aspects related to the
development and use of computational methods for character network
construction and analysis in data from various media types studied in
the humanities, such as literature, movies, comics, and video games
for example.
Topics in the special track include, but are not limited to:
- methods for character network extraction (e.g. NLP, computer
vision, etc.) - formal definitions and representation of relations in character
networks - quantitative methods for character network analysis
- computational methods for large-scale or transmedia studies of
character networks
In addition, an open track welcomes submissions on formal and
computational aspects related to the development and use of
computational methods in the humanities in general (with a particular
interest for the disciplines represented in the Faculty of Arts of
UNIL – such as literature, linguistics, history, history of art,
cinema studies).
Topics in the open track include, but are not limited to:
- Theoretical issues of formal modeling in the humanities
- Knowledge representation in the humanities
- Data structures addressing specific problems in the humanities
(including text and markup) - Quantitative methods in the humanities (e.g., for literary or
historical studies, or for multimodal data) - Applications of computer vision, image analysis and spatial
analysis in the humanities
Submissions
We invite researchers to submit abstracts of 500 to 1000 words
(excluding references; approx. 1–2 pages in the specified
format). Abstracts will be reviewed double-blind by members of the
program committee, and all submissions will receive several
independent reviews. Abstracts submitted at review stage must not
contain the authors’ names, affiliations, or any information that
may disclose the authors’ identity.
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to present their
research at the workshop as a talk, and the abstracts will be
published in the book of abstracts of the workshop. The maximum number
of submissions by the same author is two papers. An author cannot be
the first author of two papers.
Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are
available as an Overleaf template
(Overleaf, Online LaTeX Editor) and also downloadable
directly in LaTeX and Word format
(ACLPUB/templates at master · acl-org/ACLPUB · GitHub). Abstracts
must be submitted electronically in PDF format. For the submission of
abstracts we use EasyChair:
Log in to EasyChair
After the conference, authors of accepted contributions will be
invited to submit a full paper version (6–16 pages), which, if
accepted after peer-review, will be published in an open-access,
electronic conference volume endowed with persistent identifiers
(to be confirmed soon).
Invited Speakers
- Vincent Labatut, Université d’Avignon
- [This list will be completed.]
Important Dates
- Deadline for submission of abstracts: February 11, 2022
- Notification of acceptance: March 4, 2022
- Workshop: June 9–10, 2022
Organization
The workshop is organized by members of the Lausanne Lab for
Computational and Statistical Text Analysis
(Laboratoire lausannois d'informatique et statistique textuelle): François Bavaud, Guillaume Guex, Coline
Métrailler, Davide Picca, Stéphanie Pichot, Michael Piotrowski,
Yannick Rochat, Aris Xanthos.
It is hosted by the Department of Language and Information Sciences
(Section des sciences du langage et de l'information - SLI UNIL), with the support of the Center for
Linguistics and the Science of Language (Centre de linguistique et des sciences du langage - CLSL UNIL),
both in the Faculty of Arts at UNIL.
The workshop underlines the commitment of the Department of Language
and Information Sciences to the computational dimension of the digital
humanities, including formal and mathematical methods.
Scientific Committee
- François Bavaud (UNIL, SLI and IGD)
- Guillaume Guex (UNIL, SLI)
- Coline Métrailler (UNIL, SLI)
- Davide Picca (UNIL, SLI)
- Michael Piotrowski (UNIL, SLI)
- Yannick Rochat (UNIL, SLI, chair)
- Elena Spadini (UNIL, CLSR)
- Aris Xanthos (UNIL, SLI)
- [This list will be completed.]
Further info
More information about the event will be available at the following
URL: Workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities 2022 (COMHUM 2022) – Laboratoire lausannois d'informatique et statistique textuelle. Please get in
touch with Yannick Rochat (yannick.rochat@unil.ch) for specific
questions that are not answered by the website.