Workshops, conferences, and CfPs

Announcements
21

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.

22

SciPy 2022! :snake:

Last year, together with Rochelle Terman, I organized the first mini-symposium on
computational social science and the humanities. That was a great success, with very
interesting talks by Melvin Wevers, Lauren Klein, Iza Romanowska, Laura Nelson and Elliot
Ash. Because it was such a success, there will be a track for the social sciences and
humanities again this year.

And this year, anyone may submit an abstract! It doesn’t have to be more than a paragraph,
and can be about anything in your research that you use Python for. The conference is a
truly unique environment, and offers the chance to interact with researchers from very
different disciplines (such as the researchers who have worked on mapping black holes!),
as well as developers of crucial infrastructure and tooling like Jupyter. Highly
recommended!

2 Likes
23

Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute Call for Participants now Open
The NEH has generously funded a second year of this Institute. This year, we partner with the University of Arizona and include more multilingual and social media courses. We’re helping train new text analysis teachers at institutions across the country. Join us by applying now for this free institute! TAP Institute

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Object Detection Challenge in computational humanities

ICPR 2022 ODeuropa Competition on Olfactory Object Recognition (ODOR)

We are proud to announce the launch of the ICPR 2022 (ODOR) ODeuropa Competition on Olfactory Object Recognition, the world’s first competition for the detection on olfactory objects on historical artworks. Work with a training set of >24000 object annotations in 87 categories on ~3000 images and create innovative solutions to detect a wide range of objects in the challenging domain of artworks.

Info: ODOR Challenge ICPR 2022

Challenge Registration and Data: CodaLab - Competition

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Deadline extended: 8 July 2022!

Call for Papers for SUMAC 2022
The 4th workshop on Structuring and Understanding of Multimedia heritAge Contents
In conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2022
10-14 October 2022, Lisbon, Portugal

Workshop: https://sumac-workshops.github.io/2022/
Conference: https://2022.acmmm.org

Aims and scope

The digitization of large quantities of analogue data and the massive production of born-digital documents for many years now provide us with large volumes of varied multimedia data (images, maps, text, video, multi-sensor data, etc.), an important feature of which is that they are cross-domain. “Cross-domain” reflects the fact that these data may have been acquired in very different conditions: different acquisition systems, times and points of view. These data represent an extremely rich heritage that can be exploited in a wide variety of fields, from Social Sciences and Humanities to land use and territorial policies, including smart city, urban planning, smart tourism and culture, creative media and entertainment. In terms of research in computer science, they address challenging problems related to the diversity and volume of the media across time, the variety of content descriptors (potentially including the time dimension), the veracity of the data, and the different user needs with respect to engaging with this rich material and the extraction of value out of the data. These challenges are reflected in various research topics such as multimodal and mixed media search, automatic content analysis, multimedia linking and recommendation, and big data analysis and visualization, where scientific bottlenecks may be exacerbated by the time dimension, which also provides topics of interest such as multimodal time series analysis.

The objective of the third edition is to present and discuss the latest and most significant trends in the analysis, structuring and understanding of multimedia contents dedicated to the valorization of heritage, with the emphasis on enabling access to the big data of the past. We welcome research contributions for the following (but not limited to) topics:

  • Multimedia and cross-domain data interlinking and recommendation
  • Dating and spatialization of historical data
  • Mixed media data access and indexing
  • Deep learning in adverse conditions (transfer learning, learning with side information, etc.)
  • Multi-modal time series analysis, evolution modelling
  • Multi-modal and multi-temporal data rendering
  • Heritage - Building Information Modelling, Art Virtualisation
  • HCI / Interfaces for large-scale datasets
  • Smart digitisation of massive quantities of data
  • Bench-marking, Open Data Movement
  • Generative modelling of cultural heritage

Important dates

  • Paper submission: 8 July 2022 (11:59 p.m. AoE)
  • Author acceptance notification: 26 July 2022
  • Camera-Ready: 7 August 2022
  • Workshop date: 10 or 14 October 2022 (TBA)

Organizers

Valerie Gouet-Brunet (LaSTIG Lab / IGN - Gustave Eiffel University, France)
Ronak Kosti (Pattern Recognition Lab / FAU Erlangen-Nurnberg, Germany)
Li Weng (Hangzhou Dianzi University, China)

ben2
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26

Dear CHR community,

With Ludovic Moncla and Bruno Martins, I’m happy to share the CFP for the Geospatial Humanities Workshop that runs concurrently with the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference. If your computational humanities research has a spatial element, this workshop is for you :slight_smile:

I wrote a bit about what kinds of research would be a good fit and some of the practical matters related to submitting/presenting in this thread.

Details about the workshop can be found here
CFP here

Papers are due Sept 2!

The workshop invites contributions on the following topics, as well as other research related to the Spatial Humanities:

  • Gazetteer development (e.g., models, data conflation, semantic technologies, etc.)
  • Ontologies and linked data for modeling geohistorical data
  • Historical and literary geographical information systems
  • Spatio-temporal network analysis in the humanities
  • Text geo-parsing and other NLP techniques for geographical text analysis
  • Deep learning techniques for the spatial humanities
  • Novel approaches for the analysis of vague and imaginary place
  • Spatial simulation in the humanities (e.g., cellular automata and agent-based models)
  • Spatial and spatio-temporal analysis of humanities data
  • Visualization and cartographic representations
  • Handling vague and imprecise historical spatio-temporal data
  • Creating new spatial datasets from historical materials (maps, aerial photography, postal or other directories, newspapers, etc.) using state-of-the art methods
  • Novel approaches for the analysis of humanistic spatial data at scale
  • Applications of the aforementioned techniques

Contributions should be submitted in the form of long papers (i.e., up to 10 pages in PDF), reporting on relatively mature research results, or alternatively in the form of short papers (i.e., up to 4 pages in PDF), reporting on more speculative and early stage research that may nonetheless stimulate discussion at the workshop. Papers should be prepared according to the ACM formatting guidelines.

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27

2023 IGEL Conference

Venue: Monopoli (Italy)
Date: 28-30 September 2023
Theme: Rhythm, Speed, Path: Spatiotemporal Experiences in Narrative, Poetry, and Drama. Submissions related to this topic will be given priority but contributions on other topics are also welcome.
Deadline for submissions: 24 February 2023
Format: hybrid

Submissions can cover all areas of the empirical study of literature and media, including computational approaches.

I think this is a great chance for the CHR community to discuss with researchers working with actual readers and compare perspectives about the modelling of textual and contextual features involved in reading processes.

3 Likes
28

Dear all,

The Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1288) - Practices of Comparing at Bielefeld University in collaboration with the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Bielefeld University and the Swiss National Science Foundation invites submission of proposals for an exciting interdisciplinary conference, Comparing Landscapes: Approaches to Space and Affect in Literary Fiction, which will take place in April 20-21, 2023 at the ZiF Bielefeld, Germany.

You can find more information, including the keynotes and our Call for Papers on the conference homepage.

Theme

This conference brings together scholars from literary studies and digital humanities to explore representations of space and affect in literature and literary history, with a focus on two aspects: the ‘national’ as reference dimension and the role of practices of comparing.

The conference is designed to welcoming a wide range of perspectives: from literary critique to machine learning, from geospatial to sentiment analysis, from metaphor to historiographic argument.

We aim at creating an interdisciplinary event, where research on the dimensions of space and affect in literary texts are explored with reference to ‘national literatures’ and practices of comparing at different levels. This exchange of ideas shall take place among scholars from different faculties and backgrounds, who share an interest for the ways in which space and affect impact literary discourse and literary historiography.

We are looking forward to host a range of thrilling presentations comparing dimensions of space and affect across different national literatures and periods. We are inviting papers from different research traditions including, but not limited to, hermeneutics, philology, cultural studies, cognitive poetics, empirical literary studies, corpus stylistics, and all types of data-driven and digital humanities.

Important Dates

  • Deadline for Submissions: 1 February 2023
  • Notification of Acceptance: 15 February 2023
  • There is no attendance fee

Looking forward to an exciting exchange!
Berenike

1 Like
29

Measuring Meanings | Computing Concepts
Practices of Operationalization and their Implications for Text Studies

The details can be found here: https://cretaverein.de/mmcc/.

Since the work of physicist Percy Bridgman (1927, 5), ›operationalization‹ is used to refer to the practice of determining or measuring concepts by means of a »set of operations«. In Bridgman’s strong variant of operationalization, he regarded the meaning of concepts as synonymous with the operations used to measure it. In Bridgman’s view, such operational definitions are fundamental to all research in physics. The concept of length, for instance, would thus be defined by the operations which are necessary for measuring the length of a physical object. Early on, this position was intensively discussed (cf. Frank 1956), and also criticized for that, in extreme cases, each new measurement method of a concept is equivalent to a new operational definition: »it becomes a tautology that any measurement operation is the correct one for the concept associated with it« (Chang, Cartwright 2008, 367).

Text-oriented DH projects seem to align with a weaker variant of operationalization in that their activities are structured by clearly delineable sub-steps (cf. Pichler, Reiter 2022; Krautter 2022). Thereby, operationalization can both contribute to the definitional refining of (humanities’) concepts, and facilitate opportunities for their empirical examination. The workshop aims to address these questions from scientific, computational, and praxeological perspectives, and thus attempts to provide an overview of the different theoretical positions and practical approaches; in particular with regard to operationalization in the field of digital humanities and digital text analysis. We especially solicit contributions that develop their theoretical reflections by means of concrete data. Please refrain from submitting textual analyses that do not include a theoretical reflection on their operationalization practice.

Guiding questions include, but are not limited to:
• What is referred to as a concept in the text studying fields of the humanities? What is the role of such concepts in theory building?
• What is the function of quantitative, formal or computational analysis in terms of conceptualization in text studying fields?
• How does the practice of operationalization relate to traditional and current approaches to conceptualization in philosophy, e.g., Carnapian explication and conceptual engineering?
• What is the practice of operationalization in text studying fields of the humanities?
• How does operationalization interact with established machine learning workflows? Which understanding of operationalization is inherent in these workflows?
• How does operationalizing engage with interpreting?
• How do we compare and evaluate operationalizations?
• How can we conceptualize the ›agent‹ that conducts the measurement (e.g., computer vs. human)? What impact do different agents and their capacities have on our understanding of operationalization?
• What are the differences between expressing measurement rules in natural (such as annotation guidelines) and formal language in relation to the operationalized concepts? How do these as well as their guiding background assumptions affect our understanding of operationalization?
• Does the advent of large language models (such as BERT and GPT) change our notion of operationalization – and if so, how?

References
Bridgman, Percy W.: The Logic of Modern Physics. New York 1927.
Chang, Hasok / Cartwright, Nancy: Measurement. In: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, ed. by Stathis Psillos / Martin Curd. Abingdon, New York 2008, 367–375.
Krautter, Benjamin: Die Operationalisierung als interdisziplinäre Schnittstelle der Digital Humanities. In: Scientia Poetica 26 (2022), S. 215–244.
Pichler, Axel / Reiter, Nils: From Concepts to Texts and Back: Operationalization as a Core Activity of Digital Humanities. In: Journal of Cultural Analytics 7.4 (2022), https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.57195.
Frank, Philipp G. (eds.): The Validation of Scientific Theories. Boston 1956.

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Conference of the Society for the empirical study of literature (IGEL)

Venue: Monopoli (Italy)
Date: 28-30 September 2023
Theme: Rhythm, Speed, Path: Spatiotemporal Experiences in Narrative, Poetry, and Drama. Submissions related to this topic will be given priority but contributions on other topics are also welcome.
Deadline for submissions: 24 February 2023
Format: hybrid

Submissions can cover all areas of the empirical study of literature and media, including computational approaches.

I think this is a great chance for the CHR community to discuss with researchers working with actual readers and compare perspectives about the modelling of textual and contextual features involved in reading processes.

2 Likes
31

Call for Papers
SUMAC 2023
5th ACM International workshop on analySis, Understanding and proMotion of heritAge Contents
Advances in machine learning, signal processing, multimodal techniques and human-machine interaction
29 Oct - 3 Nov, 2023
Ottawa, Canada (attendance mode TBA)

In conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2023
Workshop: SUMAC Workshops 2023 | SUMAC: Workshop on the analySis, Understanding and proMotion of heritAge Contents
Conference: https://www.acmmm2023.org/

Aims and scope

The ambition of SUMAC is to bring together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to share ideas and methods on current trends in the analysis, understanding and promotion of heritage contents. These challenges are reflected in the corresponding sub- fields of machine learning, signal processing, multi-modal techniques and human-machine interaction. We welcome research contributions for the following (but not limited to) topics:

  • Information retrieval for multimedia heritage
  • Automated archaeology and heritage data processing
  • Multi-modal deep learning and time series analysis for heritage data
  • Heritage modeling, visualization, and virtualization
  • Smart digitization and reconstruction of heritage data
  • Open heritage data and bench-marking

The scope of targeted applications is extensive and includes:

  • Analysis, archaeometry of artifacts
  • Diagnosis and monitoring for restoration and preventive conservation • Geosciences / Geomatics for cultural heritage
  • Education
  • Smart and sustainable tourism
  • Urban planning
  • Digital Twins

Important dates (AoE)

  • Paper submission: July 24, 2023
  • Author acceptance notification: August 9, 2023
  • Camera-Ready: August 12, 2023
  • Workshop date: TBA

Special Highlights
Best Paper Award. Following tradition, SUMAC 2023 will also be awarding a best paper award, accompanied with a certificate and a trophy.
Journal Special Issue. Authors of the best papers from SUMAC 2023 will be invited to submit an extended and improved version for consideration for Special Issue on Cultural Heritage in the Springer journal Multimedia Tools and Applications.

Submission guidelines
Submission format. All submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal. The workshop will accept papers describing completed work as well as work in progress. One submission format is accepted: full paper, which must follow the formatting guidelines of the main conference ACM MM 2023. Full papers should be from 6 to 8 pages (plus 2 additional pages for the references), encoded as PDF and using the ACM Article Template. For paper guidelines, please visit https://www.acmmm2023.org/instructions/.

Peer Review and publication in ACM Digital Library. Paper submissions must conform with the “double-blind” review policy. All papers will be peer-reviewed by experts in the field, they will receive at least two reviews. Acceptance will be based on relevance to the workshop, scientific novelty, and technical quality. Depending on the number, maturity and topics of the accepted submissions, the work will be presented via oral or poster sessions. The workshop papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

Organizers
Valerie Gouet-Brunet (LaSTIG Lab / IGN - Gustave Eiffel University, France)
Ronak Kosti (Picsart AI Research Lab, Germany)
Li Weng (Zhejiang Financial College, China)

Looking forward to seeing you in Ottawa!

The workshop organizers

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Hi all - I’m happy to share the following CfP. Would be very interested in contributions from this community.
Tatjana

Call for Abstracts

Computational approaches to metaphor and figurative language

Date: Feb 28-Mar 1, 2024
Location: Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
Organizers: Stefanie Dipper, Tatjana Scheffler, Sebastian Reimann, Adam Roussel (Ruhr-University Bochum)
Homepage: DGfS 2024, AG: Computational approaches to metaphor and figurative language

Call deadline: August 25, 2023

Meeting description: Workshop at the Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2024) https://dgfs.de/

Call for Papers:

Figurative and non-literal language, such as metaphor, metonymy, or personification, poses a special challenge for computational analysis, since these expressions are not used with their usual, ordinary meanings, as represented in corpus data or recorded in lexical resources, but with different, derived meanings.

We aim to bring together computational linguists working on the automatic analysis of non-literal language. A special focus will be on non-conventionalized usages, such as novel metaphors or innovative forms of metonymy. In addition, we are particularly interested in approaches applicable to languages other than English, for example low-resource languages or domains.

We welcome contributions dealing with the identification of (specific forms of) non-literal language, with the interpretation of figurative expressions, or with the relation between literal and non-literal meanings in distributional semantic representations. Further, we are interested in discussing how the meaning of figurative expressions is negotiated, for example in social media, and how distributional semantic representations can be enriched in order to reflect figurative meaning.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• non-conventionalized or innovative figurative language
• computational approaches to metaphors, allegory, or metonymy
• features for automatically detecting figurative language
• the interpretation of non-literal expressions
• semantic divergence of non-literal expressions
• figurative expressions in low-resource languages
• meaning negotiation in social media
• semantic representations for figurative meaning

Invited speakers: tba

Submission details:
Authors should submit anonymous abstracts of maximally 2 pages (including references) in a 12 point font (e.g., Times New Roman). References should be formatted according to the APA guidelines. The workshop language is English for both abstracts and talks. According to DGfS regulations, speakers can only present a paper in one workshop. Please submit your abstracts as a (anonymized) pdf document to the following address: metaphor-dgfs2024@ruhr-uni-bochum.de , and include the author information in the body of the email.
Upon acceptance, participants will be requested to submit a de-anonymized shortened version of the abstract for the conference booklet.

Important dates:
Abstract submission deadline: August 25, 2023
Notification of acceptance: September 8, 2023
Workshop: Feb 28-Mar 1, 2024

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Special Session at MMM2024

CultMM: Cultural AI in Multimedia

Cultural AI focuses on developing systems that can deal with the complexities of human culture, thereby improving applications to cultural data and enhancing AI systems’ ability to deal with cultural complexities. An increasingly clear insight is that many of the complexities of culture are highly contextualised which often expresses itself in a multimodal manner. For instance, analysis of widely published iconic images (e.g., napalm girl, migrant mother) includes the image itself, the contexts in which it has been published, and how it has been received [1]. Similarly, the prominence of linked data representations of cultural data are opening up new possibilities for enriching datasets and visual content analysis [2]. As such, we argue that a cultural perspective is inherently a multimedia perspective, and whilst applications of multimedia systems to cultural data have always been at home in the multimedia community [3,4], the complexities that come from analysing culture (e.g., [5]) have insufficiently been foregrounded.

With this special session we aim to bring together experts from Cultural AI and Multimedia to discuss the challenges surrounding cultural data as well as the complexities of human culture. Additionally, we aim to demonstrate that culture is more than an aesthetically pleasing testbed for multimedia systems, and that culture offers new challenges that require multimedia solutions. In addition to technical papers we also explicitly invite high-quality position papers on related topics to cultural AI, or that highlight cultural challenges which require multimedia solutions. We will prioritise position papers that are supported by recent published results or preliminary findings that are being described for the first time in the submitted paper.

Organizers

  • Nanne van Noord, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Melvin Wevers, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Stuart James, Italian Institute of Technology & UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Italy
  • Cynthia Liem, TU Delft, Netherlands
  • Victor de Boer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
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Ontologies for Narrative and Fiction (workshop)

Monday, July 3 · 09:00 – 17:00
Tuesday, July 4 · 09:00 – 12:00
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam

Registration: GOLEM Lab - Ontologies for Narrative and Fiction (online workshop)

3 July

9:00-9:45 Janna Hastings, “How can fiction change the world? Towards an ontology of literary characters and their interactions”
9:45-10:30 Paul Sheridan, “Toward creating a collection of literary themes for use in supervised learning applications”
15 min break
10:45-11:30 Christof Schöch and Maria Hinzmann, “Towards an ontology for literary history: issues of complexity and scale when constructing the MiMoTextBase”
11:30-12:15 Ingo Börner, “Modeling Drama Corpora in CIDOC-CRM”
lunch
13:30-14:15 Valentina Pasqual, “An ontology for compositional structures, plot concepts and character roles. Case study on the ‘macchina combinatoria’ in ‘Il castello dei destini incrociati’ by Italo Calvino”
14:15-15:00 Marco Stranisci, “The World Literature Knowledge Graph: a resource for studying the underrepresentation of non-Western people”
15 min break
15:15-16:00 Ines Blin, “Leveraging Structured Representations for Narratives”
16-16:45 Magnus Pfeffer and Zoltán Kacsuk, “Creating a unified ontology for the Japanese Visual Media Graph”

4 July

09:00-9:45 Luca Scotti, “Alignment and harmonisation: Mapping ontologies for narrative and fiction”
09:45-10:30 Federico Pianzola and Xiaoyan Yang, “First steps of the GOLEM ontology for narrative and fiction”
15 min break
10:45-12:00 hands-on session: open issues in the modelling of narrative and fiction

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Call for Papers: DH Benelux 2024 Conference
Breaking Silos, Connecting Data: Advancing Integration and Collaboration in Digital Humanities
Dates: 5-7 June 2024, pre-conference workshops on 4 June 2024
Location: Leuven (BE)
Website: https://2024.dhbenelux.org/

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the DH Benelux 2024 Conference, a gathering of scholars, researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts in the field of Digital Humanities (DH). The conference explores the theme “Breaking Silos, Connecting Data: Advancing Integration and Collaboration in Digital Humanities.”

DH research often involves working with incomplete, fragmented, and diverse datasets and collections created in specific contexts and stored in separate institutions. We invite contributions that explore strategies, techniques, and methodologies for breaking down silos and connecting disparate data sets and sources, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and enabling new kinds of access to data. In particular, we welcome papers that discuss innovative approaches and best practices for designing and implementing data pipelines in the context of Digital Humanities, facilitating the flow and transformation of data across various formats, structures, and platforms.

In the last decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has started playing a significant role in data integration: we encourage submissions that explore the application of AI techniques, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal machine learning, in data integration. Topics may include AI-driven data mapping, alignment, entity recognition, data enrichment, and metadata generation.

Modelization and semantic frameworks play a crucial role in representing and integrating heterogeneous humanities data: we therefore invite papers that investigate the use of conceptual models, ontologies, semantic web technologies, and knowledge representation approaches for fostering harmonization and interoperability.

In a data-centered research domain such as DH, ensuring transparency, reliability, and accessibility of integrated data is of utmost importance. We welcome contributions that address the challenges and opportunities in adhering to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles in the context of data integration, sharing insights on best practices, ethical considerations, and data governance.

Related to this is the link with Open Research (also called Open Science or Open Scholarship) and how publication, curation, and preservation strategies as well as particular choices for (open or closed) tools, software, or infrastructures determine the impact and reusability of research results.

Finally, data-driven approaches often develop strategies to summarize and interpret information extracted from sources to create a new understanding of the material gathered. We welcome papers that propose case studies, methodological enquiries, data visualization techniques, and discussion of data-driven research within the domain of DH. Contributions that reuse data from other projects or institutions and integrate the challenges of data reuse in their papers will be particularly welcome.

We invite researchers, practitioners, scholars, and students to submit their original research, case studies, position papers, and poster presentations related to the theme of “Breaking Silos, Connecting Data” and its associated topics. We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives and encourage submissions from various disciplines within the Digital Humanities.

Important Dates:
• Abstract submission deadline: Wednesday 31 January (23:59 CET)
• Notification of acceptance: end of March 2024
• Conference dates: 5-7 June 2024, pre-conference workshops on 4 June 2024

Language:
We accept abstracts written in English and in any official language of the Benelux. Please keep in mind that English is the most widely understood language.

Formats:
For DH Benelux 2024, we welcome five types of proposals: (1) long papers; (2) short papers; (3) posters; (4) application and tool demonstrations; and (5) workshops. Abstracts should clearly state the title of the presentation and the names and affiliations of the authors and the presenters. If applicable, please include your ORCID. Please indicate for which category (or categories) of presentation you are submitting your proposal. The word length is dependent on the proposal type, see details below. References and/or bibliography are excluded from the word count. The reviewers will take word length into account. Proposals may contain graphics and illustrations.

Long papers: (abstracts of 1000-1500 words, paper presentation 20 mins + 10 mins for discussion) are suitable for presenting empirical work, theorizing, cross- and multidisciplinary work, research methods and concise theoretical arguments. The research presented in a long paper should be completed or in the final stages of development. The research’s stage of completion must be clearly stated in the abstract.

Short papers: (abstracts of 750-1000 words, paper presentation 10 mins + 5 mins for discussion) are well-suited for reporting on early stage and ongoing research, as well as new project presentations, technical details and the results of practical experimentation and proof of concepts.

Posters: (abstracts of 500-750 words) are particularly suited for detailed technical explanations and clarifications, and for the showcasing of projects and research alike.

Demonstrations: (abstracts of 500-750 words) of prototypes, work-in-progress or finished software, hardware technology, tools, datasets, digital publications and so forth. Demonstrations take place simultaneously, in parallel to poster sessions and are meant to be interactive. Conference delegates will have the opportunity to mingle among the demonstration tables in an informal setting.

Workshops: (abstracts of 1000-1500 words) are self-organized tracks planned on the day before the conference. Workshop proposals are welcome on relevant topics and/or innovative approaches/tools/techniques. Workshops can be organised either in-person or in fully virtual mode (hybrid format will not be able to be supported). We ask you to indicate the scientific scope, aims, preferred format (in-person or fully virtual), length (half day or full day), number of participants, and a preliminary program in your proposal.

The abstracts will be peer-reviewed by the DH Benelux 2024 Program Committee and published on the DH Benelux 2024 website. Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full research article for the DH Benelux Journal. A separate call for journal submissions will be made after the conference.

Submission
Submissions can be made via Easychair: Log in to EasyChair for DHB2024.

Evaluation
Proposals will be evaluated according to: relevance, clarity, novelty and contribution.
We look forward to your contributions and the opportunity to share insights, engage in discussions, and strengthen the Digital Humanities community at the DH Benelux 2024 Conference. Join us as we break silos and connect data, fostering integration and collaboration in the field of Digital Humanities.

For any queries, please contact artesresearch [at] kuleuven.be.

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PhD position Narratives in Argumentation (computational approaches)

https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/work-with-us/job-opportunities/?details=00347-02S000AI7P&cat=phd

DEADLINE: 7 January 23:59 CET

Under the supervision of Dr. Khalid Al Khatib, Dr. Federico Pianzola, and Prof. Malvina Nissim, you will work on an interdisciplinary project that involves developing computational methods for language analysis as well as conceptual models based on narrative and argumentation theories. Additionally, a dialogue with communication studies and research on persuasion is also extremely relevant.

Required Academic Experience:

  • Master’s degree in a relevant academic field (e.g., computer science, computational linguistics, information science, computational social sciences). Applicants should hold a master’s degree or be in the process of completing one by the end of January
  • proficiency in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and familiarity with Machine Learning (ML) in Python
  • good academic writing skills in English.

Candidates with the following additional experience are particularly encouraged to apply:

  • knowledge about narrative and argumentation theories
  • experience in analyzing narrative and argumentative texts

Knowledge of Dutch is NOT required.

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[Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this CfP]

Call for Papers

Special Issue at Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springer.
Submission deadline: 31 March 2024

Heritage Preservation in the Digital Age: Advances in machine learning, monomodal and multimodal processing, and human-machine interaction

https://link.springer.com/journal/11042/updates/26502650

Aims and Scope

This special issue focuses on analyzing, processing and valorizing all types of data related to cultural heritage, including tangible and intangible heritage. As stated by UNESCO, cultural heritage provides societies with a wealth of resources inherited from the past, created in the present for the benefit of future generations. The massive digitization of historical analogue resources and production of born digital documents provide us with large volumes of varied multimedia heritage data (images, maps, text, video, 3D objects, multi-sensor data, etc.), which represent an extremely rich heritage that can be exploited in a wide variety of fields, from research in social sciences and computational humanities to land use and territorial policies, including urban modeling, digital simulation, archaeology, tourism, education, culture preservation, creative media and entertainment.

In terms of research in computer science, artificial intelligence, and digital humanities, they address challenging problems related to the diversity, specificity or volume of the media, the veracity of the data, and the different user needs with respect to engaging with this rich material and the extraction of value out of the data. These challenges are reflected in the corresponding sub-fields of machine learning, signal processing, mono/multi-modal techniques and human-machine interaction.

The objective of this special issue is to present and discuss the latest and most significant trends on analysis, understanding and promotion of heritage contents, focusing on advances on machine learning, signal processing, mono/multi-modal techniques, and human-machine interaction. We welcome research contributions for (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • Monomodal analysis: image, text, video, 3D, music, sensor data and structured referentials
  • Information retrieval for multimedia heritage
  • AI assisted archaeology and heritage data processing
  • Multi-modal deep learning and time series analysis for heritage data
  • Heritage modeling, visualization, and virtualization
  • Smart digitization and reconstruction of heritage data
  • Open heritage data and bench-marking

The scope of targeted applications is extensive and includes:

  • Analysis, archaeometry of artifacts
  • Diagnosis and monitoring for restoration and preventive conservation
  • Geosciences / Geomatics for cultural heritage
  • Education
  • Smart and sustainable tourism
  • Urban planning
  • Digital Twins

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: 31 March 2024
  • Review period: 1 April - 30 July 2024
  • Notification: 31 July 2024
  • Author revision deadline: 15 October 2024
  • Final notification: 31 October 2024

Guest Editors

Submission Guidelines

Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the Instructions for Authors available from the Multimedia Tools and Applications website. Authors should submit through the online submission site at Editorial Manager® and select “SI 1250- Heritage Preservation in the Digital Age: Advances in machine learning, monomodal and multimodal processing, and human-machine interaction” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process. Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the special issue. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation, by at least three independent reviewers. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the review process.

SUMAC 2023. Please note that the authors of selected papers presented at workshop SUMAC2023 (ACM Multimedia 2023) are invited to submit an extended version of their contributions by taking into consideration both the reviewers’ comments on their conference paper, and the feedback received during presentation at the conference. It is worth clarifying that the extended version is expected to contain a substantial scientific contribution, e.g., in the form of new algorithms, experiments or qualitative/quantitative comparisons, and that neither verbatim transfer of large parts of the conference paper nor reproduction of already published figures will be tolerated. The extended versions of SUMAC2023 papers will undergo the standard, rigorous journal review process and be accepted only if well-suited to the topic of this special issue and meeting the scientific level of the journal. Final decisions on all papers are made by the Editor in Chief.

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Dear all,

As usual, the SIG-DLS is organizing a pre-conference workshop at the annual DH conference. This year it will be organized together with CLS-Infra and it will include both invited keynotes, demos, and lightning talks. We especially value the last format, which could be seen as an opportunity to share ongoing research (or just simple ideas) in an easy and engaging way. If you are interested in giving a lightning talk, check the Call at this link, and please spread the news!

All the best,

Simone