CFP: 4th Workshop on Computational History, Singapur, 6 Nov, 17

HistoInformatics2017
06.11.2017, Singapur, Pan Pacific Singapore

Held in conjunction with the 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017), 6-10 November, Singapore.

Mohammed Hasanuzzaman, ADAPT Centre: The Global Centre of Excellence for Digital Content and Media Innovation, Ireland; Adam Jatowt, Kyoto University, Japan; Gäel Dias, University of Caen Normandie, France; Marten Düring, Luxembourg Centre for Digital and Contemporary History (C2DH), Luxemburg; Antal van Den Bosch, Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

http://histoinformatics2017.adaptcentre.ie/

The HistoInformatics workshop series brings together researchers in the historical disciplines, computer science and associated disciplines as well as the cultural heritage sector. Historians, like other humanists show keen interests in computational approaches to the study and processing of digitized sources (usually text, images, audio). In computer science, experimental tools and methods stand the challenge to be validated regarding their relevance for real-world questions and applications. The HistoInformatics workshop series is designed to bring researchers in both fields together, to discuss best practices as well as possible future collaborations.

Traditionally, historical research is based on the hermeneutic investigation of preserved records and artefacts to provide a reliable account of the past and to discuss different hypotheses. Alongside this hermeneutic approach historians have always been interested to translate primary sources into data and used methods, often borrowed from the social sciences, to analyze them. A new wealth of digitized historical documents have however opened up completely new challenges for the computer-assisted analysis of e.g. large text or image corpora. Historians can greatly benefit from the advances of computer and information sciences which are dedicated to the processing, organization and analysis of such data. New computational techniques can be applied to help verify and validate historical assumptions. We call this approach HistoInformatics, analogous to Bioinformatics and ChemoInformatics which have respectively proposed new research trends in biology and chemistry. The main topics of the workshop are:

  1. support for historical research and analysis in general through the application of Computer Science theories or technologies,
  2. analysis and re-use of historical texts,
  3. analysis of collective memories,
  4. visualizations of historical data,
  5. access to large wealth of accumulated historical knowledge.

HistoInformatics workshops took place thrice in the past. The first one (http://www.dl.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/histoinformatics2013/) was held in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Social Informatics in Kyoto, Japan in 2013. The second workshop (http://www.dl.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/histoinformatics2014/) took place at the same conference in the following year in Barcelona. The third workshop (http://www.dl.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/histoinformatics2016/) was held on July 2016 in Krakow, Poland in conjunction with ADHO’s 2016 Digital Humanities conference.

For Histoinformatics2017, we are interested in a wide range of topics which are of relevance for history, the cultural heritage sector and the humanities in general. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Natural language processing and text analytics applied to historical documents
  • Analysis of longitudinal document collections
  • Search and retrieval in document archives and historical collections, associative search
  • Causal relationship discovery based on historical resources
  • Named entity recognition and disambiguation
  • Entity relationship extraction, detecting and resolving historical references in text
  • Finding analogical entities over time
  • Computational linguistics for old texts
  • Analysis of language change over time
  • Digitizing and archiving
  • Modeling evolution of entities and relationships over time
  • Automatic multimedia document dating
  • Applications of Artificial Intelligence techniques to History
  • Simulating and recreating the past course of actions, social relations, motivations, figurations
  • Handling uncertain and fragmentary text and image data
  • Automatic biography generation
  • Mining Wikipedia for historical data
  • OCR and transcription of old texts
  • Effective interfaces for searching, browsing or visualizing historical data collections
  • Studies on collective memory
  • Studying and modeling forgetting and remembering processes
  • Estimating credibility of historical findings
  • Probing the limits of Histoinformatics
  • Epistemologies in the Humanities and Computer Science

Practical Matters continue here