What to Do with a Million Books:
Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science.
Call for Submissions
Deadline: August 31, 2006
Sponsored by the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago
and the College of Science and Letters at the Illinois Institute of
Technology.
Chicago, November 5th & 6th, 2006
The goal of this colloquium is to bring together researchers and
scholars in the Humanities and Computer Sciences to examine the
current state of Digital Humanities as a field of intellectual
inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives
for future research.
In the wake of recent large-scale digitization projects aimed at
providing universal access to the world's vast textual repositories,
humanities scholars, librarians and computer scientists find
themselves newly challenged to make these resources functional and
meaningful.
As Gregory Crane recently pointed out (1), digital access to "a
million books" confronts us with the need to provide viable solutions
to a range of difficult problems: analog to digital conversion,
machine translation, information retrieval and data mining, to name a
few. Moreover, mass digitization leads not just to problems of scale:
new goals can also be envisioned, for example, catalyzing the
development of new computational tools for context-sensitive
analysis. If we are to build systems to interrogate usefully massive
text collections for meaning, we will need to draw not only on the
technical expertise of computer scientists but also learn from the
traditions of self-reflective, inter-disciplinary inquiry practiced
by humanist scholars. If we do not, we run the risk of having our
interaction with these resources defined by technical and commercial
interests alone.
The book as the locus of much of our knowledge has long been at the
center of discussions in digital humanities. But as mass digitization
efforts accelerate a change in focus from a print-culture to a
networked, digital-culture, it will become necessary to pay more
attention to how the notion of a text itself is being re-constituted.
We are increasingly able to interact with texts in novel ways, as
linguistic, visual, and statistical processing provide us with new
modes of reading, representation, and understanding. This shift makes
evident the necessity for humanities scholars to enter into a
dialogue with computer scientists to understand the new language of
open standards, search queries, visualization and social networks.
Digitizing "a million books" is thus not only a problem for computer
scientists. Tomorrow, a million scholars will have to re-evaluate
their notions of archive, textuality and materiality in the wake of
these developments. How will the humanities scholar and the computer
scientist find ways to collaborate in the "Age of Google?"
Colloquium Website:
Date:
November 5th & 6th, 2006
Location:
The University of Chicago
Ida Noyes Hall
1212 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Invited Speakers:
Greg Crane (Professor of Classics, Tufts University) has been engaged
since 1985 in planning and development of the Perseus Project, which
he directs as the Editor-in-Chief. Besides supervising the Perseus
Project as a whole, he has been primarily responsible for the
development of the morphological analysis system which provides many
of the links within the Perseus database.
Ben Shneiderman is Professor in the Department of Computer Science,
founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction
Laboratory, and Member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
and the Institute for Systems Research, all at the University of
Maryland. He is a leading expert in human-computer interaction and
information visualization and has published extensively in these and
related fields.
John Unsworth is Dean of the Graduate School of Library and
Information Science and Professor of English at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to that, he was on the faculty at
the University of Virginia where he also led the Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities. He has published widely in the
field of Digital Humanities and was the recipient last year of the
Lyman Award for scholarship in technology and humanities.
Program Committee:
Prof. Helma Dik, Department of Classics, University of Chicago
Dr. Catherine Mardikes, Bibliographer for Classics, the Ancient Near
East, and General Humanities, University of Chicago
Prof. Martin Mueller, Department of English and Classics,
Northwestern University
Dr. Mark Olsen, Associate Director, The ARTFL Project, University of
Chicago
Prof. Shlomo Argamon, Computer Science Department, Illinois Institute
of Technology
Prof. Wai Gen Yee, Computer Science Department, Illinois Institute of
Technology
Call for Participation:
Participation in the colloquium is open to all. We welcome
submissions for:
1. Paper presentations (20 minute maximum)
2. Poster sessions
3. Software demonstrations
Suggested submission topics:
* Representing text genealogies and variance
* Automatic extraction and analysis of natural language style
elements
* Visualization of large corpus search results
* The materiality of the digital text
* Interpreting symbols: textual exegesis and game playing
* Mashup: APIs for integrating discrete information resources
* Intelligent Documents
* Community based tagging / folksonomies
* Massively scalable text search and summaries
* Distributed editing & annotation tools
* Polyglot Machines: Computerized translation
* Seeing not reading: visual representations of literary texts
* Schemas for scholars: field and period specific ontologies for
the humanities
* Context sensitive text search
* Towards a digital hermeneutics: data mining and pattern finding
Submission Format:
Please submit a (2 page maximum) abstract in either PDF or MS Word
format to dhcs-submissions@listhost.uchicago.edu.
Important Dates:
Deadline for Submissions: August 31th
Notification of Acceptance: September 15th
Full Program Announcement: September 15th
Contact Info:
General Inquiries: dhcs-conference@listhost.uchicago.edu
Organizational Committee:
Mark Olsen, mark@gide.uchicago.edu, Associate Director, ARTFL
Project, University of Chicago.
Catherine Mardikes, mardikes@uchicago.edu, Bibliographer for
Classics, the Ancient Near East, and General Humanities, University
of Chicago.
Arno Bosse abosse@uchicago.edu, Director of Technology, Humanities
Division, University of Chicago.
Shlomo Argamon, argamon@iit.edu, Department of Computer Science,
Illinois Institute of Technology.
(1) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/03contents.html
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