Actualité
Appels à contributions
What to do with a million books ?

What to do with a million books ?

Publié le par Alexandre Gefen

What to do with a Million Books : Chicago Colloquium on Digital  Humanities and Computer Science

Sponsored by the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago and the College of Science and Letters at the Illinois Institute of  Technology.

In the wake of recent large-scale digitization projects, aimed at providing universal access to the world's libraries, humanities  scholars and computer scientists find themselves newly challenged to  make these resources functional and meaningful.

As Gregory Crane recently pointed out (1), digital access to 'million books' confronts us with the need to provide viable solutions to a range of difficult technical problems: analog to digital  conversion, machine translation, information retrieval and data  mining, to name a few. But mass digitization leads not just to  problems of scale. A key goal is to catalyze the development of new  computational tools for context-sensitive analysis. If we are to build systems to usefully interrogate massive text collections for meaning, we will thus need to draw not only on the technical  expertise of computer scientists but also learn from the long  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 purely technical and  commercial interests. In addition, computer scientists may also  enable humanities scholars to interact with texts in novel ways,  particularly as linguistic, visual, and statistical processing  provide us with new modes of reading, visualization, and understanding.


The book, as the locus of our knowledge, has long been at the center of discussions in digital humanities. But as mass digitization efforts accelerate the shift from a print-culture to a networked  digital-culture, it will become increasingly necessary to pay more attention to how the notion of a text itself is being re-constituted  collectively. 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, queries, visualization and social networks.

Digitizing 'a million books' is 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. Our familiar modes of scholarly edition, analysis, interpretation and publication are being challenged and  transformed in a world where blogs and wikis are busy creating new  knowledge and folksonomies are shaping our access to online archives.

How will the humanities scholar and the computer scientist find ways to collaborate in the Age of google ?

The goal of this colloquium is to bring together scholars and researchers 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.

(1) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/crane/03crane.html

Date: November 5th & 6th, 2006

 Location:  The University of Chicago

Ida Noyes Hall

1212 East 59th Street

Chicago, IL 60637


Keynote Speakers:

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 15th
  • Notification of Acceptance: September 15th
  • Full Program Announcement: September 15th

 Contact Info:

 Organizational Committee:

  • Mark Olsen, mark@gide.uchicago.edu, Associate Director, ARTFLProject, 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.