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:
- General Inquiries: dhcs-conference@listhost.uchicago.edu
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.