Workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities 2022 (COMHUM 2022)

9-10 June 2022

How to come to the conference. The workshop will take place in room  275 of the Internef building. Please take the metro M1 and leave at station UNIL-CHAMBERONNE. Then it will be a 3 minutes walk. Usually, you get a public transport pass at your hotel reception. If not, you can buy tickets at the metro station or at cff.ch (there is a very useful app too).

Program

Program (version 1 June 2022). The title of paper called “Analyzing Character Networks in Fan Fictions of Archive of Our Own” is now “Analyzing Character Networks in Crossover Fan Fictions of Archive of Our Own”. The program will be updated soon.

In the following list, click on a title to get access to the corresponding abstract (PDF).

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

Invited Speaker

• Vincent Labatut, Université d’Avignon [SLIDES]

Organization

The workshop will take place in room  275 of the Internef building. Please take the metro M1 and leave at station UNIL-CHAMBERONNE. Then it will be a 3 minutes walk. Usually, you get a public transport pass at your hotel reception. If not, you can buy tickets at the metro station or at cff.ch (there is a very useful app too).

The workshop is organized by members of the Lausanne Lab for Computational and Statistical Text Analysis (https://wp.unil.ch/llist/en): 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 (https://www.unil.ch/sli), with the support of the Center for Linguistics and the Science of Language (https://www.unil.ch/clsl), 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)
• Giovanni Colavizza (University of Amsterdam)
• Guillaume Guex (UNIL, SLI)
• Coline Métrailler (UNIL, SLI, co-chair)
• Fabian Moss (University of Amsterdam)
• Davide Picca (UNIL, SLI)
• Michael Piotrowski (UNIL, SLI)
• Yannick Rochat (UNIL, SLI, chair)
• Elena Spadini (UNIL, CLSR)
• Mathieu Triclot (Université de technologie de Belfort Montbéliard)
• Aris Xanthos (UNIL, SLI)

Further Info

Please get in touch with Yannick Rochat (yannick.rochat@unil.ch) or Coline Métrailler (coline.metrailler@unil.ch) for specific questions whose answer may not be found on the website.