Workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities 2026 (COMHUM 2026)
The third edition of the COMHUM workshop is taking place on 9 and 10 September 2026 at the University of Lausanne (UNIL)
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 4-5 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
[PDF] COMHUM 2026 – Program [indicative]
| 9 September | COMPUTATIONAL GAME STUDIES TRACK | |
|---|---|---|
| Computational Game Studies - Session 1 | Data Analysis | |
| 9h15 | OPENING | |
| 9h30 | Johan Cuda | Toward a Humanities-Oriented Methodology for Topic Modeling |
| 10h | Côme Parrinello | Video Games as Literary Art : The Role of the Protagonist in Narrative Games, A narrative and stylistic study. |
| 10h30 | Coffee break | |
| KEYNOTE | ||
| 11h | Audrey Moutat | From Design to Immersion: Spatial Dynamics in Digital Environments |
| 12h | LUNCH | |
| Computational Game Studies - Session 2 | AI tools | |
| 13h30 | Guillaume Guex | Refining the Computational Analysis of Interactive Fiction: A Hybrid Framework using Bag-of-Paths Formalism and LLMs |
| 14h | Martin Moritz and Peltonen Jaakko | Intelligence Artificielle et Jeux Vidéo |
| 14h30 | Jari Lindroos, Tanja Välisalo, Raine Koskimaa and Tero Kerttula | Towards Real-Time Analysis of Digital Game Reception |
| 15h | COFFEE BREAK | |
| Computational Game Studies - Session 3 | Case Studies | |
| 15h30 | Harshit Kargeti | Implementing and Analyzing Settlers of Catan as a Digital Artifact: Computational Recreation and Procedural System Analysis |
| 16h | John Bessai | Practicing Civic Adjudication: A MacIntyrean Model of Ethics in a Parameterized Game-Engine Micro-Prototype |
| 16h30 | Maxime Kremer | Video Games as Prosopographical Networks and Geographic Information Systems for Early Medieval History: Crusader Kings III and the Digital Historian |
| 17h | End of day 1 | |
| 19h | Restaurant (optional) |
| 10 September | GLOBAL TRACK | |
|---|---|---|
| Global track – Session 1 | Cultural heritage | |
| 8h30 | Tim Eipert and Fabian C. Moss | Towards a Generative Model of Medieval Chant |
| 9h | Luca Biccheri, Roberta Padlina and Frederic Goubier | Towards a Computational Ontology of Fallacies |
| 9h30 | Rémi Petitpierre | Computational Map Semiotics: Detecting and Encoding Cartographic Signs in Large Heterogeneous Historical Corpora |
| 10h | Venla Poso, Ida Toivanen and Jari Lindroos | The Longevity and Sustainability of AI in Research Infrastructure and Cultural Heritage |
| 10h30 | COFFEE BREAK | |
| Global track – Session 2 | Digitalization | |
| 11h | Florian Wachter, Andreas Ederer, Gregor Diez, Anton Skrinjar and Stephan Schneider | A Multimodal Computational Imaging Pipeline for the Recovery of Weathered and Erased Stone Inscriptions |
| 11h30 | Adriano Ettari and Guido Russo | MAGIC: A Computational Framework for Large-Scale Manuscript Digitization, Preservation, and Semantic Enrichment |
| 12h | Ambra Torregrossa | In Ariosto’s Creative Workshop: From Ink to the Digital Genetic Edition of the Autograph Fragments of the Orlando furioso as a Virtual Research Environment |
| 12h30 | LUNCH | |
| Global track – Session 3 | Methods | |
| 14h | François Bavaud | On the geometry of word embeddings, with applications to lexical variety |
| 14h30 | Maitrayee Mukherjee | Computing the Wayward: A Participatory Computational Method for Reading Complex Archives |
| 15h | Aris Xanthos et Colin Luginbühl | Executable claims for graph-based text analysis: from exploration to auditability |
| 15h30 | COFFEE BREAK | |
| Global track – Session 4 | Textual analysis | |
| 16h | Simon Gabay et Jean-Luc Falcone | Computing Flaubert’s gueuloir: a phonetic-driven stylometric analysis |
| 16h30 | Regina Guzaerova and Elena Hamidy | Negotiating Ethics and Aesthetics: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives on the Facebook Corpus of Russian-Language Authors |
| 17h | Jan Jokisch et Antonio Rojas Castro | Evaluating Network Analysis in Drama: A Gold-Standard Assessment of Scenic Co-Presence |
| 17h30 | CLOSING |
Special track: computation and video games
Without doubt, the digital has become an integral part of our everyday experience, whether it is due to our use of digital devices, the ever-increasing amounts of data collected and processed by said devices, or the prevalence of LLMs and AI agents in most websites or softwares. Academia and the humanities have never been more digital, which pushes digital humanities to frontiers beyond computational approaches to humanities or the application of humanities research methods to the digital. In this context, the COMHUM workshop series positions itself as an international forum primarily devoted to the following research questions:
(1) which formal or computational approaches can help address the particular challenges posed by the growing presence of the digital in humanities, e.g., digital artifacts, software, LLMs, and computer-generated data? In these cases and beyond,
(2) which methods are most appropriate to tackle the challenges posed by humanities research and how can they be applied to concrete research questions?
The first day is devoted to the specific topic of computation and video games. This topic explores computational methods for analyzing video games as well as humanities approaches to computation in video games. It has a number of ramifications in a variety of disciplines, including software studies, critical code studies, 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 2026 will be a perfect opportunity to bring together researchers from various communities studying video games using computational approaches or studying computation in video games, to review the state of the art in this domain and to outline its future developments.
In the spirit of the previous editions of the COMHUM workshop, the second day was open to submissions on any topic pertaining to theoretical or applied research on computational methods for humanities research broadly conceived.
The official language of the workshop is English.
Invited Speaker
- Audrey Moutat, University of Limoges, Centre de Recherches Sémiotiques (CeReS)
Scientific Committee
- Fanny Barnabé, University of Namur
- François Bavaud, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST
- Sophie Bémelmans, University of Lausanne, SLI
- Maude Bonenfant, Université du Québec à Montréal
- Giovanni Colavizza, University of Copenhagen and University of Bologna
- Guillaume Guex, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST
- Damien Hansen, Université libre de Bruxelles
- Pierre-Yves Hurel, University of Lausanne, SLI
- Loïc Jeanson, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST
- Coline Métrailler, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST
- Isaac Pante, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST
- Davide Picca, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST
- Michael Piotrowski, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST
- Loris Rimaz, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST (program chair)
- Yannick Rochat, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST (program chair)
- Elena Spadini, University of Bern
- Sébastien de Valeriola, Université libre de Bruxelles
- Aris Xanthos, University of Lausanne, SLI, LLIST
Local organisers
- Sophie Bémelmans
- Guillaume Guex
- Loïc Jeanson
- Colin Luginbühl
- Stéphanie Pichot
- Loris Rimaz (program chair)
- Yannick Rochat (program chair)
- Aris Xanthos
Further Info
Please get in touch with Loris Rimaz (loris.rimaz@unil.ch) or Yannick Rochat (yannick.rochat@unil.ch) for specific questions whose answer may not be found on the website.
Topics
The topics of the workshop are divided into two tracks. The special track focuses on formal and computational approaches to video games as digital artifacts as well as humanities approaches to computation in video games. This can include research related to the development and use of computational methods for video game analysis, including reverse engineering, decompiling and data collection, or analysis of computation and the emergence of code in video games, including their influence on narrative, gameplay and design.
Topics in the special track include, but are not limited to:
- Methods for data extraction in video games (e.g. telemetry, assets, models, code)
- Computational methods for video game analysis (including spatial, representational and narrative aspects)
- Analyses of intersection of computational approaches and the study of video games
- Humanities approaches to computation of video games (including software)
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, archaeology or philosophy).
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)
- Computational methods in the humanities (e.g., for language and literary studies, historical studies, or multimodal data)
- Applications of computer vision, image analysis and spatial analysis in the humanities
Submissions
We invite researchers to submit abstracts of 500 to 1000 words (excluding references). Abstracts will be reviewed double-blind by the members of the program committee, and all submissions will receive at least two independent reviews. Abstracts submitted at review stage must not contain the authors’ names, affiliations, or any information that may disclose the authors’ identity.
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to present their research at the workshop as a talk, and the abstracts will be published in the book of abstracts of the workshop.
The abstracts must use the ACL format (LaTeX, Word). Abstracts must be submitted electronically in PDF format. For abstract submissions, we use EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=comhum26
Authors of accepted contributions can be invited, after the conference, to submit a full paper version (6–16 pages), which, after peer-review, will be published in an open-access, electronic conference volume endowed with persistent identifiers (to be confirmed soon).