Digital Medievalist Journal – Call for Submissions

Dear digital medievalist community,

Digital Medievalist is an indexed (see below), open access and internationally peer-reviewed scholarly journal, devoted to topics likely to be of interest to medievalists working with digital media, though they need not be exclusively medieval in focus. It publishes work of original research and scholarship, theoretical articles on digital topics, notes on technological topics, commentary pieces discussing developments in the field, bibliographic and review articles, tutorials, and project reports. The journal also encourages reviews of books and major electronic sites and projects. All contributions are reviewed before publication by authorities in humanities computing.

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publicly available. Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.

The journal’s publisher, Open Library of Humanities, focuses on making content discoverable and accessible through indexing services. Content is also archived around the world to ensure long-term availability. Ubiquity Press journals are indexed by the following services: Nordic list, Google Scholar, Chronos, ExLibris, EBSCO Knowledge Base, JISC KB+, SHERPA RoMEO, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), EBSCOHost, OpenAire and ScienceOpen.

Prospective authors should consult the Author Guidelines at: https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/about/submissions/

More information can be found at the journal’s homepage: https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Digital Medievalist Editorial Board

Digital Diplomatics 2020 Call for Posters

Digital Diplomatics 2020 will bring together selected leading and upcoming experts in the study of Digital Diplomatics and related fields, to facilitate a productive exchange on the state and the future of the field. The conference will include expert panels, lightning talks, and a poster session, which is currently open for submissions. We are soliciting posters on any subject related to the study of charters and computing, including:

Machine Learning for Digital Diplomatics
Linguistic Corpora for Digital Diplomatics
Digitally Mediated Archives for Diplomatics
The Future of Diplomatics

Rolling Deadline no later than 17 March 12:00 GMT.
More information at https://digdipl20.hypotheses.org/87

Digital Medieval Congress 2019, Call for Proposals

1. NUME, Research Group on Latin Middle Ages, organizes in 2019 the first entirely virtual congress dedicated to medieval studies (DMC – Digital Medieval Congress).

2. The theme chosen for the first edition of the DMC is the ENVIRONMENT, in its broadest sense. We will consider Contributions investigating the problem of the relationship between medieval man and the environment in which he lived, the way in which it was perceived, imagined and transformed, with particular attention to the problem of its mental representation and the impact that this representation had on specific aspects of medieval European culture. Possible topics and approaches include but are not restricted to:

– The mutual impact between the urban context and the natural environment, and how one transforms the other;
– Researches on solutions adopted by medieval man in terms of pollution, urban hygiene, conception and use of green spaces;
– The environment understood and disseminated by political propaganda, theological reflection and artistic elaboration;
– Walking, traveling, fighting, hunting in the landscape;
– Empty places and human contexts;
– Dreamed, imagined, desired places;
– Tools and surveys for understanding the medieval landscape;
– Representations and use of animals, plants and minerals as “resources” (material, cultural, etc.).

3. There are no disciplinary limitations: contributions of history, philosophy, politics, literature, art, archeology, material culture, new technologies applied to medieval studies will be accepted.

– Contributions with two or more speakers are accepted;
– Contributions already structured in panels and leaded by a coordinator are accepted.

4. Participation proposals must have abstract format, written on a single pdf file in English, not exceeding 300 words. Furthermore, 5 keywords identifying the topic will have to be reported in the same file. Proposals must be accompanied by a short CV (no more than 1000 words), and sent by September 6th, 2019 to the email address:

info[AT]nuovomedioevo.it

NB: In the case of panels, the proposal must include a general title with a general presentation not exceeding 300 words, followed by abstracts of all the interventions (presented as in point 4.)

5. Proposals will be evaluated by the Review Board on the basis of quality, interest and originality. The judgment of the Commission will be unquestionable.

6. The Commission will notify the convocation for the speakers considered suitable by September 20th, 2019. The previous membership of the NUME Association does not necessarily imply the convocation.

7. The selected speakers will be asked to prepare a video intervention not exceeding 20 minutes, and to send it by October 12th, 2019 at:

info[AT]nuovomedioevo.it

8. The selected speakers will be required a registration fee (30 EURO each). Speakers who are not yet NUME Members will have to register with our Association (20 EURO membership fee).

9. The congress will be held on October 31st, 2019 on our social platform Numet. All received videos will be uploaded on the site, and organized in virtual rooms in which users from all over the world will be able to access and to follow and comment on the interventions. Chat rooms will also be created in which users can access to follow and animate the debate on contents.

10. At the end of the congress, all the contributions will be collected in a volume with the conference Proceedings. Speakers will be required to send a paper of their intervention by February 28th, 2020 (20,000 characters, notes and spaces included). Speakers who do not respect this deadline will be excluded from publication.

11. The Conference program will be published by October 20th, 2019.

12. The deadlines set out in this call must be strictly observed, otherwise the contribution will be excluded from the call.

NB: Please read the call at: https://www.nuovomedioevo.it/2019/06/17/digital-medieval-congress-2019/

Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Resource-Scarce Literatures

24-25 April 2019
University of Miami, FL

Call for Papers

This two-day symposium aims to bring together scholars and researchers working with computational approaches to texts. The event targets a broad audience interested in the application of digital text analysis technology, as text mining, topic modeling, authorship detection, writing style analysis, text reuse, or more generally tasks performed through Natural Language Processing (NLP). These techniques have significant potential not only for the study of literature but also for the study of texts and language in general. The symposium aims to create an open forum for showcasing these techniques.

The event is also grounded in the idea that computational text analysis should be integrated not only in the academic research by faculty and their PhD students, but also in a pedagogical environment. The use of computational analysis opens up new questions in literary studies, and exposes students to many different ways of thinking about literature today.

Computer-aided literary studies still thus tend to be focused on literatures written in modern languages. NLP tools are quite developed for modern languages, especially for the modern English language. For medieval and premodern languages, due to their instability of orthographic forms, attempts to conduct computer-aided (thus, to a degree, systematic) research face many challenges to normalize and standardize their linguistic forms. Therefore, the symposium also aims to explore the use and challenge of using NLP tools for studying literatures written in underrepresented and historical languages, such as the medieval and premodern variants and precursors of Spanish, French, Latin, and Dutch. Therefore, a special focus will be on the preprocessing routines available for these texts, such as lemmatization, by which we collect inflected forms under a single item or lemma, as well as challenges faced normalizing orthographic variation of historical texts and other languages with unstable orthographies. Among the international and national speakers we will have several experts on the topic.

Our envisioned program for the symposium is as follows: On the first day, there will be several workshops, including one devoted to integrating computer-assisted analysis in the classroom, which will offer an introduction to stylometry, visualization, and text-reuse. On the second day, there will be talks (30 min) that present ongoing research projects, methodologies, and challenges. The subject languages are preferably, but not limited to underrepresented and historical languages.

We are specifically interested in receiving proposals for contributions on one or more of the following topics:

    • Stylometry for authorship studies
    • Stylometry as an approach to literary study
    • Natural Language Processing and linguistic annotation
    • Lemmatizers for underrepresented modern languages and old languages
    • Text reuse detection
    • Normalization
    • Distributional semantics
    • Network analysis
    • Text visualization

We especially welcome contributions from those working with any type of textual corpora, preferably those conceived for a specific research and/ from a diachronic perspective. We conceive this symposium as an opportunity to share (best)-practices and broaden conversation, thus proposals can be on ongoing and experimental methodologies.

Confirmed Speakers

  • Greta Franzini (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)
  • Francisco Gago Jover (College of the Holly Cross)
  • Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp)
  • Enrique Manjavacas (University of Antwerp)
  • Marco Passarotti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)
  • Dennis Tenen (Columbia University)

Organization committee

  • Susanna Allés Torrent
  • Lindsay Thomas

Scientific committee

  • Susanna Allés Torrent
  • Alberto Cairo
  • Mitsunori Ogihara
  • Allison Schifani

Important dates 

  • 15 January 2018. Deadline for the submission of abstracts
  • 30 January 2019. Notification of acceptance
  • 24-25 April. Symposium

Abstract submissions and format
We invite researchers to submit 500-word proposals (including footnotes but excluding the bibliography) in one single page related to any of the topics mentioned above. The format of the contributions will be 20 mins presentations followed by 10 min Q&A. Title, name(s) and affiliation should appear and the preferred formats are .txt, .docx, .odt and pdf.

Submissions must be sent to susanna_alles@miami.edu and they will be reviewed by the scientific committee.

Languages 
The official language of the symposium is English, but it is possible to submit a proposal also in Spanish, French, or Italian.

The symposium will be held with support from: 

  • Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Miami
  • College of Arts and Sciences
  • SEED You Choose Program
  • Center for the Humanities

In collaboration with: 

  • University of Antwerp
  • The Digital Humanities Flanders (DHuF) research community, sponsored by the FWO

CfP: DATECH 2019: Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage (Brussels, 8-10 May 2019)

We are delighted to draw your attention to our Call for Papers for DATeCH 2019, which will take place from 8-10 May 2019 at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in the heart of Brussels, Belgium.

The International DATeCH (Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage) conference brings together researchers and practitioners seeking innovative approaches for the creation, transformation and exploitation of historical documents in digital form. This interdisciplinary conference, takes place at the intersection of computer science, (digital) humanities, and cultural heritage studies. The DATeCH 2019 is jointly organised by IMPACT Centre of Competence, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, DARIAH-BE and CLARIN-Flanders.

For full details of the Call for Papers are available on the DATeCH 2019 website: http://datech.digitisation.eu/submission/

The deadlines for submission are:

  • Abstract submission deadline: 16 December 2018, 23:59 CET
  • Full Paper submission deadline: 20 January 2018, 23:59 CET

We look forward to welcoming you to Brussels!

Apostolos Antonacopoulos, Salford University, UK
Marco Büchler, Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Germany
Sally Chambers, Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, Belgium / DARIAH-BE