Hi all,

this should be of interest to people on this list:

 

Call for Papers: Data-driven Research in the History of Southeast Europe and Turkey 

Workshop

 

Hosted by: The Chair for the History of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey (http://www.ort.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/) and the Centre for Mediterranean Studies (http://www.zms.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/index.html.en) at Ruhr University Bochum

 

Venue: Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

 

Period: 25-26 June 2015                                                                        

 

Rapidly emerging fields in the digital humanities and social sciences, including, prominently, digital history, have profited significantly from new computing tools developed in recent decades in the context of the IT boom. Among the most interesting recent developments in computational data analysis and visualization in these fields are the emergence of large, readily available “cultural data sets” (i.e., huge corpora of digitalized texts in media archives), innovative text-mining analysis software (e.g., topic modeling and keyword- and relation-extraction tools), and breakthroughs in computer graphics (e.g., interactive 3-D dynamic imagery and visualizations of complex systems and spatial data). This advance in the digital humanities and social sciences has occasionally been described as the ‘data-driven turn,’ and its application in historical research is usually called ‘data-driven history.’ When they are applicable, data-driven historical research methods provide much more extensive empirical backing than more traditional methods, sometimes supporting inductive conclusions, and many intuitive ways of presenting results. Consequently, data-driven history and related fields have taken root in the major international research.

 

This workshop will examine the current state of cross-disciplinary data-driven research on the history of Southeast Europe and Turkey and seek to stimulate its further recognition and application. Therefore, the organizers aim to bring together cross-disciplinary scholars and scientist who follow different data-driven approaches in their work on topics related to the history of Southeast Europe and Turkey. In addition to being a forum for the presentation of participants’ research projects, the workshop will focus on two issues. Firstly, it will consider ways in which data-driven methods can help solve problems in regional historical research (e.g., a lack of written sources for certain periods or multi-lingual sources, internationally dispersed archival records, diverging ethno-nationalist traditions of historiography, etc.). Secondly, the workshop will consider some of the common problems for data-driven research in the history of Turkey and Southeast Europe (e.g., the availability of data and digitalized collections of texts, the lack of regional reference corpora, copyright issues, censorship, etc.).

 

We welcome submissions from all researchers, regardless of their core disciplines, working on topics related to the history of Southeast Europe and Turkey. It is required that papers follow methods of data-driven analysis and visualization and incorporate applications of related software tools (e.g., corpus-driven discourse analysis, text mining, knowledge discovery, computational social network analysis, computational geospatial analysis, computational agent-based modeling, computational statistics etc.).

 

Prospective speakers are invited to submit abstracts of approximately 500 words with their C.V.s. Submissions should include name, affiliation, and contact details. The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2015. Accepted participants will be asked to submit original papers (max. 10,000 words) in English no later than May 15, 2015. Papers will be pre-circulated among all participants to leave room for discussion at the conference. Please note that the official language of the workshop will be English and all documents must be in English.Travel and accommodation costs of all accepted participants will be reimbursed. Participants’ papers will be published in an edited volume.

                                                                                                  

The workshop is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

 

For more information about the conference or to submit an abstract, please email the workshop coordinator, Dr. Dino Mujadžević:  Dino.Mujadzevic@rub.de