Biographical Data in a Digital World – Workshop Amsterdam, 9 April 2015

Call for Papers

The digital age has changed the way academics work in every discipline. Computers allow for the processing of digital data much faster than humans can do, they are able to show patterns and statistical analyses and can detect links that otherwise would be hard to find. This workshop explores whether and how, in the field of digital humanities, biographical data are special. Biographies are interesting for analysis with computer techniques, since individuals share a set of common characteristics that can be relatively easily identified by a machine, such as a birthdate, a partner, a profession, and a network. Tools and approaches from the digital humanities can be used for both quantitative analyses of such data and for providing leads for more qualitative research questions.

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from both the humanities and the computer sciences to exchange experiences, methods and practices with respect to ICT mediated quantitative and qualitative analysis of biographical data. What can we do already with computational methods with the huge amount of digital biographical data that is available? What will we be able to do in the future? What will we not be able to do?

We invite papers with a maximum of 2.500 words, which will undergo a single blind peer review process. After acceptance papers can be extended to 6.000 words.

Topics which may be addressed include, but certainly are not limited to:

1) Mining biographies for structured information
2) Biographies and linked data
3) Using biographical information for quantitative analyses
4) The canonization of people and events in history
5) The use or uselessness of big data for biographical research
6) Visualizing biographical data
7) Biographical Dictionaries
8) Dealing with biographical data in heterogeneous datasets
9) Practices in digitizing and converting biographical data to a software interpretable format
10) Automatic biography generation
11) Biographies across countries and cultures
12) Standards, vocabularies and best practices for the encoding and processing of biographical data

Important Dates

Deadline for the paper submission: 31 January, 2015.
Notification of acceptance: 1 March, 2015
Workshop date: 9 April, 2015
Deadline final papers: 15 May, 2015
Accepted papers will be published in online proceedings, June 2015.

Paper submission

Papers should be submitted through EasyChair.

Location
Amsterdam, more information to follow.

Accepted papers

Program

Organizing committee:
Serge ter Braake, VU University Amsterdam
Antske Fokkens, VU University Amsterdam
Ronald Sluijter, Huygens ING The Hague
Thierry Declerck, DFKI GmbH and Saarland University
Eveline Wandl-Vogt, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften

Program committee:

TBA

Contact

For further details please contact Serge ter Braake or Antske Fokkens