WHiSe III is a symposium aimed at strengthening communication between scholars in the Digital Humanities and Semantic Web communities and discussing unthought-of opportunities arising from the research problems of the former. Its best-of-both-worlds format will accommodate the practices of scholarly dialogue in both fields by inviting visions, real systems and debate.
WHiSe is co-located with the 2nd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK)
Important Dates
- Submission deadline: Tuesday, March 5, 2019*
- Notification to authors: Tuesday, April 2, 2019*
- Camera-ready paper due: Wednesday, April 17, 2019*
- Workshop day: May 20, 21 or 22 (TBC), 2019
(*) All deadlines are 23:59 Hawaii time
Call for papers
The emergence of tractable and affordable methods for the collection, enhancement and analysis of data generated en masse has helped shape several research fields, such as social sciences, into structured research fields. Digital Humanities are enjoying such a transformation to the point that their very boundaries and methodological foundations are being called into question. The quality and relevance of findings obtained from the thorough, human-driven analysis of a few sources, compared to unsupervised large-scale analytics on masses of data, is a fervent ongoing debate; and yet, the latter cannot prescind from a conscious effort in shaping the world to which the analyses need to relate. This has largely taken the form of knowledge modelling efforts, from which many ontologies, controlled vocabularies and conceptual models like CIDOC-CRM, the Europeana Data Model and FRBRoo have arisen. However, other fields traditionally less reliant on machine-readable data have seen the emergence of ‘ecological’ communities with an approach to the Web of Data. Recent examples include the 2014 ISAW papers for the ancient world, Transforming Musicology for music and musicology and Linked Pasts for history and archaeology.
As these emerging research networks deal with the reality of the Semantic Web and the ever-growing Linked Data Cloud, the WHiSe workshop series was conceived from a reflection on the extent to which the Semantic Web community is serving the needs of historians, philologists, cultural critics, musicologists and other humanists that generally: (1) cannot rely on structured data generated en masse through social networks or online media platforms; (2) deal with vague, fragmentary, uncertain, contradictory and yet still valuable evidence that poses a challenge even to Artificial Intelligence research per se; (3) have good reason to value the systematic investigation of a few sources over the (semi-)automated analytical findings on masses of content. WHiSe addresses this need by promoting dialogue between humanists who employ or are contemplating Semantic Web technologies, and Semantic Web scholars providing accounts of applied research in the Humanities. It will also be a forum for raising opportunities to explore novel research problems that can be relevant to both communities.
WHiSe III welcomes original research contributions crossing Humanities and the Semantic Web. Scholars who have conducted research or developed impactful applications are invited to submit full papers (12 pages, Springer LNCS typeset) with appropriately evaluated contributions. WHiSe III also welcomes short vision or position papers (6 pages, Springer LNCS typeset) on novel challenges or approaches to existing problems.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Knowledge base generation from classical texts
- Linking data within and across gazetteers
- Semantic enrichment of data from historical records and biographies
- Ecosystems and process descriptions for linking data in the humanities
- Linked Digital Libraries and semantic archives
- Ontology adoption in specific domains in the humanities
- Knowledge graph construction and exploitation within and across domains
- Computational methods for the prosopography of historical figures
- Capturing, modelling and reasoning on musical data
- The role of ontologies and controlled vocabularies in data preservation
- Criticism of Semantic Web standards from the point of view of humanities scholarship
- Ethical issues in using Semantic Web and Linked Data and their impact on the openness of traditional research data
- Notions on integrating digital humanities and data science
- Knowledge bottlenecks and practical difficulties in using Semantic Web technologies by humanities scholars
- Utopian / dystopian visions of the Semantic Web of the future
Submissions in all the categories mentioned above (both full and short papers) will be peer-reviewed by acknowledged researchers familiar with both scientific communities. Accepted papers will be published as online proceedings courtesy of CEUR-WS.org.
Submission Instructions
Papers will be evaluated according to their significance, originality, technical content, style, clarity, and relevance to the workshop.
We welcome the following types of contributions:
- Full papers (up to 12 pages)
- Short papers (up to 6 pages)
All submissions must be PDF documents written in English and formatted according to LNCS instructions for authors.
Page limits are inclusive of references and appendices, if any. Papers are to be submitted through the EasyChair Conference Management System. Please note that paper submissions to WHiSe III are not anonymous.
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop, in order to present the paper there, and to the conference. For further instructions please refer to the LDK 2019 page.
Prior Publication and Multiple Submissions
Every submitted paper must represent original and unpublished work: it must not be under review or accepted elsewhere and there must be a significantly clear element of novelty distinguishing a submitted paper from any other prior publication or current submission. See also the guidelines of the LDK 2019 call for papers.
Workshop Program
To come later
People
Organizing Committee
- Alessandro Adamou, Data Science Institute, NUI Galway
- Marieke van Erp – KNAW Humanities Cluster
- Albert Meroño Peñuela – Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Steering Committee
- Enrico Daga – The Open University
- Leif Isaksen – University of Exeter
Contact email: whiseworkshop@gmail.com
Program Committee
- Elton Barker, The Open University
- Francesca Benatti, The Open University
- Victor de Boer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Enrico Daga, The Open University
- Rossana Damiano, University of Turin
- Marilena Daquino, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
- Paula Granados-Garcia, The Open University
- Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University and University of Helsinki
- Ioanna Kyvernitou, National University of Ireland Galway
- Paul Mulholland, The Open University
- Kevin Page, University of Oxford
- Silvio Peroni, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
- Rainer Simon, Austrian Institute of Technology
- Konstantin Todorov, University of Montpellier
- Francesca Tomasi, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
- François Vignale, Université du Maine
More to be confirmed
Proceedings
To come after the workshop…
