The Reverse Telescope: Big Data and Distant Reading in the Humanities

Rome, 26-28 January 2017

General information

The Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e le Culture Digitali (AIUCD) is pleased to announce the sixth edition of its annual conference and invites all interested scholars to submit a proposal.

The AIUCD 2017 Conference will be held from January 26th to 28th in Rome, Italy, and it is organized by DigiLab (Sapienza University), in collaboration with the DiXiT Marie Curie network  (Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training). The DiXiT workshop “The educational and social impact of Digital Scholarly Editions” is planned before the Conference. AIUCD 2017 will also host the third edition of the EADH Day, on January 25th.

The AIUCD 2017 Conference will take place at Sapienza University, Palazzo delle ex Vetrerie Sciarra, via dei Volsci 122, Rome.

For more information, please visit the Conference website http://aiucd2017.aiucd.it/ or send an email to aiucd2017@gmail.com

Conference Topics

The main topic of the AIUCD 2017 Conference is the use of big data methods, cultural analytics and distant reading in the Humanities. We would like to explore the methodological and epistemological impact of these methods, their application in the different fields of the Humanities and on various kinds of media and digital resources, their effects on our comprehension of cultural and historical phenomena and, finally, their consequences and repercussions on the social and public perceptions of the Humanities.

We therefore encourage proposals on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Methodological and epistemological aspects of distant reading in the Humanities
• Distant reading, close reading and scaled reading: relations and interactions between hermeneutical tradition, quantitative analysis and new computational methods
• Interaction and integration of methods of statistical/quantitative analysis and formal logic methods, semantic web technologies and linked data
• Quantitative and stylometry analysis, topic modelling and clustering for literary texts, archival documents and cultural objects
• Authorship attribution and automatic text classification
• Applications and experimentations of data mining methodologies in historical, artistic and archaeological research
• Network analysis and sentiment analysis applied to the Humanities
• Interaction between Natural Language Processing technologies and data mining
• Computational analysis of multimedia resources: images, audio and video
• Methods and techniques of visualization and their impact on knowledge transfer in the Humanities
• Problems and strategies for sustainability of data produced during research activities in terms of persistence, provenance and authenticity
• Cultural and social impact of humanity research produced with computational methods

The deadline for submitting proposals is November 15th November 25th (midnight). Notification of acceptance will be sent by December 15th.

Official languages of the AIUCD 2017 Conference are Italian and English. However, it is possible to present in other languages if you provide  English slides or an English handout.