In the demanding context of the beginning of this year, we have decided to postpone the submission date of proposals for COMHUM 2022. The new deadline for submission of abstracts is February 11, 2022.

CALL FOR PAPERS

2nd workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities (COMHUM 2022)

June 9–10, 2022 — University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Special track: character network construction and analysis

At the turn of the 2020s, a defining characteristic of digital humanities remains the remarkably wide spectrum of viewpoints they encompass, ranging from a pure engineering perspective applied to humanities data to the use of well established humanities research methods to investigate born-digital artifacts. In this framework, the COMHUM workshop series positions itself as an international forum primarily devoted to the following research questions: (1) which computational methods are most appropriate for dealing with the particular challenges posed by humanities research, e.g., uncertainty, vagueness, incompleteness, but also with different positions (points of view, values, criteria, perspectives, approaches, readings, etc.)? And (2) how can such computational methods be applied to concrete research questions in the humanities?

The second edition of the COMHUM workshop will take place on June 9 and 10, 2022 at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), unless the sanitary situation requires organizing the event online. The first day will be devoted to the specific topic of computational methods for constructing and analyzing character networks. This topic has ramifications in a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, literary analysis, digital humanities, and game studies. It is of particular interest for a number of research initiatives at UNIL and in neighboring institutions. COMHUM 2022 will thus be a perfect opportunity to bring together researchers from different communities studying character networks using computational and methodologically explicit approaches, to review the state of the art in this domain and to sketch its future developments.

In the spirit of the first edition of the COMHUM workshop, the second day will be open to submissions on any topic pertaining to theoretical or applied research on computational methods for humanities research broadly conceived.

The program will consist of invited and contributed talks. The official language of the workshop is English. Contributions can be submitted in English or French.

Topics

The topics of the workshop are divided into two tracks. The special track focuses on formal and computational aspects related to the development and use of computational methods for character network construction and analysis in data from various media types studied in the humanities, such as literature, movies, comics, and video games for example.

Topics in the special track include, but are not limited to:

• methods for character network extraction (e.g. NLP, computer vision, etc.)
• formal definitions and representation of relations in character networks
• quantitative methods for character network analysis
• computational methods for large-scale or transmedia studies of character networks

In addition, an open track welcomes submissions on formal and computational aspects related to the development and use of computational methods in the humanities in general (with a particular interest for the disciplines represented in the Faculty of Arts of UNIL – such as literature, linguistics, history, history of art, cinema studies).

Topics in the open track include, but are not limited to:

• Theoretical issues of formal modeling in the humanities
• Knowledge representation in the humanities
• Data structures addressing specific problems in the humanities (including text and markup)
• Quantitative methods in the humanities (e.g., for literary or historical studies, or for multimodal data)
• Applications of computer vision, image analysis and spatial analysis in the humanities

Submissions

We invite researchers to submit abstracts of 500 to 1000 words (excluding references; approx. 1–2 pages in the specified format). Abstracts will be reviewed double-blind by members of the program committee, and all submissions will receive several independent reviews. Abstracts submitted at review stage must not contain the authors’ names, affiliations, or any information that may disclose the authors’ identity.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to present their research at the workshop as a talk, and the abstracts will be published in the book of abstracts of the workshop. The maximum number of submissions by the same author is two papers. An author cannot be the first author of two papers.

Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available as an Overleaf template (https://www.overleaf.com/read/crtcwgxzjskr) and also downloadable directly in LaTeX and Word format (https://github.com/acl-org/ACLPUB/tree/master/templates). Abstracts must be submitted electronically in PDF format. For the submission of abstracts we use EasyChair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=comhum2022

After the conference, authors of accepted contributions will be invited to submit a full paper version (6–16 pages), which, if accepted after peer-review, will be published in an open-access, electronic conference volume endowed with persistent identifiers (to be confirmed soon).

Invited Speakers

• Vincent Labatut, Université d’Avignon
• [This list will be completed.]

Important Dates

• Deadline for submission of abstracts: February 11, 2022
• Notification of acceptance: March 4, 2022
• Workshop: June 9–10, 2022

Organization

The workshop is organized by members of the Lausanne Lab for Computational and Statistical Text Analysis (https://wp.unil.ch/llist/en): François Bavaud, Guillaume Guex, Coline Métrailler, Davide Picca, Stéphanie Pichot, Michael Piotrowski, Yannick Rochat, Aris Xanthos.

It is hosted by the Department of Language and Information Sciences (https://www.unil.ch/sli), with the support of the Center for Linguistics and the Science of Language (https://www.unil.ch/clsl), both in the Faculty of Arts at UNIL.

The workshop underlines the commitment of the Department of Language and Information Sciences to the computational dimension of the digital humanities, including formal and mathematical methods.

Scientific Committee

• François Bavaud (UNIL, SLI and IGD)
• Guillaume Guex (UNIL, SLI)
• Coline Métrailler (UNIL, SLI)
• Davide Picca (UNIL, SLI)
• Michael Piotrowski (UNIL, SLI)
• Yannick Rochat (UNIL, SLI, chair)
• Elena Spadini (UNIL, CLSR)
• Aris Xanthos (UNIL, SLI)
• [This list will be completed.]

Further info

More information about the event will be available at the following URL: https://wp.unil.ch/llist/en/event/comhum2022/. Please get in touch with Yannick Rochat (yannick.rochat@unil.ch) for specific questions that are not answered by the website.