Call for Papers

8TH ESTONIAN DIGITAL HUMANITIES CONFERENCE

Shifts in language and culture: computational approaches to variation and change

October 5-7 2022

Variation and change are universal phenomena of both language and culture. The research objects of humanities - human culture, behavior and communication - are by nature continually undergoing diversification and shifts. Additionally, the rise of global online communication in recent decades has added an unprecedented dimension to these dynamics, as access to wider public outside one’s immediate communities is in everyone’s reach, digital channels have taken over some of the functions of oral communication, and new ways of interaction have evolved. These new channels and modes of communication - chat and comment platforms, online and hybrid gaming, teaching, events and metaverses - present researchers of human behavior with new opportunities and challenges, both conceptual and methodological. Born-digital data may be easier to collect, but its volumes often require considered decisions in sampling the material for research purposes and curating collections of the digital era in archives and museums. It may also demand computational skills and resources to adequately quantify, analyze and interpret. The development and adoption of such methods enables not only new avenues of linguistics and cultural data analysis, but the methodological advances are likely to be applicable to the study of more traditional, historical and digitized sources of humanities data.

The conference has three interrelated aims: to provide a platform for presenting computational humanities research in an multidisciplinary setting, provide digital methods training in the form of practical workshops, and foster networking and collaboration between diverse researchers in the local, regional and global scope.

We invite presentations across computational and digitally-enabled humanities, language sciences and cultural data analytics, particularly on the theme of variation and change.

Paper presentations may include, but are not limited to the following topics:

• detecting and describing variation and change in large corpora of linguistic and cultural data
• variation and change in digital folk practices,(panel curated by the SIEF digital folklore and ethnology working group)
• online culture and digital ethnography
• born-digital big data: opportunities, challenges, solutions
• ideas, outlooks, developments, and critique of digital humanities in Estonia and elsewhere.

Presentations and discussions on all areas associated with digital and computational humanities are welcome, in order to develop a stronger community of the field in Estonia and neighboring countries. The working language of the conference is English.

Please submit your 100-word abstract for standard (20+10) talk, short (10+5) presentation, poster or workshop via THIS FORM by 1st of August. We will send our responses by August 15.

Registration fee is 30 EUR (early bird, before October 1), 50 EUR (late / on-site). Participation is free for students. Registration opens on August 15, 2022.

The conference is the eighth in the series of conferences on digital humanities in Estonia.This year it is co-organized by the Estonian Society for Digital Humanities, the Estonian Literary Museum, Tallinn University and the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies.