Exploring Historical Sources with Language Technology

This international workshop will take place at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, and is the joint effort of two major Europe-wide initiatives: CLARIN (Common Language Resource and Tools Infrastructure) and NeDiMAH (Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities), and was initiated by members of the HiCor team. The topic of the workshop is at the core of what HiCor is about: using the techniques, methods, data and tools of linguistics to aid and support historical research.

 

The proliferation of digital resources in the Humanities is leading to the elaboration of new methods, concepts, and theories by means of which researchers can query and interpret large-scale textual collections. The goal of the workshop is to demonstrate how the application of language technology has produced a new understanding of texts in different fields of Humanities.

 

The workshop will bring together researchers who already apply language technology, and those who would like to learn about the current state of art in this new and evolving area. The organizers invite researchers (especially early career scholars) who plan to apply language technology but do not already have the necessary skills and technical background. The second main goal of the workshop is to enhance exchange of experiences, disseminate know-how, and to explore potential future collaborations.

 

Keynote speaker will be Professor Tony McEnery, Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University). Other speakers to be confirmed.

 

If you would like to participate, you have until 3 September 2014 to apply for a place. Please complete this simple online form (http://bit.ly/explorehistory), where you are asked for some details and a short statement of the reasons for your interest in participating. Thanks to generous funding from NeDiMAH and Clarin, participation will be free of charge, and funds will be available to reimburse travel and accommodation expenses for a number of participants. NeDiMAH is funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF).

 

The organizing committee are Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Huygens ING, Gabor Mihaly Toth, Universities of Passau & Oxford, and Martin Wynne, CLARIN & Oxford.

 

More information is available on the CLARIN website at http://bit.ly/exploringhistory.

 

Martin Wynne

HiCor: a Cross-Disciplinary Network for History and Corpus Linguistics

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