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Past events

Guest Lectures Across the Consortium

  • 3/06/2019: ‘Trismegistos: a Linked Open Data platform for Ancient World texts’ (Tom Gheldof at the Linguistic Resources & NLP Tools for Latin (LiLa workshop, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milano)
  • 10/10/2019: Library Labs as experimental incubators for digital humanities research (Sally Chambers, Keynote at 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice in Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2019, Oslo, Norway.)
  • 14/10/2019: Geohumanities practical course within ‘Historisch Atelier’ (Iason Jongepier, UAntwerpen)
  • 16/10/2019: Text encoding practical course within ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities’ (Wout Dillen for Advanced MA KU Leuven)
  • 4 and 8/11/2019: Text Encoding practical course within ‘Historisch Atelier’ (Wout Dillen for UAntwerpen)
  • 24 to 26 /10/2019: International Spatial Humanities Sprint Camp (Piraye Hacıgüzeller, Trinity College Dublin)
  • 28/10/2019: Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Netherlands/Flanders local chapter meeting (Piraye Hacıgüzeller, KU Leuven)
  • 2/3/2020: Geohumanities practical course within ‘Digital Humanities’ (Iason Jongepier for BA UAntwerpen)
  • 27/3/2020: Geohumanities practical course within ‘Digitale tekstanalyse en literaire theorie’ (Iason Jongepier for BA Uantwerpen)

Summer Schools and Workshops

  • What’s on the map? CLARIAH-Benelux Workshop on Geospatial and Semantic Web Technologies (UGent, 11 June 2019)
  • Antwerp Summer School in DH (UAntwerp, 1-5 July 2019)
  • DAGITAB Summer School in DH (UAntwerp and University of the Philippines, 15-19 July 2019)
  • Invited lecture and workshop at Baltic Summer School of DH (Latvia, 23-25 July 2019)
  • Archaeological and Historical Event Modelling as Linked Data – Pelagios Network Event (UGent, 26 September 2019)
  • Workshop ‘Exploring the Trismegistos (LOD) platform’ (Tom Gheldof at Linked Pasts V, Bordeaux, 11 December 2019)

Presentations of CLARIAH-VL services

  • Chambers, Sally, Wout Dillen, Tom Gheldof, Wouter Ryckbosch, Vincent Vandeghinste and Christophe Verbruggen. From DARIAH to CLARIAH in Flanders. Challenges and Opportunities for the Development of an Open Humanities Service Infrastructure. DH Benelux 2019, Liège: 11-13 September 2019.
  • Daems, Joke, Sally Chambers, Christophe Verbruggen (2019) “Beyond Madoc: Development of a IIIF-based digital corpus management and text analysis platform” IIIF Annual Conference, Göttingen: 24-29 June 2019.
  • Dillen, Wout. (2019) “Free as in Free Beer? LaTeX as a Means to Distribute the Cost of OA Publishing in the Humanities.” DH Benelux 2019, Liège: 11-13 September 2019.
  • Dillen, Wout. (2019) “Web Accessibility in Digital Scholarly Editing: Considerations from a Survey on Inclusive Design and Dissemination.” Digital Humanities 2019, Utrecht: 8-12 July 2019.
  • Dillen, Wout and Joshua Schäuble. (2019) Updating the IIIFarm. What We Learned From Teaching IIIF on a Raspberry Pi Network. IIIF Annual Conference, Göttingen: 24-29 June 2019.
  • Dillen, Wout and Joshua Schäuble. (2019) IIIFarm. Teaching Image Interoperability on a Raspberry Pi Network of IIIF-Compliant Image Servers. Digital Humanities 2019, Utrecht: 8-12 July 2019.
  • Dillen, Wout. (2019) “On Trying to Set Up Long-Term Cross-Institutional Service Infrastructures with Short-Term Funding” From Text to Data – New Ways of Reading, Stockholm: 7-8 February 2019.
  • Gheldof, Tom (2019) “The TM People data set” 3rd Epigraphy.info workshop, Vienna: 30-31 May 2019.
  • Gheldof, Tom and Yanne Broux (2019) “Linking ancient people, places, sources” Linked Pasts V, Bordeaux: 11-13 December 2019.
  • Schäuble, Joshua. “Manuscript Web. Modelling Textual Development as a Network of Text-Genetic Relations.” ESTS 2019, Malaga: 28-29 November 2019.
  • Schäuble, Joshua, and Dirk Van Hulle. “Modelling Text-Genetic Relationships” Digital Humanities 2019, Utrecht: 8-12 July 2019.

DARIAH Annual Event 2021

September 7-9, 2021

The aim of this year’s DARIAH Annual Event is to discuss the role that interfaces play in the arts and humanities. To what extent do they enable new research, and at the same time, do they also limit research possibilities? How is content/information changed while being transmitted by interfaces? How do interfaces reframe the roles of those using them, their roles as producer and/or consumer of interfaces?

Programme & Registration: https://dariah-2021.sciencesconf.org/program

KBR – Study Day Image & Data Processing in the Cultural Heritage Sector

September 14, 2021

On Tuesday 14 September, an online study day on Image & Data Processing in the Cultural Heritage Sector will take place in the context of the ADOCHS project. While morning presentations will shed light on the project results to improve the quality of the files produced in the context of heritage digitisation, those of the afternoon will open the discussion on the possible follow-up of this project and the evolution of our organisations in the light of artificial intelligence.

Programme & Registration: https://www.kbr.be/en/agenda/image-data-processing-in-the-cultural-heritage-sector/

KBR – Getting started with Linked Open Data (online workshop)

September 17, 2021

Want to get started with Linked Open Data for cultural heritage? Find out how to open up your collections or share your research. This online study day will help you start making the transition from siloed databases to Linked Open Data.

Programme & Registration: https://www.kbr.be/en/agenda/getting-started-with-linked-open-data/

ENCODE Conference Multilingual and Multicultural Digital Infrastructures for Ancient Written Artefacts

November 2, 2021

During the conference James Cowey, Kim Pham, Pascal Belouin, Matthew Munson and Mark Depauw will talk about the use and challenges of several digital infrastructures that are or can be used for the research on ancient written artefacts.

Programme & Registration: https://site.unibo.it/encode/en/agenda/encode-conference-leuven

ENCODE Training workshop Multilingual and Multicultural Digital Infrastructures for Ancient Written Artefacts

November 3-5, 2021

From November 3th-5th, 2021 the Research Unit of Ancient History (KU Leuven) hosts a training workshop on Multilingual and Multicultural Digital Infrastructures for Ancient Written Artefacts. The workshop is organized virtually via the online platform MS Teams and will be held in English. Applications for this training workshop are encouraged, and are limited to a maximum number of 20 participants. All applications – regardless of their selection for the workshop – will be invited and registered for the general conference on November 2nd. During the conference James Cowey, Kim Pham, Pascal Belouin, Matthew Munson and Mark Depauw will talk about the use and challenges of several digital infrastructures that are or can be used for the research on ancient written artefacts.

Programme and call for application: https://site.unibo.it/encode/en/agenda/leuven-workshop

CLARIN Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Event)

September 27-29, 2021

CLARIN2021 is organised for the wider Humanities and Social Sciences communities in order to exchange ideas and experiences within the CLARIN infrastructure. This includes the design, construction and operation of the CLARIN infrastructure, the data, tools and services that it contains or for which there is a need, its actual use by researchers, its relation to other infrastructures and projects, and the CLARIN Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure.

Programme & Registration: https://www.clarin.eu/event/2021/clarin-annual-conference-2021-virtual-event

Digital Humanities Virtual Discussion Group for Early Career Researchers in BE (Virtual Event)

Digital Humanities Virtual Discussion Group for Early Career Researchers in Belgium is a space for students and researchers to come together to discuss current research in DH as part of an online discussion group. The series is geared toward early career researchers—students and researchers working in Belgian institutions who are interested in DH.

1 – Monday 25 October 2021 from 15h – 16h30 CEST
Speaker: Sven Lieber from the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR)
Title of presentation: “Harvesting Social Media Heritage”

2 – Monday 22 November 2021 from 15h – 16h30 CEST
Speaker: Joren Six from Ghent University
Title of presentation: “Demystifying Deep Learning: Automatically Labeling a Corpus of Field Recordings”

3 – Monday 13 December 2021 from 15h – 16h30 CEST
Speaker: Jos Beerens from KU Leuven
Title of presentation: to be confirmed

Programme: https://www.ghentcdh.ugent.be/content/digital-humanities-virtual-discussion-group-early-career-researchers-be-october

Digital Heritage Seminars: Challenges and Opportunities of Working with Epistolary Data Collections (Virtual Event)

October 4, 2021 13:00 – 14:30

KBR invites you to attend a scholarly series on digital cultural heritage, the KBR-ULB-UGent Digital Heritage Seminar. In this series from October to December 2021 the KBR will virtually host three academic scholars in presenting their work on cultural heritage and historical networks. Network research serves to enhance our understanding of the human past, by retracing the social, political, or cultural networks from historical materials.

Programme: https://www.kbr.be/en/agenda/digital-heritage-seminar-epistolary-data-collections/

Digital Heritage Seminar: Network Analysis and Archaeological Objects (Virtual Event)

November 8, 2021 14:00 – 15:30

KBR invites you to attend a scholarly series on digital cultural heritage, the KBR-ULB-UGent Digital Heritage Seminar. In this series from October to December 2021 the KBR will virtually host three academic scholars in presenting their work on cultural heritage and historical networks. Network research serves to enhance our understanding of the human past, by retracing the social, political, or cultural networks from historical materials.

Programme: https://www.kbr.be/nl/evenement/digital-heritage-seminar-ruffini-ronzani/

Digital Heritage Seminar: Historical Network Research (Virtual Event)

December 7, 2021 14:00 – 15:30

KBR invites you to attend a scholarly series on digital cultural heritage, the KBR-ULB-UGent Digital Heritage Seminar. In this series from October to December 2021 the KBR will virtually host three academic scholars in presenting their work on cultural heritage and historical networks. Network research serves to enhance our understanding of the human past, by retracing the social, political, or cultural networks from historical materials.

Programme: https://www.kbr.be/en/agenda/digital-heritage-seminar-historical-network-research/

Linked Pasts Symposium

The 2021 Linked Pasts Symposium, hosted by Ghent University, Belgium, will be held as a remote event the week of December 13–17, and as a mix of remote and in-person activities on December 20–21.

The annual Linked Pasts symposium, which has previously been held at KCL, Madrid, Stanford, Mainz, Bordeaux, University of London and British Library, and Ghent University, brings together scholars, heritage professionals and other practitioners with an interest in Linked Open Data as applied to the study of the ancient and historical worlds. Panels and working groups at Linked Pasts are more goal-oriented than a conventional academic conference, and activities and agendas are often proposed, developed and revised by all participants at the event itself.

Announcement: https://linkedpasts.hcommons.org/

PUBLIC DOMAIN DAY 2023

February 15, 2023

The public domain is the collection of all creative works that are no longer subject to exclusive intellectual property rights in the previous year, such as copyrights and other related rights. New works become available in the public domain every year in Belgium as copyright protection expires 70 years after the death of the author or artist. This legal status does not mean that materials become accessible automatically, however.

Public Domain Day draws global attention to legal, financial, technical and institutional barriers that can prevent the general public from accessing this content even after copyright protection expires. Public Domain Day can help you or your organisation find out about initiatives to make public domain collections accessible, and share your thoughts and ideas with other interested parties.

Programme & Registration: Public Domain Day 2023 | Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (ugent.be)

IIIF Community Call – featuring Madoc

February 22, 202318h00 CET

GhentCDH will hold, with support from the IIIF community, a Madoc community call, where most of the international partners (State Library Berlin, National Library Wales, Indigenous digital archive) working with Madoc will be present. This community call is fairly low-threshold, and will go over some projects with Madoc, with the further intention of also fostering an open-source community around Madoc and pooling our knowledge a bit. This also to start stimulating further annotation projects and crowdsourcing projects with IIIF & Madoc, and responding to key user needs. IIIF community calls provide a regular forum for new and existing participants to share their work, learn about activities across the community, and discuss IIIF technology and future directions. 

More information is available in the Community Calendar: https://iiif.io/news-and-events/#call-calendar

Failure to connect: exploring the human relationships at the heart of digital humanities

March 6, 2023

Digital humanities means many things to many people – we talk of DH as being a range of methods, technologies, theoretical approaches to ask and answer research questions. But unlike traditional forms of humanities research, the research projects is not often one that can be tackled alone. DH nearly always requires collaboration with people from different subject domains, with technical experts and often with non-academic staff such as librarians, museum staff or administrative support. 

Programme & Registration: Upcoming Events – platform{DH} (uantwerpen.be)

Bibliotech 2023 Hackaton

March 13-23, 2023

In 2023, from the 13th to the 23rd of March, KU Leuven Libraries, the Faculty of Arts and the Humanities and Social Sciences Group will organize a hackathon.  This event offers an inspiring context for developing your skills. It will bring together people of all backgrounds with a keen interest in digital tools and introduce participants to the libraries’ digitized collections. 

More info & Registration: https://bib.kuleuven.be/onderzoek/digital-humanities/hackathon

Rediscovering the performance practice of musicians in the long 19th century through handwritten annotations on music scores.

March 27, 2023

FAAM, Flemish Archive for Annotated Music, is a database and research platform aiming to revive the performances of musicians from the 19th and early 20th century through the study of their annotations on music scores. The Heritage Library of the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp provides a substantial collection of historical annotated scores made by Flemish amateur musicians, performers, conductors, and composers of the long 19th century.

Programme & Registration: Upcoming Events – platform{DH} (uantwerpen.be)

Imagining the future of Open Science in Flanders together

May 11, 2023

What developments are necessary in the Open Science movement to fulfill its promise of higher quality research? Which incentives do we need to keep Flanders up to speed with international developments? How can we enable researchers to disseminate different types of (FAIR) research output? What are the limitations of open science? These and many more pressing questions concerning Open Science reveal the need for setting clear priorities in Flanders. 

More info & Registration: https://www.frdn.be/network-day-2023/

DHBENELUX Conference

May 31 – June 2, 2023

The annual DH Benelux conference serves as a platform for the community of interdisciplinary Digital Humanities researchers to meet, present and discuss their latest research findings and to demonstrate tools and projects. It is organised by DH Benelux. 

Programme & Registration: DH Benelux 2023

DARIAH Annual Event 2023: Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data?

June 6-9, 2023

Collections in libraries, archives and museums have been at the heart of humanities research for centuries. However, with the current focus on data-driven research, data management plans and the research data lifecycle, in what ways do we need to think differently about cultural heritage collections as data?

Inspired by the proclamation “cultural heritage data is humanities research data”, this year’s DARIAH Annual Event will seek to explore what this means in practice. What does it mean for cultural heritage institutions to provide access to their ‘collections as data’? Do we need to think of different workflows for digitised and born-digital datasets? Can we think of a humanities research data continuum? These are only some of the questions we aim to explore at the 2023 DARIAH Annual Event.

The DARIAH Annual Event offers the DARIAH community and beyond the possibility to present results and new ideas; to meet and network.

Programme & Registration: DARIAH Annual Event 2023: Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data?

Lecture Series: Enrique Manjavacas Arevalo

June 26, 2023

Historical Language Models and their Application to Word Sense Disambiguation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the cornerstone of current methods in Computational Linguistics. As the Humanities look towards computational methods in order to analyse large quantities of text, the question arises as to how these models are best developed and applied to the specificities of their domains. In this talk, I will address the application of LLMs to Historical Languages, following up on the MacBERTh project. In the context of the development of LLMs for Historical Languages, I will address how they can be specifically fine-tuned with efficiency to tackle the problem of Word Sense Disambiguation. In a series of experiments relying on data from the Oxford English Dictionary, I will highlight how non-parametric and metric learning approaches can be an interesting alternative to traditional fine-tuning methods that rely on classifiers that learn to disambiguate specific lemmas.

Enrique Manjavacas Arevalo is currently a post-doc at the University of Leiden, working in the MacBERTh project developing Large Language Models for Historical Languages. He obtained a PhD at the University of Antwerp (2021) with a dissertation on computational approaches to text reuse detection.

The lecture is free and open to all. Please register by sending a mail to platformdh@uantwerpen.be.

Lecture series: Mike Kestemont

July 5, 2023

The wandering verse: the computational detection of micro-intertexts in medieval literature 

Intertextuality is a ubiquitous concept in literary studies, which – because of its notoriously open-ended nature – covers a variety of correspondences between texts. Signaling intertexts is an important editorial responsibility, because it can deepen one’s reading experience of a literary work. Text reuse detection has become a popular task in the computational humanities too, although its evaluation is complicated by the lack of exhaustively annotated datasets of intertexts. Historic scholarship on medieval epics provides us with a wealthy inventory of micro-intertexts between medieval works, although their status is still hotly debated. Some philological communities have been keen on identifying intertexts as authorial features, whereas others have stressed their conventional status, especially in the wake of the oral-formulaic theory. In this talk, I will present a study on Middle Dutch epic literature, as well as an extension of this work to contemporary Middle English literature, in particular the bookshop theory surrounding the famous Auchinleck manuscript. I will argue that the intricate web woven by computationally detected intertexts can invite radically innovative readings of medieval literature 

Mike Kestemont is a research professor in the department of Literature at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He specializes in computational text analysis for the Digital Humanities. Whereas his work has a strong focus on historic literature, his previous research has covered a wide range of topics in literary history. Together with Folgert Karsdorp and Allen Riddell he has written a textbook on data science for the Humanities. Together with his Polish colleagues Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki he is involved in the Computational Stylistics Group. Mike lives in Brussels (http://mikekestemont.github.io/), tweets in English (@Mike_Kestemont) and codes in Python (https://github.com/mikekestemont). 

This lecture is organized in conjunction with the Antwerp Summer University Summer School “Digital Humanities: Computer-assisted genetic editing, from handwritten text recognition to keystroke logging ”. Registration for the summer school itself has closed, but attending the speaker’s keynote lecture is free and open to all. Please register by sending an email to platformdh@uantwerpen.be.

Omeka S Developer Event, 20-22 Sep 2023, Ghent

September 20 – 22, 2023

The Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities and CLARIAH-VL are hosting an International Omeka S Developer Event, bringing together developers of the open-source platform between Wednesday 20 September 2023 and Friday 22 September 2023. 

At Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities and through CLARIAH-VL, we are actively investing in the development of Omeka S and integrated IIIF-functionalities, both through researcher projects and through our digital support of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. Over the years, we have built thorough expertise with the platform, leading to a multitude of projects (list: here). In this event, we want to bring worldwide expertise of the platform together and stimulate a more international network of developers working with the software. The event will take place in the Book Tower of Ghent, in the Henry Van de Veldezaal.

Are you a developer working with Omeka S and interested in attending or hearing about this event? Send an email to Lise.Foket@UGent.be and get in touch with us!

CLARIAH-VL Geo workshop: Reading Historical Maps in a Digital Era

October 17, 2023

This workshop is about the (possible) application of AI to historical maps. AI can do more and more with modern maps, but older hand-drawn maps (early 19th century and earlier) are often still too complex for computers. The underlying idea of this workshop is to facilitate brainstorming around technical solutions that allow older maps to also benefit from AI technology and AI-related workflows.

In the morning, Katie McDonough, Daniel Wilson and Valeria Vitale from the leading Alan Turing Institute will give presentations and demos around two applications from the “Living with machines” project (namely MapReader and Machine Reading Maps), and in the afternoon, colleagues from the University of Antwerp, University of Ghent and University of Amsterdam will show us their own work around AI and AI-related workflows, among others.

CLARIN Annual Conference 2023

October 16 – 18, 2023

The CLARIN Annual Conference is the main annual event for those working on the construction and operation of CLARIN across Europe, as well as for representatives of the communities of use in the humanities and social sciences.

CLARIN2023 is organised for the wider humanities and social sciences communities in order to exchange ideas and experiences within the CLARIN infrastructure. This includes the design, construction and operation of the CLARIN infrastructure, the data, tools and services that it contains or for which there is a need, its actual use by researchers, its relation to other infrastructures and projects, and the CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure.

Programme & Registration: CLARIN Annual Conference 2023 | CLARIN ERIC

DH VIRTUAL DISCUSSION GROUP

Monday 23 October 2023, 15h-16h30 via Teams

Speaker(s): Sergio Alonso Mislata, Volunteer at KBR, CAMille Project

In this presentation, Sergio (MA in Information and Library Studies at Aberystwyth University) will summarise the main goals and processes established during his volunteering experience at KBR within the CAMille project. CAMille, founded in 2020 (ULB-KBR), is the (Belgian) Centre for Archives on the Media and Information. Two main research projects are currently carried out at CAMille: On the one hand, writing a history of Belgian journalism from the end of the 19th century to the present day, from a specific angle: the study of critical discourses. On the other hand, developing a database of Belgian journalists and media since 1830. This presentation will touch upon the latter.

Nodegoat workshop

November 16, 2023

To support researchers in their use of such data, CLARIAH-VL & GhentCDH are hosting 2 nodegoat workshops. In the workshop you will learn how to use this platform for your research. The workshops will be held in two parts on the same day:

1) beginners

2) advanced users (users that already are using nodegoat or have setup an instance).

The workshops, given by the developers of the platform – Lab1100, will be held on 16 November from 10 – 12h & 14 – 16h respectively at Ghent University. Both workshops will be given in English, but questions may be asked in Dutch. The exact location will be confirmed two weeks before the location to registered participants. Please register here: https://event.ugent.be/registration/nodegoat.

DH VIRTUAL DISCUSSION GROUP

Monday 27 November 2023, 15h-16h30 via Teams

The second session of the 2023 Fall Edition of the DH Virtual Discussion Group will take place on November 27th. This talk will introduce two digital research projects–Regionalizing Infrastructures in Chinese History (Reginfra) and The Lives and Afterlives of Imperial Material Infrastructure in Southeastern China (InfraLives). Both projects investigate how large-scale infrastructures, such as city walls, bridges, and roads, affected regional (dis)integration in the Chinese and neighboring territories from roughly 1000 to 1900. One of the key objectives is to explore the spatial patterns of infrastructures, including their construction, maintenance, destruction, failure, uses, and cultural meanings across different regions. Based on empirical data derived from digitized texts, the projects aim to critically examine assumptions about the relation between infrastructures and regional integration and to develop dynamic models of regional histories. The presenters will discuss methods in corpus building and text and image annotation, and explain future plans for comparative spatial analysis and machine learning.

DH VIRTUAL DISCUSSION GROUP

Monday 18 December 2023, 15h-16h30 via Teams

The third session of the 2023 Fall Edition of the DH Virtual Discussion Group will take place on December 23.

For this session, Mona Allaert (teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp), will discuss the hurdles encountered when developing and teaching the module “Digital Literacy”, a new course followed by second-year bachelor students of Linguistics and Literature. She’ll delve into the unique challenges of instructing a technically focused subject to a largely non-technical audience. Additionally, she’ll shed light on the practical learning labs that complement theoretical lessons, designed to offer students an engaging introduction to hands-on digital humanities. As the course’s second edition is underway, the discussion will revolve around adjustments made based on valuable feedback received from the previous year’s students.

EuroHPC summit

18 – 21 March, Antwerp

Join GhentCDH at the EuroHPC summit on 18 – 21 March in Antwerp where we will present about super computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  

EuroHPC JU is a joint initiative between the EU, European countries and private partners to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe and thus summit brings together users, service providers and policy makers to discuss topics in super computing.

DH Virtual discussion group

25 March 202415h-16h30 via Teams

The discussion group meets on a monthly basis via MS Teams. Each meeting features a presentation from a member of our community, a moment to share DH-related news, and a chance to network. Anyone with an interest in Digital Humanities is welcome to join the Discussion Group. The primary target audience is Belgian-based early career researchers, including motivated BA students, MA students, PhD researchers, and postdocs, but people at all stages of their careers are welcome as well as people working in the GLAM sector.

The first session of the 2024 Spring Edition of the DH Virtual Discussion Group will take place on March 25.

Speaker: Nooshin Shahidzadeh Asadi, University of Antwerp

Title: Developing Interoperable Open-Source Tools in the Digital Humanities: Merits and Complexities

In this session, Nooshin Asadi will discuss her pivot from software engineering to pursuing a PhD in digital humanities and the changes it has brought about in her professional and academic life. She will talk about her experience with the occasionally harsh but ultimately rewarding reality of producing prototypical, open-source software in the world of DH, while examining in detail the current project she is working on (Axolotl, a real-time collaborative XML editor) and the challenges and opportunities she has faced throughout its development.

More info: https://scholarlytales.hcommons.org/2024/02/29/webinar-series-dh-virtual-discussion-group-for-ecrs-in-belgium-spring-2024-edition/

Tutorial: Vev’s Design by Caroline Vandyck

27 March 2024- 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm (S.A.206 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium)

Vev’s Design is an online design studio that can be used to build your own interactive website in an intuitive way. Its prime focus is storytelling visualization, as it allows you to tell your own story in a dynamic and immersive manner. Vev offers a combination of different web design techniques that help transform text-based stories into engaging visual experiences – perfect for communicating your research to a non-expert audience. It requires no coding skills to build your own website, which can afterwards be easily integrated and updated in WordPress. This workshop will teach you the necessary basics to get started on building your own web page.

The tutorial is free and open to all. Please register by sending a mail to platformdh@uantwerpen.be.

More info: https://platformdh.uantwerpen.be/index.php/event/tutorial-vevs-design-by-caroline-vandyck/

CLARIN-EHRI workshop: Natural Language Processing Meets Holocaust Archives

27 – 28 March 2024, Prague

As part of the ongoing collaboration between CLARIN and EHRI, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Consortium, there will be two events in the first half of 2024. 1. CLARIN-EHRI workshop: Natural Language Processing Meets Holocaust Archives. This will be a practical, hands-on workshop, working on enhancement and use of Holocaust documentation as research data, hosted by LINDAT in Prague, 27-28 March 2024.

More info: https://www.clarin.eu/event/2024/natural-language-processing-meets-holocaust-archives

A call for participation is out now with deadline 15 January 2024. It would be great to get participants from more countries involved this time, and it’s a good opportunity for CLARIN folks to build on or to start collaborations in your country with historians in this domain. There are a very limited number of funded places for CLARIN participants, and we hope that national consortia and other sources of funding should be the first choice.

Guest lecture: Melvin Wevers on Working with Audio Files

28 March 2024- 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm (S.A.206 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium)

In this upcoming guest lecture, the focus will be on audio file manipulation. The session will cover tasks like loading, editing, and visualizing audio files, as well as extracting various features from them, crucial for diverse machine learning tasks including classification. Later in the lecture, speech-to-text algorithms will be explored for converting speech into text and identifying different speakers within an audio file.

Melvin Wevers, an Assistant Professor in Digital History at the University of Amsterdam, conducts research centered on applying computational methods to model historical processes. This involves combining insights from the philosophy of history with modeling techniques such as time series analysis, Bayesian statistics, deep/machine learning, and information theory.

The lecture will be held in English and is free to attend. However, registration is required as spaces are limited. Please confirm your attendance by sending an RSVP e-mail to platformdh@uantwerpen.be.

More info: https://platformdh.uantwerpen.be/index.php/event/guest-lecture-melvin-wevers-on-working-with-audio-files/

Transkribus Seminar: hands-on workshop

22 April 2024, Antwerp

The Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, together with the Working Group ‘Schrift en Schriftdragers’ (SSNM) , the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies, the Flemish Working Group ‘Mediëvistiek‘ and the Flemish Heritage Libraries, is organising a seminar series around the AI transcription tool Transkribus. Transkribus is an AI-powered platform for text recognition, transcription and search of historical documents – anywhere, anytime and in any language.

This hands-on workshop (in-person) by trainer Annemieke Romein (Transkribus-ReadCoop) will take place on Monday 22 April in Antwerp (14-17h, in the State Archive). Registration is required, because the number of participants is limited to 30 people and is possible until 17 April.

More info: https://www.ghentcdh.ugent.be/transkribus-seminariereeks-fysieke-hands-workshop-transkribus

DH Virtual discussion group

29 April 202415h-16h30 via Teams

The second session of the 2024 Spring Edition of the DH Virtual Discussion Group will take place on April 29.

Speaker: Kushal Jayesh Tatariya, KU Leuven

Title: Sociolinguistically Informed Interpretability: A Case Study in Hinglish Emotion Classification

More info: https://scholarlytales.hcommons.org/2024/02/29/webinar-series-dh-virtual-discussion-group-for-ecrs-in-belgium-spring-2024-edition/

Transkribus Seminar: online webinar

15 May 2024

The Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, together with the Working Group ‘Schrift en Schriftdragers’ (SSNM) , the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies, the Flemish Working Group ‘Mediëvistiek‘ and the Flemish Heritage Libraries, is organising a seminar series around the AI transcription tool Transkribus. Transkribus is an AI-powered platform for text recognition, transcription and search of historical documents – anywhere, anytime and in any language.

This online webinar (in Dutch) features various Transkribus User cases with a focus on ‘De laatste ontwikkelingen heet van de naald!’ (10-12h). Registration is required and is possible until 13 May.

More info: https://www.ghentcdh.ugent.be/transkribus-seminariereeks-online-webinar-‘transkribus-user-cases’

LREC-COLING2024 Pre-conference workshop

21 May 2024, Turin

Full day workshop in Turin, Italy on 21st May 2024 (the day after the ParlaCLARIN IV workshop)

More info: https://www.clarin.eu/HTRes2024

A call for papers is out now with the deadline 21 February 2024. The option to join as a participant will be available once conference registration is open next year.

Below you can find an overview of all activities CLARIAH-VL (researchers) organise or participate in:

Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA)

25 May 202409h00-18h00 – Torino, Italy (and online)

This one-day workshop seeks to bring together scholars, who are developing and/or are using Language Technologies (LTs) for historically attested languages, so to foster cross-fertilization between the Computational Linguistics community and the areas in the Humanities dealing with historical linguistic data, e.g. historians, philologists, linguists, archaeologists and literary scholars.

Despite the current availability of large collections of digitized texts written in historical languages, such interdisciplinary collaboration is still hampered by the limited availability of annotated linguistic resources for most of the historical languages. Creating such resources is a challenge and an obligation for LTs, both to support historical linguistic research with the most updated technologies and to preserve those precious linguistic data that survived from past times.

More info: Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) | Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (ugent.be)

 DH Virtual Discussion Group for Early Career Researchers in Belgium

27 May 202413h30-16h00 at Hoek 38 in Brussels (Room Gogotte).

The third session of the 2024 Spring Edition of the DH Virtual Discussion Group will take place on May 27.

Speakers: various from our DH community

The DH Virtual Discussion Group for Early Career Researchers in Belgium is for anyone with an interest in Digital Humanities. The primary target audience is Belgian-based early career researchers, including motivated BA students, MA students, PhD researchers, and postdocs, but we welcome people at all stages of their careers. We also welcome people who work in the GLAM sector. The discussion groups serves as a way for the Belgian DH community to come together, learn about new or on-going research, to stay in touch with our colleagues, to get inspired, and to welcome new researchers into our network. You do not need to have any knowledge of DH to join. 

More info:  DH Virtual Discussion Group for Early Career Researchers in Belgium: May | Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (ugent.be)

Data-driven Approaches to Ancient Languages (DAAL)

27 May 202409h00-18h00

Location: Mercator A104 (Abdisstraat 1, 9000 Ghent, Belgium)

Premodern or historically attested languages are invaluable resources of both the study of diachronic linguistics and their contemporary culture. Although these languages might be from various language families or have a different script, researchers face common challenges, among which illegible or lost text (parts), inexistent gold standards and, very important these days, scarcity of data. Luckily, more and more texts become available, but the language of those texts might be so different from their modern pendant — should that modern pendant exist — that it considerably impacts the performance of existing tools. This workshop aims to provide a platform to a broad field of researchers engaged in digital approaches to pre-modern languages.

More info: Data-driven Approaches to Ancient Languages (DAAL) – Paratexts in Premodern Writing Cultures (ugent.be)

DH Benelux 2024 Pre-conference workshop

4 June 2024

In this in-person workshop at the DHBenelux Conference CLARIAH-VL partners, a FWO infrastructure project, will give hands-on demonstrations on a number of tools developed in the CLARIAH-VL is the Flemish contribution to the European research infrastructures DARIAH and CLARIN. The infrastructure brings together 22 research teams representing a range of disciplines from the universities of Ghent, Antwerp, Leuven and Brussels and the Dutch Language Institute. CLARIAH-VL supports the highly diverse and multilingual composition of digital humanities data inherent in European long term history, culture, environment and society. We work to achieve this through facilitating and (semi-)automating as many aspects of the workflows of humanities researchers as possible, to allow researchers to take full advantage of the most recent advances in the fields of machine learning, linked data and semantic technologies especially with regard to digital text and image analysis.

The workshop will take place on Tuesday 4 June in the Monseigneur Sencie Institute (MSI) building. More information about the program and registration (until May 13th) can be found on the DH Benelux 2024 website! and here.

DH Benelux 2024 conference

4-7 June 2024

The 11th edition of the DH Benelux Conference will take place in Belgium at the Irish College in Leuven!

This year’s theme is Breaking Silos, Connecting Data: Advancing Integration and Collaboration in Digital Humanities.

The annual DH Benelux Conference serves as a platform for the community of interdisciplinary Digital Humanities researchers to meet, present and discuss their latest research findings and to demonstrate tools and projects.

The Call for Papers is open until 31 January 2024 and can be read on the DH Benelux 2024 website!

The 34th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands

30 August 2024

The 34th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands (CLIN 34), organized by the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), in collaboration with the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), and the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities (LUCDH), is set to be held on August 30, 2024 in the Lipsius building of Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Registrations to CLIN34 are open. Click here to register.

More information: https://clin34.leidenuniv.nl/

iPRES 2024

16 – 20 September 2024

iPRES is the premier international conference on digital preservation. The conference brings together experts, practitioners, researchers, and policy makers in the field of digital preservation to share their knowledge, experiences, and innovations. It is a unique platform for the global digital preservation community to present research and innovative projects, share practical experience and best practices, discuss emerging trends and challenges and collaborate on future directions and solutions.

Registrations to iPRES are open. Click here to register.

More information: https://ipres2024.pubpub.org