• Held in conjunction with Digital Humanities 2016

The HistoInformatics workshop series brings together researchers in the historical disciplines, computer science and associated disciplines as well as the cultural heritage sector. Historians, like other humanists show keen interests in computational approaches to the study and processing of digitized sources (usually text, images, audio). In computer science, experimental tools and methods stand the challenge to be validated regarding their relevance for real-world questions and applications. The HistoInformatics workshop series is designed to bring researchers in both fields together, to discuss best practices as well as possible future collaborations.

Traditionally, historical research is based on the hermeneutic investigation of preserved records and artifacts to provide a reliable account of the past and to discuss different hypotheses. Alongside this hermeneutic approach historians have always been interested to translate primary sources into data and used methods, often borrowed from the social sciences, to analyze them. A new wealth of digitized historical documents have however opened up completely new challenges for the computer-assisted analysis of e.g. large text or image corpora.

Historians can greatly benefit from the advances of computer and information sciences which are dedicated to the processing, organization and analysis of such data. New computational techniques can be applied to help verify and validate historical assumptions. We call this approach HistoInformatics, analogous to Bioinformatics and ChemoInformatics which have respectively proposed new research trends in biology and chemistry. The main topics of the workshop are: (1) support for historical research and analysis in general through the application of computer science theories or technologies, (2) analysis and re-use of historical texts, (3) visualisations of historical data, (4) provision of access to historical knowledge.

HistoInformatics workshops took place twice in the past. The first one1 was held in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Social Informatics in Kyoto, Japan in 2013. The second workshop 2 took place at the same conference in the following year in Barcelona.

For our workshop at DH2016 we invite papers from a wide range of topics which are of relevance for history, the cultural heritage sector and the humanities in general. The workshop targets researchers who work on the intersections of history and computer science. We invite papers on the following and related topics:

  • Natural language processing and text analytics applied to historical documents
  • Analysis of longitudinal document collections
  • Search and retrieval in document archives and historical collections, associative search
  • Causal relationship discovery based on historical resources
  • Named entity recognition and disambiguation in historical texts
  • Entity relationship extraction, detecting and resolving historical references in text
  • Finding analogical entities over time
  • Analysis of language change over time
  • Modeling evolution of entities and relationships over time
  • Network Analysis
  • Automatic multimedia document dating
  • Simulating and recreating the past course of actions, social relations, motivations, figurations
  • Handling uncertain and fragmentary text and image data
  • Mining Wikipedia for historical data
  • OCR and transcription old texts
  • Effective interfaces for searching, browsing or visualizing historical data collections
  • Studies on collective memory
  • Studying and modeling forgetting and remembering processes
  • Estimating credibility of historical findings
  • Epistemologies in the Humanities and computer science

Submissions need to be:

  • formatted according to Easychair paper formatting guidelines3.
  • original and have not been submitted for publication elsewhere.
  • submitted in English in PDF format
  • at the workshop’s Easychair page4.

Full paper submissions are limited to 10 pages, while short paper submissions should be less than 5 pages. Submissions will be evaluated by at least three different reviewers who come from Computer Science and History backgrounds. The accepted papers will be published on CEUR Workshop Proceedings5.

Presenters and participants are expected to cover their travel and accommodation costs.

For any inquiries, please contact the organising committee at histoinformatics2016[at]easychair.org

  • 1. http://www.dl.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/histoinformatics2013/
  • 2. http://www.dl.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/histoinformatics2014/
  • 3. http://www.easychair.org/publications/?page=1594225690
  • 4. https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=histoinformatics2016
  • 5. http://ceur-ws.org