BD2022: Biographical Data in a Digital World Workshop 2022 online Tokyo, Japan, July 25, 2022 |
Conference website | https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/events/2022/2022-07-25-bd/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bd2022 |
Submission deadline | May 20, 2022 |
Biographical Data in a Digital World 2022
Workshop co-located with the Digital Humanities 2022 (DH2022) online conference on July 25th.
Biographical and prosopographical data are invaluable sources for historical research as they provide us with essential information on thousands of historical figures: from the cultural heroes of a nation to the many thousands of other significant, yet lesser-known figures who were influential in domains such as the arts, politics, humanities, or natural sciences. Their historical life paths can provide crucial context for tangible heritage objects, which have been created, owned, or influenced by historical actors, or which depict or refer to them. The events of individual biographies can further be aggregated into (histories of) larger contextual composites: groups (e.g. guilds, family histories), institutions (e.g. art schools, universities, religious orders, political movements, companies) and regional entities (from cities to whole countries).
Computational analysis of biographies has opened up new and interesting research directions. Individuals share common characteristics that can be relatively easily identified and used for information retrieval and data analysis, such as date of birth, occupation, social networks and locations. Tools and approaches from the digital humanities can be used for both quantitative analyses of such data and for providing leads for more qualitative research questions. New methods of spatial analysis may result in new research questions.
This workshop has two main goals. First, previous events on biographical data and digital humanities have revealed that groups working in this domain have different strengths. Though many groups bring researchers from different domains together, some groups mainly consist of domain experts with a lot of knowledge of history, library studies or literature. Other teams are primarily made up of researchers specialized in automatic analysis, formal modeling or visualization. Bringing these groups together increases insights for both types of groups. Technical experts contribute insights on best practices to deal with typical challenges of the domain. Domain experts on what analyses they need, which potential technological challenges are problematic for their research questions and which are not. Second, there is keen interest in cross-national research on biographical information. Most resources are national resources and though many are open, sharing information also means understanding each other’s data representation, linking related information, etc.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Digitizing and structuring biographical data
- Standards, vocabularies and best practices for processing biographical data
- Biographies and Linked Data
- Crowdsourcing biographical data
- Automatic biography generation
- Using biographical and prosopographical data for quantitative analyses
- Canonization of people and events in history
- Use of big data for biographical research
- Dealing with biographical data in heterogeneous datasets
- Creating and maintaining biographical dictionaries
- Enriching biographies from external sources
- Reconciling persons between biographical dictionaries
- Reconciling names against a biographical dictionary
- Visualizing biographical and prosopographical data
- Network analysis of biographical data
- Biographies and spatial analysis
- Biographies across countries and cultures
Submissions, Proceedings, and Workshop Participation
We solicit submissions for the workshop as abstracts (500-1000 words). The submissions will be peer-reviewed, and the accepted submissions will be presented at the workshop (online). The submitted abstracts will not be published.
A separate call for full papers based on the abstracts will be issued after the event, with proceedings that shall be submitted to CEUR-WS.org for online publication.
At least one author of each paper needs to register to the Digital Humanities 2022 conference in order to participate in the workshop. The workshop is organized online and is open for all conference participants.
Please see the conference web page for up-to-date information: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/events/2022/2022-07-25-bd/
Important dates:
- May 20: Deadline for submissions
- May 30: Notification of acceptance
- July 25: The workshop takes place
Workshop organizing Committee:
- Mikko Koho, mikko.koho@aalto.fi, Aalto University
- Antske Fokkens, antske.fokkens@vu.nl, VU University Amsterdam and Eindhoven University of Technology
- Eero Hyvönen, eero.hyvonen@aalto.fi, Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG) and Aalto University
- Eveline Wandl-Vogt, Eveline.Wandl-Vogt@oeaw.ac.at, Ars Electronica Research Institute and Austrian Academy of Sciences
- Richard Hadden, richard.hadden@oeaw.ac.at, Austrian Academy of Sciences
- Angel Daza, j.a.dazaarevalo@vu.nl, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Workshop Program Committee:
- Mikko Koho, Aalto University, chair
- Paul Arthur, Edith Cowan University
- Angel Daza, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Thierry Declerck, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
- Antske Fokkens, VU University Amsterdam and Eindhoven University of Technology
- Richard Hadden, Austrian Academy of Sciences
- Eero Hyvönen, University of Helsinki and Aalto University
- Petri Leskinen, University of Helsinki
- Rennie Mapp, University of Virginia
- Johannes Scholz, Graz University of Technology
- Lik Hang Tsui, City University of Hong Kong
- Andrei Volodin, Moscow State University and Siberian Federal University
- Eveline Wandl-Vogt, Austrian Academy of Sciences
- Hongsu Wang, Harvard University
- David Joseph Wrisley, New York University Abu Dhabi and Princeton University