Visual Digital Humanities:
Representing and Interpreting Humanities Data
October 13-14, Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu, Estonia
The digital age has brought along an increased multimediality of communication. This concerns the source data in the field of humanities as well as the ways to perform research and represent the results. On the one hand humanities have to tackle the challenge of capturing the ever-changing and fluently moving non-textual sources in order to organise them into reproducible research data. On the other hand computational analysis enables us to rework the data on a much bigger scale. The creative nature of digital humanities commits researchers to explore, discover and develop new possibilities for data analysis.
Visual representation of data (e.g. using networks, timelines and word clouds for representing data) significantly enhances the interpretation potential of the material. Visualisation methods developed in other disciplines such as GIS mapping, graphs and charts have already been taken up in the humanities. However, there is a need to reconsider the assumptions that underlie the use of tools for data display and interpretation developed in other disciplines in order to adjust them to for working with artistic, literary, musical and historical corpora. New opportunities further enhance the possibilities to obtain meaningful insights using automated methods that complement results from more detailed but smaller scale studies. This must be done keeping in mind that qualitative data requires methods for presenting ambiguity and uncertainty in a nuanced way. The display of data from the humanities must be rooted in and appropriate to the interpretative activity being undertaken. Hence, researchers in the humanities need to engage computer scientists to allow for a more informed and accurate use of existing tools and the development of new ones.
The conference is the fourth in the series of conferences on digital humanities in Estonia, and is in this year co-organized by the Estonian Society for Digital Humanities, the Estonian Literary Museum and the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies. Traditionally, the conference includes a panel that introduces and discusses the developments in Estonian digital humanities.
Keynote speeches:
Raivo Kelomees (Estonian Academy of Arts): Interactive Art as a Method of Preserving and Exhibiting Physical Artworks
Peter Grzybek (Graz University, Austria): „Digital Humanities“ and Cultural Sciences: Πραξις · τέχνη · θεωρία · ἐπιστήμη? Practice – Technology – Theory – Science?
Conference includes hands-on workshops by Moses Boudourides (University of Patras, Greece) and by Peter Grzybek.
We welcome contributions in the following areas of digital humanities:
– mining, managing, analysing visual data;
– interpretation of data and knowledge discovery;
– visualization of various types of data (spatial, historical, folkloric, linguistic, etc.);
– ideas, outlooks, developments and critique of digital humanities in Estonia and elsewhere.
Please submit a proposal that contains your full name, institutional and disciplinary affiliation, a brief academic CV, the title of your paper and an abstract of 200-250 words (including references) by September 12, 2016.
The working language of the conference is English.
Please send your proposals to: digitaalhumanitaaria@gmail.com.
Organising team:
Mari Sarv
Liisi Laineste
