Call for Paper

Günther GÖRZ (1) | Christoph SCHLIEDER (2)
((1) FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg | (2) Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany)

Keywords: knowledge representation, natural language processing, image analysis, reasoning, learning

Call: The digital transition opens new perspectives for researchers interested in cultural processes. An increasing part of the material and immaterial heritage of Western culture is accessible via digital representations such as digital editions of manuscripts, multispectral images of paintings or 3D models of archaeological findings. Digital representations have the obvious advantage of permitting simultaneous remote access.
Additional effort is needed to include more cultural creations in the digital transition. Beyond that, the sheer number of those creations already digitally accessible raises new challenges for humanities scholars. The task of analyzing and linking the many pieces of information becomes more important and difficult than ever.
AI methods provide solutions to some of the challenges involved. The Semantic Web technology stack, for instance, permits knowledge-based algorithms to assist scholars in the task of linking large cultural data sets. Another issue is the vagueness and uncertainty omnipresent in the historic study of cultural processes. AI research has devised a number of methods able to deal with these phenomena. It is important, however, to realize that humanities scholars have specific requirements.
The session gathers interested AI researchers and humanities scholars. We encourage submissions that report on work in progress or present a synthesis of emerging research trends. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Knowledge representation for scholarly digital editions
  • Natural language processing in corpus linguistics
  • Image classification and analysis
  • Ontological approaches to semantic heterogeneity
  • Knowledge graphs in the humanities
  • Reasoning about and learning from uncertain or ambiguous evidence

Submission (open April 15, 2020)
Mind the guidelines