Baltic Digital Humanities Forum to Convene in Riga
The Baltic Digital Humanities Forum, a key event for the digital humanities community in the Baltic region, will take place next week, on 25–26 April. Hosted by the University of Latvia in its new Academic Center, the DH Forum brings together researchers and practitioners from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and other countries, and provides a platform to explore the development and impact of digital humanities (DH) in the field of humanities. As digital humanities are becoming an increasingly important part of the region's academic landscape, this forum is an important venue for discussion and networking among the growing Baltic digital humanities communities.
The first day of the Baltic DH Forum will feature a series of enlightening sessions with prominent speakers from the Baltic digital humanities research communities, representatives from national ministries and key European infrastructures in humanities – CLARIN ERIC and DARIAH-EU. These sessions are designed to provide a nuanced exploration of the evolution of Baltic digital humanities over recent decades, examine the impact of research infrastructures on the growth of the humanities, and discuss future directions for the field. The first two sessions will be available to a broader audience via live stream (University of Latvia Livestream Channel).
On the second day, the focus will shift towards a more interactive format. Forty-five research teams from three Baltic States and a few other countries will take the opportunity to present their digital humanities projects, showcase newly developed digital resources and tools, and introduce various educational initiatives, from online training platforms to summer schools and higher education modules.
The Baltic Digital Humanities Forum Calls for Participation
Digital humanities researchers, practitioners and developers are invited to participate in the Baltic DH Forum scheduled for April 25–26, 2024 in Riga!
- Dates: April 25–26, 2024
- Location: National Library of Latvia, Riga
- Participation Fee: None
- Deadline for Applications: January 25, 2024
- Event Website: http://www.digitalhumanities.lv/baltic-dh-forum-2024
Digital humanities have become a solid part of the research landscapes in the Baltic countries. Over the recent decades, this transformation has been evident through the vibrant and enthusiastic DH communities, the emergence of new research groups and centers, and the increasing presence of digital humanities courses and programs in higher education. This marks the right time for the digital humanities communities of the three Baltic States to come together, to look at how and in what directions DH has developed in our countries, to reflect on what is relevant today and to project what lies ahead in the near future.
The Baltic DH Forum spans two days, with the first day hosting sessions by speakers from Baltic DH communities and European infrastructures. The second day focuses on networking, presenting DH projects, digital tools, and educational initiatives, complemented by workshops on collaborative projects and fundraising strategies.
Apply now for participation in the Baltic DH Forum's "Demonstration and Networking Session" on the second day here by submitting a 200–250-word abstract in one of 3 categories – DH resource or tool, a Research Project, or an Educational initiative. Submissions across diverse areas related to digital humanities are encouraged!
The Baltic DH Forum is a collaborative effort organized in partnership with DARIAH-EU and CLARIN ERIC, led by the program committee comprised of researchers from all three Baltic countries. The event is financially supported by the Language Technology Initiative, funded by the European Union and the National Development Plan and the project "Towards Development of Open and FAIR Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia" (VPP-IZM-DH-2022/1-0002) funded by the Latvian Council of Science.
Contact information: [email protected]
Third digitalhumanities.lv seminar
Stuart Dunn's online seminar on methodological pluralism
There will be two seminars on 27th November and 11th December, 2:30 PM - 4 PM EET (12:30 PM - 2 PM GMT).
The first seminar will be dedicated to - Methodological Pluralism: Study Design and Implementation from the Social Sciences to DH.
How do you design a research project in the Digital Humanities (DH)? This is a far more diffuse and abstract question than one might encounter in more “conventional” branches of the humanities, and certainly more so than would come across in the social sciences, where study design practice is, more or less, a discipline in its own right. This lecture will look at some of these practices, and consider how they can (and can’t) translate to the domain of DH. How can we use the lessons of other domains to bring nuance and greater rationalization to the distinction between qualitative and quantitative data (or indeed knowledge)? I will use as my starting point an old blog post that I wrote addressing this question, and go on to illustrate some possible answers from the more recent Routledge International Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities (2020), of which I was co-editor.
Registration for the conference "Recent Language Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities"
We invite you to participate in the conference "Recent Language Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities", which will take place on 12 September 2023, 13.00-17.00, at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Latvia, 29 Raiņa Boulevard.
Conference registration: https://ej.uz/CLARINLV-registracija
More about the conference programme: https://clarin.lv/lv/
Open lectures of Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities
25 July, from 9.10
Episode No.2 of the Digital Humanities podcast
Applications for the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities open until 10 July
From 25 to 28 July, the DHELI project will host the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities (BSSDH2023) in Riga.
We encourage applications from students and researchers who might be interested in the following topics:
Registration information (deadline for applications is 10 July, but we will close earlier if all places are filled): http://www.digitalhumanities.lv/bssdh/2023/about/
Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon #DHH23
From May 23 to June 3, a hackathon on digital humanities was held in Helsinki, which was attended by Haralds Matulis, the coordinator of the DHELI project.
Haralds reports on his experience in Helsinki: "Around 50 people from different countries participated in the hackathon, divided into four research groups. I participated in the 'Interactional Dynamics of Online Discussions' group. The research data came from an 'incel' forum. The aim of the study was to investigate how forum participants communicate, what makes for constructive and non-constructive discussions, what understandings there are of their own group and external groups, what language structures are used to achieve discussion goals. During the study, various methods of digital humanities were tested and applied to internet forum data. Participating in the hackathon gave me the opportunity to test several digital humanities methods in practice and to take part in data processing workflows carried out by research group members - using methods such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, registry research, corpus linguistics, and working with large data sets."
More information about the hackathon: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/digital-humanities/dhh23-hackathon/dhh23-themes
Registration for the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities 2023 is open
Students, researchers, and GLAM professionals are welcome to enrol in the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities: Discourse Analysis and Digital Literary Studies, which will be held on 25-28 July 2023 at the National Library of Latvia (NLL) and Online.
The Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities is an international intensive continuing education programme that provides the opportunity to researchers, educators, and students of humanities and social sciences, as well as archive, library and museum professionals to master various digital research skills, from data wrangling and analysis to visualisation.
Episode 1 of the Digital Humanities podcast
The first episode of the Digital Humanities podcast "Speech Corpora" has been released, in which Haralds Matulis talks to Ilze Auziņa, a senior researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Latvia.
Workshop on the development and use of speech corpora on 18 May
Digital Humanities Forum at the European Parliament
The Digital Humanities Forum titled "Humanities in the digital age: Securing innovation and empowering democracy" will be held on April 26, 2023, at the European Parliament. The event is organized by the STOA panel vice-chair MEP Ivars Ījabs, assisted by the head of DHELI project, ILFA leading researcher Sanita Reinsone in cooperation with DARIAH-EU and CLARIN ERIC research infrastructures. The forum will feature distinguished speakers from various institutions, including Normunds Grūzītis, a leading researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Sciences of the University of Latvia.
First seminar in the digitalhumanities.lv seminar series
On 12 April 2023, the first seminar in the digitalhumanities.lv seminar series will take place in partnership with ClarinLV and DARIAH-EU. The seminars will feature presentations by both Latvian and international digital humanities researchers and practitioners, presenting their research, tools and resources developed and discussing methodological issues. The seminars will take place both in person - on the 5th floor of the National Library of Latvia at the Archives of Latvian Folklore, and remotely - on the Zoom platform. The project is developed in cooperation with the European research infrastructures CLARIN-EU and DARIAH-ERIC for language technologies and digital humanities.
DHELI project launched to advance digital humanities in Latvia
With the aim to strengthen and develop the humanities in Latvia, a new project of the National Research Programme "Digital Humanities" called "Towards Development of Open and FAIR Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia" or DHELI is being launched at the beginning of this year, with funding from the Science Council of Latvia. The project is coordinated by the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Arts of the University of Latvia with Dr. philol. Sanita Reinsone as its lead, and involves representatives from the National Library of Latvia, Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia Institute of Latvian Language and Livonian Institute, Rēzekne Academy of Technologies, Riga Technical University.
Digital Humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary area of research that blends fundamental and applied research methods to address questions within the humanities, social sciences, and arts. This field employs computational methods and uses digital resources and tools for data processing, analysis, and visualization. A prime example of the practical application and wide usage of DH is language technology, showcasing the significance of a well-established digital humanities infrastructure that not only supports researchers but also benefits a wider audience.
The 10th International Conference "Human Language Technologies – the Baltic Perspective"
The 10th International Conference "Human Language Technologies – the Baltic Perspective" will take place on 6-7 October 2022 at the House of Nature (University of Latvia).
The aim of the Baltic HLT is to provide a forum for the sharing of new ideas and recent advances in human language processing and to promote cooperation between the research communities of computer science and linguistics from the Baltic sea states and other countries.
During the past two decades, notable progress has been made in language technology development in all three Baltic countries. Although our languages are often called less resourced significant results have been demonstrated in speech technologies, machine translation, and natural language understanding.
The Conference programme includes twenty-three presentations representing a wide range of topics (speech processing, machine translation, application of deep learning techniques to different natural language processing tasks, creation of language resources, and others). Conference papers are published in the Baltic Journal of Modern Computing.
The first Baltic HLT conference in 2004 was the first event to focus on language technology development in the Baltic region. The success of this event inspired the organisation of biennial conferences in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This year, the event is organized by the University of Latvia and the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, UL in cooperation with SIA "Tilde".
Applying for the DHNB2023
The 7th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB2023) invites applications for the conference (abstract submission deadline 15 October 2022).
Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities
Everyone will also
have the opportunity to listen four open lectures on the
Facebook and Youtube channels of National Library of Latvia.
IMCS UL participates in the LREC 2022 conference
Photo: https://www.marseille-tourisme.com/
LREC 2022 (13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation) is taking place in Marseille on June 20-25, 2022. LREC is the major event on Language Resources and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies. The Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, participates in the conference with three presentations.
On June 21, there will be a report on the Latvian Language Learner Corpus LaVA, which includes more than 1000 essays written by language learners studying at Latvian universities (corpus size – 190k words). By analyzing the mistakes of the language learners marked in the texts, a set of self-assessment exercise was created.
On June 22, we will present a poster about extending the Tezaurs.lv online dictionary with word sense synonyms and other semantic links, building a new lexico-semantic resource – Latvian WordNet.
Poster presentation on the Latvian National Corpora Collection (LNCC) - a diverse collection of corpora representing both written and spoken language is planned on Midsummer's Day, June 23. All corpora of LNCC are annotated with a uniform morpho-syntactic annotation scheme, enabling federated search and consistent linguistics analysis in more than 20 corpora (1.3B tokens).
Registration for the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities is open
Students, researchers, and GLAM professionals are welcome to enrol in the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities: Essentials of News Data Mining, which will be held on 26-29 July 2022 at the National Library of Latvia and Online.
The Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities is an international intensive continuing education programme that provides the opportunity to researchers, educators, and students of humanities and social sciences, as well as archive, library and museum professionals to master various digital research skills, from data wrangling and analysis to visualisation.
In 2022, the school is organised for the fourth time and provides the opportunity to learn the basics of data analysis and visualisation with Python and R programming languages, master web harvesting skills, and learn more about network visualisation. One of the special focuses of this year is the analysis of news data and digitised newspapers in particular. The full programme can be viewed on the website Digital humanities in Latvia.