Digital Approaches to Multilingual Text Analysis [Online conference]
Dates: 2022, January 27-28
Call for abstracts
This online symposium aims to bring together professionals and academics to discuss the complex dynamics of applying digital approaches in multilingual text analysis. Up until now, use of DH tools and methods have been applied across a variety of corpora but text-analysis of English language sources has dominated this field. These approaches are increasingly being used in languages and linguistics research for non-English corpora. At the same time, the integration of these tools has seen new research questions and possibilities emerge, including questions such as “Is there a non-Anglo digital humanities (DH), and if so, what are its characteristics” (Fiormonte 2016: 438). Recent studies have begun to examine aspects such as OCR for historical text analysis and data mining (Hill & Hengchen 2019; Goodman et al. 2018), multilingual computation analysis (Dombrowski 2020), semantic and sentiment analysis (Daems et al. 2019) and historical linguistics (Evans 2016), among others. We are particularly interested in the ways researchers have used digital tools to examine “big data” from the textual past, and how new tools are being developed to process multilingual texts.
Proposals are invited for 10 minute papers which seek to address the broad question of digital approaches to multilingual text analysis. We particularly welcome scholars who are working in language programmes, and from any area of linguistics or critical approach. Such approaches may include but are not limited to:
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and/or Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for multilingual texts
- Digital mapping using non-English data
- Issues involved in dealing with non-Latin scripts
- Challenges using NLP for multilingual textual corpora
- Multilingual topic modelling, collocations, vector space analysis, authorial attribution
- Critical and/or theoretical reflections in digital approaches to multlingual text analysis
The overall aim is to think about different ways to approach multilingual textual analysis using tools from DH, and what this might mean for a non-Anglo digital humanities in the future.
Please send 250 word abstract (excluding references), name, and affiliation to: joshua.brown@anu.edu.au and katrina.grant@anu.edu.au by September 30. Notification of accepted papers will be sent out by October 15. The two-day symposium will run in 2022, January 27-28.
Format: Please submit your abstract in .pdf format to the conference organisers with “Multilingual DH” as your email subject. The conference will be online via Zoom.
If you have any queries, please contact us
Dr Josh Brown (joshua.brown@anu.edu.au)
Dr Katrina Grant (katrina.grant@anu.edu.au)
References
Auer, Anita, Moragh Gordon & Mike Olson. 2016. English Urban Vernaculars, 1400-1700: Digitizing Text from Manuscript. In María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo & Ignacio M. Palacios-Martínez (eds.). Corpus Linguistics on the Move. Exploring and Understanding English through Corpora. Leiden: Brill. 21-40.
Daems, Joke, Thomas D’haeninck, Simon Hengchen, Tecle Zere & Christophe Verbruggen. 2019. ‘Workers of the World’? A Digital Approach to Classify the International Scope of Belgian Socialist Newspapers, 1885-1940. In: Journal of European Periodical Studies 4.(1). 99-114.
Dombrowski, Quinn. 2020. Preparing Non-English Texts for Computational Analysis. In: Modern Languages Open 45.(1). 1-9.
Fiormonte, Domenico. 2016. Toward a Cultural Critique of Digital Humanities. In Matthew K Gold & Lauren F Klein (eds.). Debates in Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 438-458.
Goodman, Michael Wayne, Ryan Georgi & Fei Xia. 2018. PDF-to-Text Reanalysis for Linguistic Data Mining. The Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. 723-727. Available online at: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2018/index.html.
Hill, Mark J & Simon Hengchen. 2019. Quantifying the impact of dirty OCR on historical text analysis: Eighteenth Century Collections Online as a case study. In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34.(4). 825-843.