Author: gfranzini

CfP: Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages

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Call for Contribution: Special Issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages

“Europe’s future is digital”. This was the headline of a speech given at the Hannover exhibition in April 2015 by Günther Oettinger, EU-Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. While businesses and industries have already made major advances in digital ecosystems, the digital transformation of texts stretching over a period of more than two millennia is far from complete. On the one hand, mass digitisation leads to an “information overload” of digitally available data; on the other, the “information poverty” embodied by the loss of books and the fragmentary state of ancient texts form an incomplete and biased view of our past. In a digital ecosystem, this coexistence of data overload and poverty adds considerable complexity to scholarly research.

With this special issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages, the HiSoMA lab in Lyon,
France, and the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities in Germany, aim to create a collection of papers that discuss the state-of-the-art on intertextuality, linguistic preprocessing and the preservation of scholarly research results specifically applied to corpora in ancient languages and for which few online resources exist (Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, etc.).

Relevant topics include:

  • Methods for the detection of intertexts and text reuse, manual (e.g. crowd-sourcing) or automatic (e.g. algorithms);
  • Infrastructure for the preservation of digital texts and quotations between different text passages; Linguistic preprocessing and data normalisation, such as lemmatisation of historical languages, root stemming, normalisation of variants, etc.;
  • Visualisation of intertextuality and text reuse;
  • Creation of, and research on, stemmata.

The special issue will be published by the Journal on Data Mining and Digital Humanities (http://jdmdh.episciences.org/), an online open access journal that will release the issue shortly after its submission in order to elicit feedback from readers while concurrently supervising the standard peer review process.

Interested authors are asked to:

  1. send a title, an author list and a one page (or shorter) abstract specifying the type of contribution (full paper or project presentation) to Laurence Mellerin [laurence.mellerin(at)mom(dot)fr] and Marco Büchler [mbuechler(at)gcdh(dot)de] by October 31st.
  2. send a paper (long: up to 40 pages OR short: 2 to 4 pages illustrating the scope and research of the project), following the guidelines of JDMDH by January 31st 2016.

For further questions, do not hesitate to contact Laurence and Marco.

Diachronic Treebanks (Workshop at SLE-2016)

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Workshop at the 49th SLE meeting, Naples Aug. 31 – Sept. 3, 2016

Convenors: Hanne Eckhoff (University of Tromsø, Norway), Silvia Luraghi (Università di Pavia, Italy), Marco Passarotti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy).

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers interested in historical linguistics, who combine a solid linguistic background with an interest for the exploitation of electronic resources, and in particular of syntactically parsed corpora, in research on language change. We welcome proposals addressing diachronic issues under any type of approach and methodology, provided that they highlight the contribution of empirical evidence retrieved from treebanks in achieving meaningful results.

MOTIVATION AND AIMS

Over the last two decades, treebanks have become an increasingly useful instrument for data-driven study of linguistic structures at various levels. The proliferation of treebanks has led to a very large number of resources available for different languages, which can support comparative research of various issues cross-linguistically. In recent years, a growing number of treebanks has also become available for ancient languages and for different historical stages of the same language: the York-Toronto-Helsinki corpus and the Penn Corpora of Historical English for English, Tromsø Old Russian and OCS Treebank and RRuDi for Russian, PROIEL for various ancient Indo-European languages and recently extended to host treebanks for medieval stages of Romance and Germanic languages, Perseus Latin and Ancient Greek Dependency Treebanks for Latin and Ancient Greek, the Index Thomisticus Treebank for Latin, and several others. This allows data extraction aimed to assessing the scope and the effects of diachronic developments, managing a large amount of data and retrieving information whose relevance can then be evaluated through statistical methods. Possible issues that can be tackled through diachronic treebanks are potentially numerous and of different nature, and include increasing or decreasing productivity of syntactic or morphological constructions, and, most interesting, interrelationships between different changes that have previously been considered unrelated or whose interrelation is otherwise hard to prove.

Possible TOPICS include (but are not limited to):

  • historical developments of constructions as evidenced by data extracted from diachronic treebanks;
  • suitability of different types of treebanks (constituent-based vs. dependency-based) for research on specific diachronic changes;
  • correlations between developments in different areas of a language’s grammar;
  • similarities and differences between parallel developments of similar changes in different languages;
  • how evidence from already known and documented diachronic change can give input for annotation;
  • how semantic and/or pragmatic information can be supplied in order to better understand the rationale of changes highlighted by data extracted from treebanks;
  • specific issues raised by the development of diachronic treebanks;
  • methods and tools to build and access diachronic treebanks;
  • issues in data selection for representativeness purposes;
  • issues pertaining to scarce and non-standardised data.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

We invite you to submit abstracts up to 300 words (references not included) describing original, unpublished research related to the topics of the workshop. Abstracts should be in an editable format (e.g. .doc or .docx; no pdf will be considered), and should be sent to all workshop organizers:

The DEADLINE FOR THE SUBMISSION of the short abstract is NOVEMBER 15, 2015. Abstracts will be evaluated by the convenors, and selected abstracts will accompany the workshop proposal. We will notify you of inclusion in the workshop proposal when we submit it on November 25th.
Note that if the workshop has been accepted, you will also have to prepare a full abstract and submit it to be reviewed by the SLE scientific committee. The deadline for the submission of full abstracts is January 15, 2016.

For further information, please refer to the SLE meeting webpage at http://sle2016.eu/call-for-papers

CfP: Anachronism and the Medieval (Galway, Ireland)

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A seminar dedicated to “Anachronism and the Medieval” is planned for the next European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) Conference, to be held from 22-26 August 2016 in Galway, Ireland. The organizers look forward to receiving proposals for papers to be presented in this seminar.

This seminar focuses on anachronism, broadly defined, and its relation to the medieval period. Often understood negatively as a computational fault or disruptive error, anachronism is closely related to archaism, presentism, and para-/pro-chronism, as well as to the notion of the preposterous (in its literal Latin sense of “before-behind”). Contributors to this seminar might reflect on broad issues of temporality or particular instances of anachronism—intentional or unintentional—in relation to medieval literary exemplars, but equally welcomed are contributions that explore anachronicity in conjunction with later (Renaissance to contemporary) engagements with the medieval past and its textual traditions.

According to the ESSE conference website (http://www.esse2016.org/): “The seminar format is intended to encourage lively participation on the part of both speakers and members of the audience. For this reason, papers will be orally presented in no longer than 15 minutes rather than read. Reduced versions of the papers will be circulated beforehand among participants.”

Please send proposals of 300 words to both Yuri Cowan [yuri(dot)cowan(at)ntnu(dot)no] and Lindsay Reid [lindsay(dot)reid(at)nuigalway(dot)ie] no later than 28 February 2016. Earlier submissions would be appreciated.