The University of St Andrews School of Art History in collaboration with the St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies (SAIMS) present Re/generate: Materiality and the Afterlives of Things in the Middle Ages, 500-1500, an interdisciplinary conference on reuse and recycling in medieval Europe taking place on 6-7th May 2016.

In recent years, the discipline of Art History has been grappling with the concept of materiality, the very thingness of art. The material of medieval art, be it parchment, precious metal, gem, bone or stone, has emerged as a spearheading topic. Unsurprisingly, this “material turn” has prompted intriguing questions. To what extent does an ivory figure of the Virgin and Child embody the divine, rather than merely represent it? What exactly did pilgrims do with the holy dust or liquid which they carried away from saints’ shrines in little ampullae? It is within this context that we wish to explore how recycling was part of the medieval (re)creative process.

This conference will investigate the different ways in which medieval people used and reused goods, materials, and other elements from existing forms to create (or recreate) new art and architecture. Why did medieval people preserve, conserve, and recycle art and materials from a different era? Did such appropriation go beyond mere economic practicality? Could the very materiality of an object have been the reason for its retention or reinvention? The two-day conference is aimed at postgraduates and early career academics from a range of disciplines including, but not limited to history, art history, museum studies, archaeology, book studies and literature.

We invite twenty-minute papers on the following range of topics and their relationship to the study of materiality, recycling and reuse in middle ages:

• Second-hand materiality of medieval art and/or everyday objects;
• The concept of refuse/garbage and its reuse;
• The medieval and post-medieval afterlives of things;
• Theoretical approaches to medieval materiality; Thing theory and Stuff theory;
• Semiotics and anthropology of medieval recycling and recreation;
• Issues of authorship, circulation and ownership of recycled art;
• Genealogy of recycled materials: spoils, heirlooms, relics, ruins and remnants;
• Conservation, preservation and restoration in medieval thought and practice.

Papers on other issues related to the study of materiality and reuse of materials in the Middle Ages or of medieval materials in post-medieval practice are also welcome. Please direct your submissions (250 word abstract) along with a short biography (100 word) to regenerate2016(at)st-andrews.ac.uk no later than 1st of February 2016. Conference website: regenerate2016.wordpress.com

The Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities has established a forum for the discussion of digital methods applied to all areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences, including Classics, Philosophy, History, Literature, Law, Languages, Archaeology and more. The initiative is organized by the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) with the involvement of DARIAH.EU.

The dialogs will take place every Monday from April 11th until early July 2016 in the form of 90-minute seminars. Presentations will be 45 minutes long and delivered in English, followed by 45 minutes of discussion and student participation. Seminar content should be of interest to humanists, digital humanists, librarians and computer scientists. Furthermore, we proudly announce that Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann (KU Leuven) will be giving the opening keynote on April 11th.

We invite submissions of abstracts describing research which employs digital methods, resources or technologies in an innovative way in order to enable a better or new understanding of the humanities, both in the past and present. We also encourage contributions describing ‘work-in-progress’. Themes may include – but are not limited to –  text mining, machine learning, network analysis, time series, sentiment analysis, agent-based modelling, lexical and conceptual resources for DH, or efficient visualization of big and humanities-relevant data.

For more information, please visit: http://etrap.gcdh.de/call-for-papers-2016-gottingen-dialog-in-digital-humanities/

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.