Category: Conferences

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.

Call for Papers: Second International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Thought, slated for April 7-9, 2016

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Call for Papers
Sam Houston State University’s
Second International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Thought
April 7-9, 2016

Featuring Plenary Speaker: Dr. Caroline Bruzelius, Professor of Art History, Duke University

The conference is slated to be held on the beautiful campus of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.

Deadline to propose a Special Session:      Aug. 15, 2015
Deadline for abstracts:                                Nov. 15, 2015
Notification of acceptance:                        Dec. 15, 2015

You are invited to send your 250-300-word abstract to Dr. Darci Hill, Conference Director, on any topic dealing with Medieval and/or Renaissance thought. If you would like to propose a special session, you are welcome to do that as well. We welcome papers and performances on any aspect of this time period. Papers dealing with language and linguistics, literature, music, philosophy, history, art, music, and theatre are all equally welcome.

Please send all inquiries and abstracts electronically to:

Dr. Darci Hill,
Conference Director,
Dr.darci.hill@gmail.com
Department of English
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, Texas 77340

Seminar: On Cognition and the Digital in the Study of Ancient Textual Artefacts

Peter Stokes

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2014
Friday June 6 at 16:30 in room 103 (Holden Room), Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Ségolène Tarte (Oxford)
On Cognition and the Digital in the Study of Ancient Textual Artefacts

ALL WELCOME
Scholars studying Ancient Textual Artefacts endeavour to create knowledge through the decipherment, transcription, transliteration, edition, commentary, and contextualization of textual artefacts, thereby transforming data and information into knowledge and meaning.  Their task is hence intrinsically interpretative, and relies heavily on the mobilization of both perceptual and conceptual cognitive processes. This talk will present a number of conceptual and perceptual processes that were identified through ethnographic studies of scholars at work and linked to the cognitive sciences literature. Some show embodied cognition at work, others show the role of unconscious knowledge in the act of interpretation of Ancient Textual Artefacts.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

See the full programme for this summer’s seminars at <http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2014.html>

CALL FOR PAPERS: Third AIUCD Annual Conference

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The Third AIUCD Annual Conference
Humanities and Their Methods in the Digital Ecosystem

Scuola di Lettere e Beni Culturali
Università degli studi di Bologna
Via Zamboni 38 — 40126 Bologna
18-19 September 2014

AIUCD 2014, the Third AIUCD (Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale) Annual Conference, is devoted to discussing the role of Digital Humanities in the current research practices of the traditional humanities disciplines.

The introduction of computational methods prompts a new characterisation of the methodology and the theoretical foundations of the human sciences and a new conceptual understanding of the traditional disciplines. Art, archeology, philology, philosophy, linguistics, bibliography and diplomatics, as well as social and communication sciences, avail themselves of computational methods to formalise their research questions, and to innovate their practices and procedures. A profound reorganisation of disciplinary canons is therefore implied.

New emerging notions such as Semantic web, Linked Open Data, digital libraries, digital archives, digital museum collections, information architecture, information visualisation have turned into key issues of humanities research. A close comparison of research procedures in the traditional disciplines and in the digital humanities becomes inevitable to detect concurrencies and to renew their tools and methods from a new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective.

We invite therefore submissions relating, but not confined to the following topics:

— Digital humanities and the traditional disciplines
— Computational concepts and methods in the humanities research practices
— Computational methods and their impact on the traditional methodologies
— The emergence of new disciplinary paradigms

Accepted papers (submitted as abstracts of no more than 1000 words) shall be presented on the second conference day. Submissions have to be uploaded as PDF files on EasyChair at the following address: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aiucd2014 .

The deadline for the submission of abstracts to the Programme Committee is set at the midnight of 12 May 2014. All abstracts shall be submitted to the evaluation process organised by the AIUCD Programme Committee.  Authors shall be informed on the acceptance of their submissions within 9 June 2014.

Further details about the conference, the members of the Programme Committee and the registration process shall be published on the conference web site at the following address: http://aiucd2014.unibo.it/.

Posted by: Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (roberto rossellidelturco at gmail com)