Dear Members of the EADH-Mailingslist,

we have started the registration for our second international conference on Digital Hermeneutics, organized by the research cluster digital_culture at the FernUniversität in Hagen:

Digital Hermeneutics II: Sources, Analysis, Interpretation, Annotation, and Curation

The conference will take place at our side-campus in Frankfurt/Main on November 23/24. Please find the call below and attached a layout-version.

Best regards,

Dennis Möbus

Register now: Digital Hermeneutics II: Sources, Analysis, Interpretation, Annotation, and Curation

Veranstalter: Matthias Hemmje, Almut Leh, Uta Störl, Dennis Möbus, Binh Vu, Helmut Hofbauer, Christian Nawroth

23. November bis 24. November 2023 in Frankfurt am Main

Digitization has reached almost all areas of science and scholarship. And even in the cultural sciences and humanities, computers, databases and digital tools are increasingly important. Last year's annual conference "Digital Hermeneutics: Machines, Procedures, Meaning" of the research cluster digital_culture dealt with the theoretical and conceptual challenges inherent in hermeneutic methods, tools, and applications. The results of the conference supported understanding and meaning, when algorithms, programs, machines, and other technical procedures contribute to it [1]. Following up on these initial theoretical and conceptual results, we now want to address more technical aspects of methods, technologies, tools, and applications supporting Digital Hermeneutics under the title "Digital Hermeneutics II: Sources, Analysis, Interpretation, Annotation, Curation" and take a look at digitally supported hermeneutic research processes and anticipate the future of digitized working practices in the cultural sciences and humanities.

Without such digital support systems, it will no longer be possible to index, find, annotate, and curate the ever-growing number of digitally available resources for research data. Digital systems are also already in use for analyzing, indexing, enriching, and annotating multimedia data. But what about systems that support the analysis, annotation, and interpretation of digital research data – thus: representation of hermeneutic methods – and their results as well as supporting machine learning, reasoning, and finally automating the documentation of annotation, interpretation, and understanding?

In an exchange between humanities scholars and computer scientists, we want to explore the possibilities and limits of the vision of digitally supported hermeneutics circling around the following questions:

Digitization processes bear the risk of information loss or structural shifts and biases. How can these risks be dealt with?
The transformation of sources to data involves coding and enables the enrichment with information. How does one deal with the loss of the original source characteristics? Do standardizations promote a focus on unifying features of different sources or can nuances and deviations also be mapped?
Do the questions and epistemological interests of humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences change the availability, quality, and quantity of sources in the form of data?
How can algorithms and tools support, possibly even expand, research questions and epistemological interests in the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences?
Can computer science also benefit from the discussion of methods in the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies?

Programme

12:00 - 12:30		Welcome and Introduction
12:30 - 13:30	Keynote	Andreas Fickers: Working on the “Digital Hermeneutics Cookbook”. Some recipes for turning “raw” into “cooked” data
13:30 - 15:00	Panel I	Digital Hermeneutics - Problem Statements
13:30 - 13:45		Michael Piotrowski: Model, Corpus, Interpretation: Elements of Computational Hermeneutics
13:45 - 14:00		Discussion
14:00 - 14:15		Bianca Mix, Daniela Delvos: Towards an Evidence Storage for Hermeneutic Argumentation in a Knowledge Management System
14:15 - 14:30		Discussion
14:30 - 14:45		Carlos Manuel Romero Torrado: Soft and Hard Digital Hermeneutics, From Close Reading to Data Analysis
14:45 - 15:00		Discussion
15:00 - 15:30	Coffee
15:30 - 17:00	Panel II	From Data to Scientific Questions for Digital Hermeneutics
15:30 - 15:45		Isabelle Sarther: Infrastructures of Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age. An Empirical Study of the Auschwitz Museum on Twitter.
15:45 - 16:00		Discussion
16:00 - 16:15		Alexander Friedrich: Digital History of Concepts. Some application examples and methodological questions arising from work with the Sense Induction based research tool SCoT
16:15 - 16:30		Discussion
16:30 - 16:45		Onur Engin: “Noise Everywhere:” A Quantitative Textual Analysis of Travelers’ Accounts in Late Ottoman Istanbul
16:45 - 17:00		Discussion
17:00 - 18:30	Panel III	From Data to Scientific Methods for Digital Hermeneutics
17:00 - 17:15		Alexa Lucke: Über den Nutzen des Natural Language Processing in der computationellen Analyse literarischer Texte
17:15 - 17:30		Discussion
17:30 - 17:45		Babaki/Bagankar/Goyal/Shahriarizadeh: Topic Extraction from Biographical Interviews
17:45 - 18:00		Discussion
18:00 - 18:15		Lucija Mandić: Topics of Literary Canon: a Case Study of 19th Century Slovenian Narrative Prose
18:15 - 18:30		Discussion
18:30 - 19:30	Snack
19:30 - 20:30	Keynote	Julianne Nyhan: Towards a multimodal oral history: prospects and dangers for oral history in the digital age
20:30	Get-together
Fr., 24.11.
09:00 - 10:00	Keynote	Joris van Zundert: Hermeneutics as an interdisciplinary means of understanding
10:00 - 11:30	Panel IV	Sustainable Data Management for Digital Hermeneutics
10:00 - 10:15		Isabel Eiser: Co-Creating in Practice. Work Formats, Decision-Making, and Managing Research Logics in the Interdisciplinary Work for the D-WISE Tool- Suite
10:15 - 10:30		Discussion
10:30 - 10:45		Alexander Duttenhöfer: Towards Classifying Emerging Documents in Digital Hermeneutics and Domain-Unspecific Dictionaries
10:45 - 11:00		Discussion
11:00 - 11:15		Cord Pagenstecher: Oral-History.Digital – Qualitative Data, Quantitative Methods, Ethical Questions
11:15 - 11:30		Discussion
11:30 - 11:45	Snack
11:45 - 13:15	Panel V	Costs and Benefits of Digital Hermeneutics
11:45 - 12:00		Burkhard Schäffer, Fabio Lieder: Rekonstruktive Sozialforschung im „Uncanny Valley“? Haltungen empirisch Sozialforschender zu KI-gestützter Interpretation
12:00 - 12:15		Discussion
12:15 - 12:30		Mark Mets: Bridging dimensions: Epistemic and methodological convergence of dimension reduction in cultural data analysis
12:30 - 12:45		Discussion
12:45 - 13:00		Flavia Ferrigno: Relationship between privacy and memory
13:00 - 13:15		Discussion
13:15 - 14:00		Conclusion and Outlook

Language & Venue

The workshop language is English and it will take place on the Frankfurt Campus of the FernUniversität in Hagen:
Walther-von-Cronberg-Platz 16
60594 Hagen

Registration

If you are interested in joining the conference as a guest, please send a mail to Dennis Möbus. No fee will be charged, the external get-together is on self-pay basis. Please let us know, if you will be present for only one of the days or both.

Scientific and Organizational Committee:

Valentina Bachi, Photoconsortium
Swati Chandna, SRH Univ. of Heidelberg
Felix Engel, TIB – German National Library
Lina Franken, Univ. Vechta
Antonella Fresa, Promoter S.r.l.
Ingo Frommholz, Univ. of Wolverhampton
Matthias Hemmje, FernUniversität in Hagen
Helmut Hofbauer, FernUniversität in Hagen
Almut Leh, FernUniversität in Hagen
Michael McTear, Ulster University, Belfast
Bianca Mix, FernUniversität in Hagen
Dennis Möbus, FernUniversität in Hagen
Christian Nawroth, FernUniversität in Hagen
Muskaan Singh, Ulster University, Magee
Uta Störl, FernUniversität in Hagen
Manés Torres, Univ. of the Basque Country – UPV/EHU
Tom van Nuenen, Univ. of Cal. Berkeley
Joris van Zundert, Huygens Institute Amsterdam
Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons, Univ. of Hamm-Lippstadt
Binh Vu, SRH Univ. Heidelberg

[1] https://hagen-up.de/publikationen/von-menschen-und-maschinen-mensch-maschine-interaktionen-in-digitalen-kulturen/