CfP: Historical Labour Markets in Text: Computational and Historical Perspectives on Labour Market Evolution 24./25.4.2026
Dear European Digital Humanists, the workshop "Historical Labour Markets in Text: Computational and Historical Perspectives on Labour Market Evolution" brings together social and economic historians, labour economists, and digital humanities scholars who use textual sources (for instance job advertisements, ego-documents, legal documentation) to study historical economies of the labour markets. In the context of our Job ads project (https://historical-job-ads.uni-graz.at/) — whether in newspapers, trade journals, or early employment agencies — we used this unique window into employer demand and labor supply: occupations, skills, gender expectations, and social norms. With digitization and advances in natural language processing (NLP), new possibilities emerge for systematic, large-scale analyses across time and place. The goal of the workshop is to exchange experiences on how to prepare, model, and interpret textual sources like job advertisement data for economic, historical and digital research. We will discuss social and economic history of labour, methodological challenges (OCR, classification, text annotation, comparability across periods), share ongoing projects, and explore how computational tools can support broader historical questions about skill demand, gender segmentation, and structural change. Topics include: - Which historical sources can inform us about changing skill requirements, technological change, and gendered labour markets. - What can we learn from historical job ads about changing labour markets? - Which methods are available for extracting structured social and economic information from historical text? - How can we set up comparative and longitudinal studies of labour markets across countries and centuries drawing on data beyond already historically aggregations? - How can we enrich textual sources by linking them to economic taxonomies like HISCO, ISCO, or occupational prestige scales? - What has to be done to aggregate and integrate data created on the historical labour market? If you want to participate with a talk (ca. 20min), send an abstract with min. 400 and 750 words (excl. bibliographic references) and a short biographical sketch to [email protected] by **February 1st, 2026**. We will inform you about acceptance by the beginning of March. There will be limited financial support for travel and accommodation. Attached the call in PDF Looking forward to read your contributions Georg Vogeler -- Prof. Dr. Georg Vogeler Department of Digital Humanities University of Graz A-8010 Graz | Elisabethstraße 59/III Tel. +43 316 380 8033 <http://digital-humanities.uni-graz.at> - <http://gams.uni-graz.at> <https://online.uni-graz.at/kfu_online/wbForschungsportal.cbShowPortal?pPersonNr=80075> ORCID: 0000-0002-1726-1712 Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik e.V. <http://www.i-d-e.de> International Center for Archival Research ICARus <http://www.icar-us.eu> ERC Project DiDip <https://didip.eu>
participants (1)
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Georg Vogeler