I remember hearing this same enthusiastic rhetoric about how new technology would transform the humanities in 1979 when the latest in digital technology was a microfiche concordance.  The actual optical technology to read the carbonized papyri at Herculaneum or to optically reconstruct destroyed sections of manuscripts are a few instances I can think of where machines will do something that humans cannot.  Other than that, while it's great to have manuscript facsimiles available on the web and to catalog and communicate over the Internet, how does this change anything other than the ease with which we can do our research?
   Like you, I have been waiting for years to hear about how digital humanities is fundamentally different from the old humanities in a new medium.  And this is not to denigrate new projects for new media, but to keep some historical perspective on the long term value of what scholars have been doing since ancient times.
Nancy

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Peter Damian <peter.damian@btinternet.com> wrote:
>>Digital technologies have the potential to transform the types of research questions that we ask in the Humanities
 
How exactly?  I know that conferences invite solutions to provocative questions such as these but ...
 
>>but ultimately they will also allow us to answer questions that we were not even aware we could ask, hence the title of this conference. How
 
How on earth do we know this?  I asked this question to this group a few years ago and got no satisfactory answer.  I have a very simple need, which is a Latin spell-checker.  This would revolutionise our approach to digitisation of Latin texts. It is a relatively simple task, because I looked at the problem a few years ago.  I did not have the time or resource to solve it myself.  Perhaps I will look at the problem again.  But, then, there seems to be a whole humanities research industry devoted to 'digital humanities', so why hasn't someone provided a solution to this simple problem?
 
Edward
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2011 2:12 PM
Subject: [dm-l] SDH 2011 Supporting Digital Humanities

First call for papers

SDH 2011 Supporting the Digital Humanities:
Answering the unaskable

17-18 November, Copenhagen

 

Following the first successful SDH conference in Vienna in 2010, the CLARIN and DARIAH initiatives have decided to jointly organise the second SDH conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in November 2011. The conference venue will be at the University of Copenhagen, a participant in both CLARIN and DARIAH.

 

Digital technologies have the potential to transform the types of research questions that we ask in the Humanities, and to allow us to address traditional questions in new and exciting ways, but ultimately they will also allow us to answer questions that we were not even aware we could ask, hence the title of this conference. How can digital humanities help us not just to find the answers to our research questions more quickly and more easily, but also to formulate research questions we would never have been able to ask without access to large quantities of digital data and sophisticated tools for their analysis? Supporting the Digital Humanities will be a forum for the discussion of these innovations, and of the ways in which these new forms of research can be facilitated and supported.

 

CLARIN and DARIAH are creating European research infrastructures for the humanities and related disciplines. SDH2011 aims to bring together infrastructure providers and users from the communities involved with the two infrastructure initiatives. The conference will consist of a number of topical sessions where providers and users will present and discuss results, obstacles and opportunities for digitally-supported humanities research. Participants are encouraged to engage with honest assessments of the intellectual problems and practical barriers in an open and constructive atmosphere.

 

The first SDH conference in 2010 gave a broad and multi-facetted presentation of the domains of interest to CLARIN and DARIAH. This time we have chosen a somewhat more focussed approach, focussing on two major themes, but not excluding other themes of interest for the humanities. The two themes are:

 

·        Sound and movement – music, spoken word, dance and theatre

·        Text and things – text, and the relationship between text and material artefacts, such as manuscript, stone or other carriers of text

 

Submissions are invited for individual papers and posters, as well as panels. Focus should be on tools and methods for the analysis of digital data rather than on digitisation processes themselves, both from the provider and from the user perspective. We want to pay special attention to inspiring showcases that demonstrate the innovative power of digital methods in the humanities.

 

Some important dates:

July 15, 2011: Submission of suggestion for panels

July 24, 2011: Submission of abstracts (4 pages)

August 15, 2011: Notification on panel proposals

September 15, 2011: Author notification

October 15, 2011: Final version of papers for publication (8 pages).

November 17-18: Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark

 

Programme committee

 

Bente Maegaard, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University, Netherlands

Helen Bailey, University of Bedfordshire, UK

Tim Crawford, Goldsmith’s University of London, UK

Matthew Driscoll, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland, United States

Erhard Hinrichs, Tübingen University, Germany

Fotis Jannidis, Würzburg University, Germany

Helen Katsiadakis, Academy of Athens, Greece

Krister Lindén, Helsinki University, Finland

Heike Neuroth, Göttingen State and University Library, Germany

Laurent Romary, INRIA, France

Nina Vodopivec, Institute for Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Peter Wittenburg, MPI, Netherlands/Germany

Martin Wynne, Oxford University, UK

 

 

 

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Digital Medievalist --  http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/
Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org
News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/
Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760
Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca
Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l