The CfP below was just posted on the DHd listservice. I am forwarding this even though it is an English-speaking conference. I have read the thread on the question in which language to submit proposals to DH2014 with fascination, and wondered about two things: 1 / There are political and economic aspects linked to every lingua franca, and it is my understanding that there was a debated British newspapers a few months back about the fact that for several decades the learning of foreign languages has been rapidly declining in Britain, and the lack of prestige awarded to the mastery of foreign languages is now showing a concrete impact in the diplomatic service and the British business community. Still, I wonder whether a lingua franca is needed to make any global, transnational, or international community work, or are we going to revitalize Esperanto or are moving back to Latin and French which were important linguae francae in continental Europe? Historical alternatives would be Arabic and Persian whose reach until the 19th century covered most of the Muslim community in Eurasia and Africa, from Spain and the Balkans to northern China, Indian Subcontinent and the Pacific Rim. 2 / I find Ernesto's first comment particularly interesting because his points that languages are not neutral vehicles and that research standards vary from language to language (I would even argue that they vary from society to society, but that is another matter). But taking the long view -- as a German native who is working in the US on matters of Islamic history in Arabic and Persian -- the dominance of (bad) English at international conferences is a recent phenomenon because the international rise of English as the predominant academic language only began after 1945. Therefore it stands to reason that there is a good chance that at a certain point English will be replaced by another language. Possible candidates, judging by the sheer sizes of their world wide communities of native speakers are Mandarin and Spanish. As Neven pointed out, it may be possible to accommodate in an international context large language groups in addition to English, but the real challenge will be to accommodate native speakers in comparatively small language communities such as Maltese, Gaelic, Icelandic -- to add more exotic examples to list of smallish European languages.
Just another 0.02 -- dagmar
-------------------------------------- Call for papers
Madrid 19-20 May, 2014
The DATeCH international conference brings together researchers and practitioners looking for innovative approaches for the creation, transformation and exploitation of historical documents in digital form.
Important dates
* 7 January 2014 - Paper submission deadline * 28 February 2014 - Decision notification * 31 March 2014 - Camera-ready papers due * 19-20 May 2014 - Conference
Target audience
The workshop aims to foster interdisciplinary work and linking together participants engaged in the following areas:
* Text digitization and OCR. * Digital humanities. * Image and document analysis. * Digital libraries and library science. * Applied computational linguistics. * Crowdsourcing. * Interfaces and human-computer interaction.
Topics
Topics of interest are all those related to the practical and scientific goals listed above, such as:
* OCR technology and tools for minority and historical languages. * Methods and tools for post-correction of OCR results. * Automated quality control for mass OCR data. * Innovative access methods for historical texts and corpora. * Natural language processing of ancient languages (Latin, Greek). * Visualization techniques and interfaces for search and research in digital humanities. * Publication and retrieval on e-books and mobile devices. * Crowdsourcing techniques for collecting and annotating data in digital humanities. * Enrichment of and metadata production for historical texts and corpora. * Data created with mobile devices. * Data presentation and exploration on mobile devices. * Ontological and linked data based contextualization of digitized and born digital scholarly data resources.
Venue
The conference will take place in the Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid), in the framework of the Digitisation Days http://www.succeed-project.eu/digitisation-days (19-20 May, 2014) organised by the Succeed Support Action.
Programme committee
The programme committee is chaired by Apostolos Antonacopoulos (Salford University) and Klaus U. Schulz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität) and integrated by:
* Aly Conteh, The British Library * Basilis Gatos, Demokritos National Center for Scientific Research * Bruce Robertson, Mount Allison University * Christoph Ringlstetter, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität * Christopher Blackwell, Furman University * Claudine Moulin, Universität Trier * David Doermann, University of Maryland * Enrique Vidal, Universitat Politècnica de València * François Bry, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität * Gregory Crane, Universität Leipzig * Günter Mühlberger, Universität Innsbruck * Joan Andreu Sánchez, Universitat Politècnica de València * Laura Mandell, Texas A&M University * Lou Burnard, TEI Board * Malte Rehbein, Universität Passau * Marco Büchler, Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities * Martin Müller, Northwestern University * Neel Smith, College of Holy Cross * Rose Holley, National Archives of Australia * Simone Marinai, Università degli Studi di Firenze * Stefan Gradmann, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin * Stoyan Mihov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences * Thierry Paquet, Université de Rouen * Tomaz Erjavec, Institut Jo?ef Stefan
Submission
The following criteria will be applied to all communications submitted to DATeCH 2014 (http://datech2014.info/submissions http://datech2014.org/submissions):
* Only original material will be accepted. * All communications will be peer reviewed and published in the proceedings of the conference. * The authors of the best contributions will be invited to prepare an extended version for a collective publication of selected papers in an indexed journal (an additional reviewing process will be applied).
Contact
For additional information, please visit www.datech2014.info http://www.datech2014.info or send an email to datech@digitisation.euhttps://cubmail.cc.columbia.edu/horde/imp/message.php?index=135009# <mailto:datech@digitisation.eu>https://cubmail.cc.columbia.edu/horde/imp/message.php?index=135009#
DATeCH 2014 is supported by:
Marco BÜCHLER Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) Papendiek 16 37073 Göttingen (Heynehaus)
eMail : mbuechler@e-humanities.nethttps://cubmail.cc.columbia.edu/horde/imp/message.php?index=135009# Web : http://www.gcdh.de/ Profil : http://www.gcdh.de/en/people/team/marco-buechler/ Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/marco.buechler LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=15098543&trk=tab_pro Twitter : https://twitter.com/mabuechler