Dear all,

everyone welcome to our conference!

With best greetings

Mari Sarv

Conference on translingual and transcultural digital humanities

October 19-20, Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu, Estonia

Working with various (archival) material, researchers are often confronted with the problem that although both quantitative and qualitative methods in the humanities are quickly becoming more versatile, efficient and numerous, tools for translingual and transcultural analysis remain underdeveloped. The majority of tools for data mining and analysis are available in the biggest languages only, which makes it difficult to study the smaller or extinct ones or compare them to for example English. In fact, sometimes researchers don’t even have access to source texts of geographically close cultures because of language barrier (e.g. Estonian and Latvian are mutually incomprehensible). In the case of non-textual material, the limitations are not linguistic, in this case the access to metadata and -information, and cultural interpretations are important, and the challenges big data has to offer to non-textual transcultural research. Thus, it may not possible to get an adequate overview of the material or gain accurate insight as the results are blurred by technical difficulties. At the same time, the translingual and -cultural analysis has long tradition in different disciplines – history, religious studies, linguistics, etc – and introducing the possibilities and advances of digital tools, systems, standards, and the results of research to the academic community is greatly needed.

In its ideas and ideologies, the conference is inspired by the work of the SIG of the Alliance of the Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/ Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH) which aims to promote the collaboration among digital humanities researchers world-wide and to support the inclusion of the researchers from all geographic regions, cultures, languages and types of economies, and by http://humanidadesdigitales.net/blog/2013/07/19/is-there-anybody-out-there- building-a-global-digital-humanities-community/ the plenary speech by Isabel Galina at the 2013 Digital Humanities ADHO conference in Nebraska; and of course by the necessity for the more thorough computational competence in our everyday work.

The conference is third in the series of yearly digital humanities conferences in Estonia and includes a special panel on ongoing projects and developments in Estonian digital humanities.

We welcome contributions from the following areas:

* data-mining (incl visual, multimedia and other data) * working with data in various languages, incl small or extinct languages * translingual analysis * computational ontologies * cross-linguistic and -cultural research in the field of digital humanities * applications targeted at (usable with) various languages * the role of English as lingua franca in digital humanities, assets and drawbacks * compiling multilingual data collections (e.g. by crowdsourcing) * ideas, outlooks, projects and developments in Estonian digital humanities

Please submit a proposal that contains your full name, institutional and disciplinary affiliation with a very brief academic CV, the title of your paper and an abstract of 200-250 words. Authors will be informed about the status of their submission by August 31, 2015. Participation fee of the conference is €50. The language of the conference is English.

Deadlines:

Abstract submission: August 15, 2015 Notification of acceptance: August 31, 2015 Conference starts: October 19, 2015

Send your proposals to: mailto:digitaalhumanitaaria@gmail.com digitaalhumanitaaria@gmail.com

Mari Sarv & Liisi Laineste http://www.folklore.ee/dh/en/events/dh_conference_estonia_2015/ Estonian Literary Museum Vanemuise 42 Tartu 51003