LTHT 2012 - Workshop on Language Technology for Historical Text(s)

The interaction between Human Language Technology (HLT) and Digital Humanities (DH) at large has been the focus of various projects and initiatives during the last years, aiming to bring forward language resources and tools for the Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Heritage.
The specific focus of LThist 2012 lies on the development of technology and resources required for processing historical texts. Contributors and participants are invited: (i) To compare and, to the extent possible, interchange data, tools, approaches, and standards that make historical texts accessible to automatic processing. In line with the general topic of Konvens2012, specific attention will be paid to the adoption of empirical methods. (ii) To discuss ways and strategies for shaping HLT resources (tools, data and metadata) in ways that are maximally beneficial for researchers in the Humanities.
In the workshop, historical texts are understood in two ways: Texts as documents of older forms of languages, and texts as documentations of historical content. Therefore the workshop will not only be concerned with questions of collecting, representing, processing and exchanging corpora of historical texts and respective tools, but also with finding ways to co-relate linguistic information with data representing extra-linguistic historical context.
Topic areas that will be addressed in LThist 2012 comprise (but are not limited to) methods and tools: for processing historical texts making use of rule-based as well as statistical approaches; for building corpora of historical texts and languages; for integrating multimedia and multimodal aspects (text and image) in historical corpora; for building concrete applications and creating concrete infrastructures supporting the collaboration between HLT and DH.