HistoInformatics 2014 - 2nd International Workshop on Computational History

HistoInformatics2014 - the 2nd International Workshop on Computational History will be held on November 10th in Barcelona, Spain in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Social Informatics. It aims at fostering the interaction between Computer Science and Historical Science towards "Computational History". This interdisciplinary initiative is a response to the growing popularity of Digital Humanities, particularly in historical research, and an increased tendency to apply algorithms and computer techniques for fostering and facilitating new research methods and tools in Humanities.
History as a representation of the past has many functions. It helps to create meaning, coherence, and orientation individually and collectively and it aims to settle the foundations of our nations, our identities and our memories, to name a few. As such, it is one of the fundamental subjects taught from elementary schools onwards. Traditionally historical research is based on manual investigation of preserved records and artifacts to provide a reliable account of the past and verify different hypotheses. Alongside this hermeneutic approach historians have always translated primary sources into data and used statistics to analyze them. More recently, the field of Digital History has received attention with its aim to dematerialize patrimonial resources in order to explore them in the near future through the usage of automatic methods. This near future has already become a reality. Nowadays, due to the increasing activities in digitizing and opening historical sources, the field of History can greatly benefit from the advances of Computer and Information sciences which consist of processing, organizing and making sense of data and information. As such, new Computer Science techniques can be applied to help verify and validate historical assumptions based on text analytics, image interpretation or comparing multiple perspectives. Hence, Digital History has now entered a new era that we call HistoInformatics, analogous to Bioinformatics and ChemoInformatics which have respectively proposed new research trends in Biology and Chemistry.
Our objective is to provide for the two different research communities a place to meet and exchange ideas and to facilitate discussion. We hope the workshop will result in a survey of current problems and potential solutions, with particular focus on exploring opportunities for collaboration and interaction of researchers working on various subareas within Computer Science and History Sciences.
Themes and Topics
The main topics of the workshop are that of supporting historical research and analysis through the application of Computer Science theories or technologies, analyzing and making use of historical texts, recreating past course of actions, analyzing collective memories, visualizing historical data and providing efficient access to large wealth of historical knowledge. The detailed topics of expected paper submissions are (but not limited to):
Natural language processing and text analytics applied to historical documents
Analysis of longitudinal document collections
Search and retrieval in document archives and historical collections, associative search
Causal relationship discovery based on historical resources
Named entity recognition and disabmiguation
Entity relationship extraction, detecting and resolving historical references in text
Finding analogical entities over time
Computational linguistics for old texts
Analysis of language change over time
Digitizing and archiving
Modeling evolution of entities and relationships over time
Automatic multimedia document dating
Applications of Artificial Intelligence techniques to History
Simulating and recreating the past course of actions, social relations, motivations, figurations
Handling uncertain and fragmentary text and image data
Automatic biography generation
Mining Wikipedia for historical data
OCR and transcription old texts
Effective interfaces for searching, browsing or visualizing historical data collections
Studies on collective memory
Studying and modeling forgetting and remembering processes
Estimating credibility of historical findings
Probing the limits of Histoinformatics
Epistemologies in the Humanities and Computer Science