Digital Academy
Language Models in Digital Humanities Research
3rd – 5th September 2024
This year’s Digital Academy invites you to…
…collaboratively discuss scientific methods in the digital humanities. This September, we will focus on the incorporation of language models in digital humanities research. Language models have recently received great attention in various disciplines and research areas. In the humanities, too, they constitute an important technical innovation and come with both chances and challenges.
Within the last few years, we have seen technology rapidly change and develop, which has led to remarkable performances and advancements in diverse areas – be it in industry, scientific research or even our everyday lives. Simultaneously, there is a constant growth of the amount of available digitised or born digital data, consolidating the value of being able to process large amounts of textual data at once. This way, we can for instance extract information with the help of Named Entity Recognition or by transferring textual data to structured data and visualising complex (historical) relations.
Applying language models in the digital humanities…
…makes scholars face domain specific challenges. Applying language models to individual research questions may present scholars with questions of resources on various levels – financial and human resources as well as expertise and available data. Difficulties may also lie in processing texts that contain historical or low resource languages. Moreover, it is crucial to fathom how we can effectively make our methods and results available to both the research community and to a wider public in a transparent and explicable way.
In the course of the Digital Academy 2024, we want to explore the potential that emerges with the usage of language models and at the same time discuss how to deal with challenges and critically access how computational methods and interdisciplinary settings may affect traditional work processes in the humanities.
In a virtual setting…
…PhD students along with advanced Masters students of the digital humanities are invited to participate in our two-day workshop on 3rd and 4th September 2024. You will get the chance to present your own research projects highlighting the ways of dealing with language models and to discuss opportunities and pitfalls thereof. Together, we will experiment hands on with tools and methods. (You do not necessarily need much technical expertise in order to participate.)
On the Open Space Day, 5th September 2024, experts in the fields of digital humanities and computational linguistics will report from their experiences and afterwards discuss with the audience. This format will take place in a virtual setting, too, and is open to everyone interested. In order to participate, you do not need to register or take part in the workshop beforehand. Further information and details will be provided soon.
Both the workshop and the Open Space Day will be free of charge.
Call for Participation (two-day workshop)
1 Contributions
In the course of the workshop, you will be able to present your own research project (20 min. presentation, 10 min. discussion each). Besides topics and questions already mentioned, your contributions can, inter alia, touch upon the following areas:
- Which purposes do language models serve within your research projects?
- Which domain specific challenges do we face in the humanities when dealing with (large) language models?
- Which aspects come into play when we critically assess research results produced with the help of AI technology?
- To what extent may BERT, GPT et cetera fundamentally change routines and methods in humanities scholarship?
- How can we design interdisciplinary workflows effectively?
- Which implications do arise with the development of AI technology, especially (large) language models, from the perspective of the humanities?
Please note that the programme of the Digital Academy, including your presentations and discussions, will take place in English.
2 Submissions & Blog Articles
Please submit the following documents to digital-academy@uni-bielefeld.de:
- an abstract of your contribution (400-600 words, excl. bibliography)
- a short CV
Based on your abstract and the discussion following your contribution during the workshop, we would like to invite you to write a blog post (after participating in the Digital Academy) that will be published on the blog of Digital History @UniBielefeld. This way, we can make our results available to a broader public.
3 Deadline
The deadline for submitting contributions is on 15th July 2024 (23:59, MESZ). We will inform about possibilities of participation by 19th July 2024. Further details about the programme will be published in the course of the summer.
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us via the following email address: digital-academy@uni-bielefeld.de
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