via Marina Buzzoni

CfP Deadline: 31 May 2016

Digital editions: representation, interoperability, text analysis and infrastructures

Venue: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Dates: 7-9 September 2016

The AIUCD 2016 conference is devoted to the representation and study of the text under different points of view (resources, analysis, infrastructures), in order to bring together philologists, historians, digital humanists, computational linguists, logicians, computer scientists and software engineers and discuss about the text.On the one hand, Digital Humanities, in addition to the creation and maintenance of resources (digitization, annotation, etc.), must take into account how they will be used.On the other hand, Computational Linguistics, in addition to the development of computational tools (parsers, named entity recognizers, etc.), must take into account the quality of the resources on which the same tools are applied. These aspects: formal (models), digital (resources), computational (tools), infrastructural (platforms) and social (communities) involve different skills that the conference aims to make interact with each other.

The creation of resources and the development of tools should advance hand in hand, and should be based on solid models that meet the requirements established by the experts of the field. It is necessary that resources and tools be developed in parallel: only if you know how to use the text, what can be extracted from it and how to do it, can you adequately represent it.Now that the major digitization initiatives provide multiple editions of the same works, abundant secondary literature, as well as numerous reference books (dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.), the philologist who works in the digital age should be able to seamlessly switch from handling purely philological phenomena (variant studies) to text analysis performed according to different methods (computational linguistics).

The analysis tools and statistical methods developed to be used on an entire corpus of literary texts or extensive secondary literature collections must be integrated with the tools for comparing textual variants and evaluating possible interpretations. It is time for research infrastructures to be able to guarantee interoperability and integration between the instruments for philological studies and the instruments for the analysis of large textual corpora, breaking down the rigid barriers between digital and computational philology on the one hand, and corpus linguistics on the other hand.