Programme 29.06.2020
16:00 - 16:40 Dino Buzzetti, University of Bologna, „The origins of 'Humanities Computing' and the 'Digital Humanities' turn“
At its beginnings Humanities Computing was characterised by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Subsequently, Humanities Computing practice has been prevailingly driven by technological developments and the main concern has shifted from content processing to the representation in digital form of documentary sources. The Digital Humanities turn has brought more to the fore artistic and literary practice, as the overall activity in the social sciences and humanities, in direct digital form, as opposed to a supposedly commonplace application of computational methods to scholarly research. Consequently, the present condition in the field of Digital Humanities comprises two diverse orientations, directed to specifically different goals, that can be concisely characterised respectively as ‘knowledge design’ and ‘data science’. A further epistemological reflection on a constructive relationship between these two diverse orientations becomes now all the more necessary. |
16:50 - 17: 30 Marco Büchler , Institute for Applied Computer Science, Cultural Data Science Group, „A summary of ten years of research on historical text reuse“ (Recording)
17:40 - 18:20 David Garcia, Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Austria, "Computational affective science - Understanding emotions through digital traces“
After collective traumas such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks, members of concerned communities experience intense emotions and talk profusely about them. Although these exchanges resemble simple emotional venting, Durkheim’s theory of collective effervescence postulates that these collective emotions lead to higher levels of solidarity in the affected community. We present the first large-scale test of this theory through the analysis of digital traces of more than 60,000 Twitter users after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015. We found a collective negative emotional response followed by a marked long-term increase in the use of lexical indicators related to solidarity. Expressions of social processes, prosocial behavior, and positive affect were higher in the months after the attacks for the individuals who participated to a higher degree in the collective emotion. Our findings support the conclusion that collective emotions after a disaster are associated with higher solidarity, revealing the social resilience of a community. |
18:30 - 19:10 Alicia Gonzalez Martinez, University of Hamburg, "Cross-script searching in historical texts: breaking the barriers of religion"
Proto-writing consisted of pictograms which represented basic objects or ideas. It soon developed into a more complex system that combines logographic and phonemic symbols. Contemporary writing systems are based on the same principle: they combine symbols of logographic and phonemic nature. The difference among them is how much weight each of the two types have and in which way they represent phonemic elements. Moreover, writing has been invented quite rarely in the history of humanity. Script borrowing is a common process when different cultures are put into contact, and it ends up being an essential part of the identity to the community that uses it. One of the strongest cases of this is religion. Religion typically adopts a specific script as an identitary mark. This causes that speakers of the same language may use different scripts depending on the religion they profess. Digital Humanities can help us create tools which let us make searches in the same language regardless of the script used to represent them. In this way, we would have unbiased results when searching into historical texts. |