WHiSe 2020: Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic Web 15th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2020) Heraklion, Greece, May 31-June 4, 2020 |
Conference website | http://whise.cc/2020/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=whise2020 |
(See the website for important dates and other details.)
Call for papers
The emergence of affordable computational methods for the collection, enhancement and analysis of data generated en masse has helped shape several fields, such as social sciences, into structured research fields. Digital Humanities are enjoying such a transformation to the point that their very boundaries and methodological foundations are being called into question. The quality and relevance of findings obtained from the thorough, human-driven analysis of a few sources, compared to unsupervised large-scale analytics on masses of data, is a fervent ongoing debate; and yet, the latter cannot prescind from a conscious effort in shaping the world to which the analyses need to relate. This has largely taken the form of knowledge modelling efforts, from which many ontologies, controlled vocabularies and conceptual models like CIDOC-CRM, the Europeana Data Model and FRBRoo have arisen. However, other fields traditionally less reliant on machine-readable data have seen the emergence of ‘ecological’ communities with an approach to the Web of Data. Recent examples include Transforming Musicology for music and musicology and Linked Pasts for history and archaeology.
The WHiSe workshop series was conceived from a reflection on the extent to which the Semantic Web community is serving the needs of historians, philologists, cultural critics, musicologists and other humanists that generally:
- (1) cannot always rely on masses of structured data;
- (2) deal with vague, fragmentary, uncertain, contradictory and yet still valuable evidence that poses a challenge even to Artificial Intelligence research per se;
- (3) have good reason to value the systematic investigation of a few sources but intend to push the boundaries by exploring the potential of automated analytical findings on masses of content.
WHiSe also probes for interest in genuinely new Semantic Web research questions inspired by processes in Digital Humanities. It addresses both aspects by promoting dialogue between humanists who employ or are contemplating semantic technologies, and Semantic Web scholars providing accounts of applied research in the Humanities.
WHiSe 2020 welcomes original research contributions crossing Humanities and the Semantic Web. Scholars who have conducted research or developed impactful applications are invited to submit full papers with appropriately evaluated contributions. WHiSe also welcomes vision/position papers on novel challenges or approaches to existing problems as well as demos and preliminary results (short papers). Topics on which potential submitters are invited to contribute include, but are not limited to:
- Construction and use of Humanities Knowledge Graphs
- Knowledge base generation from classical texts
- Linking data within and across gazetteers
- Semantic enrichment of data from historical records and biographies
- Ecosystems, infrastructures and process descriptions for linking data in the Humanities
- Linked Digital Libraries and semantic archives
- Semantic search in humanities data
- Social semantics and network analysis of humanities data
- Ontology adoption in specific domains in the Humanities
- Computational methods for the prosopography of historical figures
- Capturing, modelling and reasoning on musical data
- The role of ontologies and controlled vocabularies in data preservation
- Contribution of Linked Data to the successful application of machine learning and deep learning methods in Digital Humanities
- Criticism of Semantic Web standards from the point of view of humanities scholarship
- Knowledge bottlenecks, practical difficulties and usability of Linked Data and Knowledge technologies by cultural institutions and Humanities scholars
- Ethical issues in using Semantic Web and Linked Data
- Utopic / dystopic visions of the Semantic Web of the future
Submissions in all the categories mentioned above (full and short papers) will be peer-reviewed by acknowledged researchers familiar with both scientific communities. Accepted papers will be published as online proceedings courtesy of CEUR-WS.org.