How to Survive Scientific Conferences

You’re going to a scientific conference for the first time? Here is a list of things that I think are important to know.

Aus der Fishbowl

Auf der DHd2024 habe ich zum ersten Mal eine Fishbowl-Diskussion moderiert (und auch überhaupt eine erlebt). Dieser Post enthält einige Überlegungen zum Format im DHd-Kontext, inhaltliche folgen (hoffentlich) etwas später.

Call for Papers: Computational Drama Analysis: Achievements and Opportunities

This is a CfP for the “Workshop on Computational Drama Analysis: Achievements and Opportunities” which will be held in Cologne on 14/15 September 2022. Deadline for 1-page abstracts is 6 May 2022.

Stellenausschreibung

Am Lehrstuhl für Digital Humanities/Sprachliche Informationsverarbeitung des Instituts für Digital Humanities an der Universität zu Köln ist zum 01.03.2022 eine Stelle als

Wissenschaftliche:r Mitarbeiter:in (65% TV-L 13)

für zunächst drei Jahre zu besetzen.

Prof. Reiter

Starting October 1st, I’ll be a full professor at the University of Cologne. My denomination will be “Digital Humanities – Sprachliche Informationsverarbeitung”, which is essentially DH and computational linguistics. This of course means that this is exactly the right position for me :-) I am very happy to join the Department of Digital Humanities and collaborate with colleagues at the Cologne Center for eHumanities, the Data Center for the Humanities, the CRC Prominence in Language, the Center for Data and Simulation Science, and many more.

CRETA-Coaching

For the third time, we are offering the CRETA-Coaching. This intense and on-point program will again accept applications for five to six places. Core idea of the coaching is to discuss operationalisation issues and challenges individually with young researchers. This allows taking into account the very specific research questions and conditions they have. More info can be found here: www.cretaverein.de/coaching/, details about applications are listed here (in German).

Shared Task on Scene Segmentation

With colleagues from the universities Würzburg and Darmstadt, I’m organising a shared task on scene segmentation: Scenes are time-, location- and plot-wise coherent units of a story, and can predominantly be found in narrative texts like novels or biographies. Registration is open until June 7, and the shared task is co-located with KONVENS 2021.

CRETA e.V.

In October 2020, we have established CRETA e.V., a legal entity according to German law (“Verein”). The CRETA e.V. takes over from the eHumanities centre at Stuttgart University, but is no longer bound to Stuttgart. In fact, our members already come from different universities and places. In this new form, we will continue to work on different areas of reflected text analysis, having a platform that links specific research from individual projects. More on our mission can be found on our web page.

Reflektierte algorithmische Textanalyse

Since 2015, I’ve been working in the eHumanities-Center CRETA at Stuttgart University. What we’ve been doing there and how it all fits together can (as of today) be read in a single volume, available both digitally in open-access as well as in print. Roughly one quarter of the articles are in English, the rest in German.

Virtual summer school "Deep Learning for Language Analysis"

After a break, I’m again part of the Cologne summer school on deep learning for language analysis. This year’s edition takes place from August 31 to September 4 online. I’ll be giving a class on Text Analysis with Deep Learning.

CRETA-Coaching

The CRETA-Coaching is back. This intense and on-point program will again accept applications for a total of five places. Core idea of the coaching is to discuss operationalisation issues and challenges individually with young researchers. This allows taking into account the very specific research questions and conditions they have. More info can be found here: www.creta.uni-stuttgart.de/coaching/.

A Shared Task for the Digital Humanities: Annotating Narrative Levels

The special issue on SANTA, our shared task with a narratological focus, has started to appear in the open access journal Cultural Analytics, edited by Evelyn Gius, Nils Reiter, and Marcus Willand. In the next weeks, individual guidelines will be put online one after the other. This post will be updated with links to all articles in the issue. Thanks to the crew of Cultural Analytics, as well as all the guideline authors and reviewers for making this happen!

QuaDramA: Tracking Character Knowledge (Q:TRACK)

I’m pleased to announce that QuaDramA, the research project by Marcus Willand and myself, will receive additional funding soon. In this extension called Q:TRACK, we will investigate knowledge about social relations in drama, focusing on family relations. The core idea is to track the distribution and dissemination of social knowledge by detecting the knowledge characters have, acquire and share during the course of dramatic action. In order to accomplish this, Q:TRACK combines methods from computational linguistics and digital humanities with theoretical and historical expertise of literary studies. The project builds on the research we have done in QuaDramA so far.

Reflected Text Analysis beyond Linguistics

From September 9 to 13, I will be giving a class on Reflected Text Analysis beyond Linguistics, as part of the DGfS-CL fall school 2019 at the IMS at Stuttgart University. The class is also part of the CRETA Coaching.

Cologne

It’s now official: On September 1st, I’ll join the Institute for Digital Humanities at the University of Cologne. At the institute, I’ll be an interim professor for linguistic information processing (“Sprachliche Informationsverarbeitung”). I’m looking forward to the new colleagues, students, institute, and city!

CRC 1391 Accepted

Today, the German Research Foundation (DFG) announced that a new collaborative research center (CRC/SFB: Sonderforschungsbereich) will be installed that I am involved in: Andere Ästhetik (SFB 1391). I’m leading a digital humanities subproject project together with Angelika Zirker. This is exciting news, and I can’t wait to get started.

QuaDramA Tutorial

I’m happy to announce that we will give a tutorial on quantitative drama analysis as part of the 2nd Heidelberg Computational Humanities Summer School. The tutorial will take place on Monday afternoon (July 15) and is held by the entire QuaDramA team. We will give a brief introduction into R and RStudio, but the main part will be a hands-on session using tools we develop(ed) within our project.

Exploring Vector-Space for Automatic Metaphors Detection

Report/hands-on tutorial by Elena Rogleva, Vanessa Schach, Amelie Wührl & Nils Reiter, held during the workshop Finding Metaphor in Discourse. An Intensive Training for Manual and Algorithmic Approaches to Metaphor, November 8-9, 2018, at Basel University.

After the SANTA Workshop

This after-workshop post summarizes some interesting findings during our workshop. The post focusses on subjective impressions of the workshop, it will take some more time to deliver the actual results.

SANTA Workshop

In only two and half weeks, we meet with the participants of the shared task for a three day workshop in Hamburg. I’ve outlined the agenda and explained some of the preparations.

Late Summer School 'Machine Learning for Language Analysis'

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be giving a two-day class on machine learning for reflected text analysis during the late summer school in Cologne, Germany.

Accepted Papers at LaTeCH-CLfL 2018

The list of accepted papers at the COLING workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature has just been published. Acceptance rate is higher compared to previous years: 69%.

SANTA Submissions

The deadline for submitting annotation guidelines in the SANTA shared task has passed, and we received eight submissions, with which we are very happy. We blogged about first impressions and a few more numbers.

Teaching at European Summer University in Digital Humanities

Jointly with my colleague Sarah Schulz, I’ll be giving a class on Reflected Text Analysis in the Digital Humanities at the European Summer University in Digital Humanities in Leipzig. Looking forward to meeting the very good students!

SANTA deadline approaching

The deadline for submitting annotation guidelines in the SANTA shared task will be on June 15. Information about the submission details is available now.

CorefAnnotator 1.0 released

I released a new annotation tool for Coreference, suited for the annotation of long texts containing many discourse entities and long chains. We are using it both in QuaDramA and CRETA. It’s a desktop program written in Java.

Call for Participation for Shared Task SANTA

The Call for Participation for the Shared Task on Narrative Level Annotations is out, with information about the development corpus.

How to Develop Annotation Guidelines

This article describes where to start and how to proceed when developing annotation guidelines. It focuses on the scenario when you're creating new guidelines for a phenomenon that has been described mostly theoretically.

LaTeCH-CLfL 2017 Proceedings now available

The proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, co-located with ACL 2017, are now available in the ACL Anthology.

SANTA: Creation of Annotation Guidelines

We have written about how we picture the first phase of the DH shared task that focuses on narrative levels.

PhD Position in NLP

We are still looking for a candidate for a PhD position in Natural Language Processing/Computational Linguistics, to work in the interdisciplinary research project QuaDramA: Quantitative Drama Analytics, funded by Volkswagen Foundation and soon starting at University of Stuttgart. Applications are welcome anytime.

Call for Papers LaTeCH-CLfL 2017

LaTeCH-CLfL 2017 will be joining the SIGHUM LaTeCH workshop series with the CLfL workshop series. It takes place at ACL in Vancouver, Canada on August 4th. Paper submission deadline is April, 21.

QuaDramA is hiring

We are looking for two candidates for PhD positions, to work in the interdisciplinary research project QuaDramA: Quantitative Drama Analytics, funded by Volkswagen Foundation and soon starting at University of Stuttgart.