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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1399/Introduction.pdf
Introduction: Biographical Data in a Digital World
Serge ter Braake, Antske Fokkens, Ronald Sluijter, Thierry Declerck and Eveline Wandl-Vogt
VU University Amsterdam, VU university Amsterdam, Huygens Institute for History of the Netherlands,
Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, Austrian Academy of Sciences
s.ter.braake@vu.nl, antske.fokkens@vu.nl, ronald.sluijter@huygens.knaw.nl, declerck@dfki.de, eveline.wandl-vogt@oeaw.ac.at
Abstract
BD2015 brought together researchers from Computer Science and History working on digitized biographies from all over the world.
This introduction to its proceedings provides our motivation for a conference on this topic, a short history of the origin of the event and
an outline of the selection process that led to the presentations held during BD2015 and, ultimately, to these proceedings.
Keywords: digital humanities, biographical data, biographies
1. Introduction als also have siblings, a career and children). Questions of
‘One human life, indeed, is so insignificant, because there methodology and technology go hand in hand, often in in-
are so many of them’1 . Almost seventy years ago, Dutch terdisciplinary research groups, in an attempt to facilitate
historian and biographer Jan Romein nailed with these better and enhanced biographical research.
words one of the main issues academic biographers have
to deal with: what exactly does the account of this particu-
2. Biographical data in a Digital World
lar life contribute to our understanding of history or histor- To our knowledge, Biographical Data in a Digital
ical processes in general? An individual is, after all, only World/BD2015 was the first event attempting to bring
one out of the billions of people living now (2 billion in researchers from all over the world together to discuss
Romein’s time) and the many billions who lived before. the possibilities, limitations and opportunities of research
Because of their focus on a seemingly limited topic, biogra- with biographical data with digital humanities technology.
phers in academia are asked more frequently than others to Looking backwards it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when
justify their work. Often they would say that their individ- this idea was brought to life for the first time, but we believe
ual had a huge impact on the course of history in general, or a meeting between Antske Fokkens, Thierry Declerck and
that the individual offers a lens through which we can look Eveline Wandl-Vogt at LREC 2014 in Reijkjavic (Ninth In-
at a past society as a whole. These justifications are valid ternational Conference on Language Resources and Evalu-
enough, but it also implies that there could be an almost ation) was vital for setting up the collaboration between the
limitless number of biographies worthy of general interest. VU University Amsterdam, Huygens ING, DFKI and the
Many influential people from the past do not have a full bi- Austrian Academy of Sciences. The managers of the Biog-
ography and we can look at societies at large through the raphyNet project 2 at the VU University gave their support
eyes of practically any individual who left enough traces to to organize this event, originally planned as a workshop, in
reconstruct their life. Regardless of this huge potential of Amsterdam. Biographical Data in a Digital World (short:
interesting biographical contributions to history, the range BD2015) would be organized by the previously mentioned
of individuals who are studied is very limited. Often people three people, all with a computational background, and the
who are already famous and have many biographies dedi- historians Serge ter Braake and Ronald Sluijter. The orga-
cated to them attract more scholarly attention than individ- nizers were able to mobilize a group of 23 experts on bi-
uals who have been treated relatively marginally in histori- ographies, history, natural language processing, digital hu-
ography. manities and computer science to be a part of the Program
The ‘digital turn’ opens new horizons for biographers and Committee (listed below).
historians. There is information about billions of individ- For events on a highly specific topic, it remains to be seen
uals online which could be processed, networks can be whether enough contributions will be submitted. Instead
researched and visualized in new ways and the printed of the expected (hoped for) 10-15 , we received 28 sub-
monograph is not the exclusive mode of presentation any- missions mainly from Western Europe. The papers were
more. For computer scientists, biographical data are at- reviewed by three independent reviewers from the Program
tractive to work with, because they usually are relatively Committee (including the Organizing Committee). Even-
well-structured and because individuals always share cer- tually it was decided to be as inclusive as possible and to
tain characteristics (e.g. all individuals have a gender, a date accept 21 papers. Even though we decided not to look at
of birth, parents and a place of death, and many individu- the final ‘scores’ alone, considering the different reviewing
traditions in the diverse fields the program committee mem-
1
‘Een mensenleven, inderdaad, het is zo luttel, omdat er zo bers are working in, ultimately the selected papers were
veel van zijn’ Jan Romein, De Biografie. Een inleiding (Amster-
2
dam 1946) http://www.biographynet.nl
those with an average positive score (above 0 which indi- The Organizing Committee:
cates a ‘borderline’ paper).
To our delight prof. dr. Paul Arthur from the University Serge ter Braake, VU University Amsterdam
of Western Sydney in Australia, an expert on digital hu- Antske Fokkens, VU university Amsterdam
manities and biographical data, agreed to deliver a keynote Ronald Sluijter, Huygens Institute for History of the
speech. Prof. dr. Susan Legêne, who holds a chair in politi- Netherlands
cal history at the VU University Amsterdam and who is one Thierry Declerck, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für
of the BiographyNet managers, closed the day by leading Künstliche Intelligenz
the final discussions. Eveline Wandl-Vogt, Austrian Academy of Sciences
The interest for BD2015 was also apparent from the regis-
trations from people outside the Netherlands or neighboring Alphabetic List of Program Committee Members
countries who did not present a paper. Both the Dictionary
of Swedish National Biography and the Historical Dictio- Paul Arthur, Humanities and Communication Arts,
nary of Switzerland, for example, sent representatives to University of Western Sydney
visit the event. Due to this high interest and the obvious Victor de Boer, Computer Science, Web and Media, VU
need for a regular event that allows researchers working in University Amsterdam
this domain to exchange their work and ideas, it was de- Marc Boone, History, Ghent University
cided to make Biographical Data in a digital world the Georgeta Bordea Insight, Centre for Data Analytics, NUI
first in a series of conferences taking place every two years, Galway
which is why we now speak of a conference rather than a Matje van de Camp, Taalmonsters.nl
workshop. Philip Carter, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The venue, at Rockstart on the Herengracht in Amsterdam,3 Gearóid O Cleircı́n, Dublin City University
ensured an open environment in which discussion and net- Marten Düring, Digital Humanities Lab, Centre Virtuel de
working was greatly facilitated. A live stream made sure la Connaissance sur lEurope
that people around the globe, would be able to follow the Marieke van Erp, Computational Linguistics, VU Univer-
conference as well.4 sity Amsterdam
Christine Gruber, Österreichische Biographisches Lexikon,
3. Proceedings Österreichisches Institut für Neuzeitforschung
Most authors of the 21 papers decided to submit a full ver- Pim Huijnen, History, Utrecht University
sion of their papers for the proceedings. The final sub- Eero Hyvnen, Semantic Computing Research Group, Aalto
missions were subjected to a second reviewing and editing University
round, carried out by the organizers, to ensure that the orig- Hans-Ulrich Krieger, DFKI GmbH, Language Technology
inal reviewers’ comments were addressed. This resulted in Lab
the 18 papers you find in these proceedings. We grouped Jonas Kuhn, Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
these papers in four categories: (i) Bringing Biographical (IMS), Universität Stuttgart
Data Online (4 papers), (ii) Analyzing Biographical Data Stella Markantonatou Institute for Language and Speech
with Computational Methods (5 papers), (iii) Group Por- Processing, Greece
traits and Networks (5 papers) and (iv) Visualization and Malte Rehbein, Digital Humanities, University of Passau
Representation (4 papers). Matthias Reinert Historische Kommission bei der Bay-
Even though there clearly is a wide variety of papers, many erischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
of them deal with more than one of the following ques- Anneke Ribberink, Co-founder European Journal of Life
tions: How do we extract and analyze biographical data Writing
(with NLP, or manually added metadata)? How do we link Toma Tasovac, Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities
biographical datasets? How do we visualize biographical Jo Tollebeek, History, University of Leuven
data online? How does the digital turn change traditional Jane Winters, Digital History, Institute of Historical
biography? How reliable is the biographical data (content Research, University of London
and manipulation of the content) for what kind of research Kelly Zervanou, Information and Computing Sciences,
questions? How do we identify and distinguish different University Utrecht
individuals within these huge datasets of biographical data Joris van Zundert, Digital and Computational Humanities,
(named entity disambiguation)? What ‘bigger questions Huygens ING, The Hague
can we answer with all this data?
We hope these proceedings will inspire people who work
with biographical data and that it will give fruit to further
research.
Amsterdam, 1 July 2015
3
http://www.rockstart.com/
4
https://www.youtube.com\/watch?v=
vAypbzoUEw0\&app=desktop