In line with global trends, historical records are increasingly available in digital forms. Oen they are too big to be read or viewed manually. Historians have then a keen interest in computational approaches to process and study digitized historical information for research, writing, and dissemination of historical knowledge. e HistoInformatics workshop series is focused on the challenges and opportunities of data-driven humanities and brings together scientists and scholars at the forefront of this emerging eld, at the interface between History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Computer Science and associated disciplines. e 4th HistoInformatics Workshop took place on November 6, 2017 and was a half day workshop co-located with the 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017) in Singapore.
HistoInformatics 20171—the 4th International Workshop on Computational History—was held on 6 November, 2017 in conjunction with the 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017) in Singapore. Traditionally, historical research is based on the hermeneutic investigation of preserved records and artifacts to provide a reliable account of the past and to discuss dierent hypotheses. A new wealth of digitized historical documents have however opened up completely new challenges for the computer-assisted analysis of e.g. large text or image corpora. Historians can greatly benet from the advances of Computer and Information sciences, which are dedicated to the processing, organization and analysis of such data. New computational techniques can be applied to help verify and validate historical assumptions. We call this approach HistoInformatics, analogously to Bioinformatics and ChemoInformatics, which have respectively proposed new research trends in Biology and Chemistry. e main topics of the proposed workshop are: (1) support for historical research and analysis in general through the application of Computer Science theories or technologies, (2) analysis and re-use of historical texts, (3) analysis of collective memories, (4) visualisations of historical data, (5) access to a large wealth of accumulated historical knowledge. 2
Histoinformatics 2017 was a half-day workshop. e program chairs accepted ve papers; however, one paper was withdrawn. e papers are briey described below.
e paper entitled “Creating Time Capsules for Historical Research in the Early Modern Period: Reconstructing Trajectories of Plant Medicines” presents an overview of the uses and promises of Time Capsule, a scalable framework that allows querying and analyzing botanical, linguistic, archaeological and historical data for historical scholarship. e authors of the paper “City-Stories: A Multimedia Hybrid Content and Entity Retrieval System for Historical Data” develop a framework for multimedia and entity retrieval by combining information extracted from images and entities from historical data. e paper “Detecting Linguistic Change Based on Word Co-occurrence paerns” describes an exploratory study on linguistic change based on co-occurrence paerns. Finally, the paper “Visualizing Across Space, Time and Relationships: Unveiling Southeast Asia to Contemporary Eyes rough 16th to mid-17th Century Iberian Sources” deals with the creation of an interactive visualization tool for teaching purposes using books wrien on Southeast Asia from the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries.
A keynote talk was given by Andrea Nanei, Associate Professor at the School of Art of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, titled “Computational Interactive Global Histories: Machine Readable Primary Sources and the Historian’s Perennial Chase for Truth”. We were also pleased to have a second keynote talk by Associate Professor Siew Ann Cheong from Nanyang Technological University on the topics of Agent Based Modelling and Simulations. 3
We would like to thank the program commiee members for their eort in reviewing and recommending papers. We also thank the organizers of the CIKM 2017 conference for agreeing to host our workshop and for their support, and also the anonymous reviewers who evaluated our proposal, for their support and constructive criticism.