Introduction to the 4th HistoInformatics Workshop Mohammed Hasanuzzaman Gaël Dias Adam Jatowt ADAPT Centre, School of Computing CNRS GREYC UMR 6072 Graduate School of Informatics Dublin City University University of Caen Normandie Kyoto University Dublin, Ireland Caen, France Kyoto, Japan Marten Düring Antal van den Bosch Luxembourg Centre for Meertens Instituut, Royal Netherlands Contemporary and Digital History Academy for Arts and Sciences Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg Amsterdam, Netherlands ABSTRACT 2 PROGRAM In line with global trends, historical records are increasingly avail- able in digital forms. Often they are too big to be read or viewed Histoinformatics 2017 was a half-day workshop. The program manually. Historians have then a keen interest in computational chairs accepted five papers; however, one paper was withdrawn. approaches to process and study digitized historical information The papers are briefly described below. for research, writing, and dissemination of historical knowledge. The paper entitled “Creating Time Capsules for Historical Re- The HistoInformatics workshop series is focused on the challenges search in the Early Modern Period: Reconstructing Trajectories of and opportunities of data-driven humanities and brings together Plant Medicines” presents an overview of the uses and promises scientists and scholars at the forefront of this emerging field, at the of Time Capsule, a scalable framework that allows querying and interface between History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Computer analyzing botanical, linguistic, archaeological and historical data Science and associated disciplines. The 4t h HistoInformatics Work- for historical scholarship. The authors of the paper “City-Stories: A shop took place on November 6, 2017 and was a half day workshop Multimedia Hybrid Content and Entity Retrieval System for Historical co-located with the 26t h ACM International Conference on Infor- Data” develop a framework for multimedia and entity retrieval by mation and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017) in Singapore. combining information extracted from images and entities from his- torical data. The paper “Detecting Linguistic Change Based on Word Co-occurrence patterns” describes an exploratory study on linguistic change based on co-occurrence patterns. Finally, the paper “Visu- 1 INTRODUCTION alizing Across Space, Time and Relationships: Unveiling Southeast Asia to Contemporary Eyes Through 16th to mid-17th Century Iberian HistoInformatics 20171 —the 4t h International Workshop on Com- Sources” deals with the creation of an interactive visualization tool putational History—was held on 6 November, 2017 in conjunction for teaching purposes using books written on Southeast Asia from with the 26t h ACM International Conference on Information and the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017) in Singapore. Traditionally, A keynote talk was given by Andrea Nanetti, Associate Professor historical research is based on the hermeneutic investigation of at the School of Art of Nanyang Technological University in Sin- preserved records and artifacts to provide a reliable account of the gapore, titled “Computational Interactive Global Histories: Machine past and to discuss different hypotheses. A new wealth of digitized Readable Primary Sources and the Historian’s Perennial Chase for historical documents have however opened up completely new Truth”. We were also pleased to have a second keynote talk by As- challenges for the computer-assisted analysis of e.g. large text or sociate Professor Siew Ann Cheong from Nanyang Technological image corpora. Historians can greatly benefit from the advances of University on the topics of Agent Based Modelling and Simulations. Computer and Information sciences, which are dedicated to the pro- cessing, organization and analysis of such data. New computational techniques can be applied to help verify and validate historical as- 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS sumptions. We call this approach HistoInformatics, analogously to Bioinformatics and ChemoInformatics, which have respectively We would like to thank the program committee members for their proposed new research trends in Biology and Chemistry. The main effort in reviewing and recommending papers. We also thank the topics of the proposed workshop are: (1) support for historical re- organizers of the CIKM 2017 conference for agreeing to host our search and analysis in general through the application of Computer workshop and for their support, and also the anonymous reviewers Science theories or technologies, (2) analysis and re-use of histori- who evaluated our proposal, for their support and constructive cal texts, (3) analysis of collective memories, (4) visualisations of criticism. historical data, (5) access to a large wealth of accumulated historical knowledge. 1 http://histoinformatics2017.adaptcentre.ie/