Section des sciences du langage et de l'information © 2018 for the individual papers by the respective authors. © 2018 for this volume by its editor.
Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. It is often said that the digital humanities are “situated at the intersection of computer science and the humanities,” but what does this mean? We believe that the point of using computers in the humanities is not just to automatically analyze larger amounts of data or to accelerate research. We therefore prefer to understand digital humanities as (1) the study of means and methods of constructing formal models in the humanities and (2) as the application of these means and methods for the construction of concrete models in particular humanities disciplines.
From this perspective, the central research questions are thus: 1. Which computational methods are most appropriate for dealing with the particular challenges posed by humanities research, e.g., uncertainty, vagueness, incompleteness, but also with different positions (points of view, values, criteria, perspectives, approaches, readings, etc.)? 2. How can such computational methods be productively applied to concrete research questions in the humanities?
The goal of the Workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities (COMHUM 2018) was to bring together researchers involved with computational approaches in the humanities with the objective of stimulating the research and exchange around innovative, methodologically explicit approaches, to encourage discussion among researchers and developers from different communities, and to help bridging the divide that still exists between the different disciplines involved in this field.
The workshop was organized by members of the Department of Language and Information Sciences (SLI) at the University of Lausanne, with the support of the Faculty of Arts. It underlines the commitment of the department to the computational dimension of the digital humanities, including formal and mathematical methods.
This volume constitutes the proceedings of COMHUM 2018. It contains revised and expanded versions of eight of the papers presented at the workshop. Both the original abstracts and the expanded versions were peer-reviewed. The presentations given at the workshop are available from the workshop Web site at https://unil.ch/llist/comhum2018/.
I would like to thank everybody who contributed, in one way or another, to making COMHUM 2018 a success and to the publication of the proceedings.
Lausanne, December 2018 Michael Piotrowski
(editor) • François Bavaud • Raphaël Ceré • Isaac Pante • Davide Picca • Michael Piotrowski • Yannick Rochat • Aris Xanthos Program Committee • François Bavaud (UNIL, SLI and IGD) • Raphaël Ceré (UNIL, IGD) • Giovanni Colavizza (Turing Institute, London) • Leonardo Impett (EPFL, Image and Visual Representation Lab) • Maria Kraxenberger (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics) • Cerstin Mahlow (Bern University of Applied Sciences) • Barbara McGillivray (Turing Institute, London) • Isaac Pante (UNIL, SLI) • Davide Picca (UNIL, SLI) • Michael Piotrowski (UNIL, SLI) – Chair • Yannick Rochat (UNIL, SLI) • Elena Spadini (UNIL, Centre de recherches sur les lettres romandes) • Aris Xanthos (UNIL, SLI) Contents The confluence in digital humanities: the computer scientist, the digital humanist, and the final user
Maristella Agosti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Image processing for art investigation
Bruno Cornelis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decoding what the sender did not want to transmit. Information technology and historical data; or something
Manfred Thaller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identification and quantification of colours in children’s drawings
Christelle Cocco, Raphaël Ceré, Aris Xanthos, Pierre-Yves Brandt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clustering writing components from medieval manuscripts
Mats Dahllöf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modelling vagueness – A criteria-based system for the qualitative assessment of reading proposals for the deciphering of Classic Mayan hieroglyphs Franziska Diehr, Sven Gronemeyer, Elisabeth Wagner, Christian Prager, Katja Diederichs, Uwe Sikora, Maximilian Brodhun, Nikolai Grube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Taking into account semantic similarities in correspondence analysis
Mattia Egloff, François Bavaud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Towards a quantitative research framework for historical disciplines
Barbara McGillivray, Jon Wilson, Tobias Blanke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Linking historical sources to established knowledge bases in order to inform entity linkers in cultural heritage
Gary Munnelly, Annalina Caputo, Séamus Lawless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tracing changes in thematic structure of holiday picture postcards from 1950s to 2010s
Kyoko Sugisaki, Nicolas Wiedmer, Marcel Naef, Heiko Hausendorf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supporting hermeneutic interpretation of historical documents by computational methods Cristina Vertan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 7 9 11 23 33 45 53 59 67