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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2364/0_DHN2019_preface.pdf
The fourth Digital Humanities Conference, DHN2019
Costanza Navarretta1[0000-0002-4242-9249], Manex Agirrezabal2[0000-0001-5909-2745]
and Bente Maegaard3[0000-0001-9357-9071]
Centre for Language Technology, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
1costanza@hum.ku.dk
2manex.aguirrezabal@hum.ku.dk
3bmaegaard@hum.ku.dk
Abstract. The paper describes the main characteristics of the scientific pro-
gramme of the fourth conference of Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries
(DHN2019) that took place in Copenhagen in March 2019. DHN2019, as the
preceding DHN conferences, aimed to connect researchers and practitioners ad-
dressing all topics that generally belong under the Digital Humanities field. The
DHN conferences address in particular researchers from the Nordic countries,
comprising the Baltic region, but are also open to researchers from all over the
world. Thus, DHN2019 attracted participants from 27 countries. The call for pa-
pers of DHN2019 followed the strategy proposed by the organizers of the
DHN2018, who attempted to encompass two conference traditions, one from the
humanities accepting abstracts as submissions and one from computer science
accepting full papers of varying length. The latter type of submission was the
most popular in 2019 and the present proceedings collect these papers. With re-
spect to the topics addressed by the submissions to DHN2019, they cover most
of the topics proposed by the most recent global digital humanities conferences.
Furthermore, DHN2019 focussed on four specific thematic areas: NLP for digital
humanities, multimodality and multimedia, digital pedagogy, and citizen science
in digital humanities.
Keywords: Topics, Participation, Submission.
1 Introduction
The fourth Conference Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN2019) took
place in Copenhagen from the 5th to the 8th March 2019 and followed the conferences
in Oslo (2016), Gothenburg (2017), and Helsinki (2018). The DHN2019 conference
was preceded by tutorials and workshops.
The DHN conferences are still new and address Digital Humanities (DH), a research
field that broadly covers digital approaches to humanities studies. Thus per definition
DH comprises a variety of research questions, subjects, methods and resources. This is
the strength of the field, and DH conferences offer their participants the opportunity of
hearing about and learning from different research traditions and approaches to digiti-
zation. The DHN conferences are no exceptions being events where researchers and
2
practitioners from different fields meet and exchange experience about methodologies,
tools, results and visions. As underlined in the preface to the DHN 2018 proceedings
(Mäkelä and Tolonen 2018), DHN organizers have also to address different traditions
of sharing knowledge in conferences since digital humanities attracts researchers from
a broad spectrum of humanities’ fields as well as computer science. The DHN2018
programme committee decided to combine these traditions, that is on the one hand, the
tradition from many humanities’ conferences of requiring as submissions short ab-
stracts, that are collected in books of abstracts, and on the other hand the tradition in
computer science conferences and workshops of requesting full paper submissions. The
authors of accepted papers had the possibility of revising their contributions following
the suggestions of the reviewers, and the final submissions are then published in the
conference proceedings, the main channel to publish computer science research. We
decided to follow this line of inviting both abstract and paper submissions, though
slightly simplifying the submission types.
In the following, we present some of the characteristics of DHN2019, that both link
it to and distinguish it from DHN2018.
2 The DHN2019 Organization, Topics and Special themes
The DHN2019 conference was organized by three different institutions, the University
of Copenhagen, represented by the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, and
the Department of Media, Cognition, The Royal Danish Library and DIGHUMLAB,
University of Aarhus. The Centre for Language Technology, under the Department of
Nordic Studies and Linguistics, was the main responsible for the programme and con-
ference organization. Moreover, it hosted the conference together with the Royal Dan-
ish Library.
One of the characteristics of all DHN conferences has been their openness welcoming
all kinds of submissions related to digital humanities. The topics in which the submis-
sions could be categorized have been inspired by the topics proposed in the global DH
conferences. The topics are therefore divided into two main groups, humanities areas
and digital topics. At DHN2019, we proposed 25 humanities areas and 42 digital topics.
Submissions had to address at least one humanities area and one digital topic, and most
submissions referred to more areas and topics at the same time. Examples of humanities
areas are Art history, Museology, Theology, while examples of the digital topics are
Agent modeling and simulation, Infrastructure, Natural Language Processing.
DHN conferences can also address special themes, and in DHN2019 we proposed
four focus themes as follows:
1. NLP methods and resources for digital humanities: this theme comprises rule-based
or data-driven NLP approaches as well as tools and data for processing and visual-
izing texts and/or speech.
2. Multimodality in digital humanities and digital arts: the theme covers inter alia re-
search addressing various modalities and modi, such as speech and gestures in com-
munication, texts and images, film, lyrics and music.
3
3. Digital pedagogy: this theme comprises tools and methods for e-learning as well as
digital humanities in academic curricula and pedagogy.
4. Citizen science in digital humanities, crowdsourcing, open source: the theme also
includes discussion of GDPR and other legal aspects use of NLP in digital humani-
ties.
All four themes were represented in the submissions, and we received particularly many
contributions addressing the first theme, that is NLP methods and resources for digital
humanities. Moreover, the first three themes were covered by the presentations of the
three keynote speakers.
3 Submissions
The submission call comprised abstract and paper contributions as well as tutorial and
workshop proposals. We received four tutorials and five workshop proposals. Three of
the tutorial and four of the workshop proposals were accepted, but in the end only one
tutorial and four workshops were held. The workshop proposals also reflected different
traditions. On the one hand, we got proposals of workshops as a kind of tutorials in
which the participants are given exercises and learn about methods and tools for digital
humanities in practice. On the other hand, we received proposals of workshops as the-
matic meetings in which the participants after a call for papers present and discuss their
research. Both types of workshops were accepted, and the tutorial and the four work-
shops attracted between 10 and 45 participants. Full paper contributions were required
by one of the workshops, TwinTalks, and the proceedings collecting these papers are
published together with these conference proceedings.
111 submissions were uploaded to DHN2019. This number excludes 10 submis-
sions, which were withdrawn. 82 of these 111 submissions were accepted, thus the ac-
ceptance rate was 75%. 44 of the accepted submissions were full papers with a length
between 5 and 7 pages for short papers, and 8 and 16 pages for long papers. The ac-
cepted full papers are included in the present proceedings. To conclude, more than half
of the DHN2019 submissions were regular papers.
Three sponsor abstracts were also submitted to a special DHN2019 sponsor track
and all the accepted abstracts were included in the book of abstracts published on the
conference site1. It must be noted that some abstracts were rejected by the reviewers
because they were too short (under half a page long). A suggestion to the organizers of
future DHN conferences is to require that abstracts are at least one page long excluding
tables and references. Another suggestion is to provide different criteria for reviews of
abstracts and full papers, reflecting the different submission types.
The inclusion of a special sponsor track is also a DHN2019 novelty that could be
interesting for the organizers of future DHN conferences.
1
http://cst.dk/DHN2019
4
4 Topics of the DHN2019 Contributions
Nearly all digital topics suggested in the conference tool were addressed by one or more
submissions. Figure 1 shows the distribution of submissions over the various topics.
Fig. 1. DHN2019 submission distribution over digital topics.
As it can be seen, the most popular topics were cultural heritage collections, digital
resources - publication and discovery-, data mining / text mining, interdisciplinary col-
laboration, natural language processing, corpus linguistics, digitisation - theory and
practice -, GLAM: galleries/libraries/archives/museums, open data, infrastructure, vis-
ualization, audio/video/multimedia and crowdsourcing.
In Figure 2, we show the distribution of the submissions over the humanities fields.
5
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
design
historical studies
philology
performing arts
art history
anthropology
museology
gender studies
law
philosophy
music
literary studies
linguistics
cultural and area studies
medieval studies
archaeology
communication studies
sociology
folklore and oral history
geography
library & information science
classical studies
film and media studies
Fig. 2. DHN2019 submission distribution over humanities research areas.
The figure shows that the three most popular areas are historical studies, linguistics and
literary studies. Most of the papers addressed more than two humanities topics as well
as one or two digital topics. Comparing the submissions to DHN2019 with the
DHN2018 contributions (Mäkelä and Tolonen 2018), it can be noted that the three most
popular digital topics are common to both conferences. Natural language processing
and corpus linguistics, while popular in both conferences, were addressed more often
in DHN2019 than in DHN2018, reflecting the fact that natural language processing was
one of the special themes of DHN2019. Games and meaningful play was unfortunately
not addressed at all in 2019, while it was moderately popular in 2018 being one of the
special themes of DHN2018.
It would be useful in future conferences to find ways to keep the interest alive in past
special themes through e.g. tutorials, workshops or exhibitions, and to go on discussing
the characteristics of digital humanities, a theme which was addressed not only in some
of the workshops, but also during the conference.
5 Authors, Reviewers and Participants
The DHN conferences address mainly contributions from Nordic countries, comprising
the Baltic countries, but they are also open to participants outside the Nordic area. This
was certainly visible at DHN2019, which compared to the past editions attracted more
authors and participants from all over the world. The number of authors of DHN2019
6
contributions varied from 1 to 9, and many co-authors were affiliated to different insti-
tutions often from different countries, underlining the cooperative nature of most re-
search in digital humanities.
159 authors and co-authors contributed to DHN2019 and they were affiliated to in-
stitutions of 25 countries.
Reviewers and/or authors from DHN2018 were asked to act as reviewers at
DHN2019. 143 accepted the invitation and contributed to the success of the conference.
We registered 210 participants from 27 countries. The distribution of Nordic partic-
ipants by country is in Figure 3. Not surprisingly, most participants came from Den-
mark (31%), but there were also numerous participants from Finland (24%), Sweden
(23%) and Norway (14%). There were also participants from Iceland and Estonia, and
one participant from Latvia.
Latvia 1
Estonia 6Iceland 5 3% 1%
4%
Norway 22 Denmark 47
14% 31%
Sweden 36
23%
Finland 37 24%
Fig. 3. Participants from the Nordic and Baltic Countries.
Table 1 shows the number and the relative percentage of participants from Denmark,
Finland, Norway and Sweden, the four countries that have hosted the DHN conferences
until now.
It is not surprising that the place hosting the conference influences who participates at
it. With respect to the number of first authors of the submissions, 20 first authors come
from Finland, 18 from Sweden, 15 from Denmark, 8 from Norway.
7
Table 1. Number and percentage of participants from the Nordic countries where DHN has
been hosted
DHN Conference DK FI NO SE
2016 Oslo 14 (11%) 21 (16%) 35 (28%) 30 (25%)
2017 Gothenburg 21(13%) 47 (28%) 12 (7%) 40 (24%)
2018 Helsinki 14 (15%) 124 (41%) 13 (4%) 55 (18%)
2019 Copenhagen 47 (31%) 37 (24%) 22 (14%) 36 (23%)
The number of DHN2019 participants per country is shown in Figure 4.
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
USA
Iceland
Austria
France
Latvia
Denmark
Finland
Romania
Greece
Italy
Spain
Netherlands
Ireland
Germany
Luxembourg
India
Cyprus
Cyprus
Estonia
Belgium
Czech Republic
Sweden
Brasil
Cameroun
Switzerland
United Kingdom
Norway
Fig. 4. Distribution of participants over country.
The figure shows that most participants came from European countries, but there were
also participants from outside Europe.
The participants to DHN2019 were employed at universities and research institu-
tions, archives, libraries and companies. Furthermore, there were many participants
who were connected to CLARIN, the European Research Infrastructure for Language
Resources and Technologies. With respect to gender representation, male and female
participants were equally distributed at DHN2019.
8
6 The Proceedings
The papers in the proceedings are between 5 and 20 pages long and they reflect the
variety of topics that characterized the contributions to the conference. More specifi-
cally, the subjects addressed by these papers comprise, corpus linguistics applied to
historical or literary data, linked data for historical studies, the application of NLP
methods for different tasks, and the automatic treatment of audio files. Other papers
concern the use of eye tracking for improving speech analysis, the automatic identifi-
cation of tweet bots, the use of photogrammetry and other technologies in the study of
ancient museum objects, the automatic extraction of attitudes towards immigrants from
media, improvements and evaluation of OCR methods and tools, and the construction
of corpora from social media or from digitized data. The analysis of research methods
for digital humanities, strategies for teaching computational methods to students from
the humanities are also issues addressed in the proceedings.
Finally, the proceedings of the TwinTalks workshop, which accompany the
DHN2019 proceedings, focus on the cooperative nature of digital humanities.
7 Conclusions
In this introduction, we have given some figures about the submissions to the fourth
Digital Humanities in the Nordic countries conference, and the topics addressed by
them. In the call for papers and in the topic organization of the DHN2019 conference,
we followed the main guidelines proposed by the organizers of the preceding DHN
conference in Helsinki (DHN2018). Comparing the submissions to DN2019 and to the
preceding conference, we can conclude that (1) the most popular topics are the same,
and (2) that the special themes proposed in the call for papers influence which topics
are addressed in the submissions. Another characteristic of DHN2019 compared with
previous years’ editions of the conference is that DHN2019 attracted more participants
outside the Nordic countries. Also, the relative number of full papers was higher in this
year’s conference than in DHN2018.
One suggestion to the organizers of future DHN conferences is to decide on a higher
minimum length for abstract submissions. Another suggestion is to provide different
criteria for reviews of abstracts and full papers, reflecting the different submission
types.
References
1. Mäkelä, E., Tolonen, M.: DHN2018 - An Analysis of a Digital Humanities Conference. In
Proceedings of the Third Conference of Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries. Vol-
2084, 1-9, Ceur Workshop Proceedings (2018).