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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2461/introduction.pdf
Introduction to the 5th HistoInformatics Workshop
Melvin Wevers1 , Mohammed Hasanuzzaman2 , Gaël Dias3 , Marten Düring4 , and
Adam Jatowt5
1
DHLab, KNAW Humanities Cluster, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
melvin.wevers@dh.huc.knaw.nl
2
ADAPT Centre, Cork Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland
mohammed.hasanuzzaman@adaptcentre.ie
3
CNRS GREYC, University of Caen Normandy, France
gael.dias@unicaen.fr
4
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
marten.during@uni.lu
5
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
adam@dl.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Abstract
With an increasing number digitized historical archives, we also see a growing number of
historians that rely on computational methods to examine such archives. This includes
methods for retrieving textual and visual information from archives, studying the history
of concepts, but also reflections on research practices and the construction of digitized
archives. The HistoInformatics workshop series is focused on the challenges and oppor-
tunities of data-driven historical research and brings together scientists and scholars at
the forefront of this emerging field, at the interface between historical disciplines on the
one hand and informatics on the other. The 5th HistoInformatics workshop took place on
September 12, 2019, and was a full-day workshop co-located with the 23rd International
Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2019) in Oslo.
1 Introduction
HistoInformatics 20191 —the 5th International Workshop on Computational History—was held
on September 12, 2019 in conjunction with the 23rd International Conference on Theory and
Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2019) in Oslo. The HistoInformatics workshop series brings
together researchers in the historical disciplines with those working in computer science and
associated disciplines. It is designed to discuss best practices as well as possible future collab-
orations.
Traditionally, historical research is based on the hermeneutic investigation of preserved
records and artefacts as a means to improve our understanding of the past. In recent years,
the large-scale digitization of historical documents has enabled researchers to query and ana-
lyze archives using text mining, linked data, or image analysis. Historians, like other human-
ists, show keen interests in computational approaches to the study and processing of digitized
sources. Computer scientists have developed innovative methods to query and analyze digitized
materials. In bringing together historians and computer scientists, we open up a space to vali-
date such computational methods by applying them to historical data sets to answer questions
pertinent to historical research. We call this approach: HistoInformatics.
1 https://sites.google.com/site/histoinformatics2019workshop/
Introduction to 5th HistoInformatics Workshop Wevers, Hasanuzzaman, Dias, Düring, Jatowt
2 Program
HistoInformatics 2019 was a full-day workshop. The program chairs accepted six papers. The
accepted papers are briefly described in what follows.
The paper Reflections on Design Principles for a Historical Archive in a Low Resource
Environment discussed strategies for building digital archives in environments characterized by
a lack of technical skills, facilitates, and/or funding. The authors of the paper LOCALE: A Rule-
based Location Named-entity Recognition Method for Latin Text introduce a method for location
extraction from Latin texts. The paper Clustering Ideological Terms in Historical Newspaper
Data with Diachronic Word Embeddings studies the emergence of isms in nineteenth-century
Finnish newspapers as a proxy for political language formation in Finland. The authors of
Trawling for Terrorists: A Big Data Analysis of Conceptual Meanings and Contexts in Swedish
Newspapers, 1780–1926 also turn to digitized newspaper archives. This paper traces the concept
of terrorism over almost 150 years. The paper Character Segmentation in Collector’s Seal
Images: An Attempt on Retrieval Based on Ancient Character Typeface turns to computer
vision to construct a recognition system based for document retrieval of ancient Asian books.
Finally, the authors of Plague Dot Text: Text Mining and Annotation of Outbreak Reports of
the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1952) describe the challenges related to an interdisciplinary
research project that studies reports from the third plague pandemic (1894-1952).
The workshop also included a keynote by Mikko Tolonen, Assistant Professor in Digital
Humanities at the University of Helsinki, Finland, titled: Integrated Computational Approach
in Eighteenth-Century Intellectual History. The talk focused on strategy of the Helsinki Com-
putational Group for combining computational methods with eighteenth-century intellectual
history.
3 Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the program committee members for their effort in reviewing and
recommending papers. We also thank the organizers of the TPDL 2019 conference for hosting
and supporting our workshop, and also the anonymous reviewers who evaluated our proposal,
for their constructive criticism. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to our keynote
speaker Mikko Tolonen.
2