Post: Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Resource-Scarce Literatures
24-25 April 2019
University of Miami, FL



Call for Papers
This two-day symposium aims to bring together scholars and researchers
working with computational approaches to texts. The event targets a
broad audience interested in the application of digital text analysis
technology, as text mining, topic modeling, authorship detection,
writing style analysis, text reuse, or more generally tasks performed
through Natural Language Processing (NLP). These techniques have
significant potential not only for the study of literature but also for
the study of texts and language in general. The symposium aims to create
an open forum for showcasing these techniques.



The event is also grounded in the idea that computational text analysis
should be integrated not only in the academic research by faculty and
their PhD students, but also in a pedagogical environment. The use of
computational analysis opens up new questions in literary studies, and
exposes students to many different ways of thinking about literature today.



Computer-aided literary studies still thus tend to be focused on
literatures written in modern languages. NLP tools are quite developed
for modern languages, especially for the modern English language. For
medieval and premodern languages, due to their instability of
orthographic forms, attempts to conduct computer-aided (thus, to a
degree, systematic) research face many challenges to normalize and
standardize their linguistic forms. Therefore, the symposium also aims
to explore the use and challenge of using NLP tools for studying
literatures written in underrepresented and historical languages, such
as the medieval and premodern variants and precursors of Spanish,
French, Latin, and Dutch. Therefore, a special focus will be on the
preprocessing  routines available for these texts, such as
lemmatization, by which we collect inflected forms under a single item
or lemma, as well as challenges faced normalizing orthographic variation
of historical texts and other languages with unstable orthographies.
Among the international and national speakers we will have several
experts on the topic.



Our envisioned program for the symposium is as follows: On the first
day, there will be several workshops, including one devoted to
integrating computer-assisted analysis in the classroom, which will
offer an introduction to stylometry, visualization, and text-reuse. On
the second day, there will be talks (30 min) that present ongoing
research projects, methodologies, and challenges. The subject languages
are preferably, but not limited to underrepresented and historical
languages.



We are specifically interested in receiving proposals for contributions
on one or more of the following topics:


Stylometry for authorship studies

Stylometry as an approach to literary study

Natural Language Processing and linguistic annotation

Lemmatizers for underrepresented modern languages and old languages
Text reuse detection

Normalization

Distributional semantics

Network analysis

Text visualization


We especially welcome contributions from those working with any type of
textual corpora, preferably those conceived for a specific research and/
from a diachronic perspective. We conceive this symposium as an
opportunity to share (best)-practices and broaden conversation, thus
proposals can be on ongoing and experimental methodologies.


Confirmed Speakers:
Greta Franzini (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)

Francisco Gago Jover (College of the Holly Cross)

Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp)

Enrique Manjavacas  (University of Antwerp)

Marco Passarotti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)

Dennis Tenen (Columbia University)



Organization committee
Susanna Allés Torrent
Lindsay Thomas


Scientific committee
Susanna Allés Torrent
Alberto Cairo
Mitsunori Ogihara
Allison Schifani


Important dates
15 January 2018. Deadline for the submission of abstracts
30 January 2019. Notification of acceptance

24-25 April. Symposium



  Abstract submissions and format

We invite researchers to submit 500-word proposals (including footnotes
but excluding the bibliography) in one single page related to any of the
topics mentioned above. The format of the contributions will be 20 mins
presentations followed by 10 min Q&A. Title, name(s) and affiliation
should appear and the prefered formats are .txt, .docx, .odt and pdf.


Submissions must be sent to susanna_alles@miami.edu and they will be
reviewed by the scientific committee.


Languages
The official language of the symposium is English, but it is possible to
submit a proposal also in Spanish, French, or Italian.



The symposium will be held with support from:
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Miami

College of Arts and Sciences
SEED You Choose Program
Center for the Humanities



In collaboration with:
University of Antwerp

The Digital Humanities Flanders (DHuF) research community, sponsored by
the FWO