IEEE Big Data and the Humanities Conference

The Workshop on Big Humanities will be held in conjunction with the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2013), which will take place between 6-9 October 2013 in Silicon Valley, California, USA, and which provides a leading international forum for disseminating the latest research in the growing field of “big data”.

The workshop will address applications of “big data” in the humanities, arts and culture, and the challenges and possibilities that such increased scale brings for scholarship in these areas.

The use of computational methods in the humanities is growing rapidly, with the increasing quantities of born-digital primary sources (such as emails, social media) and the large-scale digitisation programmes applied to libraries and archives. This has resulted in a range of interesting applications and case studies, and at the same time highlights the interpretative issues raised by applying such “hard” methods for answering subjective questions in the humanities.

Moreover, the questions and concerns raised by the humanities themselves have consequences for the interpretation in general of “big data” and the uses to which it is put, and the challenges of producing quality – meaning, knowledge and value – from  quantity. The workshop will thus also address complementary research that uses the humanities and its methods to provide a critical appraisal of “big data” in other areas, both inside and outside academia.

Research topics covered:

Topics covered by the workshop include, but are not restricted to, the following:

  • Text- and data-mining of historical and archival material.
  • Social media analysis, including sentiment analysis
  • Cultural analytics
  • Crowd-sourcing and big data
  • Cyber-infrastructures for the humanities
  • Relationship between ‘small data’ and big data
  • NoSQL databases and their application, e.g. document and graph databases
  • Big data and the construction of memory and identity
  • Big data and archival practice
  • Construction of big data
  • Big data in Heritage

Paper Submission:

Please submit a full-length paper through the online submission system. Papers may be up to 9 pages in length, and should be submitted as a PDF formatted according to the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines. LaTex Formatting Macros. The submission deadline is 30 July 2013.

All papers accepted for the workshop will be included in the Workshop Proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society Press, which will be made available at the Conference.

Important dates:

July 30, 2013: Due date for submission of full workshop papers
August 20, 2013: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
September 10, 2013: Camera-ready versions of accepted papers
October 6-9 2013: Workshop [exact date TBD]

For more information, see the workshop website athttp://bighumanities.net/ and the main conference website athttp://www.ischool.drexel.edu/bigdata/bigdata2013/.

Program Chairs:

  • Dr. Mark Hedges, Centre for e-Research, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK. mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk
  • Dr. Tobias Blanke, Centre for e-Research, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK. tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk
  • Prof. Richard Marciano, Sustainable Archives and Leveraging Technologies (SALT) lab, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. richard_marciano@unc.edu