Hackathon on Text Re-Use

Digital Humanities Hackathon on Text Re-Use

‘Don’t leave your data problems at home!’

27-31 July, 2015

Computer cartoon

Hosted by the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH), Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany
Organised by:  Franzini, Greta Franzini and Maria Moritz

The Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities will host a Hackathon targeted at students and researchers with agermany-652967_1280 humanities background who wish to improve their computer skills by working with their own data-set. Rather than teaching everything there is to know about algorithms, the Hackathon will assist participants with their specific data-related problem, so that they can take away the knowledge needed to tackle the issue(s) at hand. The focus of this Hackathon is automatic text re-use detection and aims at engaging participants in intensive collaboration. Participants will be introduced to technologies representing the state of the art in the field and shown the potential of text re-use detection. Participants will also be able to equip themselves with the necessary knowledge to make sense of the output generated by algorithms detecting text re-use, and will gain an understanding of which algorithms best fit certain types of textual data. Finally, participants will be introduced to some text re-use visualisations.

Click here for further information on text re-use.

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Seminar Program: Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities 2015

The dialog takes place on Tuesdays at 17:00 during the Summer semester (from April 21th until July 14th). The venue of the seminars is to be announced, at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH). The center’s address is: Heyne-Haus, Papendiek 16, 37073 Göttingen.

As announced in the Call For Papers, the dialogs will take the form of a 45 minute presentation in English, followed by 45 minutes of discussion and student participation. Due to logistic and time constraints, the 2015 dialog series will not be video-recorded or live-streamed.  A summary of the talks, together with photographs and, where available, slides, will be uploaded to the GCDH and eTRAP websites. For this reason, presenters are encouraged, but not obligated, to prepare slides to accompany their papers. Please also consider that the €500 award for best paper will be awarded on the basis of both the quality of the paper *and* the delivery of the presentation.

Camera-ready versions of the papers must be sent to Gabriele Kraft at gddh(at)gcdh(dot)de by April 30th. The papers will not be uploaded to the GCDH and eTRAP websites but, as previously announced, published as a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ). For this reason, papers must be submitted in an editable format (e.g. .docx or LaTeX), not as PDF files.
A small budget for travel cost reimbursements is available.

Everybody is welcome to join in!
If anyone would like to tweet about the dialogs, the Twitter hashtag of this series is #gddh15.
For any questions, do not hesitate to contact gddh(at)gcdh(dot)de.
For further information and updates, visit http://www.gcdh.de/en/events/gottingen-dialog-digital-humanities/.

We look forward to seeing you in Göttingen!

Click the link to view the programme with the locations: GDDH_2015_Poster.

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Article: Is it Research or is it Spying?

Marco’s latest article “Is it Research or is it Spying? Thinking-Through Ethics in Big Data AI and Other Knowledge Sciences” has just been published online! Here is the abstract:

“How to be a knowledge scientist after the Snowden revelations?” is a question we all have to ask as it becomes clear that our work and our students could be involved in the building of an unprecedented surveillance society. In this essay, we argue that this affects all the knowledge sciences such as AI, computational linguistics and the digital humanities. Asking the question calls for dialogue within and across the disciplines. In this article, we will position ourselves with respect to typical stances towards the relationship between (computer) technology and its uses in a surveillance society, and we will look at what we can learn from other fields. We will propose ways of addressing the question in teaching and in research, and conclude with a call to action.