Following up on the success of the first SDH conference, held in Vienna in 2010, the CLARIN and DARIAH initiatives have decided to jointly organise the second SDH conference, to be held in November 2011 at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, a participant in both CLARIN and DARIAH.

Digital technologies have the potential to transform the types of research questions that we ask in the Humanities, allowing us both to address traditional questions in new and exciting ways but also to answer questions that we were not even aware we could ask – hence the title of this conference. How can digital humanities help us not just to find the answers to our research questions more quickly and more easily, but also to formulate research questions we would never have been able to ask without access to large quantities of digital data and sophisticated tools for their analysis? Supporting Digital Humanities will be a forum for the discussion of these innovations, and of the ways in which these new forms of research can be facilitated and supported.

CLARIN and DARIAH are creating European research infrastructures for the humanities and related disciplines. SDH2011 aims to bring together infrastructure providers and users from the communities involved in these two infrastructure initiatives. The conference will consist of a number of topical sessions where providers and users will present and discuss results, obstacles and opportunities for digitally-supported humanities research. Participants are encouraged to engage with honest assessments of the intellectual problems and practical barriers in an open and constructive atmosphere.

The first SDH conference in 2010 gave a broad and multi-facetted presentation of the domains of interest to CLARIN and DARIAH. This time we have chosen a somewhat more focussed approach, concentrating on two major themes, but not excluding other themes of interest for the humanities. The two themes are:

  • Sound and movement – music, spoken word, dance and theatre
  • Texts and things – texts, and the relationship between texts and material artefacts, such as manuscripts, stone or other carriers of texts

Submissions are invited for individual papers and posters, as well as panels. Focus should be on tools and methods for the analysis of digital data rather than on digitisation processes themselves, both from the provider and from the user perspective. We want to pay special attention to inspiring showcases that demonstrate the innovative power of digital methods in the humanities.

Some important dates:
July 15, 2011: Submission of suggestion for panels
July 24, 2011: Submission of abstracts (1,000-1,500 words)
August 15, 2011: Notification on panel proposals
September 15, 2011: Author notification
October 15, 2011: Final version of papers for publication (8 pages).
November 17-18: Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark

Submission of abstracts
SDH2011 uses the EasyChair conference system, accessible at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sdh2011
You will need to log in in order to make a submission. If you already have an EasyChair account, you have to use that one. Otherwise you will need to create an account by signing up. To do so, simply follow the instructions on the EasyChair website.

Guidelines for authors
Guidelines for authors are available at the conference website http://cst.ku.dk/sdh2011/

Programme committee
Bente Maegaard, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Helen Bailey, University of Bedfordshire, UK
Tim Crawford, Goldsmith’s University of London, UK
Matthew James Driscoll, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland, United States
Erhard Hinrichs, Tübingen University, Germany
Fotis Jannidis, Würzburg University, Germany
Helen Katsiadakis, Academy of Athens, Greece
Krister Lindén, Helsinki University, Finland
Heike Neuroth, Göttingen State and University Library, Germany
Laurent Romary, INRIA, France
Nina Vodopivec, Institute for Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Peter Wittenburg, MPI, Netherlands/Germany
Martin Wynne, Oxford University, UK

Conference website
http://cst.ku.dk/sdh2011/ 

Contact
bmaegaard at hum dot ku dot dk