In April (27 & 28), the 2023 Chair of the KU Leuven Institute for the Study of the Transmission of Texts, Ideas and Images in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (LECTIO) will give a lecture and lead an accompanying doctoral seminar.

LECTIO is devoted to the study of the intellectual history of pre-modern and early modern Europe. It builds on the strong and unique Leuven tradition of (art) historical, philosophical, philological, linguistic, juridical and theological approaches to the history of ideas. Its mission is to foster collaborative research across the boundaries of disciplines, theories and methods. Combining more traditional philological, hermeneutical and historical-critical approaches with new methodologies, LECTIO is also at the forefront of recent developments in the Digital Humanities and the application of Artificial Intelligence to the historical humanities.

This year, the LECTIO Chair is held by Dr. Barbara McGillivray (Kings College London), who will deal with approaches to studying semantic change in her lecture and the seminar.

The lecture is entitled “From corpora to semantic spaces: how computational methods can help us uncover word meaning change in ancient texts”. The accompanying seminar is geared towards PhD candidates, during which they will learn about the practical side of studying semantic change and variation. There will also be an opportunity for the PhD researchers to present their research and receive feedback.

LECTIO encourages PhD candidates to register for the doctoral seminar, not only if their work is directly connected with NLP or corpus analysis, but if they are interested in seeing the opportunities that these approaches could bring to their research. The registration form offers two options: (1) to attend only, or (2) to attend and give a short presentation.

The dates are Thursday 27 April for the lecture, and Friday 28 April for the seminar. Attendance is free, but registration is required. Further information can be found on the LECTIO website:

• LECTIO Chair Lecture
• LECTIO Chair Doctoral Seminar

The Platform for Digital Humanities at the University of Antwerp is continuing their lecture series on Digital Humanities this spring.  

The series kicks off on Monday 21 February (16:00-18:00) with a lecture from Aafje de Roest titled “Hiphop lezen: kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve methoden voor letterkundig onderzoek naar hiphop” (in Dutch). Aafje de Roest is currently working on an NWO-funded project at the University of Leiden where she explores how Dutch youth (re)define their cultural identity through hiphop. For more details on this lecture, please see the full event description on the Platform{DH} page.  

The second lecture will take place on Monday 28 March (16:00-17:30). Julian Schröter will give a presentation titled “The challenges of investigating loosely structured genres and of operationalizing semantic content” (in English). Julian Schröter is a Walter-Benjamin Fellow at the University of Antwerp, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and McGill University. In this lecture, he focuses on the German novella, discussing advanced combinations of topic modeling and word embedding for operationalizing features that represent semantic content. For more details on this lecture, please see the full event description on the Platform{DH} page. 

The lectures are free and open to all. They are scheduled to take place in person with mandatory COVID-19 measures in place. Registration is mandatory. For more details on location, registration, and specific regulations, please visit the corresponding event page. 

The Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) is hosting an online series of three lectures given by Digital Humanities experts from across Belgium! This series is co-organized by KBR’s two labs: Camille (Center for Archives on the Media and Information) and the Digital Research Lab, in cooperation with Université Libre de Bruxelles and Ghent University. Dealing with a variety of topics, periods and methods, these talks will be held in English, with questions in French, Dutch or English. More information about each of the lectures is provided below. To register for one or all of the lectures, please use this link.

Monday 26 April 13:30 – 15:00h (CEST)

Piraye Hacigüzeller, Assistant Prof of Digital Heritage, University of Antwerp, “Participatory Mapping for Heritage: Theories, Methods and Tools” 

The proliferation of (open) digital geospatial data sets since the 1990s and the simultaneous maturation of tools to display, manage and analyze such data have led to a certain “democratization” of cartographic practices in many disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. This trend was further reinforced by the “maps and power critique”, especially prominent in the 1990s and 2000s in human geography, where the history of Western mapping was critically approached as an instrumental practice in promoting the agendas of powerful individuals, institutions and states. Further supported by a multidisciplinary “participatory turn” over the past decade, the so-called democratization of cartography has sparked an explosion of interest in participatory mapping in many social sciences and humanities disciplines as well as related interdisciplinary fields such as heritage studies. In this lecture I will provide an overview of theories, methods and tools relevant to participatory mapping projects within heritage studies.

Tuesday 25  May 15:00 – 16:30h (CEST)

Chris Tanasescu, Professor & Altissia Chair in Digital Cultures and Ethics, UCLouvain, “Computationally Assembled Collections, Live Archiving, Hybridizing Corpora: Poetry as/of Data”

The talk will analyze the opportunities and challenges of data for/as computational approaches to poetry, with specific references to the #GraphPoem project. The latter deploys natural language processing and graph theory applications in representing, analyzing, and expanding poetry corpora as networks. But where do we find the data for the corpora, and how do we collect and assemble them? In poetry the question becomes even more critical as we deal with both traditional/‘page based’ and digital (or electronic literature) forms and genres. Combining these genres and form(at)s begs for artificial intelligence-informed approaches that treat them specifically, at times on a poem-to-poem basis, while also establishing a foundation for making them cohere into intermedially consistent computationally assembled collections and computationally assembled anthologies. In an alternative scenario, databases are put together collectively as part of interactive coding events such as the ones presented over the past few years as “institute performances” at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Participants contribute data and run coding scripts assembling, analyzing, and sampling them automatically and feeding them into live-streamed archives with a community performing function. A third relevant data-intensive approach involves corpora that are hybridized by, or submerged into, other corpora both enriching and subverting the ‘original.’ The resulting consolidated data is fed to algorithms that comb the processed neighborhoods of words, lines of verse, stanzas, passages or entire works for probabilistically close replacements and thus output conglomerates of alternative readings and reconfigurations. The conclusion will consider poetry in digital space and media as a possible experimental gateway to tackling the present-day more general challenges related to cataloging, managing, analyzing, and expanding multi and inter-medial data within an analytical-creative framework.

Tuesday 15 June 15:00 – 16:30h (CEST)

Mike Kestemont, Professor Literature and Wouter Haverals, Post Doctoral Researcher, University of Antwerp, Department of Literature, “Silent voices: A Digital Study of the Herne Charterhouse as a Textual Community (ca. 1350-1400)”

The Carthusian monastery of Herne has had a profound impact on the cultural history of the Low Countries, as a true hotspot in the production, negotiation and dissemination of vernacular literature for lay audiences, in a time where most written texts were still in Latin. In a short time span (ca. 1350-1400), the members of the community collectively copied a fantastic collection of 25+ Middle Dutch and Latin manuscripts, many of which contain unique texts. The Herne monks, who took a monastic oath of silence, were unusually productive and modest scribes, as suggested by the remarkable lack of self-attributions in their material. It is somewhat anachronistic therefore that recent literary scholarship has almost exclusively focused on an elusive search for the identification of specific individuals in the monastery (such as the famous Bible translator of 1360). In this project, we propose to study the charterhouse as a tight textual community, driven by a shared goal. To this end, we will focus on the scribal practice in the monastery, as a privileged gateway into the collaborations between the monks. Using stylochronometry we will study the evolution of the copying practice of the individual scribes and convergences therein. Because a significant share of these manuscripts are still inaccessible to the scholarly community, we will apply handwritten text recognition to produce diplomatic transcriptions that scholars can search, analyze and edit further.

To register for these talks, please use this link. Registration is required in order to receive the link to the sessions. Hope to see you all there!