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

 

Over the next months CAMille (ULB-KBR), the Data Science Lab (VUB-KBR), the Digital Research Lab (UGent – KBR), and LabEL (UCLouvain-KBR) will co-organise a three-part series of webinars on Digital Humanities and lexical semantic change.

Lexical semantic change, a phenomenon describing the evolution of the meanings of lexical units, has long preoccupied historical linguists. The possibility to study this phenomenon with computational methods has far reaching implications in several disciplines since diachronic semantic change can be used to identify conceptual shifts in questions related to many aspects of society such as culture, religion, politics, economics and morality. The recent convergence of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics with a range of humanities disciplines has led questions related to lexical semantic change to gain momentum.

During the series, we will hear from three timely projects which are pushing the boundaries of Digital Humanities by creating synergies between disciplines to develop cutting-edge methods to investigate lexical semantic change at a large scale.

Programme

18.10.2022

Nina Tahmasebi (Göteborgs universitet) & Simon Hengchen : “Change is Key!”

Nina Tahmasebi and Simon Hengchen talk about the “Change is Key!” program, a 6-year research program where methods for semantic change and lexical variation are combined to answer research questions stemming from humanities and social sciences

08/11/2022

Justyna Robinson (University of Sussex): Concept-led approach to semantic change.

In this talk Justyna Robinson presents a perspective on semantic change in terms of paradigmatic relations across a text. She discusses the findings from the Linguistic DNA research project which analysed concepts in discourse of 55,000 Early Modern English books. She presents the most recent theoretical and methodological innovations, which include bottom-up modelling of prosodic meaning.

08/12/2022

Florentina Armaselu (University of Luxembourg): “Bridging NLP and LLOD: Humanities Approaches to Semantic Change”.

The talk presents an overview of theoretical aspects, natural language processing (NLP) techniques and linguistic linked open data (LLOD) formalisms that can be considered together for analysing and representing semantic change from a humanistic prespective. It focuses on a project developed as a humanities use case within the COST Action “Nexus Linguarum – European network for Web-centred linguistic data science.”

Practical details:

• When: 18/10/2022, 08/11/2022 and 08/12/2022, from 14h00 to 15h30.
• Where: Online
• Price: Free
• Registration: Registration is mandatory. The morning of the event you will be sent the link to the meeting and the etiquette to follow.
• Link: For more information, see the KBR website