We are delighted to announce the second edition of the Sloane Lab symposium series commencing on the 16th of April 2024, facilitated in collaboration with the Humanities Data Science & Methodology (HDSM) Oberseminar of TU Darmstadt, the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies (UCL IAS). This seminar invites international speakers whose work is situated at the intersections of collections as data, cataloguing histories and critical archival studies, heritage infrastructures, critical digital heritage, and information science.

The seminar papers explore and foreground:

• Computational approaches as means for historical inquiry, critique and creative takes on data driven research paradigms.
• The potential of digital tools and data aggregations to shed light on the geographic spread, collectors, and knowledge in historical cultural heritage collections.
• Reflections on the contested nature of museum and archival collections and the role of collections as data research in foregrounding overlooked or ignored and marginalised issues like imperialism, colonialism, slavery, loss, and destruction, that have shaped collections.
• The role of digital archives in addressing historical and present-day injustices.
• Creative approaches for virtual exhibition and collection data platforms design.

Paper presentations take place online between the 16th of April and the 16th of July, on Tuesdays at 15:30 BST/16:30 CET.

Register for the event and view the programme: https://critical-creative.eventbrite.co.uk

The Sloane Lab Seminar Series is convened by Marco Humbel (Sloane Lab & UCLDH), Nadezhda Povroznik (TU Darmstadt), Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt & UCL) and Andrew Flinn (UCL). Administrative support is provided by Lucy Stagg (UCLDH & UCL IAS).

This joint virtual seminar is co-hosted by University College London, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

The symposium is funded by the Towards a National Collection programme (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as an activity of the Sloane Lab Discovery Project.

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

This spring, the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) together with ULB, Ugent, VUB, and UCL will continue their Digital Heritage Seminar series. This spring edition will focus on image processing, hosting three speakers who share their experience with digitization and extracting data from digitized cultural heritage collections.   

The following provides a brief overview of the dates and topics. Please visit the links to read more and to register for the events: 

Tuesday 22 February, 14:00-15:30

Speaker: Thomas Smits, University of Antwerp
“The Visual Digital Turn: Computer Vision and the Humanities”
Full event description and registration details here. 

Tuesday 15 March, 14:00-15:30 

Speaker: Apostolos Antonacopoulos, University of Salford, Manchester, UK
“Understanding information-rich documents: experiences with historical England & Wales censuses”
Full event description and registration details here. 

Monday 11 April, 14:00-15:30 

Speaker: Clemens Neudecker, Berlin State Library, Berlin, Germany
“New Tools for Old Documents – Layout Analysis and OCR with Deep Learning and Heuristics”
Full event description and registration details here.

Starting Tuesday 9 February 2021, there will be a monthly series of interesting symposia hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Limerick. While specifically organized under the guise of Early Modern History, these virtual events will be useful for people across a wide range of skill levels and periods of specialization.

To give some context, the four sessions will cover network analysis, text analysis, databases, and geographic information systems (more commonly called GIS), respectively. Obviously, while those topics are useful specifically to historians, they can also be relevant to people studying literature, or urban development, or indeed someone who is studying protest movements. So I would urge the DH Master’s students of KU Leuven and anyone else interested in these topics to register for these events!

The seminars will be held in English and include a range of scholars and library staff from Ireland, England, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Switzerland. Click on the link here for more information from the University of Limerick about how to register!