1 June 2010, Computational Humanities Workshop at ICCS 2010

Computational Humanities is a new, largely unexplored, field which is situated at the interface between the humanities and the (exact) sciences, in particular information science. The humanities differ from the sciences in their concern with expressions of the human mind, such as language, literature, music, art and history. While computational approaches to the humanities exist since the 1960s, it is only during the last decade or so that digitized data have become available in such quantities that we can observe the emergence of a new overarching field. One of the major aims of this field is to automatically detect novel patterns and concepts in historical, musical, textual and artistic data that are (practically) impossible to find by hand. While initial work in computational humanities focused on local and low-level patterns, there is a shift towards unraveling more complex, higher-level patterns such as the notion of theme in literature, style in painting and music, and long-term relations in history. The goal of this workshop is (1) to give an introduction to this upcoming field, and (2) to investigate to what extent computational humanities share models and techniques with other areas of computational science.

For more information, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~rens/CompHum2010.htm