Call for Papers
We invite proposals for the Workshop on Explorations of the dynamics of cultural phenomena in text corpora at DHNB 2025, taking place 5-7 March in Tartu, Estonia. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from various backgrounds, such as digital humanities, linguistics, social sciences, and cultural studies to discuss computational approaches to large-scale text analysis for uncovering cultural patterns, values, and social dynamics across diverse corpora.
The workshop encourages submissions that explore topics such as cross-cultural analysis, diachronic and synchronic studies, NLP applications, and challenges in analyzing cultural text corpora and foster a better understanding of how computational methods can deepen insights into cultural phenomena and dynamics at scale. Participants are invited to share academic papers, demonstrations of work process/code/tool as well as hands-on mini-tutorials. The expected timeframe for each presentation is 30 min but can be negotiated.
Workshop Objectives
Some key areas of workshop:
- Methods to study text and culture at scale – Present computational methods and their applications for cultural analysis, covering generative LLMs for automated text analysis, non-generative LLMs, text embeddings, keyword searches and other approaches used to analyze text at scale. This can cover text summarization, annotation, sentiment analysis, collocations and keyword analyzes amongst other.
- Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives – Investigate the historical evolution of cultural phenomena, mindsets, and values as well as contemporary cross-sectional comparisons within large text collections.
- Cross-Cultural Analysis and Comparison – Discuss methods for analyzing linguistic, semantic, and thematic patterns across different cultures and languages, and explore how computational tools can enhance our understanding of cultural variation and commonalities.
- Visualization and Interpretation – Examine innovative ways of visualizing cultural data, from networks to embedding spaces, that can make complex cultural patterns more accessible.
- Beyond text – In addition, welcome presentations that broaden our text centered perspective by computational studies of other mediums, from speech and other audio to images and videos.
Target Audience
This workshop is intended for:
– Scholars in digital humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies interested in computational text analysis.
– Researchers exploring linguistic, cultural, or social dynamics through large-scale corpora.
– Practitioners and developers working with NLP tools and methods in cultural or linguistic research contexts.
Participants from various stages of project development, whether new to computational approaches or experienced in text analysis, are encouraged to submit proposals.
Submission Topics
Topics of interest for proposal submissions include, but are not limited to:
– Large-scale cultural changes
– Methodologies for large-scale cultural data exploration.
– Visualization approaches for cultural corpora.
– NLP and text centered studies of cultural phenomena in larger corpora or combined corporas
Submission Guidelines
We invite submissions of abstracts (300–400 words, excluding references) that outline the objectives, methods, and anticipated outcomes of your presentation.
All submissions should be submitted through the DHNB conference platform at https://www.conftool.org/dhnb2025/. If you do not have an account, please create one and select “Workshop on Computational Analysis of Cultural Texts” after logging in.
Important Dates
- Proposal Submission Deadline: 8 January 2025
- Notification of Acceptance: 27 January 2025
We look forward to your contributions and to an inspiring workshop advancing the field of cultural text analysis through computational methods.
Organizers
Mark Mets, Kadri Vider, Taive Särg, Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig, Mari Väina
Contact: mark.mets@tlu.ee