Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 304.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2025-01-06 19:40:36+00:00
        From: Paul Guhennec <paul.guhennec@epfl.ch>
        Subject: DH Winter School - EPFL (Switzerland) - February 2025

Dear Digital Humanities community,

EPFL's Digital Humanities Institute, in collaboration with the Fondazione
Giorgio Cini in Venice, is organising a free week-long workshop between 3rd and
7th February 2025 in Lausanne (Switzerland), dedicated to the use of large
datasets in urban history.


PRESENTATION

In ten years, the Venice Time Machine project has digitised, transcribed, and
structured a considerable amount of information about the city of Venice that
permits some reconstruction of aspects of its history through the centuries. The
team of EPFL researchers who have worked over the years on the creation of
historical datasets have also helped create specific state-of-the-art tools to
process the information using computational methods. The project has now reached
a significant level of information density that has enabled the development of a
platform for exploring historical data.

In this context, EPFL's DHLAB and the Time Machine Unit are promoting a week-
long workshop to open the datasets to research by researchers in doctoral or
postdoctoral track.

This workshop offers researchers the opportunity to discover, explore, and
understand, through computational approaches, new perspectives of Venice's long
history through unpublished datasets. Some key themes will be able to be
explored such as the evolution of urban structure, types of owners, networks and
more recent socio-economic specificities. For the first time, and before their
official publication in 2025, these data will be made available to all
researchers interested in understanding ways of digitally manipulating the
datasets and, through a large-scale approach, prospect new historical
representations hitherto little explored.

This week-long workshop will combine daily presentations and tutorials by the
researchers that helped curate those datasets to introduce the latest technical
tools for the manipulation of data in historical research. Presentations will
cover:

- cartographic visualisation,

- named-entity recognition and extraction,

- point cloud manipulation,

- conversion of structured data to networks,

- semantic segmentation of visual documents,

- and the use of foundational models (LLMs) in knowledge extraction.

Each afternoon will consist of hands-on projects where researchers will be able
to apply these tools to the various Venice datasets we will provide, in
whichever disciplinary approach — from urban history to economic history, or art
history. The last day of the week will be dedicated to the presentation and
discussion of the projects results.


LOCATION

The workshop will be taking place on EPFL's Lausanne campus exclusively from
Monday 3rd to Friday 7th February 2025.


COST AND BURSARIES

The workshop is free of charge. Lunches will also be provided free of charge.

To facilitate students' participation, six scholarships of CHF 300.- each will
be offered to help cover transportation and accommodation costs.


PARTICIPATION

This workshop is intended for scholars in digital humanities, humanities, urban
science, information systems, and others who wish to improve their knowledge of
computational approaches to historical information.

Any interest and knowledge about the history of Venice in multiple aspects is
also welcome.

The workshop is primarily intended for doctoral students and postdoctoral
researchers — but everyone is invited.


BACKGROUND REQUIREMENTS

No specific technical skills are required, but a familiarity with programming
will be important — as all tutorials will be conducted in Python. Basic
knowledge of web publishing (WordPress - Observable) is also welcome.


REGISTRATION

To register for the workshop, please send an email to paul.guhennec@epfl.ch by
Monday, January 27th, including a short summary (no more than 150 words) of your
research.


Applicants who are interested in the bursaries should also attach a page-long
statement of interest, detailing how they would benefit from the workshop's
teaching.



I remain at your disposal should you have any question.
Hoping to see you there,


Paul Guhennec
Doctoral Student, DHLAB · EPFL


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