Call for Papers

Second Call for Papers: Biographical Data in a Digital World 2019, Varna (Bulgaria), 5-6 September 2019

The digital age has changed the way academics work in every discipline. Computers allow for the processing of digital data much faster than humans can do, they are able to show patterns and statistical analyses and can detect links that otherwise would be hard to find. This conference explores whether and how, in the field of digital humanities, biographical data are special. Biographies are interesting for analysis with computer techniques, since individuals share a set of common characteristics that can be relatively easily identified by a machine, such as a birthdate, a partner, a profession, and a network. Tools and approaches from the digital humanities can be used for both quantitative analyses of such data and for providing leads for more qualitative research questions.

This conference aims at bringing together researchers from both the humanities and the computer sciences to exchange experiences, methods and practices with respect to ICT mediated quantitative and qualitative analysis of biographical data. What can we do already with computational methods with the huge amount of digital biographical data that is available? What will we be able to do in the future? What will we not be able to do?

For this edition we invite both full paper submissions and abstracts.

Papers must have a maximum of 8.000 words (excluding bibliography and footnotes) and minimum of 3000 words, which will undergo a single blind peer review process. Accepted papers will be published in online proceedings shortly after the Conference.

Abstracts should be of maximum 300 words in English. They will be checked for relevance. Accepted abstracts will be welcome to give a presentation at the Conference, and will be included in a book of abstracts.

Topics which may be addressed include, but certainly are not limited to:

1. Mining biographies for structured information

2. Biographies and linked data

3. Using biographical information for quantitative analyses

4. The canonization of people and events in history

5. The use or uselessness of big data for biographical research

6. Visualizing biographical data

7. Biographical Dictionaries

8. Dealing with biographical data in heterogeneous datasets

9. Practices in digitizing and converting biographical data to a software interpretable format

10. Automatic biography generation

11. Biographies across countries and cultures

12. Standards, vocabularies and best practices for the encoding and processing of biographical data

Special Session

Many entities share similar life-cycle of existence within human minds, such as countries, cities, other geo-political entities, cultural and historical artefacts.

We invite papers for a special session on modeling, representation and creation of data for handling life-span events in which such common entities are involved. Of special interest will be the sharing of conceptualizations, interaction between biographical data and life-span data for other entities.

Important Dates

Deadline extension for abstracts submission: 08 July 2019, 08:00 GMT.

Deadline extension for full paper submission: 07 June 2019, 08:00 GMT.

Deadline for abstracts: 21 June 2019, 08:00 GMT.

Notification of acceptance: 15 July 2019, 08:00 GMT.

Conference dates: 5-6 September 2019, Varna, Bulgaria

Camera ready version: 12 September 2019, 08:00 GMT.

Papers should be submitted through Easychair.

Proceedings of previous editions

Proceedings 2015: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1399/

Proceedings 2017: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2119/