Biographical Data in a Digital World 2019

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Biographical Data in a Digital World Conference Series

Following the inaugural conference held in Amsterdam in 2015 (BD2015) and Linz in 2017 (BD2017), we are happy to announce that the 3rd Conference on Biographical Data in a Digital World will take place in Varna, immediately following RANLP2019.

Local organization by the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IICT-BAS)

Over two days, this conference will bring together international researchers of diverse backgrounds and experiences to facilitate knowledge exchange and innovation.

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Venue 2019

Varna is the largest city on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast. The event venue is hotel “Cherno More” (in English - Black sea). It is centrally located at the entrance of the Sea Garden and offers excellent conference facilities. The city is a major tourist destination with numerous flights to/from the Varna International Airport.

Description and Topics

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.

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 across disciplines 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?

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.