HistoInformatics2021 - the 6th International Workshop on Computational History will be held on September 30th, 2021 in conjunction with The ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL2021). The HistoInformatics workshop series brings together researchers in the historical disciplines, computer science and associated disciplines as well as the cultural heritage sector. Historians, like other humanists, show keen interests in computational approaches to the study and processing of digitized sources (usually text, images, audio). In computer science, experimental tools and methods stand the challenge to be validated regarding their relevance for real-world questions and applications. The HistoInformatics workshop series is designed to bring researchers in both fields together, to discuss best practices as well as possible future collaborations. Traditionally, historical research is based on the hermeneutic investigation of preserved records and artifacts to provide a reliable account of the past and to discuss different hypotheses. Alongside this hermeneutic approach historians have always been interested to translate primary sources into data and used methods, often borrowed from the social sciences, to analyze them. A new wealth of digitized historical documents have however opened up completely new challenges for the computer-assisted analysis of e.g. large text or image corpora.

Historians can greatly benefit from the advances of computer and information sciences which are dedicated to the processing, organization, and analysis of such data. New computational techniques can be applied to help verify and validate historical assumptions. We call this approach HistoInformatics, analogous to Bioinformatics and ChemoInformatics which have respectively proposed new research trends in biology and chemistry. The main topics of the workshop are (1) support for historical research and analysis in general through the application of computer science theories or technologies, (2) analysis and re-use of historical texts, (3) visualizations of historical data, (4) provision of access to historical knowledge.

HistoInformatics workshops took place five times in the past. The first one, HistoInformatics2013, was held in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo2013) in Kyoto, Japan in 2013. The second workshop, HistoInformatics2014, took place at the same conference (SocInfo2014) in the following year in Barcelona. The third, HistoInformatics2016 was at Digital Humanities 2016 conference in Krakow, Poland. The fourth one, HistoInformatics2017 was held in conjunction with CIKM2017 International Conference on Knowledge Management in Singapore, while the fifth one, HistoInformatics2019 was held in conjunction with the 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL2019) in Norway.

Our objective is to provide for the two different research communities a place to meet and exchange ideas and to facilitate discussion. We hope the workshop will result in a survey of current problems and potential solutions, with particular focus on exploring opportunities for collaboration and interaction of researchers working on various subareas within Computer Science and History Sciences.

Few selected papers from the workshop may be invited to the special issue of the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (JDMDH).

We invite papers from a wide range of topics which are of relevance for history, the cultural heritage sector and the humanities in general. Besides original research papers, we also invite submissions of diverse types including position papers, project descriptions, or demo type papers. The workshop targets researchers who work on the intersections of history and computer science. The papers on the following and related topics (but not limited to) are especially welcome:

• Natural language processing and text analytics applied to historical documents

• Analysis of longitudinal document collections

• Time Series Analysis and Survival Analysis

• Search and retrieval in document archives and historical collections, associative search

• Causal relationship discovery based on historical resources

• Named entity recognition and disambiguation

• Entity relationship extraction, detecting and resolving historical references in text

• Finding analogical entities over time

• Network Analysis

• Computational linguistics for old texts

• Analysis of language change over time

• Modelling evolution of entities and relationships over time

• Automatic multimedia document dating

• Simulating and recreating the past course of actions, social relations, motivations, figurations

• Handling uncertain and fragmentary text and image data

• Mining Wikipedia for historical data

• OCR and transcription old texts

• Effective interfaces for searching, browsing or visualizing historical data collections

• Studies on collective memory

• Studying and modeling forgetting and remembering processes

• Estimating credibility of historical findings

• Epistemologies in the Humanities and Computer Science

• Computer Vision applied to historical image collections