university of leipzig

“Culture & Technology” – European Summer University in Digital Humanities

“Culture & Technology” – European Summer University in Digital Humanities (ESU DH C & T) 28th of July – 07th of August 2015, University of Leipzig http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/

This is to announce that since the 28th of February 2015 applications for a place at the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture & Technology” (ESU DH C & T) are being accepted viaConfTool (https://www.conftool.net/esu2015/) and that we have started to assign places to applicants whose application was positively reviewed by the experts.

The application phase closes the 31st of May 2015. Applications are considered on a rolling basis. The selection of participants is made by the Scientific Committee together with the experts who lead the workshops.

As ESU DH C & T is a member of the International Digital Humanities Training Network courses taken at the Summer University are eligible for transfer credit towards the University of Victoria Graduate Certificate in DH (http://english.uvic.ca/graduate/digital_humanities.html).

This year’s Summer University is realised together with CLARIN-D, one of the two infrastructure projects for the humanities funded by the German State Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the Humboldt Chair in Digital Humanities of the University of Leipzig.

We were successful in finding sponsors who are willing to grant support to participants of the Summer University (see: http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/node/480):

  • The German Accademic Exchange Service (DAAD) offers very generous support to alumni / alumnae of German universities.
  • The University of Leipzig through its International Centre makes available bursaries for members of its Eastern European partner universities.
  • The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria (etcl), in conjunction with the Digital Humanities Summer Institute offers up to 5 tuition fellowships for international graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
  • CLARIN-D will make available some support as well (TBA).

The Summer School takes place across 11 whole days. The intensive programme consists of workshops, public lectures, regular project presentations, a poster session and a panel discussion. The workshop programme is composed of the following thematic strands:

  • XML-TEI encoding, structuring and rendering
  • Methods and Tools for the Corpus Annotation of Historical and Contemporary Written Texts
  • Comparing Corpora
  • Spoken Language and Multimodal Corpora
  • Python
  • Basic Statistics and Visualization with R
  • Stylometry
  • Open Greek and Latin
  • Digital Editions and Editorial Theory: Historical Texts and Documents
  • Spatial Analysis in the Humanities
  • Building Thematic Research Collections with Drupal
  • Introduction to Project Management

Each workshop consists of a total of 16 sessions or 32 week-hours. The number of participants in each workshop is limited to 10. Workshops are structured in such a way that participants can either take the two blocks of one workshop or two blocks from different workshops.

The description of all workshops can be found at http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/node/481 in at least two languages. Short bios in at least two languages are available of most workshop leaders athttp://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/node/488.

The Summer University is directed at 60 participants from all over Europe and beyond. It wants to bring together (doctoral) students, young scholars and academics from the Arts and Humanities, Library Sciences, Social Sciences, Engineering and Computer Sciences as equal partners to an interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and experience in a multilingual and multicultural context and thus create the conditions for future project-based cooperations and network-building across the borders of disciplines, countries and cultures.

The Summer University seeks to offer a space for the discussion and acquisition of new knowledge, skills and competences in those computer technologies which play a central role in Humanities Computing and which determine every day more and more the work done in the Humanities and Cultural Sciences, as well as in publishing, libraries, and archives, to name only some of the most important areas. The Summer University aims at integrating these activities into the broader context of the Digital Humanities, which pose questions about the consequences and implications of the application of computational methods and tools to cultural artefacts of all kinds.

In all this the Summer University aims at confronting the so-called Gender Divide , i.e. the under-representation of women in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Germany and Europe. But, instead of strengthening the hard sciences as such by following the way taken by so many measures which focus on the so-called STEM disciplines and try to convince women of the attractiveness and importance of Computer Science or Engineering, the Summer University relies on the challenges that the Humanities with their complex data and their wealth of women represent for Computer Science and Engineering and the further development of the latter, on the overcoming of the boarders between the so-called hard and soft sciences and on the integration of Humanities, Computer Science and Engineering.

As the Summer University is dedicated not only to the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but wants also to foster community building and networking across disciplines, languages and cultures, countries and continents, the programme of the Summer School features also communal coffee breaks, communal lunches in the refectory of the university, and a rich cultural programme (thematic guided tours, visits of archives, museums and exhibitions, and communal dinners in different parts of Leipzig).

Participation fees are the same as last year.

For all relevant information please consult the Web-Portal of the European Summer School in Digital Humanities “Culture & Technology”: http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/ which will be continually updated and integrated with more information as soon as it becomes available.