EUPORIA 2021

A cycle of webinars
on annotation of literary and documentary texts
through Domain-Specific Languages

The community of digital humanists is growing and promoting best practices for any aspect of their work­flow: metadata encoding, acquisition of digital images, text digitization by OCR, mark-up of primary sources, and annotation of different layers of linguistic and stylistic analyses.

But in most cases the best practices of digital humanists are challenging for the community of traditional scholars, not simply for a reactionary attitude, but for an actual overload of cognitive stress. Historians, epigraphists, palaeographists, or philologists need to stay focused on their specific-domain tasks. Their practices are based on the functional requirements of the specific disciplines and consequently their methods and solutions should meet at the best those requirements also in a digital environment, by avoiding verbosity, semantic ambiguity, and any technicism alien to the domain. Along the centuries effective and efficient systems of annotation have been created and optimized: the evolution of the critical apparatus to increase precision, concision and expressivity, is just an example.

XML-TEI is a de facto standard in the realm of Digital Humanities. However, verbosity and peculiarities of the TEI guidelines may create a barrier between the communities of traditional and digital humanists. Domain-Specific Languages can help in this direction, because they allow the scholars to encode relevant information in a familiar way, close to the practices developed in their original domain of knowledge (e.g. epigraphy or philology), but at the same time they are machine actionable and easy to be translated in other, more verbose but standard languages, such as XML-TEI or OWL.

We call for contribution to a cycle of webinars to share ideas and experiences on Domain-Specific Languages applied to the research in the Humanities. We solicit the contribution of creators of formal grammars and users of formal languages for encoding critical apparatus, or linguistic, stylistic and multimedia annotations. But we also welcome scholars with relevant research questions that could exploit Domain-Specific Languages in their activities or that are skeptical or unsatisfied by other ready-made solutions and desire to tailor new instruments to their needs.

Webinars will take place from September to December 2020 and are aimed at the publication of a monograph at the end of the next year.

Call for Papers

CfP Download: EUPORIA2021CallForPapers

Submission form through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=euporia2021 [(free) registration required]

Contact: euporia2021@easychair.org

Submission deadline: 15th July 2020