EUPORIA2021: Webinars in Theories and Practices of the Annotation 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.

Submission Guidelines

A short abstract restricted to 500 words + references (Chicago style) must be submitted at the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=euporia2021 (EasyChair free registration is mandatory to login).

List of Topics

The main topics of the webinars are:

• Theoretical aspects of the Domain-Specific Languages: enhancing models for the representation and treatment of scholarly editions; promoting the axiomatic approach towards the formal representation of textual phenomena; promoting the discussion on the theoretical and epistemological underpinnings of the historical-critical sciences and their relationship with the experimental scientific method; circularity between constitutio and interpretatio: the hermeneutic circle.

• Scholarly editing and DSLs: preparation of mono- or multi-level critical apparatus; systems for linking the critical apparatus to the text; morphological, semantic and philological annotation of variant readings and conjectural emendations; methods for recording and formalizing the evaluations of readings formulated by scholars in the secondary and tertiary literature; preparation of repertories of variants and conjectural emendations, information retrieval, and Linked Open Data. 

• Hermeneutics and DSLs: tailoring DSLs according to the research question: case studies; interaction between different layers of analysis (e.g. lexico-semantic and metrical analysis to study Homeric formulae); open categories: personomies, folksonomies and domain ontologies.

• Annotating multimedia and 3D artifacts by DSLs: DSLs for the annotation of images, audio and video; annotation of 3D artifacts, especially in the domains of archaeology, epigraphy and cultural heritage; enhancing the tools for annotation by adding DSL editing capabilities.

• DSLs and interoperability, standardization and residual information: translation from DSLs to XML-TEI and vice versa; DSLs and languages for the representation of ontologies (e.g. OWL or turtle); the treatment of residual information, i.e. research-specific formalisms of DSLs; the engagement of the researchers in the standardization process.

• DSLs and computation: engineering aspects of the DSLs, e.g. efficiency and computational complexity; DSLs as programming languages and not only as descriptive languages; making libraries of components for the Digital Humanities domain and in particular for the computational philology; stemmatological and data mining techniques for extracting information from the critical apparatus; extracting information from collational and stemmatological data sets for the establishment of the critical text and its apparatus.

• DSLs, education and citizen science: DSLs at school (case studies); DSLs and accessibility; collaborative annotation as peer education; monitoring the benefits and challenges of the collaborative annotation at school by DSLs; the involvement of students to enhance the DSLs expressivity and to improve the usability of the annotation tools.

Organization

Scientific Board

• Bridget Almas, Alpheios Project, US
• Gioele Barabucci, NTNU, NO
• Andrea Bellandi, CNR-ILC di Pisa, IT
• Pier Giorgio Borbone, Università di Pisa, IT
• Aurélien Berra, Paris Nanterre, FR
• Barbara Bordalejo, University of Saskatchewan, CA
• Federico Boschetti, CNR-ILC & VeDPH Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, IT
• David Bouvier, Université de Lausanne, CH
• Marina Buzzoni, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, IT
• Alberto Camerotto, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, IT
• Cléo Carastro, EHESS Paris, FR
• Nicola Cusumano, Università di Palermo, IT
• Riccardo Del Gratta, CNR-ILC di Pisa, IT
• Angelo Mario Del Grosso, CNR-ILC di Pisa, IT
• Herry Diakoff, Alpheios Project, US
• Paulo Donoso, Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, CL
• Franz Fischer, VeDPH Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, IT
• Manuela Giordano, Università di Siena, IT
• Massimo Giuseppetti, Roma Tre, IT
• Taro Hyuga, University of Tokyo, JP
• Yasunori Kasai, University of Tokyo, JP
• Anas Fahad Khan, CNR-ILC di Pisa, IT
• Francesco Mambrini, UCSC di Milano, IT
• Tiziana Mancinelli, VeDPH Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, IT
• Paolo Mastandrea, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, IT
• Monica Monachini, CNR-ILC di Pisa, IT
• Camillo Neri, Università di Bologna, IT
• Renzo Orsini, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, IT
• Daniel Riaño, ILC-CSIC Madrid, ES
• Andrea Taddei, LAMA Università di Pisa, IT)
• Arsalane Zarghili, Université SMBA de Fès, MA

Program Committee

• Luigi Bambaci, Università di Bologna, IT 
• Michela Benedetti, Liceo Galilei di Pisa, IT 
• Antonella Candio, Università di Pisa & Liceo Carducci di Pisa, IT 
• Matteo Cazzato, Università di Pavia, IT
• Marilena Crucitti, Liceo Gargallo di Siracusa, IT
• Christian D’Agata, Università di Catania, IT
• Filippo Lepori, LAMA Università di Pisa, IT
• Roberta Mirandola, Liceo Galilei di Pisa, IT
• Gloria Mugelli, IIS Ricasoli di Siena & LAMA Università di Pisa, IT 
• Paola Peratello, Università di Verona, IT
• Amedeo Alessandro Raschieri, Università Statale di Milano, IT 
• Giulia Re, LAMA Università di Pisa, IT 
• Antonella Soldani, Liceo Galilei di Pisa, IT
• Antonio Stanzione, Fondazione Collegio San Carlo di Modena & LAMA Università di Pisa, IT
• Paola Tosoni, IIS Pesenti di Cascina & LAMA Università di Pisa, IT

Chairs

• Federico Boschetti, CNR-ILC & VeDPH Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, IT, federico.boschetti_AT_ilc.cnr.it
• Andrea Taddei, LAMA Università di Pisa, IT, andrea.taddei_AT_unipi.it

Invited Speakers

Invited speakers will be defined after the expiration of the CfP.

Publication

We plan to publish a book with selected papers. At the conclusion of the cycle of webinars, authors interested in publication will be asked to submit a long version of their contribution.

Venue

The conference will be held entirely online.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to euporia2021_AT_easychair.org