Francqui Chair: William Marx

S.R.219 Rode Straat 14-16, Antwerpen, Belgium

Lost and often found works

William Marx’s 2021-2022 course at the Collège de France centered around “lost works,” as “there are more lost works than there are existing ones.” Coincidentally, an international group of researchers in medieval studies published an important article in Science on the “forgotten books” of the Middle Ages. Here again, the literary scholar is invited to look at what is not or no longer present, but what might be recreated with the help of digital humanities’ tools. October 14, we organize a debate between William Marx, our Antwerp digital humanists, and other guests on this question at the University of Antwerp.

Lecture series: Megan Gooch

S.C.207 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Belgium

Failure to connect: exploring the human relationships at the heart of digital humanities

Digital humanities means many things to many people – we talk of DH as being a range of methods, technologies, theoretical approaches to ask and answer research questions. But unlike traditional forms of humanities research, the research projects is not often one that can be tackled alone. DH nearly always requires collaboration with people from different subject domains, with technical experts and often with non-academic staff such as librarians, museum staff or administrative support. 
This paper explores the impact of this growth in collaboration through the lens of failure and what happens when collaborations and partnerships don’t go as planned. We have all experienced failure in our professional lives, but it is rarely acknowledged due to risks to reputation or to future funding. But by exploring what can go wrong, we can identify some of the key collaborative skills needed by today’s digital humanists, and begin to understand how to equip the researchers of the future to thrive.

FREE

Lecture series: Nicholas Cornia

S.C.207 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Belgium

Rediscovering the performance practice of musicians in the long 19th century through handwritten annotations on music scores.

FAAM, Flemish Archive for Annotated Music, is a database and research platform aiming to revive the performances of musicians from the 19th and early 20th century through the study of their annotations on music scores. The Heritage Library of the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp provides a substantial collection of historical annotated scores made by Flemish amateur musicians, performers, conductors, and composers of the long 19th century.

FREE

Lecture Series: Enrique Manjavacas Arevalo

S.R.0.13 Rode Straat 14-16, Antwerpen, Belgium

Historical Language Models and their Application to Word Sense Disambiguation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the cornerstone of current methods in Computational Linguistics. As the Humanities look towards computational methods in order to analyse large quantities of text, the question arises as to how these models are best developed and applied to the specificities of their domains. In this talk, I will address the application of LLMs to Historical Languages, following up on the MacBERTh project. In the context of the development of LLMs for Historical Languages, I will address how they can be specifically fine-tuned with efficiency to tackle the problem of Word Sense Disambiguation. In a series of experiments relying on data from the Oxford English Dictionary, I will highlight how non-parametric and metric learning approaches can be an interesting alternative to traditional fine-tuning methods that rely on classifiers that learn to disambiguate specific lemmas.

FREE

Antwerp DH Summer School 2023 – Computer-assisted genetic editing: from handwritten text recognition to keystroke logging

UAntwerp City Campus Prinsstraat 13, Antwerp, Belgium

Intensive 5-day entry level hands-on course on making digital editions of analogue and born-digital texts. In this course, participants will acquire a set of basic computer skills such as XML and handwritten text recognition to design a TEI-compatible Digital Scholarly Edition and deploy keystroke logging technology to record and analyse born-digital texts. 

€200 – €250

Lecture series: Mike Kestemont

S.R.118 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Belgium

The wandering verse: the computational detection of micro-intertexts in medieval literature

Intertextuality is a ubiquitous concept in literary studies, which – because of its notoriously open-ended nature – covers a variety of correspondences between texts. Signaling intertexts is an important editorial responsibility, because it can deepen one’s reading experience of a literary work. Text reuse detection has become a popular task in the computational humanities too, although its evaluation is complicated by the lack of exhaustively annotated datasets of intertexts. Historic scholarship on medieval epics provides us with a wealthy inventory of micro-intertexts between medieval works, although their status is still hotly debated. Some philological communities have been keen on identifying intertexts as authorial features, whereas others have stressed their conventional status, especially in the wake of the oral-formulaic theory. In this talk, I will present a study on Middle Dutch epic literature, as well as an extension of this work to contemporary Middle English literature, in particular the bookshop theory surrounding the famous Auchinleck manuscript. I will argue that the intricate web woven by computationally detected intertexts can invite radically innovative readings of medieval literature. 

FREE

GitHub Tutorial

S.R.A.111 Lange Winkelstraat 9, Antwerpen, Belgium

On 12 February, Pieter Fivez gives a crash course on GitHub, offering insights into its functionalities such as data storage, version control and collaborative coding. The tutorial will last about an hour.

Tutorial: Vev’s Design by Caroline Vandyck

S.A.202 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

Have you always dreamed of having a visually appealing website to present your research? But you never knew where to start? In that case, join Caroline Vandyck’s tutorial on Vev’s Design! Vev’s Design is an online design studio that can be used to build your own interactive website in an intuitive way. Its prime focus is […]

Guest lecture: Melvin Wevers on Working with Audio Files

S.A.206 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

For Platform{DH} we open up some guest lectures given in the Master Digital Text Analysis. First up: Melvin Wever’s guest lecture on working with audio files for the course Computational Literary Studies. Description In this guest lecture, we will work on audio files. Besides loading, editing, and visualising audio files, we will extract different kinds […]

Antwerp DH Summer School 2024 – Computer-assisted genetic editing: from medieval manuscripts to born-digital documents

UAntwerp City Campus Prinsstraat 13, Antwerp, Belgium

Intensive 5-day entry level hands-on course on making digital editions of analogue and born-digital texts. In this course, participants will acquire a set of basic computer skills such as XML mark-up language and handwritten text recognition to design a fully-fledged, TEI-compatible Digital Scholarly Edition and deploy keystroke logging technology to record and analyse born-digital texts.

€200 – €250