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  • Lecture Series: John Ashley Burgoyne

    S.A.107 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, België, Belgium

    How to Make it Stick: A Study of Long-Term Musical Memorability Using Citizen Science.

    Psycholinguist Steven Pinker once described music as being ‘auditory cheesecake’, similar to pornography and alcohol. Indeed, human beings do not seem to get enough of it. Music can be enchanting, annoying and intriguing. It helps us to concentrate or forget, it can make us jubilant or melancholic. Some songs, the so-called ‘earwigs’, can haunt us for days. These earwigs in particular are the subject of the upcoming talk. Our speaker will discuss what makes songs stick (i.e. what makes them ‘catchy’) by computationally analysing song structure and music recognition patterns by humans.

  • Lecture Series: Barbara Bordalejo

    S.R.213 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

    The Future of the Book and the Books of the Future.

    In her talk, Bordalejo will discuss issues relating to publishing, eReaders and multimedia books.

  • Lecture Series: Benno Stein

    S.C.001 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Applying Heuristic Search Technology for Constrained Paraphrasing.

    To paraphrase means to rewrite content whilst preserving the original meaning. Paraphrasing is important in fields such as text reuse in journalism, anonymising work, and improving the quality of customer-written reviews, among other. Paraphrasing is often considered as an analysis problem – asking the following question: Are these two sentences (paragraphs) paraphrases?

  • Lecture Series: Folgert Karsdorp

    S.D.009 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

    From Rapacious Wolfs to Independent Women: Cultural Transmission of Little Red Riding Hood.

    In his lecture, Folgert Karsdorp presents new perspectives on the structure and development of story networks. A story network, defined as a non-hierarchical agglomeration of pre-textual relationships, represents a stream of retellings in which retellers modify and adapt retellings in a gradual and accumulative way. I investigate the development of the world’s biggest fairy tale icon: Little Red Riding Hood. No story has been retold, reinterpreted, recontextualized and reconfigured as often as the story about the little girl in red who meets a wolf in the forest. On the basis of a large collection of Dutch retellings of the story, I show that the evolution of its story network is largely determined by two random mechanisms of selection: cultural prominence and temporal attractiveness.

  • Lecture Series: Sabine Lenk and Nele Wynants

    S.D.014 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

    A Million Pictures.

    In this double-feature, two researchers present their work on a European project called “A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slides Heritage in the Common European History of Learning” – a project that investigates popular visual culture and performativity in the 19th century. Sabine Lenk will go first, presenting her research on ‘Digitizing Magic Lantern Slides: Problems, Challenges, Possibilities’. She will be followed by Nele Wynants, who will present her research on ‘The Legacy of the Lantern. Artistic Reuse of an Old Apparatus’.

  • Lecture Series: Elien Vernackt

    S.R.231 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

    The Magis Bruges Project

    In her talk, Vernackt will discuss the digitisation of a famous sixteenth-century map of Bruges, the development of a database, and a collaboration between different parties from both the academic and the GLAM sector. The MAGIS Bruges project responds to a variety of research interests and touches upon different issues within and outside the Digital Humanities community.

  • Lecture Series: Greta Franzini

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

    Text Reuse, Digital Breadcrumbs, and Historical Data.

    In her talk, Greta Franzini will discuss the case studies and activities of eTRAP. This project investigates the phenomenon of text reuse in order to advance automatic detection on historical data. Historical texts pose numerous challenges to automatically detect reuse. These challenges are, among others, the fragmentary survival of works, inconsistent referencing, but also the diachronic evolution of language. Unlike modern texts, where sources are consistently quoted and cited, historical texts are not always so transparent, thus opening up exciting opportunities for intertextual research.

  • Lecture Series: Erik Kwakkel

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

    Something Old, Something New: Medieval Manuscripts and Digital Reserach Methods

    In this talk, Erik Kwakkel shows how the study of medieval manuscripts can benefit from a digital approach. He presents two case studies: 1) How medieval script is studied in a quantified manner, using modest statistical research; 2) How MA-XRF, an x-ray technique, enables us to look inside early-modern bookbindings, revealing (and reading) medieval fragments that are hiding inside. These two examples will be taken as representatives of two common types of Digital Humanities research: one using digital techniques to do traditional research more efficiently, the other producing results that could not be gained in traditional research.

  • Lecture Series: Wido van Peursen

    S.D.019 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

    A Statistical Approach to Syntactic Variation. The Case of the Hebrew Bible

    In his talk, Wido van Peursen shows how combining traditional scholarship with a computational approach permits us to explore linguistic variation in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament from new perspectives. The Old Testament provides a diverse and most compelling field of study. It has a complex composition history that, according to many scholars, stretches out over a period of more than a millennium. Naturally, this corpus of texts presents a great linguistic diversity. For long, researchers have attempted to understand and explain this diversity in all its facets. The promising results of quantitative methods show once more how Digital Humanities can provide a major contribution to an ongoing discussion; respecting, but also improving an honourable scholarly tradition.

  • Lecture Series: Jeroen De Gussem

    S.R.218 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

    The Exalted Expert vs. The Exact Experiment: Authorship Attribution, Stylometry and Literary Theory.

    In his lecture, Jeroen De Gussem confronts traditional methods of authorship attribution with more recent computational methods for determining the authorship of a text. He addresses a number of practical and theoretical issues. Take a so-called “stylome”, a collection of features in an authors’ personal language use which can be quantified as data and visualized in attractive figures. Can computational formalism (or perhaps computational stylistics) capture “style” by focusing on such a stylome? Where does computational stylistics succeed where traditional stylistics have failed, and vice versa? Are computational stylistics as “objective” (or “unsupervised”) as they purport to be, or do our results only reflect the answers we were hoping to find?