ASCDC has invited internationally renowned digital humanities scholars Dagmar Schäfer, Marcia Lei Zeng, and Mark Liao to be our keynote speakers at the The 11th International Conference of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities (DADH 2020) beginning on December 1!
This year's DADH conference will be hosted by ASCDC and the Taiwanese Association for Digital Humanities, with the conference theme "Smart Data × Digital Humanities." The conference will be held entirely online. Facing the ascendance of digital humanities, we call on scholars to pool their knowledge to explore how we can convert massive quantities of disparate data preserved in digital archives, by means of the latest technological developments in semantic web and artificial intelligence, to enable large databases to serve not only as data silos passively searched by researchers, but to go further and become able to actively respond to researchers' queries and ideas, providing knowledge graphs that dynamically link people to answers.
Keynote lectures have always been the centerpiece of international forums. Dr. Marcia Lei Zeng, Professor at the School of Information, Kent State University, will present her keynote speech on "Smart Data for Digital Humanities."
What is smart data? Why should we discuss this concept, its influence, and its applications in the DH field? Dr. Zeng sees the mark that Big Data and Smart Data have left on the humanities to be a methodological shift rather than a primarily technological one. In the context of data resources that are usually served through the digital archives from libraries, archives and museums (LAMs), Dr. Zeng's keynote will discuss the value achievable by smart data.
Dr. Zeng's research interests include knowledge organization systems, Linked Data, metadata, smart data and big data, semantic technologies, and database quality control. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO). She has served as chair for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Classification and Indexing Section, as the Director-at-large of the American Society for Information Science and technology (ASIS&T), contributed to the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), co-authored bibliographic data guidelines for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and been a member of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) "Thesauri and Interoperability with Other Vocabularies" Working Group.
Dagmar Schäfer, Director of Department III "Artefacts, Action and Knowledge" at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), will present her insights with a lecture on "Digital to Humanities – Smart Data and the Role of the History of Science for DH."
Dr. Schäfer is an internationally renowned sinologist and this year's recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Germany's most prestigious research award. She was an early proponent of digital research methods in sinology, and launched and supported digital research tools and e-infrastructures at MPIWG. Her research centers around the history and sociology of technology in China, incorporating the application of technologies for digital databases, GIS, text mining, etc. Her monograph, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China, received the Pfizer Award and Joseph Levenson Book Prize.
From the viewpoint of MPIWG, an institution that has engaged with data and DH for almost three decades, Dr. Schäfer will analyze what makes the digital smart and the humanities and data relevant to each other. DH has come a long way to help study and understand how inferences from data lead to knowledge claims – that is, how the singular makes up the universal. Dr. Schäfer's keynote will suggest the next steps to be taken for the future development of DH.
Dr. Liao has worked for over 25 years in fields involved with multimedia signal processing, image processing, computer-vision-based human behavior analysis, and 3D image segmentation and recognition. Since 2013, he has been a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for contributions to image and video forensics and security.
Dr. Liao wants to lead a research team to develop a computer program that can, via machine learning technology, automatically assemble a complete song from different video clips shot from different perspectives by different amateur audience members using different phone models. This is an extension of the forward-looking technologies Dr. Liao developed while he was director of research and development for Taiwan's National Digital Archives Program from 2006 to 2012. In his keynote, he will speak on these pivotal ideas.
Since its first meeting at the end of 2009, the International Conference of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities (DADH) has utilized its yearly theme and programming agenda to collaboratively investigate ways to integrate modern information technology into the exploration of the traditional humanities field. This year's conference continues this mission, welcoming all those who share an interest in digital humanities to exchange knowledge across the online cloud, together reflecting on the many possibilities explored and yet to be explored on the future horizons of digital humanities!
For more information on the keynote speakers and their speeches, please click here.
11th International Conference of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities (DADH 2020)
Date: 1st to 4th December, 2020
Conference Theme: Smart Data × Digital Humanities
Organized by: Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures
Taiwan Association for Digital Humanities
Co-organized by: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica
Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica
Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica
Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica
Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica
Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica
Conference Homepage: https://dadh2020.ascdc.tw/index_en.php
