“Encoding Cultural Resources”

The Japanese Association for Digital Humanities is pleased to announce its fifth annual conference, to be held at Kyoto University, Japan, September 1-3, 2015.

The conference will feature posters, papers and panels. We invite proposals on all aspects of digital humanities globally, and especially encourage papers treating topics that deal with practices that aim to cross borders, for example, between academic fields, media, languages, cultures, and so on, as related to the field of digital humanities.

While the digitization of cultural resources has been widely carried out in Japan, it has been of only the most prized treasures and providing basic metadata rather than full-text encoding of a wider range of cultural resources. This situation has come about due to several environmental difficulties, including issues of compatibility of character encoding, lack of characters in the available character encoding standards, limitations in access to powerful computers, narrow bandwidth of network, weak IT literacy of humanities scholars, and so on. However, because the environment for encoding various cultural resources has gradually been improving, several projects have begun to more deeply encode their resources. To encourage and support this trend, we welcome presentations of studies and examples that treat the encoding of cultural resources in the field of digital humanities, such as TEI, EAD, KML, ePub, HTML5, RDF, LOD and so on. By so doing, we hope to contribute to the spread of the application of encoding in various stages. With this as our suggested central focus, we nonetheless welcome papers on a broad range of DH topics. For example:

Research issues, including data mining, information design and modeling, software studies, and humanities research enabled through the digital medium; computer-based research and computer applications in literary, linguistic, cultural and historical studies, including electronic literature, public humanities, and interdisciplinary aspects of modern scholarship. Some examples might include text analysis, corpora, corpus linguistics, language processing, language learning, and endangered languages; the digital arts, architecture, music, film, theater, new media and related areas; the creation and curation of humanities digital resources; the role of digital humanities in academic curricula;

The range of topics covered by Digital Humanities can also be consulted in the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Oxford University Press.

The deadline for submission of abstracts has been extended to May 18, 2015. Presenters will be notified of acceptance on 30 May 2015 (late submitters by middle of June).

Abstracts should be of approximately 750 words in length in English, including title. The following information should clearly be stated (in either an attached file, or the email body):

  1. The type of presentation (poster, short paper, long paper or panel)
  2. Title
  3. A list of keywords (up to five)
  4. The name, status and affiliation of the presenter(s)
  5. Contact email address
  6. Postal address
  7. A career description of no more than 100 words
  • Abstract should not include above information–except for the title.

Please send abstracts to conf2015 [ at ] jadh.org by May 18, 2015.

Type of proposals:

  1. Poster presentations Poster presentations may include work-in-progress on any of the topics described above as well as demonstrations of computer technology, software and digital projects. A separate poster session will open the conference, during which time presenters should be on-hand to explain their work, share their ideas with other delegates, and answer questions. Posters will also be on displayed at various times during the conference, and presenters are encouraged to provide material and handouts with more detailed information and URLs.

  2. Short papers Short papers are allocated 10 minutes (plus 5 minutes for questions) and are suitable for describing work-in-progress and reporting on shorter experiments and software and tools in early stages of development.

  3. Long papers Long papers are allocated 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes for questions) and are intended for presenting substantial unpublished research and reporting on significant new digital resources or methodologies.

  4. Panels Panels (90 minutes) are comprised of either: (a) Three long papers on a joint theme. All abstracts should be submitted together with a statement, of approximately 750 words, outlining the session topic and its relevance to current directions in the digital humanities; or (b) A panel of four to six speakers. The panel organize should submit a 750-words outline of the topic session and its relevance to current directions in the digital humanities as well as an indication from all speakers of their willingness to participate.

Contact: Please direct enquires about any aspect of the conference to: conf2015 [ at ] jadh.org

Program Committee:

  • Hiroyuki Akama (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
  • Paul Arthur (Australian National University, Australia)
  • James Cummings (University of Oxford, UK)
  • Neil Fraistat (University of Maryland, USA)
  • Makoto Goto (National Institute for Humanities, Japan)
  • Shoichiro Hara (Kyoto University, Japan)
  • Jieh Hsiang (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
  • Asanobu Kitamoto (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
  • Maki Miyake (Osaka University, Japan), Chair
  • A. Charles Muller (University of Tokyo, Japan)
  • Hajime Murai (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
  • Kiyonori Nagasaki (International Institute for Digital Humanities, Japan)
  • John Nerbonne (University of Groningen, Netherlands)
  • Espen S. Ore (University of Oslo, Norway)
  • Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta, Canada)
  • Susan Schreibman (National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland)
  • Tim Sherratt (National Library of Australia, Australia)
  • Masahiro Shimoda (University of Tokyo, Japan)
  • Raymond Siemens (University of Victoria, Canada)
  • Keiko Suzuki (Ritsumeikan University, Japan)
  • Takafumi Suzuki (Toyo University, Japan)
  • Tomoji Tabata (Osaka University, Japan)
  • Toru Tomabechi (International Institute for Digital Humanities, Japan)
  • Christian Wittern (Kyoto University, Japan)
  • Taizo Yamada (University of Tokyo, Japan)