This is the courtyard of the breathtaking Collegium Maius, the location for our conference dinner and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Picture taken by Svenja Guhr

Over the course of two days and six sessions – comprised of sixteen talks and one long-awaited keynote – some interesting shared focal points and concerns for the area of CLS emerged. It is perhaps to be expected that our field is now asking itself challenging questions about large language models: do these models understand literature? What does it even mean to understand literature? And can LLMs be used to identify the moral of a story?

A second interesting strand of research revolved around the representation of space in literary works. A variety of papers tackled the topic of literary space and place in innovative and diverse ways: from geocoding to machine learning and from analyzing literary modes of transportation to measuring how easily literary worlds can be visualized.

Another interesting set of papers clustered around the analysis of literary reception: how do texts impact readers and circulate in society? This included forays into literary citizen science, the mapping of literary communities in contemporary St. Petersburg, and my own research, which revolves around the reception and rewriting of Greek mythology in contemporary online fanfiction.

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, “The Rape of Proserpina”, Galleria Borghese, Rome. (1621-22), World History Encyclopedia

Specifically, I presented an analysis of fanfiction about the mythological figures Hades and Persephone. Most canonical versions of this myth are characterized by an explicitly unequal power dynamic, since Persephone is kidnapped and sexually assaulted by Hades. The moment of her violent abduction was immortalized in the famous statue by Bernini.

Through a computational analysis of the verbs associated with the fictional characters of Hades and Persephone in contemporary fanfiction, I measured the power dynamics portrayed in this fanfiction. The fan-written stories are varied: some portray the unequal, patriarchal power dynamics familiar from traditional versions of the myth, others rewrite the relationship to subvert canonical expectations. I also found that stories with a bigger power imbalance were less popular with readers, which led me to the title for my paper: a powerful Hades is an unpopular dude.

Me – Julia Neugarten – introducing fanfiction at the start of my presentation. Picture taken by Svenja Guhr.

Overall, we had an inspiring and diverse conference – more diverse than I can describe in a short blogpost, so I encourage you to check out all of the contributions yourself. The atmosphere was curious, inquisitive, and supportive, for which I want to thank the organizers and everyone who participated. Next year, CCLS will celebrate its 5th anniversary at the Potsdam Digital Humanities Network.

Location: Aud B2 (TB)

In September 2024, a new Research Committee on “Digital Comparative Literature” (DCL) was formed as part of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA). In September 2025, the Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS-INFRA), part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, will conclude its activities.

To celebrate the concurrent creation and conclusion of these two sister projects, the SIG-DLS (now renamed “Digital Literary Studies”) organizes a mini-conference at DH2025 in Lisbon, dedicated to all applications of digital and computational methods in the study of literature.

The program will include two lightning keynotes, four demos, and 11 lightning talks.

Schedule:

13:30-13:50 – Welcome and introduction

13:50-14:30 – Session 1 (Chair: Simone Rebora)

14:30-14:40 – Short break

14:40-15:30 – Session 2 (Chair: Joanna Byszuk)

15:30-16:00 – Coffee Break

16:00-16:55 – Session 3 (Chair: Suzanne Mpouli)

16:55-17:05 – Short break

17:05-18:00 – Session 4 (Chair: Youngmin Kim)

18:00 – Open mic

Organising & programme committee:

Simone Rebora (SIG-DLS and ICLA DCL)
Joanna Byszuk (SIG-DLS and CLS-INFRA)
Yina Cao (ICLA DCL)
Maciej Eder (CLS-INFRA)
J. Berenike Herrmann (SIG-DLS)
Youngmin Kim (ICLA DCL)
Suzanne Mpouli (SIG-DLS)
Federico Pianzola (ICLA DCL)
Pablo Ruiz Fabo (SIG-DLS)

To celebrate the concurrent creation and conclusion of these two sister projects, the SIG-DLS (now renamed “Digital Literary Studies”) organizes a mini-conference at DH2025 in Lisbon, dedicated to all applications of digital and computational methods in the study of literature.

The program (planned on Monday 14 July, 13:30-17:00 WET) will include a series of lightning talks and demos, welcoming contributions on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Distant reading techniques and computational literary studies when applied in a comparative perspective;
• Multilingual literary archives and the digitization of texts in different languages and writing systems;
• The transformation of the book, reading in the post-digital age, and born-digital literature;
• Geographic information systems, data visualization, and comparative literary studies;
• Machine translation, artificial intelligence;
• Language models and comparative literature.

To submit a contribution for a lightning talk or a demo, please send a brief abstract via the submission form by 25 April 2025. A lightning talk is intended as a short presentation (max 5 minutes) of an ongoing or finished project, or even of an idea for possible research (if you choose this format, please submit an abstract of max 250 words–excluding any bibliographic references). A demo is intended as a longer, interactive presentation (max 15 minutes) of a tool or workflow for digital/computational literary studies (if you choose this format, please submit an abstract of max 500 words excl. references–you can also add links to supporting materials like notebooks and/or videos). All proposals will be peer-reviewed by the programme committee and notifications of acceptance will be sent by 2 May 2025.

Organising & programme committee

Simone Rebora (SIG-DLS and ICLA DCL)
Joanna Byszuk (SIG-DLS and CLS-INFRA)
Yina Cao (ICLA DCL)
Maciej Eder (CLS-INFRA)
J. Berenike Herrmann (SIG-DLS)
Youngmin Kim (ICLA DCL)
Suzanne Mpouli (SIG-DLS)
Federico Pianzola (ICLA DCL)
Pablo Ruiz Fabo (SIG-DLS)

With this Call for SIG-DLS stipends, we invite submissions by 24 November 2024. Applications should be made via the dedicated online form (https://forms.gle/itCNbKDcMaqaNRqK9 – you need to log in via Google to access it) and should be composed of:

• A CV of the applicant;
• A motivation letter (max one page) detailing the planned activity for the short-term scientific mission;
• A letter from the host confirming their intention to host the applicant (the letter should be signed and should contain all contact details).

Proposals will be evaluated by the SIG-DLS Steering Committee based on the following criteria:

• Academic age of the applicant;
• Quality of the envisioned research/training plan;
• Coherence with the host expertise.

Applicants will be notified by 1 December 2024 and stipends will be transferred to the successful applicant by 31 December 2024. Awardees will have to submit a report (in the form of a blog post) after completion of their mission, which will be published on the SIG-DLS website.

Location Hazel Hall 332 and Zoom

9:00-10:30 Intro & Keynote I

Amy Earhart, Ethical Datasets: Embodied Digital Approaches

10:30-10:45 Break

10:45-11:30 Lightning talks – session I

11:30-11:45 Break

11:45-12:30 Demo session

Joanna Byszuk, From raw texts to meaningful results: working with curated datasets

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-15:00 Keynote speech II

Artjoms Šeļa, How to do research responsibly and be bad at math?

15:00-15:15 Break

15:15-16:00 Lightning talks – session II

16:00-16:30 Open mic

Organizing committee

Maciej Eder (CLS-Infra)
Joanna Byszuk (CLS-Infra and SIG-DLS)
Simone Rebora (SIG-DLS)
Berenike Herrmann (SIG-DLS)
Suzanne Mpouli (SIG-DLS)
Pablo Ruiz Fabo (SIG-DLS)

The overarching goal is to present, promote, and showcase a subfield of DH that has recently reached — or seems to have reached — a critical point of its maturity. Known under the name of Computational Literary Studies, Digital Literary Studies, or Cultural Analytics, the field primarily revolves around computer-assisted analysis of literary sources. It was commenced by the groundbreaking initiative SIG-DLS (https://dls.hypotheses.org/), and then further developed by a few other endeavors, e.g. the CLS Priority Programme founded by DFG (https://dfg-spp-cls.github.io/), the JCLS journal (https://jcls.io/), the CCLS annual conference (https://jcls.io/site/conference/), the Journal of Cultural Analytics (https://culturalanalytics.org/), the CHR annual conference (https://computational-humanities-research.org/), the COST Action Distant Reading (https://www.distant-reading.net/), and the CLS INFRA project founded by Horizon2020 (https://clsinfra.io/). 

The idea behind the workshop is to consolidate the already existing initiatives, and to share experiences between projects, centers, and scholars involved in DLS/CLS. The workshop program will be composed by a combination of invited talks, demo sessions, and lightning talks. 

With this Call, we are inviting submissions for lightning talks (max. 5 minutes) on ongoing projects, research ideas, and infrastructures in DLS/CLS. Please send a 250-word abstract to simone.rebora@univr.it by 15 May 2024. Proposals will be evaluated by the organizing committee and notifications sent by 30 May 2024.

Organizing committee

Maciej Eder (CLS-Infra)
Joanna Byszuk (CLS-Infra and SIG-DLS)
Simone Rebora (SIG-DLS)
Berenike Herrmann (SIG-DLS)
Suzanne Mpouli (SIG-DLS)
Pablo Ruiz Fabo (SIG-DLS)

Venue: University of Graz, Universitätsplatz 3, A-8010 Graz – Workshop Venue 5

First Session (13:30 – 14:15)

Chair: Simone Rebora

Second Session (14:15 – 15:15)

Chair: Joanna Byszuk

Coffee Break

Third Session (15:35 – 16:40)

Chair: Pablo Ruiz Fabo

SIG member’s meeting (16:40 – 17:00)

With this workshop, we would like to provide a renewed overview of the field of Digital Literary Stylistics, in ideal dialogue with the seminal workshop organized at DH2016, which allowed the constitution of the SIG-DLS. We therefore open a Call for Papers to all related areas of research, including (and not limited to):

• understanding and improving “classic” stylometric methods (between Delta and Zeta)
• stylometric feature engineering (character n-grams, words, syntax, and beyond)
• integration with advanced language models (e.g. word embeddings and Transformer models)
• identifying the source(s) of stylistic difference (from authors to genres, epochs, and beyond)
• style annotations (e.g. phenomenological dimension of style, gestalt annotations)
• style in different contexts (e.g. social media style, style of artificial agents)
• style in translation, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural style comparisons
• style as reader/text interaction
• style and complexity
• style and quality
• tools, platforms and infrastructures for digital literary stylistics
• (FAIR) development and sharing of corpora and collections

To submit a contribution, please send a brief abstract for a 20-minute presentation (max 250 words) to simone.rebora@uni-mainz.de by 26 April 2023. All proposals will be peer-reviewed by the programme committee and notifications of acceptance will be sent by 8 May 2023.

SIG-DLS Bursary: for this year, SIG-DLS offers two bursaries (500 Euros each) to outstanding papers presented by early stage researchers. If you intend to apply, please add a short letter of motivation to your submission.

Organising & programme committee

Simone Rebora (University of Mainz)
Joanna Byszuk (Institute of Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences)
Francesca Frontini (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, CNR Pisa)
Berenike Herrmann (Bielefeld University, Basel University)
Suzanne Mpouli (Paris Cité University)
Pablo Ruiz Fabo (University of Strasbourg)

Taking seriously this factor, the SIG DLS pre-conference workshop at the international conference DH2022 in Tokyo will ask about the current forms and functions of digital infrastructures for DLS, at a diverse global level. 

• What types of infrastructure are used by whom to what ends? What particular functions are used? 
• Where and why are scholars missing infrastructure?
• And also: can there be too much emphasis on infrastructure in certain contexts?

In particular, we will try to apply the notion of FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) and more broadly of Open Data best practices, including data citation to the DLS domain, with a critical perspective.

Research infrastructures, in particular in Europe, have provided tools and methods for the application of FAIR principles. ERICs such as CLARIN and DARIAH have been offering in particular data deposit (with persistent identifiers to cite collections), guidance for licences, standardised metadata, support for open standards, interoperable tools and platforms, access via single sign on, and also training to develop new competences for scholars. More recently the Computational Literary Studies (CLS) infrastructural project has been launched, as well as the German National research infrastructure text+, both of which aim to build a shared resource of high-quality data, tools and knowledge to aid new approaches to studying literature in the digital age.

At the same time, several problems still prevent data sharing, citation, reuse in DLS. These are of legal, technical, but also disciplinary nature. While European (or national) infrastructures may offer a partial solution to these problems, can we say that this is enough? And is it an exportable model?

In this workshop on 25 July 2022 we want to tackle the issues of making DLS research data FAIR, taking into account what RIs can offer but also the intrinsic limitations. We do so by inviting three short inputs, representing the perspectives of infrastructures and of researchers, followed by a discussion. Here, prompts from a forth speaker on the Japanese and East Asian research context will be given, addressing FAIR DLS from a diverse and global perspective.

We will also collect feedback from researchers prior to and during the meeting, and we envisage the possibility of a position paper on the issue after the conferece. 

Program

10:00 – 10:30 UTC Short provoker keynotes (confirmed speakers: Maciej Eder, Suzanne Mpouli, Andrew Piper)

10:30 – 11:15 UTC Discussion with attendees (confirmed short provoker keynote by Chifumi Nishioka: Asian Diversity in DH)

11:15 – 11:30 UTC Wrap up

11:30 – 12:00 UTC SIG’s members’ meeting

Info and registration: https://dh2022.adho.org/workshops-and-tutorials

Organizers: Berenike Herrmann, Simone Rebora, Francesca Frontini, Anne-Sophie Bories

The new DH Lab is a DH Hub at the Department of Germanic Studies and a DH meeting, research and learning space. It promotes, supports, develops and coordinates Digital Humanities research and teaching activities. The DHLab drives and supports the integration of Digital Humanities into the Germanic Studies curriculum, and serves as an on-campus hub enabling transdisciplinary DH projects and collaboration. Read more.

Attendance is online, and free, everybody is welcome. Please register for the events via the programme page.

Fall Sessions 2020

• Oct 19, 1-2pm CST – Gabriel Viehhauser (Stuttgart University, Germany)
  Openness and Restrictions in Digital Scholarly Editions
• Oct 26, 1-2pm CST – Christof Schöch (Trier University, Germany)
  How Could Digital Literary Historiography Work? Some Lessons Learned in the MiMoText Project
• Nov 9, 1-2pm CST – Fabian Offert (University of California, Santa Barbara, US)
  Critical Machine Vision as a (Digital) Humanities Challenge
• Nov 16, 1-2pm CST – Stefanie Acquavella-Rauch (Mainz University, Germany):
  Between Performance and Academia: The World of Digital Musical Editions
• Nov 23, 1-2pm CST – Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo, Canada)
  The Archives Unleashed Project: Lowering Barriers to Access through Community and Infrastructure

Spring Sessions 2021

• Feb 8, 1-2pm CST – Gunther Martens, Lore De Greve (Ghent University, Belgium)
  Sentiment Analysis of Online Literary Criticism: From Annotation to Text Mining
• Feb 22, 1-2pm CST – Leif Weatherby (New York University, US)
  Signs of Redundancy: On Digital Semiotics
• Mar 8, 1-2pm CST – Nico Schüler (Texas State University, US)
  Digital Performance Studies: Analyzing Expressiveness in Music Recordings
• Mar 29, 1-2pm CST – Julia Nantke, Sandra Bläß, Marie Früh (University of Hamburg, Germany)
  Dehmel Digital, or How to Access 36,000 Letters
• Apr 12, 1-2pm CST – Berenike Herrmann (University of Basel, Switzerland / NN), Jana Lüdtke (FU Berlin, Germany)
  Computational Sentiment Analysis of Fiction
• Apr 19, 1-2pm CST – James Baker, Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex, UK)
  Digital Humanities, Where Do We Go From Here? – A Conversation

Questions? Contact:
Thorsten Ries

First phase (asynchronous)

From Tuesday 14 July, we will publish the contributions by invited speakers on the “DH2020” Humanities Commons Group (where the main conference will take place).

These contributions will provide food for thought for an asynchronous discussion on Humanities Commons. The discussion thread will be open for the entire week before the official opening of the Conference.

Second phase (synchronous)

On Monday 20 July, at 3pm CEST, an online live event will take place on Zoom (at a link provided on the “DH2020” Humanities Commons Group), where invited respondents will discuss the contributions and open the discussion among participants. Here is a provisional schedule:

Of course, participation is free (you just have to register to the Conference and to Humanities Commons), so we are just waiting for you to join us! 

Our forthcoming Workshop on “Tool Criticism 3.0, originally scheduled for DH2020 at Ottawa, Canada, will not take place in in-person format. We will keep you posted as to new developments.

The SIG-DLS endorsed workshop “Finally, a Tool! Introducing CATMA for Identification and Metaphor Analysis with MIPVU,” originally scheduled for RaAM 2020 at Hamar, Norway, has been canceled. 

• user interface criticism;
• criticism of implied/hidden epistemologies (anatomy of tools); 
• theoretical tool criticism (e.g. issues in modeling); 
• historical tool criticism;
• biases in DLS studies; 
• replication studies.

Submission details

Proposals should be sent by 15 April 2020 to simone.rebora@univr.it. They should contain a title and a brief abstract (max 300 words).
Also feel free to enter contributions to the DLS Tool Inventory (DLS-TI), if relevant.
Acceptances will be notified by 15 May, 2020.

Organization

Organizers: Simone Rebora (University of Verona & University of Basel), J. Berenike Herrmann (University of Basel), Francesca Frontini (UPVM & Praxiling), Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta), and Thierry Poibeau (CNRS & LATTICE)

Scientific committee: Anne-Sophie Bories (University of Basel), Julia Flanders (Northeastern University), Francesca Frontini (UPVM & Praxiling), J. Berenike Herrmann (University of Basel), Thomas C. Messerli (University of Basel), Thierry Poibeau (CNRS & LATTICE) , Simone Rebora (University of Verona & University of Basel), Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta), Jan Rybicki (Jagiellonian University), and Peter Verhaar (Leiden University).

Registration

Please note that all participants and attendees will need to be registered for DH 2020. Full-day workshop registration for participants costs $70CAD and includes lunch.
Conference registration information can be found here: https://dh2020.adho.org/registration/

We are delighted to point all scholars interested in metaphor analysis to the Pre-Conference Workshop “Finally, a Tool! Introducing CATMA for Identification and Metaphor Analysis with MIPVU” taking place on 18 June 2020 as part of the International Conference of the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM) at Hamar, Norway.

Information about the workshop

When researching real-world contexts, scholars need a valid procedure for identifying and analyzing metaphorically used language. This means that they need a handle for systematically gauging the reliability of annotations, possibly for ensuing machine learning, but also a way of spotting patterns and principles behind creative and otherwise ‘messy’ cases. One such procedure for metaphor identification is MIPVU, the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (Steen et al. 2010), which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2020. Originally developed at VU Amsterdam, it is now being widely used in research projects around the globe, being adapted for different languages (see Nacey et al. [in press] Metaphor identification in multiple languages: MIPVU around the world) and different types of authentic data, including spoken and multimodal discourse (see VISMIP for visual metaphor [Sorm & Steen 2018], and FILMIP for filmic metaphor [Bort-Mir 2019]. However, many scholars are challenged by developing their own computational environment for applying MIPVU and analyzing the annotations, including reliability tests. Some use an XML editor, others MS Excel or MS Word. So far, a tool is missing that facilitates an intuitive annotation and analysis environment.

Our hands-on tutorial introduces metaphor scholars to a computational tool for applying MIPVU called CATMA, which stands for Computer Assisted Text Markup and Analysis, see https://catma.de. CATMA was developed at the Hamburg University and is currently used by over 60 research projects worldwide. It supports collaborative annotation and analysis as well as explorative, non-deterministic practices of text annotation. It integrates text annotation, text analysis, and visualization in a web-based working environment, combining the identification of textual phenomena with their investigation in a seamless, iterative fashion. The workshop is endorsed by the Special Interest Group “Digital Literary Stylistics” (SIG-DLS; https://dls.hypotheses.org/) of The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).

Workshop format: The workshop will be hands-on. After a short run-through of the basics of MIPVU, participants will learn how to work with CATMA. This introduction to CATMA includes the core annotation and analysis functionalities, text upload, annotation and specification of annotation categories, as well as text queries of source text and its annotations. Participants will also generate the visual output of query results and learn the export of markup data in XML format. In a last section, we will discuss several methods of annotation validation, including inter-annotator agreement.

Participants will be asked to acquaint themselves with the English version of the annotation manual MIPVU in preparation. Access to language-specific MIPVU protocols from Nacey et al. (in press) may be provided upon request. Participants will, however, need no prior knowledge of computational text annotation and can work with their own laptop computers. CATMA runs on Laptop or PC (Windows, Unix or MacOS) with a current web browser (MS Explorer or Edge; Firefox, Chrome, Safari) with a mouse or touchpad (touchscreen navigation is not yet supported).

 About the organizers

J. Berenike Herrmann, Basel University, berenike.herrmann@unibas.ch. Berenike is Assistant Professor (‘Oberassistentin’) at the DHLab Basel. She is a literary/linguistics digital humanist with a track record in metaphor studies, computational stylistics, and cognitive stylistics. Among her research topics are modernist and realist literature from a comparative perspective, the epistemology and methodology of computational textual studies, and evaluative discourse on the web 2.0. She is co-developer of the original and the German MIPVU.

Jan Horstmann, Hamburg University, jan.horstmann@uni-hamburg.de. Jan is a digitally working literary scholar and currently coordinates the forTEXT project (https://fortext.net) for the dissemination of digital routines, resources, and tools for text annotation and analysis. He has taught CATMA in many seminars and workshop in recent years and uses the tool especially for the annotation and analysis of German literary texts. His particular interests lie in narratological categories as well as renunciation and irony in Goethe.

Aletta G. Dorst, Leiden University, a.g.dorst@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Lettie is an Assistant Professor in English Linguistics and Translation Studies at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Her research interests and main publications are in the fields of metaphor studies, stylistics, translation studies, genre analysis, contrastive linguistics and corpus linguistics. She was part of the team that developed MIPVU for English and Dutch, and co-author of German MIPVU. She has applied MIPVU to texts from different genres and registers and in different languages.

Nils Reiter, Stuttgart University, nils.reiter@ims.uni-stuttgart.de, has a background in natural language processing and works on the analysis of literary texts. He is principal investigator in several DH-related projects concerning dramatic, narrative and historic texts and has supervised several workshops, tutorials and classes on statistical methods for text analysis, including annotation and metaphor detection. Starting in September 2019, he will be a visiting professor at Cologne University.