Digital Methods for Mythological Research

29.08.2024

The Call for Papers for the First Workshop on Digital Methods for Mythological Research taking place in Aarhus this year is open until October 1st, 2024.

Overview

More information on https://dm4myth.github.io/

The workshop aims to bring together a network of researchers from various disciplines and backgrounds who are passionate about mythological narratives and their study using digital methods. This includes research efforts such as the automatic or semi-automatic analysis and modeling of mythological narratives, comparative efforts using digital tools, or the study and representation of mythological characters.

#dm4myth is co-located with Computational Humanities Research (CHR2024, Dec. 4th-6th), in Aarhus, Denmark. The workshop will consist of traditional presentations by the participants, a networking and interest group portion in the form of table discussions, and the kick-off of the #dm4myth network. We welcome contributions from various humanities disciplines, such as (but not limited to) Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Religious Studies, Classical Studies/Classical Philology, Archaeology and Art History; as well as technical approaches from Computer Scientists, including Semantic Web specialists, Computational Linguists, Academic Data Scientists, and others.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Dataset construction, maintenance and development
  • Knowledge representation (ontologies, knowledge graphs, controlled vocabularies) for the mythological domain
  • Application and development of NLP approaches for the study of mythological plots and characters
  • Approaches for automatic character disambiguation
  • Visualization of plots and characters
  • Knowledge extraction from narrative source materials
  • Annotation of textual and/or visual narrative material (including iconographic studies) in the domain
  • Creation, fine-tuning, reuse of (Large) Language Models for the analysis and narrative modeling of mythological sources


Best Paper Award: The organizers and the programme committee will invite the authors of the best paper to extend their work into a chapter in an upcoming volume on Digital Mythological Studies.

Goals of the Workshop

#dm4myth aims to

  • Facilitate knowledge exchange, including the development of best practices, between researchers with different backgrounds who are interested in applying and developing digital tools and methods for the study of mythological narratives.
  • Create a network of researchers with shared interests across disciplines (e.g. Classics, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Religious Studies, Computer Science, Computational Linguistics).
  • Pave the way for future interdisciplinary research on digital mythological studies, and facilitate networking for researchers from different backgrounds and disciplines.

Submissions

Short Papers: 5-7 pages (excluding references). Short papers include early-stage project results, work in progress, negative results and critical reflections/tool criticism.

Long Papers: 7-10 pages (excluding references). Long papers include full project reports, completed research, theoretical reflections and original and unpublished results.

Submissions should be anonymised, written in English and must be formatted according to the Workshop CEUR template (instructions: here). The workshop proceedings will be published as an open access version under a Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0) in a suitable venue (to be announced).

Workshop Principles

We welcome participants from all related disciplines and career stages. We specifically invite colleagues from under-represented communities, geographical, organizational or linguistic backgrounds and small disciplines to submit. At least one author should attend the workshop in person or virtually to present the work.

The content of the submissions should be written by human author(s), i.e. substantial contributions to the submission by artificial intelligence agents are not allowed and will result in a rejection. The application of AI-assistants is allowed only for light editing (e.g. spell-checking) of sections that are authored by humans. In the interest of good scientific practice, the organizers recommend the publication of data and code repositories under creative commons (or comparable) licenses.

All submissions under-go peer review from at least two members of the programme committee. We aim to provide at least one review each by a domain-expert and a technical expert.

Timeline

  • Paper submission deadline: October 1st, 2024 (23:59 anywhere on Earth)
  • Notification of Acceptance: November 1st, 2024
  • Camera-Ready Deadline: November 15th, 2024
  • Workshop Date: December 3, 2024 (Full day workshop)