Following the first successful SDH conference in Vienna in 2010, the CLARIN and DARIAH initiatives have decided to jointly organise the second SDH conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in November 2011. This year's conference will focus on two major themes: 1. Sound and movement – music, spoken word, dance and theatre & 2.Text and things – text, and the relationship between text and material artefacts, such as manuscript, stone or other carriers of text.

Following the first successful SDH conference in Vienna in 2010, the CLARIN and DARIAH initiatives have decided to jointly organise the second SDH conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in November 2011. The conference venue will be at the University of Copenhagen, a participant in both CLARIN and DARIAH.

Digital technologies have the potential to transform the types of research questions that we ask in the Humanities, and to allow us to address traditional questions in new and exciting ways, but ultimately they will also allow us to answer questions that we were not even aware we could ask, hence the title of this conference. How can digital humanities help us not just to find the answers to our research questions more quickly and more easily, but also to formulate research questions we would never have been able to ask without access to large quantities of digital data and sophisticated tools for their analysis? Supporting the Digital Humanities will be a forum for the discussion of these innovations, and of the ways in which these new forms of research can be facilitated and supported.

CLARIN and DARIAH are creating European research infrastructures for the humanities and related disciplines. SDH2011 aims to bring together infrastructure providers and users from the communities involved with the two infrastructure initiatives. The conference will consist of a number of topical sessions where providers and users will present and discuss results, obstacles and opportunities for digitally-supported humanities research. Participants are encouraged to engage with honest assessments of the intellectual problems and practical barriers in an open and constructive atmosphere.

The first SDH conference in 2010 gave a broad and multi-facetted presentation of the domains of interest to CLARIN and DARIAH. This time we have chosen a somewhat more focussed approach, focussing on two major themes, but not excluding other themes of interest for the humanities. The two themes are:

1. Sound and movement – music, spoken word, dance and theatre

2. Text and things – text, and the relationship between text and material artefacts, such as manuscript, stone or other carriers of text

Submission

Submissions are invited for individual papers and posters, as well as panels. Focus should be on tools and methods for the analysis of digital data rather than on digitisation processes themselves, both from the provider and from the user perspective. We want to pay special attention to inspiring showcases that demonstrate the innovative power of digital methods in the humanities.

Contact for submission : Bente Maegaard, Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen : bmaegaard@hum.ku.dk

Dead-line for submission : July 24, 2011

Some important dates:

• July 15, 2011: Submission of suggestion for panels
• July 24, 2011: Submission of abstracts (4 pages)
• August 15, 2011: Notification on panel proposals
• September 15, 2011: Author notification
• October 15, 2011: Final version of papers for publication (8 pages).
• November 17-18: Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark

Programme committee:

• Bente Maegaard, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University, Netherlands
• Helen Bailey, University of Bedfordshire, UK
• Tim Crawford, Goldsmith’s University of London, UK
• Matthew Driscoll, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland, United States
• Erhard Hinrichs, Tübingen University, Germany
• Fotis Jannidis, Würzburg University, Germany
• Helen Katsiadakis, Academy of Athens, Greece
• Krister Lindén, Helsinki University, Finland
• Heike Neuroth, Göttingen State and University Library, Germany
• Laurent Romary, INRIA, France
• Nina Vodopivec, Institute for Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Peter Wittenburg, MPI, Netherlands/Germany
• Martin Wynne, Oxford University, UK