AVinDH SIG Workshop

DH2019’s theme Complexities asks the field “to focus on DH as the humanist way of building complex models of complex realities, analysing them with computational methods and communicating the results to a broader public.” Understanding the diversity of the human experience means turning to diverse sources, which includes the different forms in which people produce knowledge and communicate ways of knowing. One way that people make and communicate meaning is through audio and visuals. Forms such as drawing, film, and radio construct, convey, and circulate our complexities including beliefs, values, and histories. Analyzing these forms has become an increased object of study within DH; a field which has traditionally focused on text. With this move from the periphery to the center of audio and visual (AV), scholars are turning to computational methods to increase the discovery, analysis, and accessibility of AV materials.
The AVinDH SIG Workshop will bring together DH scholars interested in learning how to analyze AV materials. The day-long workshop will include:
1. Hands-on Sessions that share approaches and methods for computational image and audio analysis. The workshops will cover approaches to computational analysis of audio and visual. The workshops are designed to offer strategies across the analysis pipeline from collecting data (Tutorial: Collecting YouTube Data and Tracking Reuse of Public Broadcasters), assessing the quality of AV data (Tutorial: CLARIAH Media Suite and Data Transparency), video annotation (Tutorial: Semantic Annotation Tool) and image analysis (Tutorial: Distant Viewing with the DV Toolkit). Two sessions will be running simultaneously. The AVinDH SIG decided to include two tutorials with tools developed by CLARIAH since the conference is located in the Netherlands. This will allow multiple members of the teams who have built these tools to attend, which would be cost prohibitive if all of the members had to travel, and support DH members who are interested in learning about these tools. The other two sessions are from scholars based in the United States.
2. Lightning Shorts where participants can share briefly share projects, with a focus on works in progress. The Lightning Shorts session will focus on current research in AV DH. Each participant will have three-minutes to introduce their work. The goal of the session is to share a range of work in the field in the same space so that participants can quickly become aware of each other’s work as well as identify those their scholarship is in conversation with. It also allows more participants than traditional models like paper sessions. Participants will be invited to register ahead of time and also will be able to sign-up the day of the workshop if there are time slots remaining.
3. Closing Session that provides a recap of the day.
The AVinDH SIG Workshop builds off of several years of effort to center AV in the field. In Lausanne (2014), Krakow (2016) , and Montreal (2017), the AVinDH SIG led an all-day mini-conference. The workshops were primarily a conference format in which participants submitted proposals, were reviewed, and then selected to present their research. Attendance has steadily increased. The AVinDH SIG is now shifting toward hands-on workshops. DH scholars have been forging new computational approaches and building software as well as platforms to facilitate computational analysis of AV due to the rapid advancement in deep learning and computer vision. Due to this shift, the AVinDH SIG offered a half-day workshop on computer vision with images in Mexico City (2018). The sold-out workshop indicated significant interest in hands-on workshops. For 2019, AVinDH SIG is looking to blend the two models. We are proposing a day-long workshop for 2019 because workshops require significant time to be effective; there has been an exciting increase in DH tools and software in this space; and, the SIG would like to support work in audio and visual analysis. The lightning shorts still offer a space for people to present their research and share projects with the community. The closing session will be a recap of the day and closing remarks.
Schedule: https://avindhsig.wordpress.com/workshop-2019-utrecht/