Workshop Twin Talks 2: Understanding and Facilitating Collaboration in DH at DHN 2020

By Eliza Papaki | News | January 8, 2020

Call for Workshop Papers – Deadline extended to Monday Jan 13 2020!

Conference website: http://dig-hum-nord.eu/conferences/dhn2020/
Workshop website: https://www.clarin.eu/event/2020/twintalksdhn2020
Submission deadline: Monday, Jan 13 2020
Submission URL: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=twintalksdhn2020

Special feature of this workshop: a mix of “Twin Talks” and “Teach Talks”
This workshop is special as it combines a mix of talks submitted and presented by a humanities researcher and a digital expert (the Twin Talks). They report on the research carried out together, both from their individual perspective (either humanities research or technical), as well as on their collaboration experience. Another part of the talks (the Teach Talks) are talks by people with experience or interesting ideas about how cross-discipline collaboration is or can be addressed in curricula or other training activities.

Why two types of talks?
The main objective of the workshop is to get a better understanding of the dynamics in the Digital Humanities workflow where humanities scholars and digital experts meet and work in tandem to solve humanities research questions. The best way to do this seems to be to give both parties the opportunity to present their achievements and to share their collaboration experiences with the audience. The insights gained should help those involved in the education of humanities scholars, professionals and technical experts alike to develop better training programmes.

As the problem of cross-discipline collaboration is not new we also invite those who have relevant experience or interesting ideas about how to address this in university or other curricula to share their ideas with the audience.

Who should submit?

For the Twin Talks: Pairs of a humanities researcher and a digital expert who have done joint research and who want to report on their work and on their collaboration experience.
For the Teach Talks: People (not necessarily in pairs) with relevant experience in or ideas about how to address cross-discipline collaboration in university or other curricula.

Why should you submit and/or attend?
Humanities research can only benefit maximally from new developments in technology if content and digital experts team up, very similar to the hard sciences where research is done in teams working on a specific problem, where everybody brings in his/her specific content and technical expertise and skills. Co-design, co-development and co-creation are the rule rather than the exception, but very little is known about how this collaboration works in practice and how better training and education of both humanities scholars and digital experts could facilitate the way they collaborate. This is what this workshop wants to address, based on real-life collaboration examples. We especially invite researchers, professionals, educators, and RI operators with a special interest in creating the conditions where humanities scholars and technical experts can fruitfully collaborate in answering humanities research questions.

Format of the workshop
This full-day workshop will start with an invited talk, followed by 15 minute Twin Talks or Teach Talks, each followed by 5 minutes for questions and discussion. The Twin Talks should contain the following three components: presentation of the humanities problem and its solution, presentation of the technical aspects of the research done, and a report on the collaboration experience itself, including obstacles encountered and recommendations how better training and education could help to make collaboration more efficient and effective. After the talks, there will be a round table discussion with all participants to formulate the lessons learned from the presentations, and to identify further steps that could be taken.

Research and teaching topics
All humanities research topics in a very broad sense are welcome, where we explicitly include social sciences and well as cultural heritage studies. Research or teaching activities may be completed or ongoing, as long as the presentation explicitly addresses the way the humanities researcher and the digital expert have collaborated or still collaborate.

What we expect from the submissions for the Twin Talks track:

They are authored and presented by one or more humanities scholars and one or more digital experts
They start from a humanities research question (i.e. not a technical question, a presentation of a tool, a platform or a data collection)
They describe the research carried out jointly and its results
They describe the technical aspects of the methods used and the results obtained
They analyse the way the scholar and the technician collaborated, addressing issues such as (but not limited to):
- What was easy and what was difficult – and why?
- How did the researcher and technician change each other’s way of looking at things?
- Did they, for instance, make each other aware of blind spots they had?
- Did the combination of thinking from a DH research question and thinking from a technical solution lead to new insights?
- How could better training or education of scholars and digital experts make collaboration easier, more effective and more efficient?

For submissions for the Teach Talks track, one single author and presenter is sufficient, but multi-author papers are of course equally welcome.

Submission instructions and important dates

Format: PDF. We follow the format instructions for the main conference, see: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines
Size: Extended abstracts, size ca 2000-4000 words, covering research questions and answers, technical aspects and collaboration experience for Twin Talks, or relevant education experience for Teach Talks
Publication: The workshop proceedings will be included in the proceedings of the main DHN2020 conference
Submission URL: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=twintalksdhn2020
Important dates:
- Monday, Jan 13 2020: Submission deadline
- Monday, Jan 27: Notification of acceptance/rejection
- Monday, Feb 24: Submission of final version, taking into account reviewers’ comments
- Tuesday, Mar 17: Workshops
- Wednesday, Mar 18 – Friday, Mar 20: Main conference

Programme committee
This workshop is a joint initiative of CLARIN ERIC and DARIAH ERIC, and is supported by the SSHOC project.

Chairs and main organisers:

Steven Krauwer (CLARIN ERIC / Utrecht University; steven@clarin.eu)
Darja Fišer (CLARIN ERIC / SSHOC / University of Ljubljana; darja.fiser@ff.uni-lj.si)

Members: