We’re delighted to invite you to register to the upcoming Friday Frontiers webinar on Multilingual DH and Its Users: A UX-based Community Exploration, taking place on Friday, April 11th at 11:30 CEST. This webinar is organised as part of the Spring/Summer 2025 series.
The Friday Frontiers webinars allow researchers, practitioners and stakeholders from across the broad DARIAH community, and now beyond, to learn about current research, best practice and social impact, and different tools and methods in digital humanities scholarly practice.
The webinar sessions are all free to attend, but registration is required. Presentations are all recorded and published at a later date on DARIAH-Campus.
Information on the upcoming webinar
When: Friday 11th April, 10.30am IST / 11.30am CEST / 12.30pm EEST
Title: Multilingual DH and Its Users: A UX-based Community Exploration
Speakers: Aliz Horvath (Central European University, Vienna), Cosima Wagner (Freie Universität Berlin University Library), David Joseph Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi).
Abstract
Although research and teaching in most (digital) humanities disciplines are largely multilingual, our institutional infrastructures still often fall short in accommodating our scholarly linguistic and geo-cultural diversity. Having studied the resource gap of knowledge infrastructures and its implications for advancing multilingual digital research, in this talk we argue that there is a specific role to be played by the digital humanist, first in drawing attention to the realities of our larger DH community, and second in lobbying for the design of workflows which assume multilinguality (and multiscriptual and multidirectional characteristics). A wider conversation is urgently needed amongst global DH practitioners and knowledge infrastructure designers/managers about these issues. Drawing on methods in the UX community, we have developed six data-driven user personas from the DH community (a graduate student, a professor, a librarian, an academic technology specialist, etc.) The talk will address needs and challenges of multilingual DH practitioners, through highlighting their broader relevance to the field, and staging a performative component using fictional (but revelatory) interviews with the personas. This double mode of the talk demonstrates how the theoretical implications can be translated to individual knowledge actors and ultimately lobbies for more linguistic and geocultural diversity.
About the speakers
Alíz Horváth has a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago (2019) and currently works as assistant professor of East Asian history and Digital Humanities at Central European University (Vienna, Austria). She is interested in the mechanisms of transnational flows within and beyond East Asia (with a focus on Japan, China, and Korea). She is also an avid advocate of linguistic diversity in digital humanities and has published multiple articles on language inclusivity in DH and on challenges and potential points for collaboration in digital East Asian studies. She recently co-guest edited a special issue on East Asian studies and DH for the International Journal of Digital Humanities with Hilde De Weerdt. Beside regularly presenting her work at major international conferences and serving as peer reviewer for multiple journals in East Asian studies and digital humanities, she is also co-founder and chair of the DARIAH Multilingual DH Working Group, member of the Core Editorial Team for the DARIAH sustained project, OpenMethods, member of the editorial board for Asia Pacific Perspectives, a topic editor of the Asian and Asian Diaspora studies section of Reviews in DH, member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of OPERAS, member of the Scientific Committee of the overlay journal Transformations, and former contributor to the pioneering NEH-funded project, New Languages for NLP, organized by Princeton.
Cosima Wagner is a research librarian at Freie Universität Berlin University Library (Germany), with a background in Japanese Studies, History and Library & Information Science. After ten years as faculty member (research fellow, assistant professor) at the institute for Japanese Studies of Goethe-University / Frankfurt she is since 2013 serving as liaison to the East Asian Studies faculty at Freie Universität Berlin with a special focus on Digital Humanities, Research Data Management and Open Science. Her research interests include a Science & Technology Studies approach to knowledge infrastructure management, multilingualism and non-Latin scripts in the digital space, Area Studies librarianship as well as critical algorithm studies. She is co-convenor of the Multilingual DH working group within the DH association of the German-speaking areas (DHd).
David Joseph Wrisley is Professor of Digital Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi (UAE). His research interests include comparative approaches to medieval literature in European languages and Arabic, digital spatial approaches to corpora, neural methods for handwritten text recognition across writing systems and open knowledge community building in the Middle East where he has lived and researched since 2002. He co-organized two RTL (right to left) conferences at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and also co-founded two digital humanities training events in the Middle East, in Beirut in 2015 and in Abu Dhabi in 2020.
