Last year, the Innovative Hub of Inter Humanities, the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University invited four experts in the field of Digital Humanities (DH) to participate in a symposium open to the public. Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary research field that uses digital technology to preserve, exhibit, analyze, and educate about cultural resources and humanities materials. This year, we also established a working group called Kyoto University Digitization Hub of the Humanities, Social and Cognitive Sciences (KUDH), and from August 22 to 26, we held KUDH Basics: LaTeX, a workshop on LaTeX, a popular formatting software used in mathematics, physics, and in the humanities, especially in social sciences and cognitive sciences.

And now, under the banner of “Inter Humanities” cooperation, we have decided to hold an international conference, inviting three researchers active in Digital Humanities from Kyoto University, and seven researchers and practitioners of Digital Humanities from Europe and the United States. The three areas to be discussed are digital corpora, character encoding, and digital archives. The cultures to be covered are wide-ranging, including the Chinese character cultural sphere, Western antiquity, ancient Egypt, and ancient Maya. In consideration of the time zone difference of the participants, the conference will be divided into four 2-3 hour sessions instead of the usual two consecutive days, with Session 1-a to be held on October 2, Sessions 2 and 3 on October 16, and Session 1-b on October 23. Sessions 1-a and 1-b are on the same topic. Each research presentation will last 40 minutes but will be followed by 20 minutes of ample time for questions. We look forward to seeing you there if you are interested in digital humanities and DH.

October 2　(Sat.) 9:50-12:30 JST

Session 1-a  “Digital Corpus and Syntactic Annotation through Universal Dependencies:
UD Treebanks for Coptic, Classical Chinese, Old Japanese, and Ainu

• 9:50-10:00: Opening remarks by Chigusa Kita and So Miyagawa

• 10:00-11:00: “UD Treebanking for Coptic DH: Low Resource NLP Technologies for NER, Lexicography and Linked Open Data” by Amir Zeldes (Georgetown University),

• 11:00-12:00: “UD for lzh (Classical Chinese) ojp (Old Japanese) and ain (Ainu)” by Koichi Yasuoka (Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University)

• 12:00-12:30: Further discussions

October 16  (Sat.) 15:50-22:00 JST

Session 2  Character Encoding of Complex Scripts: Chinese, Mayan, and Egyptian Hieroglyphs

• 15:50-16:00: Opening remarks by Chigusa Kita and So Miyagawa

• 16:00-17:00: “Machine-readable description of Chinese Characters” by Tomohiko Morioka (Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University)
• 17:00-18:00: “The Encoding of Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing” by Carlos Pallán Gayol (University of Bonn)
• 18:00-19:00: “Unicode Control Characters for Ancient Egyptian” by Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of St. Andrews)

Session 3  Digital Archiving and  Curations: Kyoto, Leipzig, London, and Stellenbosch

• 19:00-20:00: “The Development, Collaborations, and Evaluation of the Kyoto University Rare Materials Digital Archive” by Chifumi Nishioka (Kyoto University Library)
• 20:00-21:00 “Current Trends in Digital Editions and Curatorial Practice: Examples from Leipzig, London and Stellenbosch” by Franziska Naether (Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities Leipzig)
• 21:00-21:30: Further discussions

October 23 (Sat.) 16:50-20:00 JST

Session 1-b  Digital Corpus and Syntactic Annotation through Universal Dependencies:
Vedic Corpus, Language Comparison through UD, Potential and Limitations of UD

• 15:50-16:00: Opening remarks by Chigusa Kita and So Miyagawa
• 16:00-17:00:  “Universal Dependencies: Comparing Languages in Space and Time”
  by Daniel Zeman (Charles University Prague)
• 17:00-18:00: “Historical Background of the Formation of the Veda in Ancient India, as Deciphered from the Visualization of the Influence Relations among the Vedic Texts”
  by Kyoko Amano (Kyoto University, Hakubi Center for Advanced Research)
• 18:00-19:00: “UD: Potential and Limitations” by Giuseppe Celano (Leipzig University)
• 19:00-19:30  Discussion and concluding remarks

• Venue:: Held online via Zoom
• Free of charge, advance reservation required
• People who belong to other universities than Kyoto University are also welcome to attend.
• There is no obligation to attend all three sessions. There is no obligation to attend all three sessions. You can enter and leave the room at any time.
• All lectures will be given in English.
• Each session will consist of a 40-minute lecture and a 20-minute Q&A session.
• If you would like to participate in the conference, please complete the registration form on the conference website from the button of  “Register now!” or the page of registration. The conference website is here: https://www.kyoto-u-digitization.org/.

Host: Kyoto University, Graduate School of Letters, Center for Studies of Cultural Heritage and Inter Humanities (CESCHI), the Innovative Hub of Inter Humanities