Keynote speaker: Prof. Andrei TERIAN

Did you know?

• In Romania, more original rather than translated fiction is still being published.
• The production of children’s literature already amounts to around 1/5 of the entire literary book production in Romania.
• Every year in Romania more new domestic novels are being published than have been published here from the beginnings to the World War I.
• The number of new Romanian poetry books published annually is about 50% higher than the number of new Romanian fiction titles.
• About 8% of the local poetry volumes published in Romania are (also) written in foreign languages.

Well, now you know all these. Come and find out more!

Time and location: Wednesday, 23 May 2018
Senate Room, 2^nd Floor, Building A, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași

Language: Romanian

Andrei Terian is a professor of Romanian literature with the Faculty of Letters and Arts at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. His research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century Romanian literature, cultural theory, the history of modern criticism, comparative and world literature. He has published numerous essays in Romania and in international journals such as CLCWeb—Comparative Literature and Culture, World Literature Studies, Interlitteraria, ALEA: Estudos Neolatinos, Slovo, Primerjalna književnost, and Romània Orientale. His works include the monographs G. Călinescu: A cincea esență (2009) and Critica de export: Teorii, context, ideologii (2013), the co-authored reference series Dicționarul general al literaturii române (1^st edition, 7 volumes, 2004-2009; 2nd edition, 4 volumes, 2016-2017) and Cronologia vieții literare românești. Perioada postbelică: 1944-1964 (10 volumes, 2010-2013), and the co-edited volume Romanian Literature as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

Dear participants in the PHSS conference,

We intend to organize a practical, hands-on workshop in the field of natural language processing, focusing on computational lexicography and machine summarisation. We aim to have an interactive seminar in which participants work together with us. The main activities will be centered on the following issues: how metadata are annotated on the CoRoLa platform, and how we make queries on the KorAP platform in order to find words, constructions, occurrences both in written and speech corpora, and work with metadata filters.

Trainers: Dr. Anca-Diana Bibiri, Dr. Alex Moruz

Organizers: Faculty of Computer Sciences, UAIC, Department of Interdisciplinary Research in Social Sciences and Humanities

Language: Romanian

The workshop will be held on the Thursday, the 24^th of May 2018. It is open for those who register via email at phssconference2018@gmail.com, until the 18^th of May 2018.

What is CoRoLa?

The Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language CoRoLa, run by the “Mihai Drăgănescu” Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Bucharest and the Institute for Computer Science in Iași, is a corpus in electronic format, available (online) for free, in order to be used for studies on contemporary language, for processing language, for creating applications that use knowledge extracted from large corpora, for improving translation and for teaching Romanian. CoRoLa includes data in both written and spoken forms of the language. The textual collection is made up of publications covering the period from the 2nd World War to our days, while the spoken collection includes only recent recordings.

CoRoLa corpus includes two types of annotation: 1. metatextual (information about the text) – metadata; and 2. linguistic (phonetic, prosodic, morphological, phrasal, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic).

The metadata annotators (many of which are volunteers) work under the guidance of a detailed Annotation Manual. The online platform developed at IIT-Iaşi (Romanian Academy, Institute for Computer Science – Iaşi), which includes facilities for cleaning formatting, standardizing Romanian diacritics, eliminating hyphenation, visualizing statistics about the quantity of texts accumulated and their subdomains, and filling in metadata. However, many clearing phases are still done manually: separating articles from periodicals in different files, removal of headers, page numbers, figures, tables, text fragments in foreign languages, excerpts from other authors, and annotation of footers and end-notes (decided to be left in the texts).

Dr. Anca-Diana Bibiri and Dr. Alex Moruz are active members of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași.

 

 

Sursă foto: http://www.uaic.ro

Keynote speaker: Prof. Dan CRISTEA

It is easy to overwhelm an auditory by portraying the benefits brought by information technology in the life of a humanity researcher. When the auditory comes mainly from this domain and when the speaker is somebody like me, linked to IT by profession, the danger of exaggeration is even bigger. I will try in this talk to avoid this trap by presenting in a neuter voice not only the lovely facets of using digital technologies in the humanities, but also the long way to achieve this, the profile of the digital humanities researcher and their “sufferings” along the long way from convincing people to collaborate till a result is obtained. The majority of comments and convulsions are inspired by the activity of the Iași NLP-Group, therefore gathered from both the University and the Academy.

Dan CRISTEA is a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași and a principal researcher at the Institute for Computer Science of the Iași branch of the Romanian Academy. The research group in natural language processing lead by prof. Cristea, which brings together people from both institutions, has been mainly involved in: computational morphology and lexicography, creation of linguistic resources, machine summarisation, anaphora resolution, temporal analysis in texts, etc. He is a correspondent member of the Romanian Academy and a full member of the Academy of Technical Sciences of Romania.

Further details on the conference events will be available soon.

Dear All,

We would like to inform you that the abstract submission deadline for this year’s edition of the PHSS conference, titled Mapping Digital Futures, has been extended. The new deadline for abstract submission is Sunday, the 15^th  of April 2018.

Thanks to all submitters so far! Further paper proposals may be sent to us at phssconference2018@gmail.com.

NEW!

The page Abstract Submission has been updated!

Dear Participants,

We are glad to announce that the fourth PHSS volume, Revolutions. The Archeology of Change (eds Emanuel Grosu, Anca-Diana Bibiri, Camelia Grădinaru, Andreea Mironescu, Roxana Patraș), has been published at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University Press.

Thank you for your valuable contribution!

Nowadays, technology does not constitute a separate sphere anymore; it is profoundly involved and embedded in the majority of domains, from daily life to modern devices of life research and enhancement. In their turn, digital technologies cover a vast area of methods (big data visualization, 3D-modelling, data mining) and practices (hashtag movements, gaming in alternative realities, computer-mediated and phone-mediated communication) that have systemic effects on society, economy, and politics. We are living in a brave new world, that is, the digital world: we interact online, we are able to make digital multitasking, we communicate through various means, we practice new forms of commerce and banking, and, perhaps most of all, we share information.

The digital turn alters the patterns that have been used before for interpreting the world, the models of interaction, and those of individual and collective expression, at the same time challenging both sciences and arts to yield new approaches and move for new hypotheses in current situations. In this context, one can notice a higher enthusiasm for exploring the inter-disciplinary relationships, a growth of interdisciplinary studies as well as a serious questioning of traditional paradigms on account of the people’s increased computer-reliance. Have the humanities a digital future? To what extent do the digital methods alter the traditional way of research in humanities and social sciences? How can the culture of democracy, the respect for diversity and mutual understanding be promoted though social media? How will technology change the approaches to problems concerning private life, security and conflict mitigation?

The 5^th PHSS conference sets out to answer these contemporary questions. But we are also interested in „archeological” investigations of other technological revolutions in the past and of the impact they had in the evolution of cultures and also in the representations of the „future” in various historical stages. This year’s topic invites various approaches, from history, sociology, psychology, political sciences, communication studies, and economics, to the theory of culture, literature, and the arts.

We invite researchers in all fields to submit abstracts until April, the 15th 2018. Please see the Call for Papers using the following links in English and Romanian.