Benjamin Štular
The Slovenian Language Technologies Society (SDJT), the Centre for Language Resources and Technologies at the University of Ljubljana (CJVT) and the research infrastructures CLARIN.SI and DARIAH-SI organised the conference “Language Technologies and Digital Humanities” which took place at the end of September 2016. ARIADNE presented “Povezani odprti podatki (LOD) v praksi” (ARIADNE: Linked Open Data (LOD) in practice).
 Benjamin Štular presenting ARIADNE |
 Attentive audience at the Faculty of Arts building of the University of Ljubljana |
 Group photo of JT-DH attendees in Ljubljana |
Language Technologies & Digital Humanities is a conference with tradition and youthfulness in one. The tradition comes from this being the tenth biannual event with the first Language Technologies Conference in Slovenia taking place in 1998. Eighteen years in anything digital is considered to be an honourable tradition!
On the occasion of the tenth anniversary in 2016, it was decided to embrace the intersection of digital technologies and the humanities field, otherwise known as the Digital Humanities. The digital humanities are perceived as a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative field that is radically changing accepted practices in humanities research. It is also encouraging the development of new analytical techniques and methods but has so far lacked a national or regional event to present its results and encourage discussion.
The following extract from the Introduction to the Proceedings summarizes the approach and resulting contributions to the conference:
In contrast to the previous editions of the Language Technologies conferences, and taking into account the specifics of the Digital Humanities field, the 2016 submission were not limited to full papers, but extended abstracts were accepted as well. Additionally, a student session, a round table on terminology and a session with the presentation of the sponsors was organised. All regular and student contributions were reviewed by two members of the programme committee, with the conference also presenting the talks of five invited speakers. The proceedings contain 58 accepted papers, 5 of which are from invited speakers, 30 regular full papers, 17 abstracts, and 6 student contributions, with 41 contributions in Slovenian, with the others in English, Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian languages.
This was the best event to introduce the first results of ARIADNE to the DH researchers of the Western Balkan region, especially since this geographic area is somewhat under-represented in our project. To this end, the project’s coordinator Prof. Franco Niccolucci and deputy coordinator Prof. Julian Richards combined forces with ARIADNE colleagues to prepare the best possible presentation. Consequently, the presentation and the article in the proceedings are the result of the entire project’s team effort, foremost Kate Fernie who prepared the presentation in English, and fundamentally all the authors of the reports cited in the article.
Benjamin Štular is a Member of the Programme committee for the Conference on Language Technologies & Digital Humanities 2016.