2nd Workshop on Big Humanities Data, held in conjunction

The 2nd IEEE Workshop on “Big Humanities Data” will be held on Monday, October 27, in conjunction with the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2014), which takes place between 27-30 October 2014 in Washington DC, USA, and which provides a leading international forum for disseminating the latest research in the growing field of “big data”. This workshop will address applications of “big data” in the humanities, arts, culture, and social science, the challenges and possibilities that such increased scale brings for scholarship in these areas. The use of computational methods in the humanities is growing rapidly, with the increasing quantities of born-digital primary sources (such as archives of emails and social media) and the large-scale digitisation programmes applied to libraries and archives. This has resulted in a range of experiments with new methodologies and new applications. At the same time, humanities and culture research is itself challenged by interpretative issues raised by applying such data-driven methods for answering humanities research questions. Moreover, the questions and concerns raised by the humanities themselves have consequences for the interpretation in general of “big data” and the uses to which it is put, and the challenges of producing quality – meaning, knowledge and value – from quantity. The workshop will thus also address complementary research that uses the humanities and its methods to provide a critical appraisal of “big data” in other areas, both inside and outside academia.