“The ninth annual meeting of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities
and Computer Science (DHCS) will be hosted by Northwestern University on
October 23-24, 2014. A skeletal website is up at
http://dhcs.northwestern.edu. There will be more flesh on it as time goes
on.

This is a call for papers on just about anything that plausibly stays
within the intersection of DH and CS. A submission for a paper or poster
should include an abstract of ~750 words and a minimal bio. Send it to
martinmueller@northwestern.edu by June 30, 2014. We expect to notify you
of accepted submissions by July 25.

The DHCS Colloquium has been a lively regional conference (with
non-trivial bi-coastal and overseas sprinkling), rotating since 2006 among
the University of Chicago (where it began), DePaul, IIT, Loyola, and
Northwestern.  At the first Colloquium Greg Crane asked his memorable
question “What to do with a million books?” Here are some highlights that
I remember across the years:

* An NLP programmer at Los Alamos talking about the ways security
clearances prevented CIA analysts and technical folks from talking to each
other.
* A demonstration that if you replaced all content words in Arabic texts
and focused just on stop words you could determine with a high degree of
certainty the geographical origin of a given piece of writing.
* A visualization of phrases like “the king’s daughter” in a sizable
corpus, telling you much about who owned what.
* A social network analysis of Alexander the Great and his entourage.
* An amazingly successful extraction of verbal parallels from very noisy
data.
* Did you know that Jane Austen was a game theorist before her time and
that her characters were either skillful or clueless practitioners of this
art?

And so forth. Given my own interests, I tend to remember  “Text as Data”
stuff, but there was much else about archaeology, art, music, history, and
social or political life.

Looking back over the almost ten years of the DHCS Colloquium, I also
remember that some of the most interesting papers have come from graduate
students. While the DHCS Colloquium is not a graduate student conference
per se, we will look with particular interest at paper and poster
submissions by  graduate students.

This year’s colloquium will partly overlap and share some programming with
the annual members meeting and conference of the Text Encoding Initiative,
which will be hosted by Northwestern University, October 22-24. The
details of shared programming remain to be worked out, but there will be a
shared plenary session on Thursday afternoon, October 23.  “Text as Data”
will look at its topic  from various technical perspectives and range
across the humanities and social sciences. The session will be  moderated
by Daniel Diermeier, the IBM Professor for Regulation and Competitive at
Northwestern¹s Kellogg School Management and the Director of the Ford
Motor Company Institute for Global Citizenship.

We look forward to receiving many and interesting submissions. As in
previous years, the program committee will consist of members from past
and current host institutions.

With best wishes for a good summer from myself and the program committee

Martin Mueller
Chair, Program Committee DHCS 2014
Professor emeritus of English and Classics
Northwestern University

Martin Mueller
Professor emeritus of English and Classics
Northwestern University”