KBR Digital Heritage Seminar Series 2022: Humanities Approaches to Semantic Change

The KBR Digital Heritage Seminar Series 2022 is a three-part seminar series, showcasing three timely projects which are pushing the boundaries of Digital Humanities by creating synergies between disciplines to develop cutting-edge methods to investigate lexical semantic change at a large scale. The series is co-organised by CAMille (ULB-KBR), the Data Science Lab (VUB-KBR), the Digital Research Lab (UGent – KBR), and LabEL (UCLouvain-KBR).

Language provides a window into societies and cultures of the past and the present. In the past decade, the development of large historical/diachronic text corpora and the popularisation of computational methods in the humanities have allowed scholars to leverage language patterns to answer a large array of research questions in disciplines as varied as linguistics, history, archaeology, literature and media studies.

Lexical semantic change, a phenomenon describing the evolution of the meanings of lexical units, has long preoccupied historical linguists. The possibility to study this phenomenon with computational methods has far reaching implications in several disciplines since diachronic semantic change can be used to identify conceptual shifts in questions related to many aspects of society such as culture, religion, politics, economics and morality. The recent convergence of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics with a range of humanities disciplines has led questions related to lexical semantic change to gain momentum.

-  08 December 2022, 14h CET, Florentina Armaselu (University of Luxembourg): “Bridging NLP and LLOD: Humanities Approaches to Semantic Change

These talks will be held in English, with questions in French, Dutch or English. The target audience is scholars, but the general public is warmly welcome. Registration can be completed via this form and is mandatory, the morning of the event you will be sent the link to the virtual series and the etiquette to follow. Should have any further questions please see the following website or   email isabelle.gribomont@kbr.be or brecht.deseure@kbr.be.