DHELI project launched to advance digital humanities in Latvia
With the aim to strengthen and develop the humanities in Latvia, a new project of the National Research Programme "Digital Humanities" called "Towards Development of Open and FAIR Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia" or DHELI is being launched at the beginning of this year, with funding from the Science Council of Latvia. The project is coordinated by the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Arts of the University of Latvia with Dr. philol. Sanita Reinsone as its lead, and involves representatives from the National Library of Latvia, Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia Institute of Latvian Language and Livonian Institute, Rēzekne Academy of Technologies, Riga Technical University.
Digital Humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary area of research that blends fundamental and applied research methods to address questions within the humanities, social sciences, and arts. This field employs computational methods and uses digital resources and tools for data processing, analysis, and visualization. A prime example of the practical application and wide usage of DH is language technology, showcasing the significance of a well-established digital humanities infrastructure that not only supports researchers but also benefits a wider audience.
The 10th International Conference "Human Language Technologies – the Baltic Perspective"
The 10th International Conference "Human Language Technologies – the Baltic Perspective" will take place on 6-7 October 2022 at the House of Nature (University of Latvia).
The aim of the Baltic HLT is to provide a forum for the sharing of new ideas and recent advances in human language processing and to promote cooperation between the research communities of computer science and linguistics from the Baltic sea states and other countries.
During the past two decades, notable progress has been made in language technology development in all three Baltic countries. Although our languages are often called less resourced significant results have been demonstrated in speech technologies, machine translation, and natural language understanding.
The Conference programme includes twenty-three presentations representing a wide range of topics (speech processing, machine translation, application of deep learning techniques to different natural language processing tasks, creation of language resources, and others). Conference papers are published in the Baltic Journal of Modern Computing.
The first Baltic HLT conference in 2004 was the first event to focus on language technology development in the Baltic region. The success of this event inspired the organisation of biennial conferences in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This year, the event is organized by the University of Latvia and the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, UL in cooperation with SIA "Tilde".
Applying for the DHNB2023

The 7th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB2023) invites applications for the conference (abstract submission deadline 15 October 2022).
Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities

Everyone will also
have the opportunity to listen four open lectures on the
Facebook and Youtube channels of National Library of Latvia.
IMCS UL participates in the LREC 2022 conference

Photo: https://www.marseille-tourisme.com/
LREC 2022 (13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation) is taking place in Marseille on June 20-25, 2022. LREC is the major event on Language Resources and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies. The Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, participates in the conference with three presentations.
On June 21, there will be a report on the Latvian Language Learner Corpus LaVA, which includes more than 1000 essays written by language learners studying at Latvian universities (corpus size – 190k words). By analyzing the mistakes of the language learners marked in the texts, a set of self-assessment exercise was created.
On June 22, we will present a poster about extending the Tezaurs.lv online dictionary with word sense synonyms and other semantic links, building a new lexico-semantic resource – Latvian WordNet.
Poster presentation on the Latvian National Corpora Collection (LNCC) - a diverse collection of corpora representing both written and spoken language is planned on Midsummer's Day, June 23. All corpora of LNCC are annotated with a uniform morpho-syntactic annotation scheme, enabling federated search and consistent linguistics analysis in more than 20 corpora (1.3B tokens).
Registration for the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities is open
Students, researchers, and GLAM professionals are welcome to enrol in the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities: Essentials of News Data Mining, which will be held on 26-29 July 2022 at the National Library of Latvia and Online.
The Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities is an international intensive continuing education programme that provides the opportunity to researchers, educators, and students of humanities and social sciences, as well as archive, library and museum professionals to master various digital research skills, from data wrangling and analysis to visualisation.
In 2022, the school is organised for the fourth time and provides the opportunity to learn the basics of data analysis and visualisation with Python and R programming languages, master web harvesting skills, and learn more about network visualisation. One of the special focuses of this year is the analysis of news data and digitised newspapers in particular. The full programme can be viewed on the website Digital humanities in Latvia.
Public spaces: new forms of digital discourse(?)
On 14 June, the seminar "Public spaces: new forms of digital discourse(?)" with Stuart Dunn will take place at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia, organized in cooperation with Riga Technical University.
Registration is open for the international conference ELAG 2022
On
8–10 June 2022, the National Library of Latvia (NLL) will host
the international conference ELAG 2022, the leading
conference in Europe on the use of information technology in
libraries and other cultural heritage institutions.
"For more than forty years, the ELAG conference has provided an opportunity for professionals from cultural heritage institutions and IT industry to discuss the latest technologies and exchange best practices. No exception, internationally recognized industry professionals have confirmed their participation in this year’s conference in Riga," points out one of the conference’s organizers, Semantic Web Expert of the NLL Uldis Bojārs, PhD, inviting to register for the conference by 1 June.
The conference PROGRAMME, registration FORM and other helpful information are available on the ELAG 2022 website https://elag2022.lnb.lv/.
Language and Culture in the Digital Age
On
30 March 2022, the 80th International Scientific Conference of
the University of Latvia will host the session "Language and
Culture in the Digital Age".
The session is dedicated to digital humanities and resource
development, as well as to the role, use and research of language
and culture in today's digital world.
Organisers: Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, Livonian
Institute of the University of Latvia, digitalhumanities.lv
Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/
Baltic HLT 2022. The 10th Conference. First Call for Papers
Human Language Technologies - the Baltic
Perspective
Riga, Latvia
October 6-7, 2022
Conference aims
The aim of the Tenth Baltic Conference "Human Language Technologies - the Baltic Perspective" is to provide a forum for the sharing of new ideas and recent advances in human language processing and to promote cooperation between the research communities of computer science, linguistics and digital humanities from the Baltic states and the rest of the world.
The conference aims to bring together researchers, developers and users from the fields of natural language processing, computational linguistics and digital humanities to discuss state-of-the-art of human language technologies (HLT) in the Baltic states, to exchange information, to find new synergies and to promote initiatives for international cooperation.
The event is also important for gathering and consolidating ideas related to cooperation through EU Research and Innovation programmes.
New course "Introduction to Digital Humanities": applications until February 10

RTU ETHZF
Master's study programme "Digital Humanities" offers the
opportunity to participate in the course "Introduction to
Digital Humanities", which will be taught by lecturers from
Lineja University in Sweden (Ahmad Kamal, Patrick Gavin) in the
spring semester. This course is now in its second year.
There are several places available! Students can get
credits.
Application deadline 10 February at 12 noon.
Lectures start on 11
February, in English every Friday from 16.30 to 19.50, for 16
weeks.
The work is intensive, but the knowledge gained fully outweighs
it.
Participants:
- apply by sending an email to dh@lulfmi.lv;
- write a brief introduction about yourself (research, field of interest, study programme);
- indicate whether a CP will be required.
Language and Culture in the Digital Age
Six guest lectures at RTU on digital humanities
From October 22 to
December 10, six guest lectures will be given by Stuart
Dunn, an experienced researcher and head of the Department of
Digital Humanities at the King’s College London, as part of the the
Riga Technical University (RTU) Master's programme "Digital
Humanities".
During the Open Access Week also learn about CLARIN-LV

From 25 to
31 October, International Open Access Week, which
is a global week of
self-initiated events highlighting Open Access to
research, is being celebrated around the world. This
initiative is seen as an important catalyst for fruitful
discussions, building new collaborations and strengthening and
developing existing collaborations. This year, the UL Library and
the OpenAIRE National Open Access Service (NAPD) welcome Latvian
scientific communities to short online lectures.
DHN2020 Post-Proceedings are now published!
The post-proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries 5th Conference (DHN2020) have now been published and are available here.
There are a total of 26
articles related to the topic of digital humanities, several of
which are from Latvian institutions.
On 2 June, The conference “Latvian Language Digital Resources and Tools for Education” will take place

CLARIN Latvia conference “Latvian Language Digital Resources and Tools for Education” will take place 2 June, 2021. Those interested will be able to listen to the readings on Zoom from 10:30 until 15:15.
To register, fill out the form https://ej.uz/ClarinLV2021.
The conference programme available here.
Doctoral students invited to participate in the "Young Researchers' Day" on May 21, 2021.
Doctoral
students of Humanities and Social Sciences Programmes studying at
Latvian and foreign universities are invited to participate in the
scientific conference Young Researchers' Day on
May 21, 2021.
The conference is organized by the UL Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art in cooperation with the UL Faculty of Humanities with the support of the VPP project “Digital Resources of Humanities: Integration and Development” (Nr. VPP-IZM-DH-2020/1-0001).
Applications must be submitted electronically by April 20, 2021 – https://ej.uz/jauno-petnieku-diena.
Digitalhumanities.lv now has its own YouTube channel
The channel is now officially live with the "Digital Humanities Series". The first episode is called "Computer analysis and visualization of text", where National Library of Latvia invites everyone to listen to the researcher Anda and programmer Valdis talk about computer text analysis.
On March 10, a DH VPP panel, seminar and discussion took place
On Wednesday, March 10, 2021, from 14:00 to 16:30, the panel “Digital Resources for Humanities: Integration and Development” took place Online. There the participants of the National Research Programme (VPP) project presented their research.
Demonstration seminar on the use of Digital Resources in the Humanities
Registration: https://ej.uz/dh-resursi-novadiem