Methods

Computational approaches to visual and material culture [June 2/3, Oxford, in person – FREE ]

Computational approaches to visual and material culture

Join us for a two-day thematic research event on computational approaches to visual and material culture at Oxford’s Weston Library!

2 June 9:30am-5:00pm to 3 June 9.30am-5:00pm

In-person event: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library, Oxford

Free event and open to all. Registration required, limited places available. Please follow the link below to register.

Register on Eventbrite

Data/Culture, the Centre for Digital Scholarship (Bodleian Libraries), Digital Scholarship @Oxford, and Mapping the Arts and Humanities (SAS, London) are hosting a two-day thematic research event exploring new ways of working with images, objects, and performances. The event focuses on developing research questions and approaches, using existing tools and resources. Participants will work collaboratively in small groups, supported by Research Software Engineers, and have the opportunity to develop a research idea further through a prize of dedicated technical collaboration. No prior coding experience is required.

Who is this for?

This event is designed for:

  • Arts and Humanities researchers (scholars and postgraduate students)
  • those working with images, objects, archives, or performance materials
  • those interested in exploring new research methods
  • those developing or planning research projects or grant applications

What do you need?

  • An interest in your research question
  • (Optional) a dataset or collection you work with
  • A laptop is desirable but not essential

You do NOT need:

  • coding experience
  • prior knowledge of tools
  • technical expertise

Galaxy – Digital Research Methods Training [Free, online, register by May 16]

Galaxy – Digital Research Methods Training online

We would like to draw your attention to the Galaxy Training Academy 2026, a free, international training programme focused on open, reproducible digital research methods, with particular relevance for arts, humanities, and cultural heritage research.

This training is relevant if you:

• work with textual, audiovisual, or cultural heritage data;

• are interested in practical approaches to digital humanities, text analysis, or machine learning;

• would like access to shared, non‑commercial computational infrastructure for research and teaching experiments;

• are interested in FAIR research practices for the digital arts and humanities.

About the Galaxy Training Academy 2026

The Academy is organised by the Galaxy Training Network, a long‑running international community that develops and delivers training for the Galaxy open‑source research infrastructure, which is widely used and supported across the global research community.

Dates: 18–22 May 2026 (Registration deadline: 16 May)

Format: Fully asynchronous (no live sessions)

Cost: Free

More details: https://training.galaxyproject.org/training-material/events/2026-05-18-galaxy-academy.html

The Academy is open to researchers at all career stages, including postgraduate students, doctoral researchers and early‑career academics. 

Participants work through a structured set of video‑based and text‑based tutorials at their own pace. No prior experience with Galaxy is required, although more experienced users are also welcome.

Topics

Recommended tracks for community members include: Digital Humanities; From Zero to Hero with Python Machine Learning.

Indicative topics in the Digital Humanities track include:

• Introduction to Digital Humanities workflows in Galaxy

• Researching cultural data using OpenRefine

• Text mining Chinese newspaper archives

• Automated transcription of audio and video materials

The FLOW Project: A Modular Workflow for Automatic Text Recognition and Beyond [Feb 18, online @ 15:00 GMT]

The FLOW Project: A Modular Workflow for Automatic Text Recognition and Beyond

Bodleian Bytes

18 February 15:00 to 16:00

Online event. Registration required.

Registration: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/registration-bodleian-bytes-the-flow-project

Historical research often involves working with highly diverse and complex source materials, ranging from handwritten manuscripts to large, heterogeneous document collections. Machine learning methods are increasingly shaping how historians work with digitised sources, particularly through Automatic Text Recognition (ATR). In this talk, Jonas Widmer and Dana Meyer will introduce The FLOW, a modular, microservice-based framework designed to support machine learning–driven data management and processing in the Digital Humanities.

The talk will outline how The FLOW separates complex ATR workflows such as pre-processing, model training, inference, and evaluation into independent, reusable components that can be combined flexibly and accessed without programming experience. Using state-of-the-art transformer-based models, the project aims to make advanced text recognition workflows more transparent, reproducible, and scalable across diverse historical datasets.

Jonas and Dana will outline a typical FLOW workflow, showing how datasets are managed on the Hugging Face platform and then processed step by step. The focus will be on how such workflows can support everyday research practices when working with large and heterogeneous historical corpora.

Speaker Biographies

Jonas Widmer is a Research Software Engineer specialising in Digital Humanities at the University of Bern. In this role, he assists in planning and developing projects focused on Natural Language Processing. His primary interest lies in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), where he engages with historical projects and their diverse sources.

Dana Meyer is a Master’s student in Intelligent Interactive Systems at Bielefeld University and works as a research assistant on the project The Flow in the Digital History group at Bielefeld University

Jonas Widmer

Jonas Widmer

Dana Meyer

Dana Meyer

Bodleian Bytes

Bodleian Bytes is a series of online talks hosted by the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries. The series engages with innovative national and international research in digital scholarship. It is a virtual space for discussions surrounding different tools and methodologies whilst also providing inspiration for future digital research.

Event Details and Registration

Registration is required for this free online event. Registration closes at 17.00 on Monday 16 February 2026.

Date and time: Wednesday 18 February, 15:00-16:00 (UK time)

Location: Online via Zoom.

For further information, please email the Centre for Digital Scholarship: cds@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Centre for Digital Scholarship

The Centre for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at the Bodleian Libraries is a space and place for engaging, leading and shaping discussions around digital scholarship practice and research within and beyond the University of Oxford. 

SynFlow: Continuous Semantics Change Analysis via Dependency Co-occurences [Jan 26, online, @17:00 GMT]

SynFlow: Continuous Semantics Change Analysis via Dependency Co-occurences

The first talk of the Data in Historical Linguistics Seminar Series 2026 will take place remotely on Monday 26 January 2026 at 5pm GMT. Bách Phan-Tất (KU Leuven, Belgium) will be presenting on SynFlow: Continuous Semantics Change Analysis via Dependency Co-occurences

Registration for this talk will close at midnight on the Friday before the event and the link for this can be accessed here: https://forms.gle/HEnpTKreXdrZqjfA8 

Participants will receive a Microsoft Teams link via email on the morning of the talk. 

The abstract for this talk can be found at this page.

The programme and registration links for all talks in the series can be found on our website: 

2026 Programme

This seminar series is run by Andrea Farina (King’s College London) and Dr Mathilde Bru and is aimed at PhD students and early career researchers. The purpose of this seminar series is to bring together researchers working on historical linguistics with a quantitative approach, and to discuss current avenues of research in this topic. We hope that these seminars will nurture international collaboration and establish academic ties among researchers working on similar topics in this field.

ACDH Lecture: From Punch Cards to Prompt Engineering [Jan 20, online, 16:45 CET]

ACDH Lecture: “From Punch Cards to Prompt Engineering: The MHDBD and the Future of Semantic Annotation with LLMs” with Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer & Julia Hintersteiner (both Universität Salzburg)


📅 Tuesday, January 20th, 2026
⏰ 16:45 – 18:15


The invited speakers will present the complete technological redesign of the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (hashtag#MHDBDB): After decades of development in relational and RDF-based environments, the project has moved to a TEI-first architecture designed to support LLM-driven research.

The speakers address the key reasons for this shift:
i) the need for structured, AI-readable data;
ii) the practical limits of high-complexity standoff models; and
iii) the excessive resource demands of large-scale RDF infrastructures.

In this context, Large Language Models are reshaping annotation, search, and interpretation. TEI-XML emerges as a sustainable framework for transparent, semantically robust, and interoperable Expert-in-the-Loop workflows, balancing philological rigor with AI scalability.
The talk offers a focused perspective on the evolving technical foundations of text research in the humanities.

More detailed information,

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/acdh/newsevents/event-series/acdh-lecture-121

This lecture is jointly organised in close collaboration with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) and the University of Vienna and is part of the University’s Digital Humanities Lecture Circuit (WS 2025).