Editors: Prof. Nirmala Menon
Dr Reema Chowdhary
About the Book
The edited book ‘Multilingualism and Digital Humanities: Exploring Language diversity in the Digital Age’ brings together research that examines the intersection of multilingualism and digital technologies within the field of humanities. The book aims to shed light on the diverse ways in which language diversity and digital tools can shape and transform the practices of DH scholarship. The primary objective of this book is to investigate how language diversity impacts digital technologies, tools, methodologies, and cultural practices, and how digital platforms, in turn, influence multilingualism and language use in different contexts. We recognize that the cultural, social, or political investigation of human history often needs to engage with multilingual corpora in order to be truly cognizant of diversity. Digital monolingualism is a cause of cultural and technological asymmetries and it is only recently that this language disparity (Cottom 2019) is beginning to be acknowledged as critical for the high-dimensional nature of historic data (Spence et al. 2021, Purschke and Schmalz 2022 forth., Purschke 2020, among others). While the so called ‘major(ity)’ languages have been prevalent in most digital books and manuscript repositories and in digital scholarly editions, computational historic research has tended to focus on one or the other of these languages.
However, recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), such as multilingual word vectors (Sangiacomo et al. 2021; Bhattacharya et al. 2019; Ulčar et al. 2021) and (machine) translation (Tanasescu et al. 2021; Edman et al. 2021), make possible the investigation of trans- and multilingual corpora and open new avenues in overcoming the monolingual bias.
The book aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how digital technologies can be harnessed to promote linguistic diversity, intercultural understanding, and inclusive digital practices in an increasingly interconnected world. Through the exploration of these interdisciplinary topics, this edited book will serve as a comprehensive resource for researchers, scholars, and practitioners interested in the dynamic relationship between multilingualism and digital humanities.
We invite scholars and researchers to submit their original contributions for consideration. We aim to conduct a Book Sprint workshop to thrash ideas and develop the main arguments of the chapters to create an innovative publication. While the volume will emphasize the use/development of digital tools for Indian languages and translations, experiences and work on other languages will also enrich the discussion.
The edited volume will consist of contributions in the form of essays, review papers and experimental submissions. We encourage submissions on multilingual and multicultural training and mentorship; pedagogy developing a multilingual lexicon for teaching DH; discussion of pedagogical materials (syllabi, tutorials, exercises, learning outcomes, assessment and rubrics); digital language learning and teaching; textual data management, analysis, and visualisation; computational approaches to studying texts in languages other than English; digital preservation and multilingual heritage; language technologies for different scripts and languages.
In recent years, various initiatives have aimed to address the challenges for digital linguistic diversity, including work on biocultural diversity, endangered languages, digital cultural studies, multilingual language technologies and global perspectives on digital humanities. This book aims to strengthen connections between numerous overlapping digital and languages-driven conversations and
initiatives with a specific lens on the languages of the sub-continent.
Details of Theme
We invite abstracts between 250-300 words in the following areas (including but not limited to)
- Multilingual text analysis
- Digital archives and multilingual cultural Heritage Preservation
- Machine translation and NLP for diverse languages
- Multilingual digital publishing
- Investigating multilingual textual data management
- Language and Identity in online spaces
- Digital pedagogies for cacophonic classrooms
- Future directions for the multilingual digital corpora and the evolving digital landscape
Submission guidelines:
Original research essays should be between 8000-10000 words. Citations should adhere to the MLA Style Guide. Please include a separate 250 words Author Biography and contact information.
All submissions must be sent to convenerjpn@iiti.ac.in or rsukhija@iiti.ac.in
Important Dates:
- Abstract Submission: 12 July 2023
- Notification of Acceptance: 17 July 2023
- Submission of full papers: 30 November 2023
We will notify the contributors on the status of their submissions throughout the review process.