Call for Papers AIM2022: Artificial Intelligence and Minority

Date: 28-30 September 2022
Location: University of Groningen, the Netherlands (hybrid/online options dependant on circumstances)
Submission deadline: 15 May 2022 (11:59 PM CET) (was 29 April)

The University of Groningen’s Department of History of Philosophy and Center for Digital Humanities are inviting submissions to the “AIM2022: AI and Minority” international conference. The event seeks to bring together scholars at various stages of their career who work in the history of philosophy or cognate areas in cultural history and the humanities broadly defined, and who use AI-inflected approaches to bring to life neglected figures, unrepresented language groups and racial profiles, as well as any historical aspect(s) that go(es) beyond the canon of their disciplines. While AI is often related to gender and racial bias, we aim to focus on machine intelligence as a potentially welcome companion to traditional forms of humanistic inquiry and on minorness as paramount for the study of the human past. The conference thus seeks to encourage collaborative, inter-, trans-, and post-disciplinary forms of scholarship across different aspects of minority in AI-enabled cultural history research.

Furthermore, we recognize that multilingualism is inextricably related to the human past and present and 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. In digital humanities, it was only relatively recently that language started to be acknowledged as critical for the high-dimensional nature of historic data (Spence et al. 2021, Purschke and Schmalz 2022 forth., Purschke 2020). While the so called ‘major(ity)’ languages have been prevalent in most digital book and manuscript repositories and in digital scholarly editions, computational historic research has tended to focus on one or the other of these languages due to available and readily-accessible language-agnostic technology. 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.

Applicants are encouraged to explicitly address the minority stakes of their interdisciplinary research in the following fields: history of philosophy, history and philosophy of science, ethics, social and political philosophy, and cultural studies. Although the conference specifically encourages contributions to multilingual, AI-enabled historical research, the program is also open to monolingual minority-dedicated cross-disciplinary projects.

The panels will be organized according to the following broad and more specific topics, although innovative contributions beyond these are also encouraged:

• geo-cultural diversity in intellectual history
• ethics of multilingual historical research
• (translingual) text mining and network analysis in computational history
• language-aware tools and approaches for history research
• quantitative approaches to marginalized groups in philosophy
• peripheral approaches to philosophy
• translations, multiple editions, and linguistic diversity in the humanities
• multilingualism in the philosophy of medicine and biology
• socially relevant philosophy in science and engineering

Instructions for applicants

Applicants should submit a title, a 300-word abstract, 5 keywords, and a short bio by April 29, 2022 via EasyChair. They will be notified of the outcome of their submission by May 15.

Publication

Participants have the opportunity to submit their paper for open-access publication with a university press should they wish to do so.

Contact

For more information on the conference and the department, please visit the Department of the History of Philosophy or contact Raluca Tanasescu at r.a.tanasescu rug.nl.

Funding and support

The event is inspired by the European Research Commission-funded project “The Normalisation of Natural Philosophy: How Teaching Practices Shaped the Evolution of Early Modern Science” and funded by the grant agreement No. 801653 Natural Philosophy. It is organized in collaboration with the Minorities & Multilingualism Programme at the University of Groningen (www.minorities.nl).

Advisory board

Susan Aasman (University of Groningen, Centre for Digital Humanities)
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar (University of Groningen, Minorities & Multilingualism)
Christoph Purschke (University of Luxemburg, Department of Humanities)
Diana Roig-Sanz (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, GlobaLS Research Group)
Andrea Sangiacomo (University of Groningen, Faculty of Philosophy)