PhD Workshop “Beyond Search: Opening Up Audiovisual Content for Humanities Studies”

Date: 25-26 September 2023
Location: Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), EPFL, Lausanne
Organisers: Yuchen Yang, Prof. Dr. Sarah Kenderdine
Context: Narratives From the Long Tail: Transforming Access to Audiovisual Archives Event Series

Description In recent years, audiovisual content (AV), with its growing accessibility, rich hidden meanings, and complexity in modality, became a new frontier for research in humanities and computational domains. The quest for properly and meaningfully opening up the variety of information (such as historical, social, affective, and aesthetic) available in the ever-increasing AV materials requires a collective effort from both sides to co-create not only new methods but also new research questions. This transdisciplinary task pushes us to work across ossified divisions, such as the “Humanities” and “Sciences”, in ways that can help us realise a more collaborative, equitable, and generous configuration of the field of Digital Humanities.

This 2-day workshop, covering both the theoretical and practical aspects of processing and utilising audiovisual data, provides an entry point and a test field for researchers from EPFL and other Swiss universities working on digital humanities and audiovisual content understanding.

Target participants - students and researchers who are curious in:

• introducing audiovisual data as materials for humanities and sociological studies
• developing and improving computational methods for processing and extracting features from audiovisual content with real-world applications
• scoping creative and artistic data-driven experiences and interaction.

If needed, this course can provide you 2 ECTS credits.

Lecturers:

• Prof. Marina Hassapopoulou, New York University
• Ingrid Mason, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
• Prof. Lauren Tilton, University of Richmond
• Prof. Matthias Grotkopp, Freie Universität Berlin
• Prof. Mark Williams & Dr John P. Bell, Dartmouth College
• Dr Luca Rossetto, University of Zurich

Application: Interested applicants should apply using this Google form. Workshop registration is free. For participants travelling from outside of Lausanne, a subsidy for travel and accommodation for a maximum of CHF 350 can be provided on a selective base.

The deadline for submitting the application form is 31st August 2023. The result will be communicated via email to each applicant by early September 2023.

Read more about the programme, the lecturers and the learning outcome of the course here.

Should you have any questions or require further information, please feel free to reach out to yuchen.yang@epfl.ch

This workshop is funded by the SNSF and the EPFL, and it has the support of DARIAH-CH and CLARIN-CH.