ZČU hosted an international conference on computational approaches to the study of the past

Conference Cooperation Science and research

On 6-8 October 2022, the International Conference Computing the Past: Computational Approaches to the Dynamics of Cultures and Societies was held at the Study and Research Library of the Pilsen Region.

The conference was organized by the research centre CCS-Lab (Computing Culture & Society Laboratory) at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. It was opened on Thursday evening by Vojtěch Kaše from the Department of Philosophy, David Šanc, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, and Přemysl Brada, Head of the Department of Computer Science and Computing at the Faculty of Applied Sciences of the University of West Bohemia. 

The aim of the conference was to bring to one table researchers from various humanities and social sciences dealing with the human past, who have experience with the use of computer technology in their research. The event was attended by approximately thirty participants in total, which proved to be a suitable number for the pleasant flow of informal discussions during and outside the program. Approximately half of the participants were from abroad, namely Austria, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Participants included archaeologists, historians, philologists, religious scholars, biblical scholars and philosophers. 

The academic programme of the conference consisted of three invited lectures, seventeen standard fifteen-minute papers and a final panel debate. Several research posters were also displayed in the venue. Invited speakers were Tom Brughmans from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, Monica Berti from the University of Leipzig and István Czachesz from the University of Tromsø, Norway. They were purposely selected to represent different academic disciplines. However, they all shared a common interest in the use of computational methods in research and a professional interest in the historical environment of the ancient Mediterranean. Tom Brughmans is an archaeologist who uses computer modelling methods in his research on the economy of the Roman Empire. In his lecture, he stressed that when using computational methods in research, we should remember to be as accessible as possible to colleagues who are more reticent about the applicability of these methods. Monica Berti is a classical philologist who has long been involved in the preparation of digital editions of ancient texts in Greek and Latin and the development of computer tools for working with these texts. Her lecture paid much attention to the need to standardize the data formats used and their encoding. István Czachesz is a New Testament biblical scholar and promoter of innovative approaches to the study of early Christianity. 

In his lecture, he presented several examples of the use of computational methods in the study of the subject and outlined the possibilities of their further development. For example, he presented an abstract computer model that sought to shed new light on the importance of the so-called traveling prophets for the spread of a given religious movement in its earliest phase. 

In addition to invited talks, there were papers applying computational approaches in a variety of historical contexts and using different types of data. For example, Arianna Sacco from the Institute of Archaeology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences presented her project using formal network analysis methods to analyse a set of archaeological data from the Late Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period in ancient Egypt (i.e. c. 1850-1550 BC). Petr Pavlas from the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic turned his attention to the possibility of using computational text analysis methods for automatic metaphor recognition in a large corpus of digitized texts from the period 1517-1715. Nina Nikki from the University of Helsinki and Zdeňka Špiclová from the Department of Philosophy at the University of ZČU used distributional semantics methods to demonstrate how the perception of the legacy of Paul of Tarsus is transformed in a corpus of early Christian Greek texts from the first five centuries. 

The academic programme of the conference was rounded off on Saturday before noon with a panel debate. It was fueled mostly by questions from the audience and again discussed a topic that had already been opened during the opening lecture: how to communicate this type of historical research to traditionally oriented colleagues who are either reticent or outright hostile to these approaches? The participants of the event were also offered a non-academic programme: some of them went on a joint tour of the Pilsner Prazdroj brewery on Friday evening and on Saturday afternoon for a walk around the Bolevec ponds. As usual, this programme offered space for continuing informal discussions on professional issues, but also for natural deepening of established contacts. 

Several institutions contributed to the success of the event. In addition to the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts and the CCS-Lab Centre of ZČU, it is necessary to mention the Study and Research Library of the Pilsen Region, which provided the premises for the event. The costs of the event were covered by the funds from the Rector's reserve of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic. The event was also supported by the Czech Association for Digital Humanities (CzADH) and the Centre for Digital Religious Research (CEDRR) at Masaryk University in Brno.


Gallery


Faculty of Arts

Naděžda Hlaváčková

13. 10. 2022