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Blogpost written by Francesca Frontini (Université Paul Valéry - Montpellier) about the CAHIER annual workshop, that was dedicated to the retro-digitisation of historical documents. |
On 26-29 June 2018 the Praxiling laboratory at the Paul-Valéry University in Montpellier hosted the CAHIER annual workshop, this year dedicated to the retro-digitisation of historical documents.
CAHIER is a consortium within the French Huma-Num infrastructure with a focus on digital editions and corpora. Given the particular interest in these topics within the wider digital humanities community, and within the framework of Huma-Num’s participation in various infrastructural projects and activities at a European level, the attendance of the workshop was opened up beyond the scope of CAHIER, to include external participants.
Thanks to travelling grants offered by CLARIN and DARIAH ERIC, 7 PhD students and researchersfrom France and other European countries were able to attend the tutorials offered by specialists in DH and digital editions alongside 18 members of CAHIER.
Find the complete program here.
The special focus of the workshop was e-lexicography, with some lectures and hands on sessions dealing with the digitisation of dictionaries, their representation with standard formats such as , the connection with Linked Open Data and their archiving according to best practices in terms of preservation and documentation.
The workshop was an opportunity for people from within and outside CAHIER to meet with each other and also to get to know more about DH projects and infrastructures in Europe. Besides CLARIN and DARIAH, participants were introduced to PARTHENOS activities such as the Standardisation Toolkit and the initiatives of the newly started ELEXIS project.
Some new networking opportunities have arisen during the atelier, including a new lexicography interest group within the CAHIER consortium, and collaborations around the retro-digitisation of historical dictionaries from the 17th and 18th century, aimed at filling important gaps in terms of available digital resources for French historical linguistics (Basnage project, dictionnaire Trévoux 1721 edition). Such projects will crucially benefit from and rely on the standards and technologies presented at the workshop.
Here is some of the feedback we received:
"Participating in this meeting has allowed me to discover very interesting projects still unknown to me and, above all, has allowed me to find new sources of inspiration and develop now ideas". (Camilla Talfani, PhD student at the university of Toulouse 2).
