Digitization of cultural heritage remains a key and long-standing focus within the Digital Humanities. Over the past two decades, initiatives like e-codices and national libraries, such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, have made their historical (hand-)written documents accessible to the public. This access has not only stimulated paleographic and codicological research but has also enabled significant progress in machine learning areas, particularly automatic text recognition (and indirectly guided progress with visual language models).
While current state-of-the-art methods allow us to process large volumes of documents with good results, this data reuse has only marginally advanced the methodologies in the humanities, which primarily focus on qualitative questions. This year's DHCH summer school aims to facilitate discussions among researchers, GLAM specialists, digitization experts, and the wider DHCH community. With the goal to support the next generation not only to profit from the developments but also to rethink approaches to the material of the past.
In workshops, hands-on exercises, and discussions, the participants will learn about the intricacies of digitization and text recognition processes, while developing (and testing) their own approaches. The Summer School is organized in connection with SCOOP (Source Code of the Past), e-Codices ORD, the Flow (SNSF-Project).
This year’s DHCH26 will take place from the 15th to the 17th of June 2026. If you are a PhD student or an MA student considering a PhD and would like to attend the conference, you have to submit a on page PhD research proposal focused on the topics of: Manuscript work, Big Data or AI to adhere to this year’s chosen research focus. Please also submit a 250-word researcher bio so we can introduce you properly at the conference.
Application:
Up to 20 patricipants will be accepted for the summer school. Registration priority will be given to students from DHCH Universities. There are no fees for the summer school; however, patricipants or their home universitites must cover their travel and accomodation costs in Rome.
Please send your application with a short CV an (if available) a link or description of your PhD project to:
Coûts de participation
