2024Q3 Reports: SIGHUM

Summary

SIGHUM brings together researchers interested in computational linguistics applications to all aspects of the humanities and the social sciences, and provides a forum for communication between ACL researchers and other communities and organisations acting in the digital humanities and computational social sciences. The new board, elected in July 2022, having successfully revitalized the group, has undertaken the activities listed below with the goal to strengthen the group’s impact and broaden the community.

Membership

In the last year the group membership continued to grow, going from 425 members on 14 June 2023 to 469 members on 28 June 2024. Our mailing list (https://groups.google.com/g/sighum) is actively used to disseminate information and stimulate discussions among members via 185 messages (as of 28 June 2024).

Officers

President: Barbara McGillivray, King’s College London (elected July 2022). Secretary: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Saarland University (elected July 2022) Liaison Representative: Sara Tonelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler Trento (elected July 2022)

The elections for the new board took place in June 2024: 27 members took part: 100% voted for Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb for the position of President, Lorella Viola for the position of Secretary, and Craig Messner for the position of Liaison Representative of SIGHUM.

Activities

In addition to the monthly board meetings, we invited the whole group to two online meetings on 18 April 2024, timed to accommodate different time zones. These meetings were an opportunity for members to connect and contribute to the implementation of the strategic priorities of the group. The SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL) is an annual workshop series that aims to provide a forum for researchers who are working on aspects of natural language and information technology applications that pertain to data from the humanities, social sciences, cultural heritage, and literature. The LaTeCH workshops were initially motivated by the growing interest in language technology research and applications for the cultural heritage domain. The scope has soon nevertheless broadened to also include the humanities, the social sciences, and the literary studies. Since the official formation of SIGHUM, the LaTeCH workshop series constitutes the SIGHUM annual workshop and the venue for the SIGHUM annual business meeting. In 2024, SIGHUM supported the 8th Joint SIGHUM LaTeCH-CLfL 2024 Workshop held at EACL 2024 https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2024/ featuring 10 talks, 18 posters, and one invited speaker.

Website and social media

The group’s website (https://sighum.wordpress.com/) provides information on the officers, group events, as well as a privacy policy and a blog. The group also has social media accounts: SIGHUM account on X (@SighumSocial) and on Mastodon (@SighumSocial@masto.it)

Mailing list

The group’s mailing list is via the Google group https://groups.google.com/g/sighum/ .