Registration is now open for the Baltic Digital Humanities Summer School 2024
Call for Applications: Sixth Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities 2024 – Large Language Models and Small Languages
Applications are now open for the Sixth Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities (BSSDH 2024), titled “Large Language Models and Small Languages”, which will take place on July 22–26, 2024, at the National Library of Latvia (NLL) in Riga — in person and online via Zoom.
The Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities is an international intensive training program offering researchers, lecturers, and students in the humanities and social sciences, as well as professionals from archives, libraries, and museums, the opportunity to acquire a wide range of digital research skills — from working with digital data to data visualization techniques.
This year’s focus is on large language models (LLMs) and their application in research. Andres Karjus, computational linguist and cultural analytics researcher at the CUDAN Lab, Tallinn University, will demonstrate how LLMs can perform text annotation and analysis tasks more effectively and much faster than previous generations of technologies. Līva Rotkale, philosopher and lecturer at the University of Latvia, will share her experience in using ChatGPT as a research support tool. As in previous years, participants will also learn text processing and data visualization with Python, led by lecturers from the University of Latvia, Riga Technical University, and NLL researchers Uldis Bojārs and Valdis Saulespurēns.
The program will also address how smaller languages are approaching natural language processing (NLP) and LLM development. Javier de la Rosa from the AI Lab of the National Library of Norway will discuss the development of a large language model for Norwegian. Researchers Sanita Martena, Ilga Šuplinska, and Antra Kļavinska will introduce digital resources for the Latgalian language. A dedicated workshop on morphological and syntactic tagging tools—especially important for morphologically rich languages—will be led by Normunds Grūzītis, senior researcher at the AI Laboratory, Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia.
Focusing on the use of AI in image analysis, BSSDH 2024 will also feature guest researcher and artist Mar Canet Solà, who will present Collection Space Navigator — a tool that enables multidimensional exploration of large image datasets. This topic will be of particular interest to memory institution specialists working with digital image collections and visual data research.
A full description of lectures and workshops is available at: https://www.digitalhumanities.lv/bssdh/2024/.
The summer school will be held in a hybrid format (in person and online). The participation fee for both on-site and online attendees is EUR 40. Each day, one public lecture will be live-streamed free of charge on the NLL’s Facebook and YouTube channels. The language of instruction is English.
Registration: https://www.digitalhumanities.lv/bssdh/2024/registration/
The Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities is organized by the National Library of Latvia, the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia (LU LFMI), and the University of Latvia.
Supported by:
– the State Research Programme “Digital Humanities” project “Development of an Open and FAIR-Compliant Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia” (No. VPP-IZM-DH-2022/1-0002);
– the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) and CLARIN-LV.