Philtag

As an established series of conferences in Würzburg on the use of digital methods in the humanities and cultural studies, Philtag offers the opportunity to learn about and exchange information on new trends, projects and technologies in the field of digital humanities at an international level.

The most important topics of the previous conferences included OCR (Optical Character Recognition), text mining, digital editions and the presentation and visualisation of text corpora. Especially in the field of Optical Character Recognition, guest speakers from various institutions have been invited time and again, highlighting the continuous lines of development in this branch of research. In addition to contributions on the OCR of incunabula, the importance of OCR processes for researching scholarly traditions and the recording of historical scientific records, insights into OCRopus++, OCR-D, deep learning in OCR recognition and the presentation of the OCR4all software, the programme also repeatedly included topic-specific workshops.

In the field of text mining, i.e. the discovery of meaning structures in unstructured or only weakly structured text data using algorithm-based analysis methods, various tools and procedures in the field of research were presented. These included ways of identifying translators, recognising unmarked literal speech in novels, creating networks of figures, analysing mood progressions in novel texts to classify literary genres and using ATHEN for the targeted annotation of text corpora.

Currently, Philtag is increasingly focusing on the topic of digital editions and the need for integrative, modular and efficient workflows from pure data to the presentation and visualisation of research results. This included contributions and workshop reports on the new Faust edition, the digital edition of German medieval poetry, the hybrid edition of the works of the Austrian Bible translator and the requirements and realisation of a digital edition of the Narragonien digital research project.

Particularly in view of the increasing demands on the humanities, cultural studies and humanities in the age of digitalisation, a Philtag will take place again in 2026 to provide information about innovations in the academic field and to profitably promote the exchange between different institutions and research fields.