Official event website: https://cudan.tlu.ee/conference/

About CUDAN 2023

We invite submissions for the Cultural Data Analytics Conference 2023 / CUDAN 2023, organized by the ERA Chair project for Cultural Data Analytics at Tallinn University, generously funded by the European Commission. Inspired by initial large gatherings of the cultural analytics community, including UCLA/IPAM 2016, and multidisciplinary conferences such as NetSci, IC2S2, or CCS, we aim to bring together researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders using methods of cultural data analytics to understand cultures and cultural production. This particularly includes multidisciplinary combinations of quantification, qualitative inquiry, computational analysis, and visualization to make sense of large cultural datasets, including visual, audiovisual, linguistic, and other genres of socio-cultural materials. The conference is scheduled to happen in Tallinn, Estonia from December 13 to 16, 2023, including a number of leading invited practitioners, peer-reviewed talks, and poster contributions from the community.

Key Dates

Abstracts due: July 24, 2023 (23:59 CET)
Notification of acceptance: September 14, 2023
Conference: December 13-16, 2023
Pre-conference workshops: December 13, 2023
Main conference: December 14-16, 2023

 Winter morning in Tallinn. CC-BY Maximilian Schich

Keynotes confirmed

– Petter Holme, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland (https://petterhol.me/)
– Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Université de Genève, Switzerland (https://www.unige.ch/…)
– Mauro Martino, Visual Artificial Intelligence Lab, IBM Research, Boston, USA (https://www.mamartino.com/)
– Anu Masso, TalTech, Tallinn, Estonia (https://taltech.ee/…)

Call for Abstracts

We invite authors to submit a single-page abstract pdf including a (mandatory) descriptive figure and caption by the 24th of July 2023 via our OpenReview submission system. We accept contributed talks, lightning talks, and posters (please indicate your preference). We strive for an in-person event to maximize community interaction, yet we will offer a limited amount of remote presentation slots. Review is single-blind.

In the spirit of multidisciplinary abstract conferences and idea conferences, we encourage submissions which aim to present entirely novel work, and also recently published contributions which would benefit from broader multidisciplinary discussion. In the latter case, please make sure to cite the original publication venue.

SUBMIT HERE: https://openreview.net/group?id=CUDAN.tlu.ee/2023/Conference

Conference scope

Cultures and cultural production are multifaceted phenomena, which, like other complex systems, cannot be fully understood from the perspective of a single specific discipline. This is why the core mission of cultural data analytics is to join forces and make headway across disciplines and domains of expertise. Feeding into this mission, we welcome both multidisciplinary submissions, and contributions from specific disciplines, which aim to benefit from discussion in a multidisciplinary forum.

We encourage discussion towards a deeper understanding of cultures and cultural production including aspects, methods, and intersections of the following fields:
– cultural analytics, culturomics, and socio-cultural data science;
– digital humanities and computational humanities;
– cultural evolution, including experimental and observational approaches;
– cultural complexity science, network science, computational social science, and social physics;
– computational linguistics, quantitative aesthetics, critical computer vision, and machine learning;
– art history, cultural history, cultural semiotics, film studies, musicology, and urbanism;
– artistic research, algorithmic curation, and AI art (including aspects of cultural data analysis);
– creative industries research, media economics, and policy studies;
– data journalism, data science, and information visualization.

Contributions ideally address at least one of the following subject domains (in line with state-of-the-art conceptual reference models for cultural data):
– material aspects, including artworks, architecture, texts, images, sound, film, digital media, databases, and other forms of tangible cultural heritage;
– conceptual aspects, including cultural practices, rituals, theories, policies, data models, narratives, imagined communities, and other forms of intangible cultural heritage;
– social aspects, including human behaviour, human mobility, social networks, and social media;
– temporal aspects, from slow historical processes to turbulence in today’s economy of attention;
– spatial aspects of historical topography, cultural geography, and urban dynamics;
– event aspects, which combine the above aspects in cultural co-production, event series, tourism, etc.;
– network aspects of socio-cultural interaction, including the inherent ecology of complex networks as documented in the structure and dynamics of large cultural knowledge graphs or blockchains associated with the crypto-art-market, for example.

Conference program

The CUDAN 2023 main conference programme (December 14-16, 2023) will include six keynotes covering the spectrum of relevant disciplines, a lightning talk session in the plenary, parallel sessions, and a poster section. The latter will run throughout the whole conference in the coffee and lunch area that is collocated with the plenum. The conference will close with a best poster and best paper award ceremony.

The pre-conference day (December 13, 2023) will feature introductory workshops by CUDAN senior fellows, covering aspects of cultural data analysis and visualization using Python, R, Tableau, and the Collection Space Navigator.

Before and after the main conference, we will offer sightseeing tours, including the medieval Tallinn old town and Christmas market (among many reasons to visit Estonia).

We are further planning a meet the publisher’s session and other opportunities for relevant stakeholders, including exhibition booths.

If you or your institution/company is interested in participation, please contact us via email to cudan@tlu.ee, ideally before September 14, 2023.

Registration & Accommodation

As we are fully funded through the European Commission, there will be no conference fee for accepted participants, with the exception of the conference dinner. Accepted participants are required to register and confirm their attendance. Information regarding accommodation (including reduced rate hotels) and a form to order VISA support letters will be announced on the conference website (https://cudan.tlu.ee/conference/).

Organizers

Organizing chair

Maximilian Schich, CUDAN ERA Chair holder

Advising chair

Lev Manovich, Cultural Analytics Lab, City University of New York, US

Organizing committee

Andres Karjus, CUDAN Senior Fellow (computational linguistics)
Ksenia Mukhina, CUDAN Senior Fellow (computer science)
Mila Oiva, CUDAN Senior Fellow (cultural history)
Mikhail Tamm, CUDAN Senior Fellow (social physics)
Sandra Kaljumäe, CUDAN Project coordinator
Sirli Peda, Tallinn University Conference Center
Sirli Taniloo, Tallinn University Conference Center

Programme committee confirmed

James Abello Monedero, Rutgers University, US
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Indiana University, Bloomington, US
Ruth Ahnert, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Sebastian Ahnert, University of Cambridge, UK
Kim Albrecht, Artist, Berlin, DE
Eduardo Altmann, The University of Sydney, AU
Sandra Alvaro, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ES
Stefano Balietti, Universität Mannheim, DE
Clarisse Bardiot, Université Rennes 2, FR
Maria Christina Binz-Scharf, CUNY City College of NY, US
Chico Q Camargo, University of Exeter, UK
Nicola Carboni, Université de Genève, CH
Damiano Cerrone, Tampere University, FI
Javier Cha, University of Hong Kong, HK
CJ Chen, Nanjing University, CN
Ana Clemente, University of Barcelona, ES
Bronwyn Coate, RMIT University, AU
Michele Coscia, IT-University of Copenhagen, DK
Brian Coxall, Brigham Young University, US
David J. Crandall, Indiana University, US
Christine Cuskley, Newcastle University, UK
Maria-Rita D’Orsogna, University of California, Los Angeles, US
Kate Elswit, University of London, UK
Sara Irina Fabrikant, University of Zurich, CH
Elena Fedorovskaya, Rochester Institute of Technology, US
Jianbo Gao, Beijing Normal University, CN
David Garcia, Universität Konstanz, DE
Bruno Goncalves, Data For Science, Inc., US
Jack Grieve, University of Birmingham, UK
Daria Gritsenko, University of Helsinki, FI
Thilo Gross, HIFMB & Universität Oldenburg, DE
Ryan Heuser, Princeton University, US
Yurij Holovatch, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, UA
Natalie M Houston, University of Massachusetts at Lowell, US
Ana Jofre, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, US
Mauri Kaipainen, Perspicamus, Helsinki, FI
Folgert Karsdorp, Meertens Institute, NL
Lindsay King, Stanford University, US
Harald Klinke, LMU Munich, DE
Ilias Kyriazis, Fachhochschule Potsdam, DE
John Laudun, University of Louisiana at Lafeyette, US
Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, Aarhus Universitet, DK
Lik-Hang Lee, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HK
Liina Lindström, University of Tartu, EE
Jordi McKenzie, Macquarie University, AU
Stefania Milan, University of Amsterdam, NL David Mimno, Cornell University, Ithaca/NY, US
Daria Morozova, Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, FR
Cassini Nazir, University of North Texas, US
Maarja Ojamaa, University of Tartu, EE
Giovanni Petri, Northeastern University London, UK
Iyad Rahwan, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, DE
Martin Rosvall, Umeå University, SE
Louis Michael Shekhtman, Northeastern University, Boston, US
André Skupin, San Diego State University, US
Oleg Sobchuk, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, DE
Juan Luis Suárez, University of Western Ontario, CA
Pablo Suarez-Serrato, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, MX
Nina Tahmasebi, Språkbanken (The swedish language bank), SE
Timothy R Tangherlini, University of California, Berkeley, US
Mark Taylor, University of Sheffield, UK
Jer Thorp, New York University, US
Lauren Tilton, University of Richmond, US
Mikko Tolonen, University of Helsinki, FI
Stephen Miles Uzzo, National Museum of Mathematics, US
Melvin Wevers, University of Amsterdam, NL
Hyejin Youn, Northwestern University, Evanston, US

For updated information, please re-check the conference website (https://cudan.tlu.ee/conference/).
In case of questions, please do not hesitate to contact us via email to cudan@tlu.ee.

We’d love to welcome you in Tallinn, Estonia in December 2023!