National History Conference Comes to Newcastle

Attendees at the Australian Historical Association conference will have the opportunity to get hands-on experience using computational linguistics for historical analysis and learn from one of the leading scholars in the field.

A digital history workshop is planned as part of the conference and will be led by international scholar Associate Professor Michelle Moravec from Rosemont College in Philadelphia.

Around 400 historians will converge on The University of Newcastle for the Australian Historical Association’s 36^th annual conference on 3 – 7 July.

This year’s conference theme is “Entangled Histories” and reflects the increasing move away from narrowly defined ‘national’ histories towards an understanding of history as an interlinked whole where identities and places are the products of mobilities and connections.

Director of the Centre for the History of Violence and member of the Centre for 21^st Century Humanities, Professor Philip Dwyer is convening the conference and says it is the largest annual history conference in Australia.

“Planning for the conference is well under way. We’ve secured prominent national and international keynote speakers and panelists including Professor Dane Kennedy from George Washington University, and Professor Christina Twomey from Monash University,” Professor Dwyer said.

“Of particular note will be the digital history workshop on July 3 conducted by Associate Professor Michelle Moravec. This is a great opportunity for researchers to get hands on experience exploring the use of computational linguistics for historical analysis. An overview of how computational linguistics may be used to answer historical questions will precede a practical demonstration of the rudiments of corpus linguistic analysis, a method of using digital tools which allow users to search through texts rapidly and reliably,” Professor Dwyer said.

“The workshop cost is included in the conference registration fee, however numbers are limited and pre-registration is essential.”

Sponsorship opportunities are now available. Please contact Professor Philip Dwyer for more information.

About the speakers:

Professor Dane Kennedy, Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University

Dane Kennedy received his PhD in British history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. He teaches British and imperial history at George Washington University, where he holds the Elmer Louis Kayser professorship. He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship for 2003-2004.

Professor Christina Twomey, Head of History, Monash University

Christina Twomey is a Professor and Head of History in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University. She is also Director of the Faculty of Arts Focus Program Global Conflict and Violence and a member of the international coordinating committee of Historians Without Borders.

Associate Professor Michelle Moravec 

Michelle Moravec is a digital historian who works primarily in computational linguistics (“Under this name she is fitly described”: A Digital History of Gender in the History of Woman Suffrage) and network analysis (Beyond Citations, the Historian’s Altmetrics). She is also interested in the methodological implications of doing history digitally (How Digitized Changed Historical Research) as well as the ethical implications of digitizing archival materials (Ethics and Digital History). She uses digital methods to historicise the concept of notability, in among other things, Wikipedia (Wikipedia’s Notable Women Problem). She sits on the American Historical Association’s Digital History Standards committee and serves as the digital history editor for Women and Social Movements.