Call for Applications - PhD Workshop - Beyond Search: Opening Up Audiovisual Content for Humanities Studies

Expanding our areas of inquiry builds new routes for the field. In recent years, audiovisual (AV) content, with its growing accessibility, rich hidden meanings, and complexity in modality, became a new frontier for research in humanities and computational domains. The quest for properly and meaningfully opening up the variety of information (such as historical, social, affective, and aesthetic) available in the ever-increasing audiovisual (AV) materials requires a collective effort from both sides to co-create not only new methods but also new research questions. This transdisciplinary task pushes us to work across ossified divisions, such as the “Humanities” and “Sciences”, in ways that can help us realise a more collaborative, equitable, and generous configuration of the field of Digital Humanities.

Spanning through the 25th and 26th of September, this 2-day workshop (2 ECTS), will cover both the theoretical and practical aspects of processing and utilising audiovisual data (generously provided by our partners), and provide an entry point and a test field for researchers from EPFL working on digital humanities, audiovisual content understanding, and HCI to formulate and validate new ideas.

We welcome students and researchers who are curious about:

• introducing audiovisual data as materials for humanities and sociological studies;
• developing and improving computational methods for processing and extracting features from audiovisual content with real-world applications;
• scoping creative and artistic data-driven experiences and interaction.