Events – Center for Digital Text Scholarship (DigiTS)

Upcoming events

06.-08.05.2026

Doctoral School on Network Analysis

The 3-day workshop is aimed for PhD and MA students as well as academic staff from Estonian universities.

The workshop introduces participants to the application of network theory in the humanities, with a particular emphasis on linguistics, as well as literary and cultural studies. The first day begins with an introductory lecture that offers a conceptual and methodological overview of the field, outlining key concepts, models, and research questions. This is followed by presentations from experts who demonstrate how network-based approaches can be applied to different kinds of data and research problems. The second and third day of the workshop are dedicated to the transfer of practical skills. Participants will learn essential techniques for data preparation, incl visualizing networks in ways that support exploration, interpretation, and scholarly communication.

The program also includes hands-on workshops on data preparation, data visualisation and using network metrics to describe networks and nodes. Participants will also be introduced to the use of Gephi, one of the most widely used network visualization tools, which offers a broad range of methods for highlighting important structural properties of networks.

Additional information, including timetable and registration link: www.digits.ut.ee/network-analysis-workshop

11.05.2026

AI-teh seminar #1: Digital Humanities and AI: A Showcase

For this monthly seminar series, we invite colleagues from the Humanities and Social Sciences to present how they have leveraged artificial intelligence in their own research methodology. The seminars are practically oriented demonstrations of instances of implementing AI at any stage of research, including data preparation, annotation, analysis or anything else. The seminars should serve as a platform not only to showcase uses of AI and get feedback on this, but also for participants to get inspiration for their own research and potentially as an opportunity to further collaboration.

In the first seminar, on May 11, Prof. Maciej Eder (Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities, UT Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics) will give a presentation titled Digital Humanities and AI: A Showcase.

The seminar will take place at Jakobi 2-438 and Zoom at 16:00-17:30 (EEST). Register here.

08.06.2026

AI-teh seminar #2: AI in Research: from Annotators to Assistants and Agents

In the second seminar of the series on June 8, Andres Karjus (Associate Professor of Computational Social Science, UT Institute of Social Studies) will give a presentation titled AI in Research: from Annotators to Assistants and Agents.

The seminar will take place at Ülikooli 18-139 and Zoom at 16:00-17:30 (EEST). Register here.

Past events

22.04.2026

Beyond Publish or Perish: Humanities Publishing in the Age of AI

Jakobi 2-438, Tartu & Zoom
18:00-19:30 EEST

Agenda:

18:00 Artjoms Šela
Where to Publish? Digital Humanities between DIY and Academic Journals (slides)
18:30 Alan Colin-Arce
The Humanities and Social Sciences Commons: A Multilingual Space for Scholarship and Connection (slides)
19:00 Faraz Forghan Parast
The Generative Turn: AI’s Reconfiguration of Knowledge Infrastructures (slides)

Register here
(please register regardless of whether you join in person/on Zoom)
Join Zoom Meeting

The seminar focuses on humanities publishing in the Age of AI. The seminar is organised in collaboration with the DigiTS Advisory Board members Artjoms Šela who will be speaking on the topic of challenging the traditional publication models and Professor Ray Siemens, Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, whose colleagues Alan Colin-Arce and Faraz Forghan Parast will be speaking about the HSS Commons and AI’s reconfiguration of knowledge infrastructures.

Artjoms Šeļa is a researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, where he works with the Versification Research Group, and curates the open multilingual poetry collection PoeTree. His research focuses on computational literary studies, large-scale historical change, transnational and comparative approaches to poetry and poetic form. He serves on the editorial board of the Computational Humanities Research journal (CUP), acts as the Chair for the steering committee of the European Summer University in Digital Humanities, and is actively involved in research networks around Plotting Poetry and Computational Humanities conferences. In 2025 he received the ADHO Antonio Zampolli Prize as part of the Computational Stylistics Group.

In the seminar, Artjoms will be delivering the talk Where to Publish? Digital Humanities between DIY and Academic Journals:
The rise of Digital Humanities was inextricably linked with the development of Web 2.0: a changing landscape of digital technologies and infrastructures that promised to redefine academic publishing. The community cited blog posts and tweets in academic papers, were early adopters of Open Access and scientific reproducibility ethos, established DIY digital publishing pipelines, and pushed for recognition of multifaceted DH work within traditional systems of university evaluation. And yet, old systems have deep roots that hold them firmly in place, while Twitter is dead. The largest academic publishers remain the dispensers of prestige, critical for early career scholars and those who depend on metrics-driven evaluation in their institutions. In this talk, I explore, from the perspective of a practicing researcher, the tension that exists between following the values of the community and the reality of publication patterns. By observing trends, citation patterns, and recent developments in DH-adjacent academic publishing, I try to assess the current status quo and identify new answers to the existential question—”Where to publish?”.

Alan Colin-Arce is a Research Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship at the University of Victoria’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and the research lead for the the Humanities and Social Sciences Commons. His research focuses on the influence of language and geography in knowledge production, especially in scholarly communication and web archives. Alan has contributed to several multilingual digital humanities projects, including the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory, Uncomfortable Footprints, and Latin American Women’s Rights Movements: Tracing Online Presence through Language, Time and Space.

In the seminar, Alan will be delivering the talk The Humanities and Social Sciences Commons: A Multilingual Space for Scholarship and Connection:
English is the lingua franca of scholarship, that is, the common language through which scholarly work is disseminated. While this situation allows researchers to communicate regardless of their first language, it also creates barriers for non-Anglophone speakers to contribute to knowledge creation and dissemination. For instance, researchers and students for whom English is not their first language tend to spend more time on academic tasks such as reading and writing papers or preparing presentations (Amano et al., 2023). In the humanities and social sciences (HSS), English is widely used, but there is also an increasing recognition of the importance of using local and national languages throughout the research process to study locally relevant topics, reach local and national audiences, and increase the diversity of perspectives in research. As scholarship and researchers are multilingual, online open community spaces for HSS disciplines should also be available in multiple languages to reflect the work of researchers in these fields. This presentation will discuss how multilingualism has guided the work of the Humanities and Social Sciences Commons, an in-development, not-for-profit space for open scholarship that combines elements of academic social networks and academic repositories. This website is available in six languages (English, French, Spanish, Bangla, Portuguese, and Ukrainian), with Chinese and Polish also in development. The HSS Commons also provides the infrastructure to openly share different research outputs and collaborate with other researchers and groups. Through these initiatives, we aim to increase the discoverability of multilingual scholarship, reduce the linguistic barriers to sharing scholarship, and provide multilingual tools to enable researchers to collaborate and discover their peers’ work.

Faraz Forghan Parast is Coordinator of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria and a researcher in Education, Curriculum and Instruction. His work spans digital humanities, linguistics, translation studies, education, and software development. He has contributed to collaborative research on generative AI and Open Social Scholarship, including the environmental scan Taking Bearings: Open Social Scholarship Meets AI, and has developed creative-critical work at the intersection of AI and translation, including On a Loom of Code and Colour, as well as the AI Usage Label Tool, which supports transparent and reflective self-disclosure of AI use in scholarly work. His research focuses on meaning-making across languages, the role of computational systems in textual scholarship, and the ways AI is reshaping reading, writing, translation, and knowledge production.

In the seminar, Faraz will be delivering the talk The Generative Turn: AI’s Reconfiguration of Knowledge Infrastructures:
This presentation shares findings from an ongoing environmental scan on generative AI and its implications for Open Social Scholarship. As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into research, teaching, publishing, and public knowledge platforms, it is reshaping how knowledge is produced, circulated, and trusted. The scan approaches this transformation through three interconnected dimensions: the open, the social, and the scholarly. The talk explores how AI complicates commitments to openness through tensions around open access, open data, and “open” AI systems; how it raises social concerns around provenance, algorithmic opacity, synthetic media, labor, and environmental cost; and how it is reconfiguring scholarly practice through changes to authorship, pedagogy, research workflows, and accountability. Rather than treating AI as a purely technical development, this presentation frames it as a broader cultural and epistemic shift. It argues that Open Social Scholarship offers a valuable framework for understanding these transformations and for imagining more ethical, equitable, and publicly engaged knowledge futures.

17.02.2026

DigiTS I Annual Progress Meeting

The event focused on the first year of the DigiTS project. Prof. Maciej Eder gave an overview of first year’s activities, future plans and introduced the full time hired in the last months. All DigiTS researchers- Thiago Dumont Oliveira, Botond Szemes, Kristiina Vaik and the junior researchers Sofia Kriuchkova and Bhumika Bhattacharyya introduced their ongoing research projects. The aim of the meeting was to give an overview of our activities and first year progress to DigiTS team members and collaborators in partner institutions.

Slides of the research presenations can be viewed here.

19.01.2026

ETIS and the Estonian Research System

The event, intended for the DigiTS staff from associated Masters student to Professors leading the project, aimed to introduce the Estonian Research Information System, funding opportunities in Estonia, classification of publications and the importance of avoiding predatory journals. At the event, Kalmer Lauk, Analyst of Research and Development at the University of Tartu Grant Office, gave a thorough overview of the topics. Lauk’s slides can be accessed here: Estonian Research Information System (ETIS).

University of Tartu employees can browse different funding opportunities on the Pivot-RP Database, sing up for the funding opportunities newsletter and contact the UT Grant Office for more information, incl. for help with applications.

19.11.2025

Large Language Models and the Estonian Language: the State of the Art

Schedule:

14:00-14:15 Prof. Maciej Eder, Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities (University of Tartu Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics)
Introduction of DigiTS + Welcome to the LLM Extravaganza!
14:15-14:45 Eleri Aedmaa, Principal NLP Engineer (Estonian Language Institute),
Kristel Uiboaed, Head of Language Data Infrastructure (Estonian Language Institute)
Advancing Language Resources: Infrastructure, Data Collection at Scale, and Benchmarking Strategy
14:45-15:15 Assoc. Prof. Kairit Sirts, Associate Professor in Natural Language Processing (University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science)
Improving Estonian Language Capabilities in Open LLMs: Opportunities and Challenges
15:15-15:45 Prof. Mark Fišel, Professor of Natural Language Processing (University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science)
Large Models, Small Data

The event took place at Jakobi 2 & Zoom. The presentations were not recorded but you can access the slides above.

The event was co-organised by the Center of Digital Text Scholarship (DigiTS) and Language Data Research Infrastructure (KeTA).