Newspapers, Magazines & AI Models: Training an (Re-)Use in the Digital Humanities

Call for Papers

The ACDH-CH (Austrian Academy of Sciences) is hosting a conference from 7-8 May 2025:

The two-day conference is dedicated to the use of AI models for the digitization and analysis of newspapers and magazines from the early modern period to the present. This covers both the “out-of-the-box” use or fine-tuning of existing models and the training of new models. The term “AI model” is deliberately defined broadly and includes several subfields of artificial intelligence (e.g., Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Generative AI, NLP) and architectures (e.g., CNNs, BERT, GPT, CLIP) as well as different modalities (text, image, multimodal models) and modes of integration into individual workflows (e.g., through applications such as Transkribus, Newspaper Navigator; through Python libraries like spaCy, flair).

Further, the planned conference focuses on various application scenarios of AI in relation to newspapers and magazines. The following areas of use are of particular interest:

Layout analysis and structural annotation
Automated Text Recognition (HTR, OCR)
Text genre classification
Semantic/linguistic annotation (e.g., Named Entity Recognition, Part-of-Speech Tagging)
Image annotation and classification (Computer Vision)
Format transformation and data modeling
Corpus design and searchability
Data analysis and visualization

For these as well as other areas of application, the ACDH-CH invites submissions for 20-minute presentations that showcase specific use cases, share practical insights, and discuss limitations and potentials of using AI models in the context of the digitisation and exploration of newspapers and magazines. Presentations on results of completed projects are equally welcome as work-in-progress reports on ongoing research projects. The call is also explicitly open to early-career researchers.

Interested participants are asked to submit abstracts of approximately 300 words (in German or English). Please send your submission along with a short biography of 2–3 sentences by January 15, 2025.

Detailed information can be found via the ACDH-CH Website:

Newspapers, Magazines & AI Models Conference