10:00-17:00, 29 January 2026, MS Teams
9:30-17:00, 26 March 2026, Ghent University, Belgium
We are pleased to invite contributions for an one-day virtual workshop and one-day in-person workshop focusing on the citizen science and automatic transcription techniques in the field of historical demography. These events aim to foster dialogue, share methodological innovations, and advance best practices for the transcription of historical demographic data.
Scope and Objectives
Through presentations the first virtual workshop explores projects that are transcribing historical demographic records. After the workshop interested researchers, practitioners, and citizen scientists start working on a best practice manual. The in-person workshop will bring all contributors together to finalize the best practice manual, which will be published in Historical Life Course Studies. The workshops are structured around two interlinked themes:
Citizen Science in Historical Demography: to highlight the untapped potential of citizen contributions and explore pathways for integrating lay-generated data and analysis into scholarly frameworks.
Automatic Transcription of Historical Records: to focus on technological and methodological advances in automatic source transcription.
Call for Contributions
We invite abstracts for presentations on topics including, but not limited to:
Citizen science projects related to historical data collection and transcription;
Case studies involving automatic transcription of historical records;
Collaborative tools and platforms enabling large-scale historical data processing;