About CUDAN 2023
We invite submissions for the Cultural Data Analytics Conference 2023 / CUDAN 2023, organized by the ERA Chair project for Cultural Data Analytics at Tallinn University, generously funded by the European Commission. Inspired by initial large gatherings of the cultural analytics community, including UCLA/IPAM 2016, and multidisciplinary conferences such as NetSci, IC2S2, or CSS, we aim to bring together researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders using methods of cultural data analytics to understand cultures and cultural production. This particularly includes multidisciplinary combinations of quantification, qualitative inquiry, computational analysis, and visualization to make sense of large cultural datasets, including visual, audiovisual, linguistic, and other genres of socio-cultural materials. The conference is scheduled to happen in Tallinn, Estonia from December 13 to 16, 2023, including a number of leading invited practitioners, peer-reviewed talks, and poster contributions from the community.

Key Dates
Abstracts due: July 24, 2023 (23:59 CET)
Notification of acceptance: September 14, 2023
Conference: December 13-16, 2023
Pre-conference workshops: December 13, 2023
Main conference: December 14-16, 2023

Keynotes confirmed
– Petter Holme, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
– Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Université de Genève, Switzerland
– Mauro Martino, Visual Artificial Intelligence Lab, IBM Research, Boston, USA
– Anu Masso, TalTech, Tallinn, Estonia

Call for Abstracts
We invite authors to submit a single-page abstract pdf including a (mandatory) descriptive figure and caption by the 24th of July 2023 via our OpenReview submission system. We accept contributed talks, lightning talks, and posters (please indicate your preference). We strive for an in-person event to maximize community interaction, yet we will offer a limited amount of remote presentation slots. Review is single-blind.

SUBMIT HERE: https://openreview.net/group?id=CUDAN.tlu.ee/2023/Conference

Conference scope
Cultures and cultural production are multifaceted phenomena, which, like other complex systems, cannot be fully understood from the perspective of a single specific discipline. This is why the core mission of cultural data analytics is to join forces and make headway across disciplines and domains of expertise. Feeding into this mission, we welcome both multidisciplinary submissions, and contributions from specific disciplines, which aim to benefit from discussion in a multidisciplinary forum.

We encourage discussion towards a deeper understanding of cultures and cultural production including aspects, methods, and intersections of the following fields:
– cultural analytics, culturomics, and socio-cultural data science;
– digital humanities and computational humanities;
– cultural evolution, including experimental and observational approaches;
– cultural complexity science, network science, computational social science, and social physics;
– computational linguistics, quantitative aesthetics, critical computer vision, and machine learning;
– art history, cultural history, cultural semiotics, film studies, musicology, and urbanism;
– artistic research, algorithmic curation, and AI art (including aspects of cultural data analysis);
– creative industries research, media economics, and policy studies;
– data journalism, data science, and information visualization.

Contributions ideally address at least one of the following subject domains (in line with state-of-the-art conceptual reference models for cultural data):
– material aspects, including artworks, architecture, texts, images, sound, film, digital media, databases, and other forms of tangible cultural heritage;
– conceptual aspects, including cultural practices, rituals, theories, policies, data models, narratives, imagined communities, and other forms of intangible cultural heritage;
– social aspects, including human behaviour, human mobility, social networks, and social media;
– temporal aspects, from slow historical processes to turbulence in today’s economy of attention;
– spatial aspects of historical topography, cultural geography, and urban dynamics;
– event aspects, which combine the above aspects in cultural co-production, event series, tourism, etc.;
– network aspects of socio-cultural interaction, including the inherent ecology of complex networks as documented in the structure and dynamics of large cultural knowledge graphs or blockchains associated with the crypto-art-market, for example.

Conference program
The CUDAN 2023 main conference programme (December 14-16, 2023) will include six keynotes covering the spectrum of relevant disciplines, a lightning talk session in the plenary, parallel sessions, and a poster section. The latter will run throughout the whole conference in the coffee and lunch area that is collocated with the plenum. The conference will close with a best poster and best paper award ceremony.

The pre-conference day (December 13, 2023) will feature introductory workshops by CUDAN senior fellows, covering aspects of cultural data analysis and visualization using Python, R, Tableau, and the Collection Space Navigator.

Before and after the main conference, we will offer sightseeing tours, including the medieval Tallinn old town and Christmas market (among many reasons to visit Estonia).

We are further planning a meet the publisher’s session and other opportunities for relevant stakeholders, including exhibition booths.

If you or your institution/company is interested in participation, please contact us via email to cudan@tlu.ee, ideally before September 14, 2023.