The DHNB conference 2023 (6th to 10th of March)
Summary: Take a look at the DHNB conference this week – it sounds pretty good!
This week, the 2023 Digital Humanities in the Nordics and Baltics (DHNB) Conference is taking place (online). Its topic is Sustainability: Environment – Community – Data. On Monday (6th) and Tuesday (7th) local workshops are happening, among others at the Royal Danish Library (7.3., 10-12).
Wednesday to Friday are then packed with interesting presentations, starting at noon-ish (12:30) and going into the evening.
My presentation
For myself a small contribution named Collecting and sharing references in Christian-Muslim religious encounters with the OTRA framework: an assessment and a roadmap was accepted as a “Show and Tell” presentation. Due to the online format, there will not be any live “showing and telling”. Rather, I was asked to record a 5-minute presentation beforehand. Admittedly, it takes a bit of the thrill out of it, if one just sends in a recording. To make it a bit more fun, I therefore recorded it in the middle of our local, snow-clad forest. The presentation is scheduled to run on Friday, the 10th, some time (or on repeat) between 12:30 pm and 2 pm.
Update: There will apparently be a chance to discuss my presentation afterwards, i.e. in the panel ST06: Show and Tell Presentations (Reels) between 2:30 pm and 3 pm.
Here is an impression of how this looks like

Presentations I will be watching closely
I am most interested in Semantic Web technologies. Three talks I would highlight are:
(1) Both talks in OT03: Political Discourse, Thursday, 9th of March, 12:30-2 pm.
Otto Tarkka, Kimmo Elo, Filip Ginter, Veronika Laippala: Exploring the stability of political rhetoric in Finnish parliamentary debates using deep learning
Magnus P. Ängsal, Daniel Brodén, Mats Fridlund, Leif-Jöran Olsson, Patrik Öhberg: Vectors of Violence: Changing Conceptualizations of Terror, Terrorism and Våldsbejakande extremism in Swedish Parliamentary Data, 1971–2018
My comment: Both talks use language technology on parliamentary speeches in order to gain insights on shifting or stable discourses. This might be interesting to consider for historical discourses, such as inter-religious debates.
(2) In DT02: Infrastructures, Thursday, 9th of March, 2:30-4:00 pm.
James Matthew Fielding, Alois Pichler: The SRDM Methodology for Sustainable Semantic Infrastructure: The Case of the Wittgenstein Archives Bergen and Its Related Resources
My comment: When starting out with my project, the Wittgenstein Archives stuck out to me as one successful employment of Ontologies to structure humanistic data. One can explore connections within Wittgenstein’s “Nachlass” through an ontology explorer. Now they are harmonizing their (assumedly custom) ontology with the widely-used top level ontology CIDOC CRM, a process that is guided by the ominous “Semantic Reference Data Modeling” (SRDM), which will probably be explained in the talk.
In DT04: Open Data FAIR, Friday, 10th of March, 2:30-4 pm.
Costanza Navarretta, Dorte Haltrup Hansen: CLARIN-DK: Supporting the production and distribution of FAIR data – achievements and open issues
My comment: Clarin.dk is probably the most prominent and influential DH data platform in Denmark. Therefore it’s time to listen and cheer for the home team regarding the questions of how data production and sharing can be made more “FAIR” (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jacob Langeloh (March 6, 2023). Running as a Reel. OTRA-Blog. Retrieved April 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/voyf