Conference #

About CUDAN 2023 #

The Cultural Data Analytics Conference 2023 / CUDAN 2023 is scheduled to happen in Tallinn, Estonia from December 13 to 16, 2023, including a number of leading invited practitioners, peer-reviewed long talks, and lightning+poster contributions from the community. The conference is 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 CCS, 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.

Confirmed keynotes, accepted long talks, and accepted lighting talk and poster combinations are listed below. Further information includes the conference scope, key dates, registration & accommodation, the now closed call for abstracts, the team of organizers, and the international program committee members (who have performed peer-review).

We welcome on-site participants in Tallinn from December 13 to 16!

Live streaming #

Plenary talks and parallel session talks A happen in room A002; parallel session talks B happen in room 046 (cf. detailed schedule below).

Dec14 room A002 plenary + A (starting at 9:00):
https://youtube.com/live/TZAKyrobWGk?feature=share
Dec14 room A046 B (starting at 14:30):
https://youtube.com/live/erkg5nB-4eE?feature=share
Dec15 room A002 plenary + A (starting at 9:00):
https://youtube.com/live/nP0dsi6wgPA?feature=share
Dec15 room A046 B (starting at 14:30):
https://youtube.com/live/C8qwKPEFMnM?feature=share
Dec16 room A002 plenary + A (starting at 9:00):
https://youtube.com/live/FGQfBSBgfHs?feature=share
Dec16 room A046 B (starting at 14:30):
https://youtube.com/live/RX-874FhuD0?feature=share

Winter morning in Tallinn. CC-BY Maximilian Schich

Keynote speakers #

– Petter Holme, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland (https://petterhol.me/)
– Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Université de Genève, Switzerland (https://www.unige.ch/…)
– Mauro Martino, Visual Artificial Intelligence Lab, IBM Research, Boston, USA (https://www.mamartino.com/)
– Anu Masso, TalTech, Tallinn, Estonia (https://taltech.ee/…)

Program schedule overview #

CUDAN 2023 Conference schedule (2023-12-12 version)

Program schedule description #

The pre-conference day (December 13, 2023) features introductory workshops by CUDAN senior fellows, covering aspects of cultural data analysis and visualization (see detailed schedule below). The workshops required a free separate signup: https://forms.gle/n6ETYKHLw17KNxP46.

The CUDAN 2023 main conference schedule is set to run over three full days (December 14-16, 2023), including four keynote lectures, two keynote panel sessions, a set of long talks and a set of lightning talk/poster combinations. Most long talks and all lighting talks are scheduled to happen in the plenum (Tallinn University Audimax A002), while afternoon long talks are scheduled in two parallel tracks (rooms A002 and directly adjacent A046). The poster session will run throughout the whole conference in the coffee and lunch area, collocated with both lecture halls. Catering throughout the whole event is free of charge for registered participants. The main conference program will close with a best poster and best long talk award ceremony. Special events include an AI Art Exhibit Reception with food and drinks (December 15, free for all registered participants). A meet the publishers session and a group photo will precede the morning keynote on December 15 and 16.

Before and after the main conference (December 13 & 17), we will offer walking tours, including the medieval Tallinn old town, the Christmas market, and a tour along the coast into the forest (all among many reasons to visit Estonia). Warm clothing is highly recommended. Separate registration was sent to participants via email.

Program schedule details #

December 13 #

December 14 #

December 15 #

December 16 #

December 17 #

Featured publishers #

EPJ Data Science (SpringerNature)
chief editors: Ingmar Weber & Yelena Mejova
https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/

Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (SpringerNature)
chief editor: Gino D’Oca
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/

Journal of Cultural Analytics (McGill University)
editor: Andrew Piper, McGill University
https://culturalanalytics.org/

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS)
chief editor: Marton Karsai, CEU
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/acs

Data & Policy (Cambridge University Press)
contact: Anastasija Nikiforova, Tartu University
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/data-and-policy

Cultural Science Journal (Sciendo)
editor-in-chief: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
https://sciendo.com/journal/CSJ

International Journal for Digital Art History (Heidelberg)
head: Harald Klinke
https://dahj.org/

Leonardo (MIT-Press)
ceo: Diana Ayton-Shenker
https://leonardo.info/

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 welcomed 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.

Key Dates #

Abstracts due: July 24, 2023 (23:59 CET)
Notification of acceptance: September 14, 2023
Registration deadline: October 31, 2023 (or until we run out of capacity)
Conference: December 13-16, 2023
Pre-conference workshops: December 13, 2023
Main conference: December 14-16, 2023 Walking tours: December 13 (afternoon) & 17 (morning)

Conference venue #

The CUDAN 2023 conference venue is located in the Astra building of Tallinn University, Narva mantee 29, 10120 Tallinn, Estonia.

Registration & Accommodation #

Conference registration for accepted authors, PC members, CUDAN affiliates, and guests was made available free of charge, thanks to funding through the European Commission. Pre-conference workshops required free separate signup.

As we are fully funded through the European Commission, there will be no conference fee for accepted participants. Accepted participants are required to register and confirm their attendance. all catering throughout the conference is free of charge for registered participants. Yet, in order to stay in line with European Commission rules, we kindly ask all participants in Tallinn to sign the participation form morning when they enter the conference venue.

Accepted speakers have been notified via email and have been requested to register for the conference by October 6. We kindly asked Programme Committee members and CUDAN affiliates to register by October 31 (to anticipate crowd size and name tag preferences). Guests were welcome to apply for conference participation by October 31. Registration was possible via the following registration form: https://konverentsikeskus.tlu.ee/en/cudan-2023-conference-registration-form

Accepted authors, PC members, and guests were asked to book and cover their own travel and accommodation. Tallinn Airport is a small and highly efficient, only a few minutes commute from the city center, and well connected via international hubs including Copenhagen, Helsinki, Frankfurt, Munich, Riga, and Stockholm. Reduced rate hotel rooms were available from December 12 to 17, using the booking code “CUDAN23” in the following hotels:

– Park Inn by Radisson Central Tallinn 4* (75 Euro, single Standard room per night)
– **Tallink City Hotel** 4* (80/90 Euro, single/double Standard room per night)
– **Tallink Express Hotel** 3* (50/57 Euro, single/double Standard room per night)
– **Nordic Hotel Forum** 4* (90/105 Euro, single/double Standard/Superior room per night)

Please see the following PDF for booking details: CUDAN2023-Hotels.pdf

VISA support letters were provided to accepted authors upon request (via the conference registration form above).

Publishers that want to participate in the meet the publishers session and exhibitors, as well as other relevant stakeholders, who were interested in participating, were encouraged to contact us via email to cudan@tlu.ee.

The planned networking dinner for all participants has been merged with the AI Art Exhibit reception on December 15, which now features food and drinks. No separate registration is necessary. A separate keynote dinner on December 14 is restricted to invited speakers and CUDAN project affiliates. We kindly ask all other conference participants to mingle during the day and organize December 14 dinner on their own. Tallinn culinary scene worthwhile checking out in its full diversity.

Call for Abstracts (closed) #

We invited 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 accepted a total of 49 long contributed talks and 27 combined lightning talks & posters, by a total of 157 accepted co-authors. We strive for an in-person event to maximize community interaction, yet we will offer a limited amount of remote presentation slots. Review was single-blind and performed by a college of 65 Programme Committee members (as listed below).

In the spirit of multidisciplinary abstract conferences and idea conferences, we encouraged submissions that aim to present entirely novel work, and also recently published contributions which would benefit from broader multidisciplinary discussion, asking authors to cite the original publication venue in the latter case.

SUBMISSIONS & REVIEWS: https://openreview.net/group?id=CUDAN.tlu.ee/2023/Conference

Note that submissions and reviews are visible in the review system for accepted authors and reviewers. The conference line-up of accepted authors, who have confirmed their participation, is published above.

Organizers #

Organizing chair #

Maximilian Schich, CUDAN ERA Chair holder

Advising chair #

Lev Manovich, Cultural Analytics Lab, City University of New York, US

Organizing committee #

Workshop chair: Andres Karjus, CUDAN Senior Fellow (computational linguistics)
Video chair: Ksenia Mukhina, CUDAN Senior Fellow (computer science)
Catering chair: Mila Oiva, CUDAN Senior Fellow (cultural history)
Schedule & poster chair: Mikhail Tamm, CUDAN Senior Fellow (social physics)
AI Art Exhibit chair: Mar Canet Sola, CUDAN PhD Fellow (AI art research) Sandra Kaljumäe, CUDAN Project coordinator
Sirli Peda, Tallinn University Conference Center
Sirli Taniloo, Tallinn University Conference Center
Lydia Kurus, Tallinn University Conference Center

Programme committee #

James Abello Monedero, Rutgers University, US
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Indiana University, Bloomington, US
Ruth Ahnert, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Sebastian Ahnert, University of Cambridge, UK
Kim Albrecht, Artist, Berlin, DE
Eduardo Altmann, The University of Sydney, AU
Sandra Alvaro, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ES
Stefano Balietti, Universität Mannheim, DE
Clarisse Bardiot, Université Rennes 2, FR
Maria Christina Binz-Scharf, CUNY City College of NY, US
Chico Q Camargo, University of Exeter, UK
Nicola Carboni, Université de Genève, CH
Damiano Cerrone, Tampere University, FI
Javier Cha, University of Hong Kong, HK
CJ Chen, Nanjing University, CN
Ana Clemente, University of Barcelona, ES
Bronwyn Coate, RMIT University, AU
Michele Coscia, IT-University of Copenhagen, DK
Brian Coxall, Brigham Young University, US
David J. Crandall, Indiana University, US
Christine Cuskley, Newcastle University, UK
Maria-Rita D’Orsogna, University of California, Los Angeles, US
Kate Elswit, University of London, UK
Sara Irina Fabrikant, University of Zurich, CH
Elena Fedorovskaya, Rochester Institute of Technology, US
Jianbo Gao, Beijing Normal University, CN
David Garcia, Universität Konstanz, DE
Bruno Goncalves, Data For Science, Inc., US
Jack Grieve, University of Birmingham, UK
Daria Gritsenko, University of Helsinki, FI
Thilo Gross, HIFMB & Universität Oldenburg, DE
Ryan Heuser, Princeton University, US
Yurij Holovatch, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, UA
Natalie M Houston, University of Massachusetts at Lowell, US
Ana Jofre, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, US
Mauri Kaipainen, Perspicamus, Helsinki, FI
Folgert Karsdorp, Meertens Institute, NL
Lindsay King, Stanford University, US
Harald Klinke, LMU Munich, DE
Ilias Kyriazis, Fachhochschule Potsdam, DE
John Laudun, University of Louisiana at Lafeyette, US
Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, Aarhus Universitet, DK
Lik-Hang Lee, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HK
Liina Lindström, University of Tartu, EE
Jordi McKenzie, Macquarie University, AU
Stefania Milan, University of Amsterdam, NL
David Mimno, Cornell University, Ithaca/NY, US
Daria Morozova, Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, FR
Cassini Nazir, University of North Texas, US
Maarja Ojamaa, University of Tartu, EE
Giovanni Petri, Northeastern University London, UK
Iyad Rahwan, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, DE
Martin Rosvall, Umeå University, SE
Louis Michael Shekhtman, Northeastern University, Boston, US
André Skupin, San Diego State University, US
Oleg Sobchuk, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, DE
Juan Luis Suárez, University of Western Ontario, CA
Pablo Suarez-Serrato, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, MX
Nina Tahmasebi, Språkbanken (The swedish language bank), SE
Timothy R Tangherlini, University of California, Berkeley, US
Mark Taylor, University of Sheffield, UK
Jer Thorp, New York University, US
Lauren Tilton, University of Richmond, US
Mikko Tolonen, University of Helsinki, FI
Stephen Miles Uzzo, National Museum of Mathematics, US
Melvin Wevers, University of Amsterdam, NL
Hyejin Youn, Northwestern University, Evanston, US

For updated information, please re-check the conference website (https://cudan.tlu.ee/conference/).
In case of questions, please do not hesitate to contact us via email to cudan@tlu.ee.

We’d love to welcome you in Tallinn, Estonia in December 2023!