We could present our project recently at the DHd Conference 2024 in Passau, Germany from 26.02.2024 – 01.03.2024. The conference is the annual meeting of the "Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum" association (https://dig-hum.de). This year’s edition was then 10th and took place under the theme "DH Quo Vadis".Our team had the chance to present a poster on our project, the "Tracing the Transformation of the Labour Market through Historical Job Advertisements" on February 29th.
Our research focuses on analyzing historical job advertisements from 1850-1950 in Austria, utilizing NLP techniques to study employment trends and the evolution of skills demand within the ANNO corpus of digitized newspapers. The project confronts challenges such as OCR and OLR errors and aims to refine data quality for deeper insights.
In addition to our poster presentation, we participated in the Posterslam with humorous readings from our historical job ad collection, highlighting the project's unique approach to digital humanities research.
The opening keynote of the conference already demonstrated how close our project is to DH: Marco van Leeuwen (https://www.uu.nl/staff/MHDvanLeeuwen), a renowned historical sociologist (or social historian – he did not take side) is the inventor of the History of Work Classification (https://historyofwork.iisg.amsterdam/) and his talk addressed the link between records of everyday historical people and digital analysis of, as we are doing in our project. This and any other contributions made participation in the DHd Conference 2024 a valuable opportunity for dialogue and collaboration within the Digital Humanities community, enriching our project with fresh perspectives and feedback.
For more details and to see the conference poster go to our research results.