Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for the international conference ** Collect & Connect: Archives and Collections in a Digital Age **. The deadline for paper submissions is 11 September 2020. The conference will be held online on 23 to 24 November 2020. Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden (the Netherlands) from 23 to 24 November 2020 (* see also COVID 19 note below).

The aims of this conference which officially concludes the NWO/Brill Creative Industries Project Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives (2016-2020) are twofold. First, to present results of finished and original research in the field of digitized archives and natural and cultural heritage collections. Second, to promote exchange and discussion between researchers and heritage professionals in the field of digital natural and cultural heritage. Papers can be submitted as regular papers (=10-12 pages) and short papers (=5-9 pages) through EASYCHAIR. More information about the conference and the link to the submission system can be found here: http://cfp.makingsenseproject.org

All positively reviewed papers shall be submitted as proceedings volume to CEUR-WS.orghttp://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fceur-ws.org%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEBm1QvnYY6Vm7SnigPfVyTcXDYgQ for online publication. Six to eight papers presented at the conference are expected to be selected for publication in the Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH).

Scope of the special session: In recent years, libraries, archives and museums have spent major efforts on annotating and enriching their digitized archives and collections with contextual information, in order to make them retrievable and interlinked in novel ways. Often institutions aim to enhance their reach and relevance for broader user groups. A major challenge in the field is the heterogeneous character of many of such digitized collections. Many handwritten archives and collections of physical objects in the realms of natural history, archaeology, history, and art history entail combinations of textual and visual elements whose interpretation requires a range of different expertise and computational technologies. This conference therefore welcomes papers that present, discuss, and reflect upon the technical, social, and institutional challenges digital heritage professionals and researchers encounter when enriching heterogeneous digitized collections with context. Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Semantic web approaches to interlinking digitized historical archives and collections * Text and image interpretation in digital collections * Multimodal collection interpretation and access * Handwriting recognition and heterogeneous digital collections * Machine learning and digital collections * Bias and digital heritage * Computer vision and digital collections * Digital collections' access and inclusivity * Sharing and visualization of heterogeneous historical archives and collections * Citizen science (including crowdsourcing) and digital archives and collections * Challenges of enriching digitized handwritten archive material * Digital capture and annotation of heterogeneous collections and artefacts * Dealing with uncertainty, quality issues, data bias and collection gaps * Geographical and spatial enrichment of collections * Application of common vocabularies and data reconciliation If you are not sure whether you research fits with ** Collect & Connect ** or if you have any other question relate to the event, please do not hesitate to contact the conference chairs:

1. Andreas Weber (a.weber@utwente.nlmailto:a.weber@utwente.nl)

1. Eulàlia Gassó Miracle (eulalia.gassomiracle@naturalis.nlmailto:eulalia.gassomiracle@naturalis.nl) 2. Katy Wolstencroft (k.j.wolstencroft@liacs.leidenuniv.nlmailto:k.j.wolstencroft@liacs.leidenuniv.nl)

4. Maarten Heerlien (m.heerlien@rijksmuseum.nlmailto:m.heerlien@rijksmuseum.nl)

Kind regards, Andreas Weber

(*) COVID-19 NOTE: Due to current COVID-19 regulations we do not yet know in what form the conference will take place. For now, we aim at a hybrid conference which will allow a small number of participants from nearby to come to Naturalis. All other participants (including presenting authors from abroad) who cannot come to Naturalis, will get in any event the opportunity to contribute to the conference digitally.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr. Andreas Weber, University of Twente Assistant professor | Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS) https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/steps/staff/weber/ International Conference: Collect&Connect: Archives and Collections in a Digital Age - submit a paperhttp://cfp.makingsenseproject.org/! ICAART Special session on AI & Digital Cultural Heritage (ARTIDIGH 2021) - submit a paperhttp://www.icaart.org/ARTIDIGH.aspx! Most recent journal paper: Collecting Colonial Nature (BMGN, 2019, 134) - PDFhttps://www.bmgn-lchr.nl/articles/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10741/ Most recent book: Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts (Brill, 2019) - TOChttps://brill.com/view/title/24990?lang=en