Listening to the Past: Digital Approaches to the History of Sound and Language

Call for Papers

The “Listening to the Past” workshop will bring scholars with interests in history, linguistics, and the digital humanities together to discuss the use of audio[visual] sources, the development of innovative methodologies for their study and dissemination, and assess the state of the field and chart opportunities for future research. Funding for the workshop is kindly supported by the Volkswagen Stiftung in conjunction with the research project “Let the Past Speak! Turning Migrant Letters of the 19th Century into Speech,” a joint collaboration of the German Historical Institute Washington and the University of Texas at Austin (Department of Germanic Studies) that will investigate leveraging written and oral sources with artificial intelligence (AI) technology to revive the sound of 19th-century speech.

Over the past fifteen years historians have become alive to the potential of the history of the senses, developing a new awareness and interest in methodological approaches rooted in sensory perception. Part of this work has included attempts to reconstruct the frameworks by which actors in the past created shared sensory vocabularies—whether visual, auditory, or olfactory, among other possibilities—to make sense of or to transform their surroundings and their culture. Out of necessity, when dealing with unconventional sources, such as songs and recipes, where lived experience might transcend the textual or the pictorial, scholars in history and other disciplines have also developed new tools to conduct research and to in turn communicate their results to academic and public audiences. 

With respect to auditory sources, linguists and especially sociolinguists have long been at the forefront of research, using both studies specifically designed to record language usage and oral histories recorded for other purposes to trace the history and development of regional, social, and other types of dialects as well as “standard” speech. Over the past twenty years, linguists have also opened up new avenues for research by analyzing historical (hand-written and printed) documents with digital methodologies to determine how languages and their various dialects change over time and why. These data not only shed light on the structural changes of languages and dialects, but they also have allowed linguists to gain a better understanding of the social and regional dynamics which influence language change.

Given this background, the “Listening to the Past” workshop will bring together a small cohort of scholars with interests in history, linguistics, and digital humanities to discuss the use of audio[visual] sources, the development of innovative methodologies for their study and dissemination, and to assess the state of the field and chart opportunities for future research.

We invite scholars from various methodological and historical backgrounds to participate in this international workshop. The workshop will be conducted in English. Scholars of linguistics working on any language, not only German, are encouraged to contribute proposals. The potential thematic range for proposals includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• Sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, including the development of dialects in diaspora communities
• The history of sound and the use of recorded/audiovisual sources in historical research
• Applications of artificial intelligence to historical and linguistic research
• Ethics of digital methodologies, tools, and datasets in the humanities
   

The workshop will take place from March 19-20, 2026, and will be hosted by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

Please submit an abstract (max. 500 words) and a short CV online in English via the GHI conference platform by May 28, 2025.

Accommodations will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers. Participants will make their own travel arrangements; funding subsidies for travel are available upon request for selected scholars, especially those who might not otherwise be able to attend the workshop, including junior scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources.

For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Hans Boas or Atiba Pertilla. For other logistical questions, or if you have any difficulties submitting your information online, please contact Nicola Hofstetter-Phelps.