Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 286.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2026-01-09 16:16:52+00:00
        From: Georg Vogeler <georg.vogeler@gmx.de>
        Subject: CfP: Historical Labour Markets in Text: Computational and Historical Perspectives on Labour Market Evolution 24./25.4.2026

Dear Digital Humanists,

the workshop "Historical Labour Markets in Text: Computational and
Historical Perspectives on Labour Market Evolution" brings together
social and economic historians, labour economists, and digital
humanities scholars who use textual sources (for instance job
advertisements, ego-documents, legal documentation) to study historical
economies of the labour markets.

In the context of our Job ads project
(https://historical-job-ads.uni-graz.at/) — whether in newspapers, trade
journals, or early employment agencies — we used this unique window into
employer demand and labor supply: occupations, skills, gender
expectations, and social norms. With digitization and advances in
natural language processing (NLP), new possibilities emerge for
systematic, large-scale analyses across time and place.

The goal of the workshop is to exchange experiences on how to prepare,
model, and interpret textual sources like job advertisement data for
economic, historical and digital research. We will discuss social and
economic history of labour, methodological challenges (OCR,
classification, text annotation, comparability across periods), share
ongoing projects, and explore how computational tools can support
broader historical questions about skill demand, gender segmentation,
and structural change.

Topics include:

- Which historical sources can inform us about changing skill
requirements, technological change, and gendered labour markets.
- What can we learn from historical job ads about changing  labour markets?
- Which methods are available for extracting structured social and
economic information from historical text?
- How can we set up comparative and longitudinal studies of labour
markets across countries and centuries drawing on data beyond already
historically aggregations?
- How can we enrich  textual sources by linking them to economic
taxonomies like HISCO, ISCO, or occupational prestige scales?
- What has to be done to aggregate and integrate data created on the
historical labour market?

If you want to participate with a talk (ca. 20min), send an abstract
with min. 400 and 750 words (excl. bibliographic references) and a short
biographical sketch to wiltrud.moelzer@uni-graz.at by **February 1st,
2026**. We will inform you about acceptance by the beginning of March.
There will be limited financial support for travel and accommodation.

Attached the call in PDF

Looking forward to read your contributions

Georg Vogeler
--
Prof. Dr. Georg Vogeler

Department of Digital Humanities
University of Graz
A-8010 Graz | Elisabethstraße 59/III
Tel. +43 316 380 8033
<http://digital-humanities.uni-graz.at> - <http://gams.uni-graz.at>
<https://online.uni-
graz.at/kfu_online/wbForschungsportal.cbShowPortal?pPersonNr=80075>
ORCID: 0000-0002-1726-1712

Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik e.V. <http://www.i-d-e.de>
International Center for Archival Research ICARus <http://www.icar-us.eu>
ERC Project DiDip <https://didip.eu>


_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php