Workshop on Structure and Interpretion
Lausanne,
Workshop on Structure and Interpretation: Towards Computational Historiographical Modeling
On March 31, 2026, we held the closing workshop of my SNSF project Towards Computational Historiographical Modeling: Corpora and Concepts at the Château de Dorigny.
The workshop brought together a panel of invited international experts, local researchers, and early-career researchers to discuss the epistemology of digital and computational humanities, with a focus on structure and interpretation.
We focused specifically on the challenges of historiographical modeling with regard to conceptual reasoning, causality, and uncertainty in formal systems; the ways in which models reflect historiographical concepts; and the epistemology of digital and computational humanities in light of infrastructural and formal constraints more broadly.
Manfred Thaller giving the keynote.
Following a keynote by Manfred Thaller, the workshop was organized as a World Café, based on position statements prepared by the interdisciplinary panel of invited scholars. The workshop explicitly takes a dialogic approach, centering discussion as a method of research and knowledge production. Participants should therefore be prepared to take an active role in the discussions.
Invited Speakers
- Sébastien de Valeriola (ULB)
- Moritz Feichtinger (University of Basel)
- Tessa Gengnagel (University of Cologne)
- Sébastien Poublanc (CNRS/University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès)
- Manfred Thaller (emeritus, University of Cologne)
- Christian Wachter (University of Münster)