CHR2027 will offer four half-day pre-conference workshops on Tuesday, 5 January 2027:

Please note that the information on this page is preliminary and subject to change as arrangements are finalised.

• two parallel workshops in the morning; and
• two parallel workshops in the afternoon.

All registered workshop participants will be provided with lunch. Lunch will be served at the end of the morning workshops and at the beginning of the afternoon workshops.

Each workshop will be registered for and priced individually. Workshop fees will be additional to the main conference registration fee, and the price of each workshop is to be confirmed.

Exact times, rooms, workshop allocations, capacity, and registration details will be added as arrangements are confirmed.

Workshop Descriptions

App Studies Workshop

This workshop will introduce participants to the field of App Studies. It will present a key archive for historical app studies, together with tools and methods for working with it. The first part will focus on metadata, and the second will use a workflow for researching software artefacts. The work will be placed in the wider context of related projects, enabling participants to generate future research questions.

The Body as Evidence: Humanities-led Approaches to Computational Analysis of Embodied Traces

Computation can now extract a great deal from recorded bodies: pose, gesture, gaze, timing, effort, kinematics, facial signals, and spatial relations. It can embed, cluster, and retrieve these features at scale. A less settled problem is what such features license researchers to claim about culture, history, transmission, or meaning. Computational research on recorded bodies has substantially expanded operational access: the capacity to make bodily material searchable, comparable, and measurable. Operational access, however, does not by itself establish epistemic access.

The workshop puts one proposition to the test: every representation reduces. A photograph, video, motion-capture recording, pose skeleton, or movement descriptor retains some dimensions of movement while reducing others, and more data do not by themselves produce more valid interpretation. The workshop therefore asks under what conditions body-derived computational features can function as humanities evidence, making explicit the chain from source material to representation, from representation to measurement, and from measurement to cultural claim.

The workshop is organised around four to five cases: two from the organisers and the remainder selected through a short open call. Each case will include source material, a computational representation or analytical output, a humanities question or claim, and an unresolved inferential problem. Source material and a one-page case sheet will be circulated one month in advance. Brief provocations will open the day, after which participants will work in groups through a sequence of activities. Groups will be formed primarily by interest, with expertise used to balance them where necessary, and capped to ensure that each includes participants from more than one discipline.

Code Checks Workshop

Like any field of research that relies on computational methods, computational humanities depends on high-quality, or “good”, code to produce reliable and reproducible research results. Code-quality assessment is context-dependent: functionality matters more than style for code accompanying a paper, while reusable software tools have a higher bar for quality. There is, however, still no full agreement on code quality or code review. Even at CHR, not all papers are accompanied by code, and when code is present it cannot always be run (Illmer 2025).

The approach proposed by the CODECHECK project (Eglen and Nüst 2019) is a workflow in which another person tries to run the code for a paper and reproduce its research results and figures. This offers a practical, low-barrier approach to improving reproducibility. The process provides recognition for code authors and code checkers, and improves quality because authors know that someone else will be running their code.

Envisioning Print

This workshop invites participants to engage with a highly interdisciplinary project, Envisioning Print, funded by Schmidt Sciences under its Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) programme. Envisioning Print brings together researchers in computer vision, printing history, and Human-Computer Interaction at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford, working closely with Research Software Engineers at both institutions.

The project is creating a human-centred AI/ML tool, together with a fine-tuned model and dataset, which uses computer vision and perceptual design thinking to address a specialised and demanding task: identifying intentional differences between states of printed books, images, and music. Participants will be invited to test and critique the software and contribute to a broader discussion about humanistic ways of seeing in the age of AI.