[Afridig] Deadline extension RAIL workshop and DHASA conference

[Menno Van Zaanen]

Deadline extension:
Due to several requests, we have decided to extend the deadlines for
both the DHASA 2025 conference and the co-located RAIL workshop.

NEW DEADLINE: 4 August 2025
DHASA Conference dates: 10-14 November 2025
RAIL Workshop date: 10 November 2025
Venue: CSIR International Convention Centre.
The sixth RAIL workshop website: https://sadilar.org/rail-2025/
DHASA website: https://digitalhumanities.org.za/


DHASA conference information (RAIL information follows below):

Theme: The role of humanities in digital humanities and artificial
intelligence

The Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA) is
pleased to announce its fifth conference, focusing on the theme The
role of humanities in digital humanities and artificial intelligence.
In a region where the field of Digital Humanities is still relatively
underdeveloped, this conference aims to address this gap and foster
growth and collaboration in the field. The conference offers an
opportunity for researchers interested in showcasing their work in the
broad field of Digital Humanities to come together. By doing so, the
conference provides a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-
the-art in Digital Humanities, particularly within the Southern Africa
region. As such, we welcome submissions related to Digital Humanities
research conducted by individuals from Southern Africa or research
focused on the geographical area of Southern Africa in the broad sense.

Furthermore, the conference serves as a platform for information
sharing and networking among researchers passionate about Digital
Humanities. By bringing together experts working on Digital Humanities
in Southern Africa or with a focus on Southern Africa, we aim to
promote collaboration and facilitate further research in this dynamic
field. In addition to the main conference, affiliated workshops and
tutorials will be organised, providing researchers with valuable
insights into novel technologies and tools. These supplementary events
are designed for researchers interested in specific aspects of Digital
Humanities or seeking practical information to enter or advance their
knowledge in the field.

The DHASA conference welcomes interdisciplinary contributions from
researchers in various domains of Digital Humanities, including, but
not limited to, language, literature, visual art, performance and
theatre studies, media studies, music, history, sociology, psychology,
language technologies, library studies, philosophy, methodologies,
software and computation, AI, and more. Our goal is to cultivate an
inclusive scientific community of practice within Digital Humanities.


RAIL 2025 Workshop information:

The sixth Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop
will be co-located with the Digital Humanities Association of Southern
Africa (DHASA) 2025 conference at the CSIR International Convention
Centre in Pretoria, South Africa, on 10 November 2025. The RAIL
workshop is an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on
African indigenous languages resources such as natural languages
processing (NLP) tools, Human Language Technologies (HLT), data
collections, and annotations. This workshop aims to  foster a
scientific community of practice that focuses on computational
linguistic tools and data that are designed for or applied to the
indigenous languages of Africa. Many African languages are under-
resourced while only a few are considered to be somewhat better
resourced. These languages often share interesting properties such as
writing systems, making them different from most high-resourced
languages. From a computational perspective, these languages lack
enough corpora to undertake high level development of NLP and HLT
tools, which in turn impedes the development of African languages in
these areas. During previous workshops, it was noted that the problems
and solutions presented were not only applicable to African languages
but were also relevant to many other low-resource languages across the
world. Because these languages share similar challenges, this workshop
provides researchers with opportunities to work collaboratively on
issues of language resource development and learn from each other.The
RAIL workshop has several aims. First, the workshop brings together
researchers who work on African indigenous languages, forming a
community of practice for people working on indigenous languages.
Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished
existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in
a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for
discussions on novel, desired resources for future research in this
area. Third, it enhances sharing of knowledge on the development of
low-resource languages. Finally, it enables discussions on how to
improve the quality as well as availability of the resources.The
workshop has “Language resources in the age of large language models”
as its theme, but submissions on any topic related to properties of
African indigenous languages (including related non- African languages)
may be accepted.


Submission Guidelines for both RAIL and DHASA:

* Long papers: Authors may submit long papers with a maximum of 8
content pages and unlimited pages for references and appendices. The
final versions of accepted long papers will be granted an additional
page (leading to a total of up to 9 content pages) to incorporate
reviewers’ comments. Long papers accepted for the conference will be
presented in 30-minute time slots (which includes 10 minutes for
questions).
* Short papers: Authors may submit short papers with a maximum of 5
content pages and unlimited pages for references and appendices. The
final versions of accepted short papers will be allowed an extra page
(leading to a total of up to 6 content pages) to accommodate reviewers’
comments. Short papers accepted for the conference will be presented in
15-minute time slots (which includes 5 minutes for questions).
* Executive summaries: Authors can submit an executive summary for work
in progress, limited to 1 page. Executive summaries accepted for the
conference will be presented as posters during a dedicated poster
presentation slot.

Steps to submit your contributions:
* Please register here: https://www.conftool.pro/dhasa2025
* Once registered, click on Your Submissions to submit a new
contribution.
* Here you will have the option to submit a:
- DHASA Long paper
- DHASA Short paper
- DHASA Executive summary
- RAIL submission
* Select and click on your contribution type to continue.
* Add the following detail:
- Information on all the authors
- Contribution details, including the title and topic best suited to
your contribution.
- Up to five keywords, and
- An indication of whether students are submitting the contribution.
* Upload your file and submit, or save your submission and return at a
later stage to upload your file.


Peer Review Process

The peer review process is fully open. This means that the reviewers
will see your name, and you will be able to see the reviewers’ names.
This also means that you do not need to anonymise your submission.


Data Sets

Authors are encouraged to upload their dataset to the SADiLaR
repository (https://repo.sadilar.org/). Guidelines for submission are
available here: https://sadilar.org/en/resource-guidelines/. In case of
difficulties uploading the datasets, please reach out to Benito Trollip
(benito.trollip at nwu.ac.za).

All accepted long and short paper submissions that are presented at the
conference will be published in the JDHASA journal, see
https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/dhasa. In addition, the executive
summaries for the poster presentations will be published in a book of
executive summaries before the conference.

We particularly encourage student submissions where the first author is
a student.

All submissions should adhere to the ACL style guide:
https://acl-org.github.io/ACLPUB/formatting.html

*Please note that although we follow the ACL guidelines, the page limit
for DHASA submissions differs from what is specified in those
guidelines.

Submissions should be submitted in PDF format. Submissions that do not
adhere to the prescribed style guide will be rejected.

Follow this link to go to the submission platform:
https://dh2025.digitalhumanities.org.za/submission/


DHASA Organising Committee

Sthembiso Mkhwanazi, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Aby Louw, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Andiswa Bukula, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
Franco Mak, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Ilana Wilken, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Johannes Sibeko, Nelson Mandela University
Juan Steyn, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
Laurette Marais, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Marissa Griesel, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
Privolin Naidoo, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

RAIL Organising Committee

Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa

--
Prof Menno van Zaanen     menno.vanzaanen at nwu.ac.za
Professor in Digital Humanities
South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
https://www.sadilar.org
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