Digitale Slawistik

The integration of digital technologies has become increasingly important across academic disciplines in the 21st century, rapidly transforming research possibilities and methodologies in the humanities and social sciences. Since the emergence of transformer neural networks like BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and the subsequent rise of Large Language Models, linguistic research has experienced yet another wave of profound changes, especially in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Despite these developments, implementing digital technologies remains a desideratum in Slavic linguistics, particularly when working with low-resource historical varieties. The panel “Digitale Slawistik” (‘Digital Slavic Studies’), held as a part of the 48th Austrian Linguistics Conference (48. Österreichische Linguistiktagung) at the University of Innsbruck on December 18–19, 2024, aimed to address this gap by bringing together linguists who study Slavic languages and incorporate digital methods into their research practice. Over the two days, scholars from Germany, Austria, Italy, and the Czech Republic presented their research. The event was organised by Elias Bounatirou (University of Vienna), Anna Jouravel (University of Freiburg), Maximilian Grübsch (University of Vienna), and Ilia Afanasev (University of Vienna).