HistoInformatics 2017 - the 4th International (half-day) Workshop on Computational History will be held on 6 November, 2017 in conjunction with the 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017), Singapore. Traditionally, historical research is based on the hermeneutic investigation of preserved records and artifacts to provide a reliable account of the past and to discuss different hypotheses. Alongside this hermeneutic approach historians have always been interested in translating primary sources into data and used methods, often borrowed from the Social Sciences, to analyze them. A new wealth of digitized historical documents have however opened up completely new challenges for the computer-assisted analysis of e.g. large text or image corpora. Historians can greatly benefit from the advances of Computer and Information Sciences which are dedicated to the processing, organization and analysis of such data. New computational techniques can be applied to help verify and validate historical assumptions. We call this approach HistoInformatics, analogous to Bioinformatics and ChemoInformatics which have respectively proposed new research trends in Biology and Chemistry. The main topics of the proposed workshop are: (1) support for historical research and analysis in general through the application of Computer Science theories or technologies, (2) analysis and re-use of historical texts, (3) analysis of collective memories, (4) visualisations of historical data, (5) access to large wealth of accumulated historical knowledge.

This is a highly interdisciplinary workshop that goes beyond traditional Computer Acience topics. The workshop emphasizes non-standard, research-oriented informatics technologies for solving novel research problems and scenarios. Our objective is to provide for the two different research communities a place to meet and exchange ideas and to facilitate discussion. We hope the workshop will result in a survey of current problems and potential solutions, with particular focus on exploring opportunities for collaboration and interaction of researchers working on various subareas within Computer Science and History Sciences.