This year marks the third annual DHBenelux conference, which cycles through the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The third instalment will be held in Luxembourg, and as part of the local organisation and programme committee I get the chance this year to look at all the submissions. Inspired by Scott Weingart’s series on submissions to the annual ADHO DH conference (see his 2016 post on submissions here), I present you a first analysis of the submissions to DHBenelux 2016. Later posts will bring comparisons with the 2014 and 2015 editions, as well as a description of the steps taken to get to the figures below.

Types of submissions

We received a total of 116 submissions this year. This year introduces a difference in time allocated to long papers (30 minutes inc questions) and short papers (15 minutes inc questions). Other than that, the numbers are simple:

• 34 long paper (750-1000 words abstract)
• 55 short paper (500-750 words abstract)
• 36 Poster or Demo (500 words abstract)

Authors

Collaboration

These 116 submissions were written by a total of 204 authors. Only a quarter of authors did not collaborate: 49 authors worked alone. Some authors wrote a paper alone next to collaborating on another paper, so that a total of 57 papers was written by a single author, almost half of all the submissions. See the below chart for a complete overview of the number of authors per submission, and hover on each bar to see the numbers.

Countries

These 204 authors come from a total from 13 countries, making the submissions a bit more international than “Benelux” seems to suggest. Unsurprisingly, most of the authors do come from the Benelux, over half the authors come from Belgium (55) or the Netherlands (61). For reasons of privacy, I have combined all the countries with a single author representing under “Other”. See the below chart for a complete overview.

Keywords

Author provided keywords

In contrast to the global DH conference, DHBenelux does not ask to check predefined categories. Instead, what we have are keywords provided by authors. An advantage is that this covers the topics better, but a disadvantage is the wide variety of keywords we get. The 116 submissions are described using 1,151 words, or 579 unique words. The variety shows when we count how many of these unique words occur only once: 420. Removing slight alterations might make this a smaller figure: e.g., in the below chart I combined “network” (11 occurrences) and “networks” (11 occurrences) into “network” (22 occurrences), but for now we can get a gist of keywords used. See the chart below for all the keywords occurring five times or more often.

Words from the abstracts

Finally, let’s compare when we extract words from the abstracts themselves. All the abstracts together contain 105k words, and 15.8k unique words^[1]These are not exact figures, since many abstracts contain the paper title, author names, and references, but some do not. Moreover, I did not combine similar words in this analysis. This review is just to get a sense of the submissions. Overall the words are fairly similar from the keywords; digital is the main term of interest, applied to mainly historical and textual research. See below the chart with all words from the submission abstracts with over 100 occurrences.

Wrap-up

So far, what we can see is that the submissions to DHBenelux 2016 are nicely varied. In future blog posts I will compare these numbers 1) to which submissions finally get accepted, 2) to the earlier DHBenelux conferences, and 3) the global DH conference (if possible). If you want more information on the submissions, ask away in the comments.