Digital Humanities Laboratory

A mosaic of visuals originating from various research projects at the DHLAB.

The Digital Humanities Laboratory was founded by Professor Frédéric Kaplan in 2012. The lab develops new computational approaches to manage large digital cultural objects (such as large corpora of texts, images, and complex documents), and to execute high-resolution digitization of artifacts, buildings, and cities. It also aims to develop new understandings of digital cultures, such as visual languages, video culture, and linguistic mediations.

Most Recent Publications

2026

A circuit diagram illustrating an hourglass timer circuit. The diagram includes components such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors, connected by lines representing electrical connections. Labels indicate component values and connections. The circuit is designed to control the timing of an hourglass display, with annotations explaining the function of each component.A Study of Temporal Fusion Strategies for Named Entity Recognition in Historical Texts

E. Boros 

2026. 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, Tampere, Finland, 2025-09-23 – 2025-09-26. p. 14 – 24. DOI : 10.1007/978-3-032-06136-2_2.

ICDAR 2025 Competition on Historical Map Text Detection, Recognition, and Linking

Y. Lin; S. Tual; Z. Li; L. Jang; Y. Y. Chiang et al. 

2026. 19th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2025), Wuhan, China, 2025-09-16 – 2025-09-21. p. 568 – 585. DOI : 10.1007/978-3-032-04630-7_33.

2025

Georeferencing historical maps using local feature matching and Delaunay consistency

B. Vaienti; I. di Lenardo; F. Kaplan 

Cartography and Geographic Information Science. 2025.  p. 1 – 23. DOI : 10.1080/15230406.2025.2566789.

Lausanne 1831

I. Di Lenardo; R. G. Petitpierre 

Cinisello Balsamo Milano : Silvana Editoriale Spa, 2025.

LLM-Powered Agents for Navigating Venice’s Historical Cadastre

T. Karch; J. Saydaliev; I. di Lenardo; F. Kaplan 

2025

Recognizing and Sequencing Multi-word Texts in Maps Using an Attentive Pointer

M. Zou; T. Dai; R. Petitpierre; B. Vaienti; F. Kaplan et al. 

2025

Cultural Heritage-Based Game Design A Case Study of The Hill

J. Tang 

2025.

Segmentation and Clustering of Local Planimetric Distortion Patterns in Historical Maps of Jerusalem

B. Vaienti; I. di Lenardo; F. Kaplan 

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. 2025. Vol. 14, num. 3. DOI : 10.3390/ijgi14030132.

Reconstructing Saint Mark’s Square in Venice: A 4D Model with Point Cloud Integration for Analyzing Historiographical Hypotheses

I. di Lenardo; B. Vaienti; P. Guhennec; Y. Ubelmann; I. Bianchi et al. 

Heritage. 2025. Vol. 8, num. 2. DOI : 10.3390/heritage8020075.

Exploring Large Vision-Language Models for Historical Newspaper Segmentation

D. C. Papadopoulos 

2025.

Data Visualization Dashboard For Large-Scale Data Processing Monitoring And Quality Control

E. G. J. E. Garandel 

2025.

HAECcity: Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding of City-Scale Point Clouds with Superpoint Graph Clustering

A. Rusnak; F. Kaplan 

2025. 2025 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, Nashville, TN, USA, 2025-06-11 – 2025-06-12. p. 5256 – 5265. DOI : 10.1109/CVPRW67362.2025.00521.

LLM agents for interactive exploration of historical cadastre data: framework and application to Venice

T. Karch; J. Saydaliev; I. Di Lenardo; F. Kaplan 

Computational Humanities Research. 2025. Vol. 1. DOI : 10.1017/chr.2025.10014.

Studying Maps at Scale: A Digital Investigation of Cartography and the Evolution of Figuration

R. G. Petitpierre / F. Kaplan; I. Di Lenardo (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2025. 

Investigating OCR-Sensitive Neurons to Improve Entity Recognition in Historical Documents

E. Boros; M. Ehrmann 

2025. 26th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, Bandar Sunway, Malaysia, 2024-12-04 – 2024-12-06. p. 54 – 66. DOI : 10.1007/978-981-96-0865-2_5.

Document processing in data-scarce, domain-specific environments: The case of multilingual classical commentaries

S. Najem-Meyer / F. Kaplan; M. Romanello (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2025. 

The Skin of Venice: A Computational Approach to the City’s Urban Structure

P. Guhennec / F. Kaplan; I. Di Lenardo (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2025. 

2024

A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO IDENTIFYING TOP-LEVEL TERMS FOR DEVELOPING A SKOS VOCABULARY FOR UKRAINIAN EPIGRAPHY

H. Tamrazyan 

Слобожанський науковий вісник. Серія: Філологія. 2024. num. 7, p. 58 – 65. DOI : https://doi.org/10.32782/philspu/2024.7.9.

Exploring cartographic genealogies through deformation analysis: case studies on ancient maps and synthetic data

B. Vaienti; I. Di Lenardo; F. Kaplan 

Cartography and Geographic Information Science. 2024.  p. 1 – 21. DOI : 10.1080/15230406.2024.2424891.