This workshop brings together social and economic historians, labor economists, and digital humanities scholars who use textual sources (for instance job advertisements, ego-documents, legal documentation) to study historical economies of the labor markets.
In the context of our Job Ads project — whether in newspapers, trade journals, or early employment agencies — we used this unique window into employer demand and labor supply: occupations, skills, gender expectations, and social norms. With digitization and advances in natural language processing (NLP), new possibilities emerge for systematic, large-scale analyses across time and place.
Historical Labor Markets in Text: Computational and Historical Perspectives on Labor Market Evolution
The goal of the workshop is to exchange experiences on how to prepare, model, and interpret textual sources like job ads data for economic, historical and digital research. We will discuss social and economic history of labor, methodological challenges (OCR, classification, text annotation, comparability across periods), share ongoing projects, and explore how computational tools can support broader historical questions about skill demand, gender segmentation, and structural change.
Topics for Discussion
- Historical sources that reveal changing skill requirements, technological shifts, and gendered labor markets.
- Insights from historical job advertisements for understanding labor market evolution.
- Methods for extracting structured social and economic information from historical textual data.
- Designing comparative and longitudinal studies of labor markets across countries and centuries drawing on data beyond already historically aggregations.
- How to link textual sources to economic taxonomies such as HISCO, ISCO, or occupational prestige scales.
- Approaches to aggregating and integrating newly created historical labor market data.
Call for Contributions
Participants are invited to submit an abstract of 400–750 words (excluding references) for a 20-minute presentation, together with a short biographical sketch.
Please send submissions to wiltrud.moelzer@uni-graz.at by 1 February 2026.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by early March 2026. Limited funding for travel and accommodation will be available.