Digital History Conference 2026

Digital History – Doing Cultural Heritage

When: 28. September - 1. October 2026

Where: University of Salzburg

Registration: Kindly refer to the Call for Contributions - Submission deadline: 18.12.2025.

Organisation: Christina Antenhofer (Mittelalterliche Geschichte und Historische Hilfswissenschaften), Laurence Cole (Österreichische Geschichte), Karoline Döring (Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit), Peter Färberböck (Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit), Christoph Kühberger (Geschichts- und Politikdidaktik/Public History), Robert Obermair (Geschichts- und Politikdidaktik/Public History).

Every two years, the Working Group on Digital History within the Association of Historians in Germany (VHD) , together with partner institutions at alternating venues, organizes a large-scale Digital History conference. The event serves as a platform for discussing current developments in digital history within the German-speaking academic community, focusing particularly on disciplinary transformations and methodological implications. Previous conferences held in Göttingen / online (2021) , Berlin (2023) , and Halle (2024) have addressed concepts, methods, and critiques of digital history, the use of digital methods in historical research practice, and the relationship between Digital History and Citizen Science. In 2026, the conference will take place outside Germany for the first time. Hosted by the University of Salzburg—a key institution in the Austrian Digital Humanities community—the fourth conference will focus on the potential of digital access and computational historical research into cultural heritage.

Conference Theme

In recent years, digital approaches in the historical sciences have attracted particular attention in the fields of digital editions and text processing. By contrast, discussions about digital access to material sources and the broader domain of cultural heritage have been comparatively underrepresented. At the University of Salzburg, research on material culture in connection with digital tools and methods has a long tradition. Accordingly, the 2026 Digital History Conference places cultural heritage at its center and embeds it within a broad discussion of “Doing Cultural Heritage.” This also entails involving stakeholders beyond universities—such as museums, archives, heritage institutions, and memorial initiatives. These cultural and memory institutions are undergoing profound transformations through digitization, which require not only practical but also theoretical reflection. The Salzburg conference will thus focus on three major thematic areas: Documenting, Mediating, and Remembering.

Documenting historical records:
The first thematic area focuses on the documentation of historical holdings, encompassing the full range of historical sources. Particular attention is paid to the materiality of sources and to questions of how they can be digitally represented, semantically annotated, and analyzed in an appropriate way. This includes both text-bearing artifacts and material or visual sources such as buildings, landscapes, and much more. Approaches from ancient DNA research—i.e., the study of the DNA of historical humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms—may also be addressed. The goal is to explore diverse digital approaches, including digitization for improved scholarly access, transformation into digital 3D objects, digital offerings as new narrative layers or exhibition spaces, and the digital processing of historical sources. Possible topics include:

Securing and cataloguing archival and museum holdings
Digitally documenting material culture, images, and textual sources in their materiality
Digital collections and born-digital objects
Postcolonial debates in the context of archival and museum collections
Research on ancient DNA and its implications for the historical sciences

Mediating cultural knowledge:
The use of digital mediation tools (including AI) has become an increasingly prominent research field in history education and public history. This includes not only the study of digital media objects (apps, VR, games, databases, etc.) as vehicles for learning and conveying history, but also empirical investigations into user practices and processes of reception in order to critically accompany the appropriation of digital culture. This second thematic area therefore aims to create space for research into digital mediation environments within the heritage sector—discussing both theoretical approaches and pragmatic implementations. At the same time, it seeks to strengthen empirical reception studies concerning engagement with the digital and to focus on the associated challenges. Using concrete case studies of “Doing Cultural Heritage,” mediation strategies employing digital tools are to be explored from multiple perspectives, foregrounding not only the technical dimension of historical offerings but also their historiographical framing and individual reception. Possible topics include:

The use of AI or VR in different mediation contexts
Historical learning in, through, and with digital media (production and reception)
AI as both a point of departure and a site of reflection for history
Digital Public History between digital hype, meaningful innovation, and commercial trivialization
Empirical reception studies of digital mediation offerings
VR as museum staging or game-based “reality”
Digital Humanities tools for researching mediation processes

Remembering (im)material pasts:
Commemorative and memory culture in the 21st century can no longer escape the influence of digitization. Since the Instagram project @ichbinsophiescholl , debates about a contemporary and appropriate culture of remembrance in digital spaces have entered the academic mainstream. The range of activities is as diverse as memory culture itself. This third thematic area opens the conference to a wide variety of questions in this field. Possible topics include:

Digital visualization of commemorative landscapes
Digitally presented eyewitness testimony (e.g., holograms of Holocaust survivors)
Digital mediation formats at memorial sites
Digital games and representations of the past
Digital archives and digitized sources as opportunities for a living culture of remembrance
Ethical questions regarding the use of social media in commemorative practices

Kindly refer to the Call for Contributions and submit your contribution (paper, poster, workshop) until 18.12.2025.

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