DHd2026: Call for Papers

DHd2026: “Not Only Text, Not Only Data”

annual conference of the Association of Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries, organized by the University of Vienna.

23–27 February 2026. Submission deadline: 1 August 2025

Both digitization of cultural heritage and abstract information modeling have, in recent years, significantly expanded the breadth of potential research in the humanities. The initial source of this expansion was primarily the creation of textual corpora and the development of algorithms and interfaces for text analysis. Over time, this has evolved to the point where it now includes the digital capture of virtually all “objects” within the humanities, and their attendant analytical interconnections: individuals, places, material culture, concepts, artworks, spoken interactions, and more. Yet despite the diversity of approaches, ideas, data, and methods in today’s digital humanities, focus often remains on more text-centred projects and data-focused results. We propose addressing the challenges posed by this expansion beyond text and data as the conference motto: not by excluding text-centered approaches but by placing them within a broader context.

Disciplines such as art history, archaeology, and museum studies traditionally produce and analyze datasets related to material culture, including climate data, landscape profiles, and image matrices. They also produce analytical data, including human biological data such as genetics, and perception data, like eye-tracking, EEG, fMRT, and so on. However, this data is contextualized by informed integration with further information that completes a historical and contextual picture, necessitating varied data obtained through the analysis of diverse datasets. The conference aims to foster greater consideration of what diverse data means for scholars.

Data creation is not the end but rather the very beginning of contemporary projects. Researchers in the digital humanities now frequently find themselves not only producing data but also conceiving of and developing algorithmic frameworks for their analyses, including the use of machine learning techniques recently mostly discussed under the label of Artificial Intelligence. Both the data itself and the approach taken are equally vital: data often lose much of their value when divorced from the methods used for both their creation and analysis. This aspect of knowledge production – the creation of methods and functions – has yet to receive sufficient attention in terms of their reuse and replication within the digital humanities. The lack of clear standards and best practices in this regard remain a fundamental challenge in digital humanities research. The same applies to preservation of interfaces and scripts of all kinds. Here too, it is essential to intensify cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Code and algorithms each play a role that is as crucial for interdisciplinary dialogue with other fields of study (from computer science to social sciences) as academic prose. Other disciplines can only understand humanities data if they comprehend interpretations, which, in turn, depends on how they are processed. Hence, the development, preservation, and informed discussion of code are core components, if not prerequisites, for interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary engagement.
The conference aims to create a productive space for encounters and discussions to explore these issues. Panels, presentations, workshops, and poster sessions will bring together experts from the fields of data science, digital cultural heritage research, and digital archival studies with representatives from the more text- and language-oriented digital humanities. We look forward to providing a venue for discussion and deliberation to foster discourse on code and algorithms, databases and archives, and text and data, and how these things positively push the boundaries of our research in the humanities.

We invite contributions to interdisciplinary research that combines the humanities with computational methods and digital technologies, including but not limited to:

Use of digital tools and resources to study humanities disciplines, including history, literature, art, and cultural studies
Exploration of the impact of technology on humanities research and teaching
Best practices around programming and software development in the humanities
Reuse and adaptation of existing datasets and algorithms for new research directions
Studies concerning the replicability of previously obtained research results
Sustainability and preservation of both data and research processes; how does data stewardship engage with algorithms?
Current and developing best practices for work with non-textual as well as textual digital cultural heritage
(Not) reinventing the wheel: what to do about pre-processing scripts
Data Studies and the transferability of data and algorithms across disciplines
Libraries as mediators of heterogeneous data and/or software tools in DH: enabling access, integration, and reuse beyond text- and data-centric approaches
Photogrammetry and modelling of cultural heritage spaces
Soundscapes, music, and audio in the digital humanities
Multimedia and game studies for the humanities
Ethics and sustainability of LLMs

The detailed call, including submission modalities, can be found on the conference website:

DHd2026 website: Call for Papers

Submission deadline: 1 August 2025