Call for Papers

The Australasian region is home to myriad archipelagos with deep significance, from the Kulkalgal Nation islands in the middle of Torres Strait to the Wharekauri (‘Misty Sun’) archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, east of Aotearoa’s South Island. Diverse, sacred, and yet increasingly under threat, these sites offer powerful examples of how land and sea are woven into cultural knowledge systems, social relations, and identities.

Archipelagos also serve our conference as a metaphor to spark dialogue about new directions and approaches in the Digital Humanities. They inspire us to conceptualise the fragmentation, clustering, dispersion, and interconnection of data in the Digital Humanities in discussions that prioritise local experiences and networks to challenge dominant narratives. In an age of algorithmic ubiquity, we aim to examine how seemingly isolated ‘islands’ of knowledge can remain distinct but intricately connected across evolving global contexts.

Archipelagos can also signify the coming together of disciplines, ideas and methodologies in ways that honour local histories, languages, and cosmologies while advancing sustainable, community-informed projects in the digital arena. From ‘relation-oriented AI’ to ‘embodied knowledge archives,’ our conference theme foregrounds situatedness, proximity, and place as indispensable foci for future DH research and practice (Brown, Whaanga & Lewis 2023; Alliata et al. 2024).

How to submit an abstract

Keynote Speakers

Jill Walker Rettberg (Professor of Digital Culture & Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen)

Kirsten Thorpe (Associate Professor, Indigenous Archives and Data Stewardship Hub, University of Technology Sydney)

Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker (Nyungar technologist, writer, & digital rights activist, Digital Rights Watch, Australia)

Details

Digital Archipelagos invites submissions for a four-day interdisciplinary Digital Humanities conference on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people at The Australian National University, hosted by the HASS Digital Research Hub and the Research School of Humanities and the Arts. The main conference will run from midday on 3 December, with pre-meetings, workshops and allied events on 2 December, including the Canadian Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS) gathering.

The conference will draw on environmental and cultural dynamics to investigate the ethics of collecting, studying, and preserving digital cultural heritage. It will also highlight Indigenous data practices and sustainable approaches to the Digital Humanities. We frame sustainability not just as a technical concern, but as a ‘multifaceted activity’ across environmental, political, cultural, and artistic domains (Tucker 2022). To that end, we invite proposals that address topics such as ethical collaboration, decolonised data governance, critical archival practices, multimodal storytelling, ecological critiques of digital infrastructures, and community-driven digital projects, along with other Digital Humanities topics.

Like the diverse archipelagos that inspire our theme, we seek to engage the DH community around new topics and pathways, with papers and workshops from the wider arts, humanities, social sciences. We welcome contributions from scholars, librarians, archivists, artists, writers, practitioners, performers, activists, and others engaged with the intersections of Digital Humanities, sustainability, and social justice. We especially encourage submissions that propose novel, interdisciplinary frameworks and methods in DH and cognate fields.

Our conference also warmly welcome colleagues from the wider Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector. The DHA Organising Committee invite members of the Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives, Museums (AI4LAM) community, practitioners in GLAM, and Information and Computer Science researchers in Higher Education to submit proposals for presentations and workshops

We offer the following as moorings for our conference across 3 themes:

1. AI-Enhanced Humanities Research

  • AI and artistic practice, cultural value, and labour
  • Policy and consent in the automation of cultural data
  • AI and/in humanities pedagogy and education
  • Emerging AI tools and cultures in DH
  • Critiques of computational tools and methodologies
  • Responsible AI as Public Humanities

2. Digital Cultural Stewardship

  • Data connections, silos, fragmentations, bridges, and clusters
  • Digital narratives and situated, embodied storytelling
  • Metadata, data schema, data architectures
  • Collections-as-Data
  • Co-design in the Digital Humanities
  • New approaches in GLAM (e.g. collaboration with researchers)
  • Research Software Engineering (RSE) roles & responsibilities
  • Mapping, geospatial tools, and language networks
  • Collaborative research projects & Critical Infrastructure Studies (CIS)
  • Digital curation and stewardship

3. Data Ethics and Inclusive Practice

  • Decolonial DH, engagement, and inclusiveness principles
  • Climate, cultural heritage, and responsible digital preservation
  • Indigenous/community data protocols
  • Frameworks for cultural care
  • Data justice, digital empowerment, resistance
  • Geography and fieldwork in DH
  • Environmental Digital Humanities
  • Cultural flows, diasporic communities, trans-oceanic exchange

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands and waters on which we live, work and play.