Aligned Conferences & Events | 2024
Conference and Colloquium
Call for Papers
We are happy to announce that proposals are now being accepted for presentations at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2024!
Presentations may focus on any topic relating to the digital humanities. Submissions are welcome from all members of the digital humanities community, including faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, early career scholars, independent researchers, librarians and others in the GLAM community, alt-academics, academic professionals, those in technical programs, and those new to the digital humanities.
The Conference & Colloquium is a relatively informal, collegial venue for sharing work and ideas, and we encourage presenters to think beyond the traditional conference paper format for their presentations and to invite feedback and engagement from the DHSI community.
Submissions are welcome in two formats:
Conference Presentations
Presentations should be 10–15 minutes long and will be organized into themed sessions. This format is well suited to presenting research findings, in-depth argumentative papers, or reports on completed research.
Colloquium Lightning Talks
Presentations should be 5 minutes long and will be organized into themed sessions. This format is well suited to demonstrations of new tools, reporting on in-progress research, announcing new projects and tools, and brief, tightly focused argumentative papers.
Please submit proposals through this online submission form.
The form asks for
- the title of the presentation
- the names and emails of all contributors
- a 200–250-word abstract
- a list of 5 keywords describing the presentation
The deadline for submissions is 15 December, with presenters being notified on 10 January.
After the event, we will invite presenters to contribute papers to a special issue of Interdisciplinary Digital Engagements in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), a peer-reviewed, online, open-access journal founded to showcase the innovative, engaging scholarship shared annually at DHSI.
For more information, contact the DHSI Conference & Colloquium Chair, Kyle Dase (kyledase@uvic.ca).
Project Management in the Humanities
Wednesday, 5 June
Project management is a tool that has long been associated with business. Its use in the academy is increasing as projects grow beyond the scope of a single researcher. Funding agencies are encouraging this trend by requesting detailed and realistic work plans as part of grant applications. However, challenges exist for the application of project management to research projects. For example, research goals may be articulated but the methodology to accomplish them is not well understood. This is further complicated by the fact that researchers see the application of these tools as rigid management approaches, perhaps not suited for the academy.
Having said this, due to increasingly collaborative interdisciplinary projects, many humanities scholars find themselves as “instant” or “accidental” managers. They are leading teams of researchers from a variety of disciplines, research assistants, librarians and others, as well as managing financial and other resources. This is something for which they are often not prepared due to a lack of training in this area.
This raises questions for exploration with regard to the application of project management in the humanities generally and digital humanities more specifically. These include:
- What does project management look like in the humanities and digital humanities?
- What skills and knowledge are needed?
- What is the best way to engage and train researchers in the use of these tools and skills?
- What tools are the most effective for managing projects within the humanities and digital humanities?
- What particular challenges do academics face using project management?
- What can be learned from the review of the use of project management in other contexts, such as libraries?
- How can students be managed within a project management framework?
- What does project management look like in the age of COVID-19?
We invite proposals for 5 minute talks that address these and other issues pertinent to research in the area. Proposals should contain a title, an abstract (of approximately 250 words, plus list of works cited), and names and affiliations. Please send proposals on or before 15 December to siemensl@uvic.ca.
Open Digital Collaborative Project Preservation in the Humanities
Wednesday, 12 June
Open digital collaborative scholarship in the Arts and Humanities is significant for facilitating public access to and engagement with research, and as a mechanism of growing the digital scholarly infrastructure. But the path to adopting open, collaborative, digital scholarship has been challenging, not least of all due to questions of economic stability, infrastructure, access, understanding, implementation, and engagement.
The advent of online technologies has provided Arts and Humanities researchers with greater opportunities to collaborate and create different projects. These projects are computationally robust and require a significant amount of collaboration, which brings together different types of expertise to collaborate on equal terms rather than a model where some sets of expertise are in service to others.
The convenience and familiarity of computational methods can make us forget (or overlook) that there is a certain fragility associated with our online tools. Kathleen Fitzpatrick has argued that many online projects in the digital humanities have an implied planned obsolesce—which means that they will degrade over time once they cease to receive updates in their content and software libraries (Planned Obsolescence, NYU Press, 2011). In turn, this planned obsolescence threatens the completeness and the sustainability of our research outputs in the Arts and Humanities over time, presenting a complex problem made more complex when environments are not static objects but rather dynamic collaborative spaces.
This virtual conference aims to address the following research questions:
- How can we create viable, sustainable pathways for open, digital scholarship?
- How can we design, implement, and document the best practices for the development of open, social, digital projects in the Arts and Humanities?
- How can we amplify the positive aspects of collaboration to magnify the contribution and streamline the development of digital projects?
- How can we preserve these environments in ways that speak to the needs of our communities, and are open, collaborative, effective, and sustainable?
Submissions should be sent via email to luis.meneses@viu.ca and are due by 15 December. They should include the title of the submission, the name(s) and affiliation(s) of contributor(s), and a 300-word abstract.
Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms
“Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms” explores the way hypertext has been expressed by artists, world-wide, both in terms of the systems they used and genres with which they experimented. It features a wide array of hypertext art produced from the mid-1980s to the present by artists and scientists working in and creating a variety of platforms and approaches and offers an exploration into the forms of hypertext that have emerged over the last 35 years, influencing, as media theorist Jay David Bolter claims, “the way we think” (Writing Space 2).
Divided into four thematic sections—Authoring Systems and the Art They Wrought (1986-present), Early Web & the Affordances of the Browser (1995-2000), Beyond the Click: Experimental Methods for Navigating and Experiencing Hypertext Art, and Conserving Hypertext Art—the exhibition takes a broad look at the development of hypertext systems and art, from the platforms used for artistic production to ways in which artists leveraged the affordances and constraints of hypertextual environments. Many of the works produced between 1986 to the mid-1990s are displayed on legacy computers, specifically Macintosh Classic IIs running System Software 7.0.1, so that visitors can experience early hypertexts as they were originally envisioned for access. Likewise, later works produced after the Apple Corporation shifted from the Classic operating system to MacOS X, are shown on Apple iMacs sold from 2007 to the mid-2010s running 10.10.1 (Yosemite). Accompanying these works are contextual materials, such as interviews, Traversals, and web-based hypertexts, displayed on iPads.
This exhibit previously displayed in Rome, 5-8 September 2023. Full exhibit details at https://the-next.eliterature.org/exhibition/hypertext-and-art/index.html
With a launch (with light nibblies) on Monday at noon-1.00, this exhibit will run in McPherson Library Room 129 Monday Noon-4.00, Tuesday-Thursday 10.00-4.00, and Friday 10.00-Noon.
#GraphPoem
Friday, 14 June
All those connected to DHSI 2024 are invited to be part of the EPoetry event #GraphPoem by MARGENTO by contributing text files or weblinks to a collectively assembled dataset and/or run a script plotting the latter into a real-time evolving network.
The Graph Poem is an ongoing transnational project combining natural language processing and graph theory-based approaches to poetry, with academic, DH-literary, and performative outputs.
When DHSI registration opens, participants will be able to sign up for GraphPoem and will receive an account giving them access to the data and the code.
#GraphPoem will have two main components viewable to anybody accessing the following online venues at the time of the event: a livestreamed performance on Margento’s Facebook page and the bot @GraphPoem tweeting text-nodes selected from the evolving graph by a network analysis algorithm and fed into the performance.