DHA2021 Call for Proposals

The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) is pleased to invite proposals for DHA2021 (our COVID-delayed conference formerly known as DHA2020).

DHA 2021 will take place from 22-25 November 2021. To allow for COVID-19 uncertainty, it will be a hybrid ‘In-person’ / ‘On-line’ conference held simultaneously in the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, and virtually.

This call for proposals closes on 20 August 2021.

Please email proposals to: dha2020@canterbury.ac.nz.

The DHA2021 conference theme is ‘Ka Renarena Te Taukaea / Creating Communities’. This theme invites close examination of what connects DH scholars and practitioners to each other and to communities. We welcome a strong local focus on expanding the ways to develop and interconnect research activities within and beyond the Digital Humanities in Australasia and the Pacific. Given the extreme events our region has been experiencing – including terrorist hate crimes, pandemic disruption, and the ongoing environmental catastrophe – it also seems timely to think carefully and courageously about the role DH might play in creating communities capable of leading and contributing meaningfully to global conversations about a safe, equitable’ and sustainable future.

We hope DHA2021 will focus on how digital technologies can not only create connections but support diversity, creativity, community building, wellbeing, and resilience in a world of rapidly evolving challenges. We believe it is a strength of our evolving discipline that DH is constantly revising and renewing its connections with others, often acting as an institutional, methodological, or discursive link between fields of research, professional practices, and programmes within cultural heritage, and we expect many contributions will reflect this. At the same time, our location in the South Pacific creates a unique opportunity and responsibility to engage DH in rethinking the place of the humanities locally, regionally, and in relation to the major social and environmental challenges we face globally.

Recent years have seen the growth of initiatives that expand DH’s boundaries in areas such as computational humanities, Indigenous and postcolonial studies, spatial humanities, critical making, and infrastructure studies. In short, the breadth of these research and pedagogical interests makes it timely to consider the ways ‘community’ shapes and is shaped by DH.

We invite contributors to address the conference theme through the following sub-topics:

• DH and First Nations and Indigenous communities
• Diversity in DH – ensuring inclusion, promoting varied perspectives, giving marginalised communities a voice
• Regional and global communities – DH scholarship across places and cultures, especially the divides of postcolonial legacies, geopolitical or environmental boundaries
• Social and methodological scales of research in DH:
  • How does DH examine social scales – the personal, the family, the institution, the city;
  • How do these relate to methodological questions such as close vs. distant reading?
• DH as public humanities – how do we communicate humanities research and seek the attention and participation of wider communities with research activities?
• DH within topical issue communities, such as environmental humanities, critical race studies, or countering online extremism
• Communities as objects of study, e.g. online communities, interpretive communities
• DH within event communities, such as DH in post-disaster research
• Collaborations across strongly ‘disciplined’ boundaries or research communities, such as between DH and physical or mathematical sciences
• Research groups and labs as communities
• DH communities within (or across) institutions and between DHers in academic, library, software development and other professional roles.
• Creative and artistic communities: digital art, literature, and creative media as DH practice, and a way to interrogate shared critical and cultural concerns
• Pedagogical communities – teachers + students. The real learning happens through contact with students.
• Any other topic relevant to Digital Humanities in the Australasian / Indo-Pacific / Asian region.

We welcome the following types of contributions, all of which will be able to be delivered either virtually or in-person:

1. Posters

Posters are intended for presenting work-in-progress as well as demonstrations of digital projects or software. Some version of a poster session will take place during the conference, with presenters available to explain and discuss their work. This may include both traditional A1 print posters, and ‘3-slides, with 3-minute video/audio’ posters for on-line display. The exact presentation requirements will be advised in due course.

2. Short papers

Short papers are allocated 10 minutes (plus 5 minutes for questions) and are suitable for describing work-in-progress and reporting on shorter experiments and software and tools in early stages of development. On-line participants will have the option to present live, or record presentations in advance for delivery during the session time followed by participation in a live Q&A session.

3. Long papers

Long papers are allocated 25 minutes (plus 5 minutes for questions) and are intended for presenting substantial unpublished research, significantly developed or completed digital projects, or theoretical / methodological advances. On-line participants will have the option to present live, or record presentations in advance for delivery during the session time followed by participation in a live Q&A session.

4. Multi-paper Panels

Panels should bring together three to five papers in order to address a single topic related to the conference theme. The aaDH 2020 Programme Committee adopts the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations’ (ADHO) commitment to creating a more diverse and inclusive global research community, and panel organisers should consider this carefully when selecting panel members. Panel proposals should include a panel abstract of no more than 500 words, in addition to individual paper abstracts of no more than 500 words each. Panel organisers are encouraged to contact the chairs of the aaDH Programme Committee to discuss their proposals in advance. Innovative ideas for virtual or hybrid panels are welcome.

5. Workshops

Workshop proposals may be for half-day, whole-day, or programmed on-line sessions, on any topic relevant to Digital Humanities. These may include discussion and/or computing activities on specific software, tools or programming techniques; DH research methodologies, frameworks or theories; or introductions to specific research problems or domains. These proposals should be no longer than 1500 words, and should include a title, full contact details for all workshop presenters, an outline of the workshop structure, a list of facilities or resources required, and any constraints (such as maximum number of participants, software needed etc.).

Please note the following requirements for all proposals

• Abstracts for posters, short papers, and long papers may be no more than 1000 words (panel and workshop proposals may be longer, as specified above).
• The aaDH Programme Committee may offer to accept a proposal in a different category from the one you have chosen.
• All abstracts should cite relevant literature and supporting information (citations and references are not included in the word count)
• You should indicate the intended category for your proposal in the subject line: ‘POSTER’, ‘SHORT’, ‘LONG’, ‘PANEL’, ‘WORKSHOP’ and ‘In-person’ or ‘On-line’

Registering for DHA2021

Full details on how to register for DHA2021 will be available on the conference web site soon, with our aim being to make participation for students and virtual attendees as economical as possible.

To present at the conference, whether virtually or in person, you must be a member of aaDH at the time of the conference. Membership instructions are at https://aadh.au/join/.

Please read the whole page before you click the ‘membership’ link as the Oxford University Press website which you will be directed to can be a bit confusing.