Digital Archipelagos DHA2025 Call for Papers

The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) is pleased to invite proposals for Digital Archipelagos DHA2025 .

DHA 2025 will take place from 3-5 December 2025 held in the Canberra on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people at the Australian National University. It will be hosted by the HASS Digital Research Hub and the College of Arts and Social Sciences.

This call for papers closes on Friday 9 May 2025.

Please submit papers via ConfTool

If you have any questions or other enquires, please contact us via email at: dha2025conference@gmail.com

The DHA2025 theme is Digital Archipelagos. 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.

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.

We invite contributors to address the conference theme through the following three 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 welcome the following types of submissions

Posters, papers and panels

• Poster: present work on any relevant topic or summarise projects, tools, methods, artwork, visualisation, or software demonstrations at any stage of development
• Short papers (10 minutes): present work in progress or new methods, tools or ideas in the early stages of development. Short paper sessions will run for 90 minutes and include 5 short papers
• Long papers (20 minutes): present completed, substantial research (either published or unpublished) or report on the development of significant projects, digital resources, or detailed theoretical, speculative, or critical discussions. Long paper sessions will run for 90 minutes and include 3 long papers
• Panel proposals (90 minutes): present a single, focused topic comprising 4-6 speakers OR 3 long papers. Panel proposers should be attentive to panel diversity and scope in their selection of panel topics and presenters.

Workshops & Birds of a Feather

• Workshop proposals (half day): present introductions to a specific software approach, method, or theoretical framework/approach. (NB. Abstracts for workshops should be 500 words and include a proposed structure/outline of the session)
• Birds of a Feather (BoF) (60 minutes): an informal discussion devoted to a specific topic, new idea, or conceptual/theoretical theme. Participants have a shared interest in exploring a theme, without any formal agenda

Abstracts are to be submitted via ConfTool by 9th May

Notifications of acceptance will be communicated by 13th June

Note: For the allied event on 2-3 December “Re-Defining Open Social Scholarship in an Age of Generative ‘Intelligence’” please see the CFP for the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS). Submissions for the CAPOS event should be submitted separately.