The 7th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB2023) will be online from 8–10 March 2023.
DHNB conferences focus on research, education and communication in the interdisciplinary field of digital humanities in the Nordic and Baltic regions and beyond. The DHNB2023 online conference explores the many facets of Sustainability in the Digital Humanities with a particular focus on its aspects of Environment, Community and Data.
Environment
The Digital Humanities do not stand at a distance from the environmental challenges facing the planet. In 2014, Bethany Nowviske challenged DH scholars and practitioners to consider the place of the field in the Anthropocene. What responsibilities do we have as the world around us burns, dries, drowns, and changes before our eyes, as species go extinct and ways of life come to an end? How do DH projects and practices depend on unsustainable systems and mindsets? How do the unequal consequences of environmental challenge influence what research gets done in DH, and who can contribute? How can the field contribute to a more sustainable world?
Community
Since its inception, Digital Humanities has been a community-driven effort. We can see this not least in the many regional and linguistic organisations all over the globe. DH has been described as grassroots communities, sprouting from small local research groups or gathering around digital research support centres and labs at universities and libraries. DHNB is a young and prosperous community, spanning eight countries and speaking many languages. But is it a sustainable one? And how can we shape and
create its future success together? Sustainable communities are places where people of diverse backgrounds and perspectives feel welcome and safe, where every group and every member has a say in the decision-making process, and where intellectual prosperity is shared. What does this mean for DHNB now and in the future?
Data
The primary source material for humanists has many data formats, and research is becoming increasingly digital and, in many cases, only exists in digital form. As increasing digitisation leads to a large volume of data, Digital Humanities must implement affordable ways to access, store and archive this data. The efforts of doing so can be seen in the development of large data repositories, both collective ones and within specialised fields. When it comes to making the collected data of repositories,
but also of single examinations accessible – and as such also visible – open data/open science has become a well-known term and a requirement in many funding evaluations. But what does this mean in terms of sustainability? How does the growing amount of digital data available for research within Digital Humanities go together in terms of long-term storage, communal access and the restrictions of sensible data? What aspects of collaborative software development concerning future accessibility could help with the environmental footprint of this data volume?
Topics of Interest
Topics of interest for the theme of DHNB2023 online include, but are not limited to, the
following:
Environment
● The intersection of Digital humanities and environmental humanities/studies
● Applications of DH methods to environmental research
● Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis: Researching the climate crisis with a DH approach – scrutinising the climate impact of DH infrastructures, tools, and research in the Nordic and Baltic countries and beyond
Community
● Cross-disciplinary and collaborative approaches to digitised material, including participation, crowdsourcing, and citizen science
● Challenges and possibilities for community-building and maintaining, especially at DH centres at universities, DH labs and research support units at libraries, archives and museums, dedicated research groups, and networks
● Virtual communities, especially new and exploratory ways of co-working, co-developing, and co-disseminating research and data across institutional, national and language borders
Data
● Critical, theoretical and empirical perspectives on digital preservation, long-term archiving and accessibility, as well as software and data sustainability
● Sustainability of digital research infrastructures for humanities and social sciences
● Aspects of FAIR data sharing and data re-use
● Software, system and code sustainability; how to work with, handle, preserve, migrate, emulate, or terminate legacy software and systems
● Critical perspectives on software (frontend/backend) development in and for Digital Humanities projects
● Cultural Heritage collections as data
DHNB is thoroughly interdisciplinary: contributions from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as other related disciplines, fall within the scope of the conference. We particularly welcome professionals from the cultural heritage sector, the information and communications technology sector, and research software engineers and developers to contribute and share their views and experiences of
working in an institutional setting within the framework of digital humanities.
To gain further insight into potential paper titles and topics, please also refer to the DHNB 2022 book of abstracts.
To encourage the development of high-quality contributions, DHNB 2023 has a shared Zotero collection of literature relating to DH and sustainability issues regarding the environment, community, and data that everyone is encouraged to contribute to.
Access the group via https://www.zotero.org/groups/4750058/dhnb2023.
Timeline
- 15 September 2022
– ConfTool opens for submissions - 21 October 2022
– Extended abstract submission deadline - 15 December 2022
– Notification to authors - 05 January 2023
– Registration opens - 15 February 2023
– Deadline for registering for the conference for all authors - 1 March 2023
– Deadline for uploading visual material for show-and-tell presentations - 8–10 March 2023
– Conference - 15 March 2023
– Deadline for submitting full papers - 24 April 2023
– Deadline for submitting revised papers - June 2023
– Publication of proceedings
Submission types
Long Papers
Twenty minutes presentation + ten minutes of questions and answers.
Long papers report on completed, original and unpublished results.
Proposals should be a minimum of 400 and a maximum of 600 words.
Panels
Four to five contributions of ten minutes each + at least 30 minutes for a discussion between panellists and time for questions and contributions from the audience.
Contributions in panels may present work in progress and opinion pieces.
Panels are submitted as individual contributions of a minimum of 200 and a maximum of 400 words, accompanied by a 200-word description of their overarching theme. All panels must have a moderator.
Use this GoogleDoc to draft panels and find contributors: https://bit.ly/3R6BfAb!
Show and Tell
Five minutes presentation + exhibition on the conference website.
Show-and-Tell exhibitions (the visual component of the presentation, i.e. a slide, an image, a website, a poster etc.) will be made publicly available on the conference website.
Presentations will be held in a dedicated live session and an open online exhibition on the conference website during March.
Proposals should be a minimum of 200 and a maximum of 300 words.
Workshops
In addition to papers and show-and-tell presentations, DHNB2023 calls for proposals for workshops and tutorials to be held preceding and succeeding the conference in March 2023. These workshops can be organised either as digital events or as in-person local/regional events, or anything in between. We encourage creativity and inclusion!
DHNB2023 workshops are intended to bring together participants around a particular subtopic, while tutorials present a useful tool or method of interest to the digital humanities community.
Workshops and tutorials can take the form of either a half-or full-day or even two or more full-day sessions.
Proposals should include the session format (workshop or tutorial, online or in-person or hybrid), title, and a short description of the topic (minimum of 400 and maximum of 600 words) as well as the contact information of the person(s) responsible. Proposals should also include the following: intended audience and an approximate number of participants. The conference committee will provide feedback to workshop organisers as soon as possible.
If you have ideas for other kinds of presentations or contributions to the conference, please contact dhnb2023@dhnb.eu.
Submission instructions
Each submission should contain a title, a 400–600 word abstract for papers, a 200–300 word abstract for show-and-tell presentations (or for workshops: a description of the proposal of similar length), 3–5 keywords, a list of author(s), title(s), and affiliation(s), and a 100-word biography per author.
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper.
Participants can only be the first author (= presenter) of one paper at the conference and the second author/contributor of one additional paper (long paper, panel, or show-and-tell presentation).
Submissions should be written in English, and presentations should be held in English.
All contributions should be submitted via the ConfTool conference management system via https://www.conftool.org/dhnb2023.
All submissions accepted for the conference will be published in the DHNB2023 book of abstracts.
In addition, papers will have the option to be included in the DHNB2023 conference proceedings. Please read the instructions for the conference proceedings.
The deadline for submitting full papers is 1 February 15 March 2023. Submitted papers will then undergo a double-blind peer review process, and authors may be asked to do revisions before publication.
Organisation/Contact
DHNB 2023 is organised jointly by
The University of Oslo Library
The University of Bergen Library
The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger
Contact the organisers via dhnb2023@dhnb.eu.
For updates and news, visit https://dhnb.eu/conferences/dhnb2023/.
Follow and interact with DHNB2023 on Twitter #DHNB2023 @DHiNorden.
