DHd 2026, “Not Only Text, Not Only Data”, annual conference of the Association of Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries, organized by the University of Vienna.
23–27 February 2026.
Submission deadline: 1 August 2025
Both digitization of cultural heritage and abstract information modeling have, in recent years, significantly expanded the breadth of potential research in the humanities. The initial source of this expansion was primarily the creation of textual corpora and the development of algorithms and interfaces for text analysis. Over time, this has evolved to the point where it now includes the digital capture of virtually all “objects” within the humanities, and their attendant analytical interconnections: individuals, places, material culture, concepts, artworks, spoken interactions, and more. Yet despite the diversity of approaches, ideas, data, and methods in today’s digital humanities, focus often remains on more text-centred projects and data-focused results. We propose addressing the challenges posed by this expansion beyond text and data as the conference motto: not by excluding text-centered approaches but by placing them within a broader context.
Disciplines such as art history, archaeology, and museum studies traditionally produce and analyze datasets related to material culture, including climate data, landscape profiles, and image matrices. They also produce analytical data, including human biological data such as genetics, and perception data, like eye-tracking, EEG, fMRT, and so on. However, this data is contextualized by informed integration with further information that completes a historical and contextual picture, necessitating varied data obtained through the analysis of diverse datasets. The conference aims to foster greater consideration of what diverse data means for scholars.
Data creation is not the end but rather the very beginning of contemporary projects. Researchers in the digital humanities now frequently find themselves not only producing data but also conceiving of and developing algorithmic frameworks for their analyses, including the use of machine learning techniques recently mostly discussed under the label of Artificial Intelligence. Both the data itself and the approach taken are equally vital: data often lose much of their value when divorced from the methods used for both their creation and analysis. This aspect of knowledge production – the creation of methods and functions – has yet to receive sufficient attention in terms of their reuse and replication within the digital humanities. The lack of clear standards and best practices in this regard remain a fundamental challenge in digital humanities research. The same applies to preservation of interfaces and scripts of all kinds. Here too, it is essential to intensify cross-disciplinary dialogue.
Code and algorithms each play a role that is as crucial for interdisciplinary dialogue with other fields of study (from computer science to social sciences) as academic prose. Other disciplines can only understand humanities data if they comprehend interpretations, which, in turn, depends on how they are processed. Hence, the development, preservation, and informed discussion of code are core components, if not prerequisites, for interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary engagement.
The conference aims to create a productive space for encounters and discussions to explore these issues. Panels, presentations, workshops, and poster sessions will bring together experts from the fields of data science, digital cultural heritage research, and digital archival studies with representatives from the more text- and language-oriented digital humanities. We look forward to providing a venue for discussion and deliberation to foster discourse on code and algorithms, databases and archives, and text and data, and how these things positively push the boundaries of our research in the humanities.
We invite contributions to interdisciplinary research that combines the humanities with computational methods and digital technologies, including but not limited to:
- Use of digital tools and resources to study humanities disciplines, including history, literature, art, and cultural studies
- Exploration of the impact of technology on humanities research and teaching
- Best practices around programming and software development in the humanities
- Reuse and adaptation of existing datasets and algorithms for new research directions
- Studies concerning the replicability of previously obtained research results
- Sustainability and preservation of both data and research processes; how does data stewardship engage with algorithms?
- Current and developing best practices for work with non-textual as well as textual digital cultural heritage
- (Not) reinventing the wheel: what to do about pre-processing scripts
- Data Studies and the transferability of data and algorithms across disciplines
- Libraries as mediators of heterogeneous data and/or software tools in DH: enabling access, integration, and reuse beyond text- and data-centric approaches
- Photogrammetry and modelling of cultural heritage spaces
- Soundscapes, music, and audio in the digital humanities
- Multimedia and game studies for the humanities
- Ethics and sustainability of LLMs
The main languages of exchange in the DHd community are German and English. Proposals can be submitted in German or English. We encourage all participants to hold their presentations at the conference in German, but contributions in English are also welcome.
The following formats can be submitted (see below for more details on each category):
- Presentations, including position papers on theory, meta-reflections on digital humanities practices, presentation of methods or tools, computer-supported analysis or interpretation of humanities themes, or other appropriate work within the digital humanities (submission of at least 1500, maximum 2000 words)
- Presentations in the Doctoral Consortium (submission of at least 500, maximum 750 words)
- Panels (minimum three, maximum six participants, one submission of at least 1200, maximum 1500 words)
- Posters (submission of at least 500, maximum 750 words)
- Half-day or full-day workshops prior to the main conference (submission of at least 1200, maximum 1500 words)
A submission for a scholarly presentation usually has references, which are listed at the end in a bibliography and are not counted toward the length of the text. All other words (including e.g. image captions) are counted.
A good submission follows the principles of good scientific work and describes the research question, material, method and results in a structured way in terms of content and form. Please note that your submissions should be small but fully-fledged scientific publications that can be published accordingly. If you are unsure about the form of submission, we recommend taking a look at successful examples from the last conference: The Book of Abstracts for DHd2025 provides an overview of accepted presentations, panels, posters and workshops. We also recommend taking a look at the guidelines for the review process of the DHd annual conferences (in German).
For the submission, you must register in ConfTool and submit ONE of the following:
- a dhc file created with the DHConvalidator web service for review. In addition, a short summary of the submission of approx. 100-150 words must be entered in ConfTool.
- Alternatively, you can use the FidusWriter for creating submissions. If you want to use the FidusWriter, you will have to first create a submission in ConfTool as usual. You (and your co-authors) will then log in to FidusWriter with the same login credentials as in ConfTool. After pushing the button “ConfTool: Synchronisieren”, you will be able see your contribution with all metadata. The contribution can then be written collaboratively in FidusWriter. It is important that your e-mail address in ConfTool is validated (as well as that of your potential co-authors) so that the registration in FidusWriter is possible. Once you have completed your contribution in FidusWriter, you will be able to export it using the “Export>DHC (HTML + TEI + DOCX)” button and submit the .dhc file in ConfTool. Detailed documentation on how to use FidusWriter can be found here (video and text). Please note that the FidusWriter is still in an evaluation phase, so please allow a little more time than usual to create a contribution using the new tool. If there are any questions or problems during the process, please contact us here: dhd-fiduswriter-support@uni-koeln.de. Thank you for your collaboration!
Participants may only make one submission for a presentation or poster (role: ‚Presenter in ConfTool‘) and only give one presentation. Co-authorship of a maximum of two further submissions (presentation or poster) is possible. In addition, participants can be involved in a maximum of one panel submission. Workshop submissions are not subject to this restriction. Each DHd working group also has the opportunity to make one additional submission (workshop, panel, poster), which must be labelled as such. For submissions with multiple contributors, it is recommended to indicate the role(s) of the contributor(s) in a footnote at the start date of the submission according to the CRediT taxonomy (in the form: “Contributor Roles: First_name_1 Last_name_1 (Conceptualisation, Writing – original draft), First_name_2 Last_name_2 (Software), First_name_3 Last_name_3 (Writing – review & editing).“).
Possible formats include:
Individual presentations (20′ presentation + 10′ discussion; submission of at least 1500, maximum 2000 words):
Unpublished results or developments of significant new methods or digital resources and/or a methodological or theoretical concept should be presented. Presentation submissions should contextualize the research contribution in an appropriate way against the background of the current state of research and make clear its significance for the (digital) humanities or a respective sub-area thereof. Submissions for presentations must be explicitly assigned to one of the foci “Tool/Resource”, “Theory/Meta-reflection/Position Paper”, “Method”, “Computational Analysis/Interpretation”, or “Open Field”. The poster format is intended for projects for which no interim results are yet available.
A final version of accepted presentation submissions must be submitted by 5 December 2025, taking into account the review feedback, with a maximum length of 2,500 words.
Presentations in the Doctoral Consortium (submission of at least 500, maximum 750 words):
The promotion of young researchers is a special goal of the annual conference of the association “Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V.” For this reason, presentations can be submitted separately to a Doctoral Consortium in order to present dissertation projects of selected participants. In addition to the opportunity to present your own research topic, you can also obtain feedback from the specialist audience in order to further develop your own doctoral project thematically and methodologically. The focus is on the initial phase of doctorate/PhD studies. Doctoral candidates with advanced projects are therefore encouraged to submit individual presentations (see above). Exposés (length 500-750 words, plus bibliography) for the Doctoral Consortium can be submitted until 1 August 2025 in the usual way via the ConfTool as a contribution of the type (conference track) “Doctoral Consortium”. The authors of the selected exposés will be invited to the Doctoral Consortium. For them, the participation fee for the symposia will be waived; in addition, the costs for an overnight stay will be covered by the organisers if possible. Additional accommodation and travel costs will be borne by the participants themselves.
In addition, it is planned to award travel grants to presenters and participants who have little or no financial resources available for their own positions and projects. Participants in the Doctoral Consortium will also be able to apply for these travel grants. A separate call will be published for the travel grants.
Panels (minimum three, maximum six participants incl. moderator; 90’ in total, including at least 30′ of open discussion; submission of at least 1200, maximum 1500 words):
Panels offer three to six participants the opportunity to discuss a topic that goes beyond the scope of a single project, project ending date or research location. Panels should not consist exclusively of participants from a joint project. It is encouraged to submit panels particularly related to the conference theme, and to give the audience the chance to discuss controversial topics. Care should be taken to ensure that a panel is composed according to diversity criteria. It is expected that no more than one third of the 90-minute meeting will be devoted to prepared statements and that the debate within the panel will allow sufficient time for discussion with the audience. The panel organizers should submit a short description of the topic of at least 1200, maximum 1500 words and confirm the willingness of the listed colleagues to participate in the panel. A rigorous presentation of the thematic or methodological relevance of the individual contributions to the overall context of the panel is of decisive importance for the acceptance of a panel submission.
Posters (submission of at least 500, maximum 750 words):
Posters can be submitted on any topic of the Call for Papers. They can also describe the status of individual projects. Accepted posters will be published together with their abstracts in the Zenodo Community of the DHd Association under a CC-BY licence. While poster abstracts must adhere to the same deadline as all other abstracts (5 December 2025 for camera-ready submission), the posters themselves must be submitted by the presenters as a file via ConfTool by 23 February 2026 at the latest in order to be published on Zenodo. More detailed information on the procedure will be communicated to the poster presenters after acceptance.
Workshops taking place before the conference (half day/4 h to two half days/8 h incl. breaks; submission of at least 1200, maximum 1500 words):
We encourage submission of teaching, training and further education formats or tutorials (e.g. on specific topics, technologies, tools, key skills), as well as collaborative forms of work on topics and/or data (e.g. hackathons, barcamps, tool testings), but longer meetings of DHd working groups focused on a predefined output can also be submitted. Workshops will last half a day (4 hours, incl. break) or a full day (7-8 hours, incl. breaks) and will take place on Monday and Tuesday of the conference week.
Submissions must include the following information:
• Title and a short description of the topic (minimum 1200, maximum 1500 words), full contact details of all contributors and a paragraph on their research interests
• Format details
• Information on the target audience, in particular on necessary prior knowledge
• The number of possible participants
• Details of any technical equipment required
• The Call for Papers specific to the workshop, if one is published
Workshop conveners are expected to register for the symposia.
The deadline for submissions is 1 August 2025 (23:59, CEST). Please note: As in previous years, this deadline will not be extended.
Accepted submissions, which have the character of regular, permanently citable small publications, will be published both in the Zenodo Community of the DHd Association (individually and in the conference publication) and together with the short summaries on the conference website and in the conference programme. Via the DHConvalidator you will also receive a template for the submission of Word or OpenOffice formats with the guidelines for citations, references and bibliography.
Review of the submissions will follow an open peer review process in which the names of the submitters and reviewers will be disclosed to each other (so-called open identities), the reviews themselves will not be published. Notification of whether the submission has been accepted is expected to be sent by 5 November 2025. If you have any questions regarding the submission process, please send an email to the chair of the Programme Committee: silke.schwandt@uni-bielefeld.de.
As in previous years, the DHd conference will publish a Book of Abstracts, containing the accepted submissions; however, unlike in previous years, publication will not be automatic. Camera-ready versions of accepted abstracts will be expected by 5 December 2025; in order to be eligible for publication, these versions must take into account the reviewer feedback, and will be checked to ensure they did. If an abstract has not been adequately revised, it may still be presented at the conference, but will not be published in the Book of Abstracts. Final acceptance for abstract publication will be sent out by 15 January 2026.
DHd2026 will be an on-site event; it is assumed that accepted entries will be presented by the contributors in person. While keynotes will be streamed, a full hybrid mode is not planned for this conference.