CfP: DARIAH annual event 2026 - Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement

DARIAH Annual Event, with the topic «Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement» will take place on May 26th to May 29th, 2026, in Rome, Italy.

The event will be hosted by CNR: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. May 26th will be a day for DARIAH internal meetings, followed by the main conference on May 27th to May 29th.

Argument: 

The theme of DARIAH’s 2026 Annual Event is to explore digitally-enabled research through a public and participatory lens, focusing on who our research is for, what are its social and public benefits, and how research can serve to create new dialogues within the public sphere. We seek to foster exchanges on how digital infrastructures, networks and collaborative methods can enable and sustain forms of scholarship that are open, flexible and socially responsive. A way to frame this is through the concept of hybridity: an intermingling of ‘disciplines, technological and cultural practices’ which embed within them the goal of connectivity. This may be connectivity of the university or memory institutions with society through collaborative and joint engagements,¹ or it might be providing alternative spaces for/where people can connect and interact through a hybrid network of physical and technology-mediated encounters to co-construct knowledge.’²

This notion of engaged scholarship has the power to make a positive contribution to the quality of human life, civic engagement, and public value, while producing knowledge that is beneficial and urgently needed to tackle societal issues.³ Engaged research can also enhance the quality of research itself, while improving the social and economic impacts for all participants.⁴ Participatory projects have proved their potential in empowering participants – and the universities and memory institutions that run them – to explore cultural meanings, values and contexts, enriching their knowledge of both past and present, while strengthening the social fabric and fostering new forms of learning, participation and co-creation.⁵

The very heart of our research, addressing key questions of cultural heritage, shared memory and societal justice, touches the core of what it means to be a member of a community: be it local, national, or international. What we do as humanists is not just important, but critical for healthy democratic societies. We have an obligation to ensure that our research is conducted in an ethical manner, that we communicate with society at large when sharing our results, and that we ensure that our research infrastructure is resilient to guarantee that we pass on our knowledge to future generations.

Engaged research enacted through networked media challenges the very notion of ‘the public’ — one that is no longer confined by time and space.⁶ In her 2021 book Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good, Kathleen Fitzpatrick describes this as conducting research not simply in public, but in conversation with the public⁷ with the goal of developing knowledge spaces⁸ in which research is created and shared, providing new forms of learning, knowledge production,  and collaboration.

We are looking for scholarly reflections, concrete experiences and case studies, theoretical contributions, and policy considerations that examine how digital, social and institutional infrastructures can support engaged research, and nurture generosity, participation and shared creativity in the digital arts and humanities.

References: 

1 Nørgård, Rikke Toft, Susan Schreibman, and Marianne Ping Huang. “Digital Humanities and Hybrid Education: Higher education in, with and for the public.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities, pp. 11-29. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.

2 Cook, John, Tobias Ley, Ronald Maier, Yishay Mor, Patricia Santos, Elisabeth Lex, Sebastian Dennerlein, Christoph Trattner, and Debbie Holley. 2015. “Using the Hybrid Social Learning Network to Explore Concepts, Practices, Designs and Smart Services for Networked Professional Learning.” In State-of-the-Art and Future

Directions of Smart Learning, Proceedings of International Conference on Smart Learning Environments (ICSLE 2015), Sinaia, Romania. Lecture Notes in Educational Technology, edited by Yanyan Li, Maiga Chang, Milos Kravcik, Elvira Popescu, Ronghuai Huang, and Kinshuk N.-S. Chen, 123–129. Heidelberg: Springer.

3 Davidson, Cathy N., and David Theo Goldberg. “Engaging the humanities.” Profession (2004): 42-62.

4 Holliman, Richard. “Supporting excellence in engaged research.” Journal of Science Communication 16, no. 5 (2017): 1-10; Holliman, R. and Warren, C. J. (2017). ‘Supporting future scholars of engaged research’. Research for All 1 (1), pp. 168–184. DOI: 10.18546/rfa.01.1.14.

5 Davidson, Cathy N., and David Theo Goldberg. “Engaging the humanities.” Profession (2004): 42-62.

6 Jay, Gregory. “The engaged humanities: Principles and practices of public scholarship and teaching.” (2010).

7 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Generous thinking: A radical approach to saving the university. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021.

8 Lévy, Pierre. Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. Perseus books, 1997. See also https://www.glamlabs.io/publications/open-a-glam-lab

Topics of interest: 

• Infrastructures of engagement: designing open, inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable platforms
• New models of collaboration across academia, memory institutions, and society
• Pedagogies of engagement and public-facing (digital) humanities education
• Mapping engagement: Evaluating and evidencing public value and impact in digital research
• Preservation, stewardship, and resilience in digital knowledge infrastructures
• Co-creation, citizen science, public and participatory humanities, and community-driven, engaged scholarship
• Policy and governance frameworks for sustaining participatory infrastructures
• Creative and artistic practices as forms of public engagement and dialogue
• The role of digital archives and participatory practices in shaping collective memory and identity
• Ethical and sustainable approaches to participatory digital-enabled  research
• Implementing CARE: Designing digital infrastructures that foster trust, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility
• Intercultural and transnational perspectives on public digital humanities
• Research infrastructure as critical Infrastructure – strategies to build resilient infrastructure for engagement and public good
• Policy and governance frameworks for sustaining participatory infrastructures

Proposals: 

The call for participation accepts:

• Papers
• Panels
• Posters and Demos

For all contributions, a title and an abstract are to be submitted via the Submission page, which can be accessed here (to be announced). Accepted submissions will be published in the Book of Abstracts on Zenodo. All accepted papers will be part of thematic sessions, chaired by a member of the Programme Committee.

Types of proposals: 

• Paper submissions should include a title, the names of the authors and a 500-word abstract. In ConfTool, please provide the abstract text in the corresponding field; please also upload a pdf with the abstract, references and (possibly) images (500 words max, excluding references). We expect papers to be in the range of 15-20 min.
• Panel submissions should include a general title and a list of contributions that make up the panel, the names of the authors for each contribution and a 750-word abstract for the whole panel. In ConfTool, please also upload a pdf with the abstract, references and (possibly) images (750 words max, excluding references). The total duration of the panel session is 90 minutes. We encourage the authors of this submission type to include moments of exchange with the audience, we would like this to be an interactive session, as much as allowed by the time and format.
• We are looking for original posters and demos related to the topic of this year’s event. This category typically includes state-of-the-art project reports, work in progress, beta-versions of tools or new releases of existing tools and services. Demonstration interfaces, online prototypes and experimental work with data at the intersection of cultural heritage and the arts and humanities are welcome. Submissions should include a title, the names of the authors and a 500-word abstract. In ConfTool, please also upload a pdf with the abstract, references and (possibly) images (500 words max, excluding references).

Evaluation: 

Each submission will be reviewed by at least two reviewers selected among the Programme Committee (PC) and other DARIAH bodies (DARIAH Joint Research Committee, DARIAH National Coordinator Committee, DARIAH Coordination Office, DARIAH Strategic Management Team). The reviewers are chosen by the PC according to their expertise in the digital arts and humanities and digital cultural heritage.

The proposals will be reviewed against the following criteria:

1. Structure and clarity
2. Originality, innovation
3. Relevance to the event’s topic
4. Relevance to DARIAH’s communities and DARIAH’s strategy  

Further details can be found in our Peer Review Guidelines.