DH Forum

The DH Forum is an annual conference held every Fall from 2011-2019 at the University of Kansas. The Forum consists of several days of hands-on workshops, research paper and poster presentations, and prominent keynote speakers, each year addressing a different general digital humanities theme. The forum is free and open to all, and each year attracts 80 to 120 local, national, and some international speakers and participants, including librarians, scholars, and students from a range of disciplines. The Forum encourages student participation and recognizes one or more student's work each year through a monetary award. Videos and abstracts of most of all Forum presentations are available below.

Talks and recordings are also searchable through the IDRH Finding Aid.

2019: Bodies | Justice | Futures

“This year, the theme of the Forum is: Bodies, Justice, Futures. With this theme, the Digital Humanities Forum hopes to inspire presenters to think about the ways in which we envision and build towards just futures for individual and collective bodies from around the globe.  By evoking the human body, we ask presenters to foreground humanistic inquiries of digital culture and technology, to trace continuities between historical realities and present socio-political conditions, and/or take up issues related to marginalized and invisible lived experiences.”

2018: Digital Frontiers

“The theme for the 2018 Digital Frontiers is Finding Community in Digital Humanities. When the diversity of disciplines, technologies, and communities involved in DH converge, we are often confronted with novel and/or previously uninvestigated approaches to the field. How do these aspects overlap? Where do they diverge? Each community brings its own voice and perspective, often urging us to interrogate the assumptions hidden within our own work. This conference's theme asks participants to examine these intersections and bring us into dialogue with one another. Aside from disciplinary and research communities in the Digital Humanities, we also frame communities as those of lived experiences: international communities, marginalized communities and communities of resistance, classroom communities, digital communities, and others.”

2017: Digital Storytelling & The Humanities

“This year's DH Forum will focus on the theory and practice of digital storytelling as it relates to humanities research, teaching and learning. In particular, we seek innovative approaches and examples of digital storytelling that address questions related to democratizing DH practices, communicating knowledge and research, and representing underrepresented languages, places and peoples.”

2016: Places, Spaces, Sites: Mapping Critical Intersections in Digital Humanities

“Notions of place, space, and site are theorized and put into practice in distinct ways across various academic fields. Spatial technologies and location services and tools, along with the rise of geohumanities work, are bringing the tensions among ideas of place, space, and site to the surface. Moreover, a turn towards internationalization and the global has been taking place in Digital Humanities scholarship and practice, further complicating our notions of space and place. Digital Humanities has the capacity to bring these tensions together in both conflicting and harmonious ways. The 2016 DH Forum seeks to explore the intersections, mutual critiques and/or coincidences among fields, and their practices and conceptual tenets.”

2015: Peripheries, Barriers, Hierarchies: Rethinking access, Inclusivity, and Infrastructure in Global DH Practice

“Our 2015 Digital Humanities Forum will take a critical approach to exploring peripheries, barriers and hierarchies of digital humanities practice in a global context, identifying those assumptions, and advocating and showcasing alternative practices to advance the field. We will critically engage these issues by exploring themes such as inclusivity, accessibility, global perspectives, decolonization, and democratization as they relate to digital humanities practice and infrastructure.”

2014: Nodes & Networks in the Humanities: Geometries, Relationships, Processes

“The network has emerged as a powerful model in humanities scholarship in recent years. It is used as a visualization and analytic tool to explore objects, ideas or events and their relationships; as a method to discover, link and create new resources and data; and as a social structure through which we conduct our scholarly and social lives and develop our self-identity. Our digital objects, and our digital selves, all exist in ‘the Net.’ As Elijah Meeks argues, ‘The network is not a social network or geographic network or logical network but rather a primitive object capable of and useful for the modeling and analysis of relationships between a wide variety of objects.’”

2013: Return to the Material

“Recently digital humanities discussions have returned to a focus on the material in many senses. Bethany Nowviskie’s talk at MLA 2013—‘Resistance in the Materials’—explored various facets of the material aspects of digital humanities, including the role of craft and collaboration, the ‘increasing casualization of academic labor,’ and the emergence of digital-to-physical technologies. We will explore these and related topics in this year's conference with the theme ‘Return to the Material.’"

2012: Big Data and Uncertainty in the Humanities

“This conference seeks to address the opportunities and challenges humanistic scholars face with the ubiquity and exponential growth of new web-based data sources (e.g. electronic texts, social media, and audiovisual materials) and digital methods (e.g. information visualization, text markup, crowdsourcing metadata).”

2011: Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities

“Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities is a one-day conference held at the University of Kansas on September 24, 2011, which will allow KU and non-KU faculty and graduate students to explore the theory and practice of knowledge representation, broadly conceived, and to showcase their digital humanities projects and methodologies. The keynote speaker will be C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. The conference is part of our 3-day Digital Humanities Forum, which includes hands-on workshops and THATCamp Kansas.”