CFP – English

English | French | Spanish

Deadline: January 15, 2022, 11:59:59 PM (GMT-12)

The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN) will hold DH Unbound, a collaborative virtual conference, from May 17-19, 2022. May 19th will feature a collaborative program with Humanistica 2022. Read more about DH Unbound 2022 on the About page. 

Submit a proposal

Conference Focus

DH Unbound 2022 is guided by ACH and CSDH/SCHN’s commitments to equity and justice. The conference recognizes that digital humanities scholarship is inextricably sociopolitical. Therefore, we have chosen to forgo a theme to emphasize the inherent sociopolitical nature of the work and encourage all proposal writers to explicitly address the sociopolitical stakes of their work. 

DH Unbound 2022 prioritizes proposals that focus on social justice in multiple contexts: anti-racist work, Indigenous studies, cultural and critical ethnic studies, intersectional feminism, postcolonial and decolonal studies, and queer studies. 

We also prioritize proposals that explicitly address multilingualism in digital humanities, which is itself a matter of social justice. Examples of topics include: multilingual metadata, linked open data, preservation and dissemination of endangered languages, OCR for non-Latin scripts, methods for right-to-left languages, tools and interfaces for multilingual digital humanities, multilingual pedagogies, and multilingual corpora.

Conference Scope

Areas of digital humanities scholarship that are relevant to the conference include but are not limited to:

• Digital and computational approaches to humanistic research and pedagogy
• Digital cultural heritage
• Digital surveillance
• Digital humanities tools and infrastructures
• Digital librarianship
• Digital media, art, literature, history, music, film, and games
• Digital public humanities
• Environmental humanities & climate justice
• Humanistic and ethical approaches to data science and data visualization
• Humanistic research on digital objects and cultures
• Humanities knowledge infrastructures
• Labor and organization in digital humanities
• Physical computing
• Resource creation, curation, and engagement
• Use of digital technologies to write, publish, and review scholarship

As a conference committed to cross-disciplinary engagement, DH Unbound 2022 welcomes interdisciplinary proposals. We are also especially interested in receiving proposals from participants with a range of expertise and a variety of roles, including alt-ac positions, employment outside of higher education, and graduate students. We further invite proposals from participants who are newcomers to digital humanities. 

Submission Information

Types

We welcome the following submission types: 

Papers (12-15 minutes): Dynamic presentations that share experiments, works-in-progress, or sustained reflections on outcomes of more complete project while engaging a range of participants and fostering connections and dialogue. 

Lightning Talks (5 minutes): Highly focused presentations that succinctly introduce a topic, method, tool, project, or work-in-progress to catalyze ideas and foster follow-up discussion. To propose a session with multiple lightning talks, please propose a panel or roundtable.

Posters (poster session): Poster proposals present work on any relevant topic or offer project, tool, and software demonstrations in any stage of development. Poster presenters will record a brief (5 minutes, maximum) video to accompany their poster and will join the conference platform during the poster session for synchronous conversations with attendees. 

Panels (1 hour and 15 minutes): Engaging sessions that facilitate dialogue between presentations that are largely independent, highlighting connections between projects, methods or themes and reserving a minimum of 15 minutes for discussion with the audience. 

Roundtables (1 hour and 15 minutes): Sessions for which speakers provide brief interventions or framing on a cohesive set of issues, keywords, methods, and/or themes, reserving a minimum of 30 minutes for discussion among speakers and the audience. 

Installations and Performances (installation/performance session): Art work, creative data visualizations, performances, demonstrations and other critical interventions that engage conference issues, methods, and themes. Installation and performance presenters will record a video of their presentation or installation and will join the conference platform during the performance session for synchronous conversation with attendees. 

Alternate Format (variable length): Given the experimental possibilities of a virtual conference, we encourage those proposing sessions to consider alternate formats. When proposing a session of this type, please describe your session and indicate a preferred time length.

Languages

While our CFP has been released in English, Spanish, and French, we welcome proposals for contributions in all languages. Proposals will be reviewed in the language of submission. Regardless of the language of your proposal, please ensure that your five keywords are in English to facilitate program scheduling. 

Scheduling

Please note that for the purposes of scheduling, we may suggest an alternative submission type or collaboration between related proposals.

We recognize that a virtual conference makes attendance possible for participants from a range of time zones. We welcome this and will do our best to accommodate scheduling needs due to time zones, provided that these needs are noted at time of submission in “Remark/Message from the Authors to the Program Committee and Chairs.”

While there is no limit on the number of submissions, the program committee will not normally schedule more than two presentations from one presenting author.

Proposal Details

Proposals will be submitted using ConfTool. Please create a new account to submit your proposal, even if you have participated in prior digital humanities conferences. For general advise on using ConfTool, please consult their “Instructions for Submitting Authors.”  

Requirements

• Abstract
  • 250-word abstracts for papers, posters, lightning talks, installations, and performances
  • 500-word abstracts for panels, and alternate formats. Alternate formats must include requested time length. 
  • Abstracts should directly address the review criteria: relevance to conference focus; engagement with relevant scholarship; framework and purpose; applicability, significance, and value; and organization and clarity. 
• List of participants and contact information
  • Entered directly into ConfTool along with submission
• 3-5 keywords
  • Entered directly into ConfTool along with submission

Sample Proposals

Individual Papers: Kanyinsola, Hicks-Alcaraz, Garcia, Rehberger et al.

Lightning Talks: Wymar, Bateman

Posters: Bench et al., Vaglienty Gonzalez, Cong-Huyen et al.

Panels: Grigar et al., Rogel-Salazar et al.

Roundtables: Van Wasshenova et al., Barnett et al., Lavin et al., Stevenson et al.

Installation/performances: Stover and Hart, Rieder et al.

Alternate format: Dombrowski et al.

Proposal Review and Notification 

Open Peer Review

DH Unbound 2022 proposals will undergo open peer review. Names and affiliations of authors will be known to a proposal’s reviewer, while names and affiliations of the reviewer will be known to the authors. We are adopting open peer review for several reasons:

• Lack of consensus about how to anonymize submissions, which leads to proposals that are identifiable; 
• The public nature of digital humanities scholarship, which means that anonymized submissions are not, in fact, guaranteed to be anonymous; and
• The lack of accountability in blind peer review, which can promote incivility in the review process. 

Therefore, our use of open peer review is intended to mitigate the implicit inequities in the blind review process. We recognize, however, that open peer review raises issues with power dynamics, such as concerns that emerging scholars may have about evaluating an established scholar. To mitigate these issues, the Program Committee will carefully and thoughtfully assign reviewers, and reviewers will have the right to refuse to review a submission for any reason. We also recognize that open peer review could contribute to increased bias. To mitigate this, we encourage reviewers to evaluate their biases and will provide clear guidance for their role in the review process. We are grateful to DH2020 Program Committee Chairs Laura Estill and Jennifer Guiliano for their work on open peer review, which influenced our approach for DH Unbound 2022. 

Review Criteria

Our review criteria reflect the commitment to an expansive understanding of digital humanities and the sociopolitical nature of scholarship: 

Review Timeline

The review period will begin on January 18, 2022 and end on February, 18, 2022. 

Notifications about acceptance or rejection will be made by March 1, 2022. Reviews will also be made available upon notification. 

Privacy and Licensing

Privacy

Proposal authors will be prompted to review our GDPR-compliant privacy statement when creating a ConfTool account. Submissions and reviews will not be made available to the public. The Program Committee will have access to all submissions and reviews. Reviewers will be able to view only the proposals assigned to them for review. Authors will be able to view reviews of their submissions after the review process concludes. Names of reviewers will be displayed on a slide in an alphabetical list during the opening session of the conference in gratitude for their contribution. 

Licensing

When submitting a proposal, authors will be prompted to review our Creative Commons Transfer Terms and Licensing statement, which requests use of a Creative Commons-Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0) license for the submission.

This license will be used as follows:

1) Accepted proposals will be revised by authors and published in the online program along with their names and affiliations; and

2) In lieu of a Book of Abstracts, revised abstracts will also be deposited in Humanities CORE, where they will be preserved and given a digital object identifier (DOI). Additionally, conference participants are strongly encouraged to deposit their presentations — whether in the form of a paper, slides, poster, or other format — to CORE, and to share them with the DH Unbound 2022 group on the Commons, in order to facilitate ongoing discussion and citation of your work.

Materials deposited in CORE will be governed by the Humanities Commons Terms of Service, about which more information can be found in the CORE FAQ. 

Code of Conduct

DH Unbound is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone regardless of gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, origin, or religion. By attending DH Unbound events, you signal your commitment to contributing to a safe and inclusive experience for all. We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form, whether events are held virtually or face-to-face. Participants in DH Unbound events violating these rules may be barred or banned from DH Unbound activities at the discretion of the organizers.

Harassment includes but is not limited to: derogatory verbal comments; sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language; sexual and/or discriminatory text or audio-visual material in conference spaces (virtual or face-to-face), unless being critiqued in an academic context; deliberate intimidation; stalking; following; harassing photography or recording; questioning someone’s right to use the restroom of their choice; sustained disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact; and unwelcome sexual attention.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the event.

DH Unbound 2022 seeks to uphold these values throughout the submission and review process as well as during the conference itself. Please familiarize yourself with the reporting guidelines and our process for addressing violations. 

Accessibility 

ACH, CSDH/SCHN, and Humanistica strive to ensure that DH Unbound 2022 is accessible for all participants. We are evaluating conference platforms to ensure that they are accessible for all participants. All synchronous sessions will make live transcription available to participants, and keynote and plenary sessions will also include sign language interpretation. We will provide guidelines for accessibility of sessions to all accepted participants. More information, along with a request for information about participant needs, will be circulated in March 2022. 

Conference Time Zone

DH Unbound 2022 will be scheduled in Eastern Time. On Tuesday, May 17th and Wednesday, May 18th, sessions will be scheduled from approximately 10:00am-7:00pm Eastern Time. On Thursday, May 19th, sessions will be scheduled from 9:00am-4:00pm Eastern Time to accommodate participants across the Francophone world.

Conference Registration and Bursaries 

Registration for DH Unbound 2022 will open March 1, 2022. 

The cost of running DH Unbound 2022 is shared between ACH and CSDH/SCHN. As a result, we must charge registration fees to cover the cost. Registration fees will cover the cost of running a virtual conference, which include conference submission management software, conference platforms for videoconferencing and spatial chat, honoraria for keynote and plenary events, and accessibility (sign language interpretation and remote captioning for keynotes and plenaries and live captioning for conference sessions). We have worked to keep the registration costs as low as possible while ensuring we are providing attendees with a positive conference experience.  

Bursaries

ACH and CSDH/SCHN will offer a limited number of bursaries to support attendance by members who are contingently employed or are graduate students. Details are forthcoming from ACH and CSDH/SCHN.

Registration Fee Schedule

We encourage non-members to register with their preferred organization to receive member rates. Non-members wishing to affiliate with ACH should register using the non-member categories below. Those wishing to affiliate with CSDH/SCHN or Humanistica should join their preferred organization to obtain their member number and then register for DH Unbound 2022 using the member categories below.

Contact Information

For questions and concerns about the CFP, conference program, submissions, Code of Conduct, or accessibility, please contact the DH Unbound 2022 co-chairs at dhunbound2022[at]ach.org.

If you are interested in translating this call for proposals into another language, please contact the co-chairs at dhunbound2022[at]ach.org.

Program Committee Co-Chairs

ACH Co-Chair: Roopika Risam, Salem State University

CSDH/SCHN Co-Chair: Barbara Bordalejo, University of Lethbridge

Humanistica Co-Chair: Emmanuel Château-Dutier, Université de Montréal

Additional Program Committee members will be announced shortly.

The Program Committee gratefully acknowledges Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Alex Gil, Jennifer Guiliano, and Geoffrey Rockwell for their help preparing the call for papers.