Report on Recent ADHO Annual Conferences: Multilingual DH in Focus

This is a guest post by Joanne Bernardi.

Graduate students in the humanities learn early that academic conferences are cornerstones of our professional communities. We’re encouraged to attend, participate, establish, and then sustain professional profiles and records of accomplishment. Ideally, these conferences are also opportunities to broaden our awareness of current discipline-specific practices and ideas, helping us to discern and then hone our intellectual interests and priorities. Conferences can also provide spaces to reconnect with friends and colleagues and form new relationships with like-minded people. For those of us working in non-English or even non-European languages with scripts other than the Latin alphabet, however, attending one of the large annual conferences held by organizations representing more conventional humanities disciplines, and scholarly topics typifying Anglo-European languages-based curricula (e.g., the Modern Languages Association), can be a daunting, marginalizing experience, especially for first timers.

 In contrast, as a first-time attendee at the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) annual international conference in 2023, hosted that year by the University of Graz, Austria’s Department of Digital Humanities, it was refreshing to find acknowledgment and validation of multilingualism as a key component in inclusive and equitable DH practice and, by extension, the practice of all academic disciplines. Pre-conference sessions for DH2023: “Collaboration as Opportunity”[1] included a day-long workshop, “Who Are the Users in Multilingual DH (MLDH),” that featured lively discussion, camaraderie, and a communal write-a-thon resulting in two collaborative papers submitted for publication. I decided to attend DH2024: “Reinvention and Responsibility” (hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University’s Arlington, Virginia campus) when I noticed a similar half-day “Multilingual DH” workshop was planned. My experiences attending DH2023, DH2024, and both Multilingual DH pre-conference workshops prompted this post about recent developments at the annual ADHO conference, recognized as the largest and most recognized global conference in the field of digital humanities,[2] and ADHO’s increased organizational promotion of multilingualism, both in digital humanities as a field and as an emerging interdisciplinary field of its own.

Context: ADHO and ADHO’s annual conference

The Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations is an international umbrella organization coordinating activities across thirteen constituent organizations open to individual membership and overseeing ADHO’s annual international conference. ADHO’s oldest constituent organizations can be traced back to the 1970s. Formal efforts to establish ADHO began in 2002; the first conference formally designated as a “Digital Humanities” conference was held in 2006. Many readers will be familiar with ADHO and the annual conference, but the central role the conference plays in shaping its mission to promote and support digital research and teaching across arts and humanities disciplines nevertheless warrants renewed attention. The pandemic initiated a period of self-reflection and open discussion about improving the annual conference and, by extension, the organization itself through greater transparency and alignment with ADHO’s core values (e.g., diversity, equity, inclusion, and decolonization) and its objectives (including collaboration, networking, project-sharing, open access, and international dissemination of DH scholarship). This process has resulted in ongoing changes in, for example, conference protocol, the make-up of coordinating and organizing committees, the call for papers, the selection of conference themes, and the conference peer review process.[3]  One initiative aims to permanently transition the conference to a hybrid in-person/online status. DH2023 was the first in-person conference since DH2019 at Utrecht University. DH2020 (Carleton University and the University of Ottowa, Canada) and DH2022 in Tokyo (deferred from 2021) were both convened online. DH2026: “Engagement,” to be held in Daejeon, South Korea (The Daejeon Convention Center, July 27-August 21), will be the first ADHO annual in-person conference in Asia. When a DH2026 organizing committee representative introduced the conference venue at DH2024, he referred to plans for AI translation and mentioned “Translinguality in the era of AI” as a potential topic.

A permanently hybrid annual conference format would be a lifesaver for individuals affected by the increasingly complex politics of international travel. Several DH2024 presenters had to resort to remote participation because of last-minute U.S. visa complications. There was a broadly diverse geographical range of presenters at both DH2023 (in Graz) and DH2024, although DH2024, the first annual conference in the U.S. since 2013, was dominated by U.S.-based presenters (see Figure 1).

Hybrid access also increases the possibility of conference participation by students and emerging scholars for whom the cost of travel would be prohibitive. Notably, ADHO provides support for students and young scholars as part of its investment in diversifying attendance and participation at its annual conference and in the DH community at large. In my experience, the general distribution of attendees and panelists at the DH2023 and DH2024 conferences lacked evidence of the hierarchy (e.g., in rank or professional roles) common in the academic community. ADHO Awards Committee administers three types of awards assisting students or young scholars: Conference Bursary Awards facilitate presenting at the annual conference; the Paul Fortier Prize is awarded to the best annual conference paper by a young scholar; and the Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen Young Scholar Prize recognizes significant scholarly contribution by a young scholar at a humanities conference using digital technology. The student member conference registration fee for DH2024 was US$100. Individuals can become members of the ADHO community and register for the annual conference at the membership rate by joining any of ADHO’s constituent organizations. Annual student membership in the Association for Computers and the Humanities, for example, currently costs only US$26.00.

DH2025 will be held July 15-18 at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa with the theme “Accessibility and Citizenship.” The deadline for proposals was in early December, and the keynote speakers were also announced at that time. The pre-conference workshops have not yet been announced. In addition to presenting at the annual conference, other opportunities to become involved include serving as a peer reviewer, and in the past, previous conference participants have been given the opportunity to voluntarily chair panels. In such cases, conference organizers attempt to match each volunteer’s research interests with panel topics to the extent possible. I volunteered as a chair for DH2024, and introduced and moderated discussions about five projects (including four based in Asia) bridging physical and digital worlds. This experience made the conference that much more rewarding.

ADHO and Multilingual DH

English was the official language at DH2023 and DH2024, but the term “multilingualism” gained more visibility after ADHO’s 2022 post-pandemic self-reassessment. DH2023’s organizers thought the subject of multilingualism and conference languages important enough to issue a September 2022 statement available on ADHO’s website that explains why the official language in Graz would be English (for one, they had committed to hosting an English-language conference in 2019). This statement credits ADHO’s Multi-Lingualism & Multi-Culturalism Committee (MLMC) (created in 2005) for ADHO’s official policy on multilingualism in its conference protocol, and for piloting Spanish, French, Italian, and German versions of ADHO’s English-language website (these are ADHO’s five “standard languages”). According to ADHO’s conference protocol, “ADHO is a multilingual organization with a multilingual conference,” and Program Committees and Local Organizers can add languages “when the conference would benefit from the inclusion of presentations in a language beyond the standard five.” Formally bilingual conferences are also possible providing specific logistical conditions are met. Past conferences have shown, however, that simply increasing the number of permissible languages does not necessarily guarantee a higher percentage of multilingual participation,[4] evidence that multilinguality involves considerations that go beyond the issue of permissible conference languages. According to ADHO’s website, MLMC was on hiatus in 2022, but it will be reconsidering the organization’s language policy now that ADHO constituent organizations “extend well beyond Europe and North America.”[5]

The two excellent pre-conference workshops I attended were sponsored by ADHO’s Multilingual Digital Humanities Special Interest Group (Multilingual DH). They were not exclusively attended by those of us working in languages outside the dominant Anglo-European sphere, but our presence in both (well-attended) workshops was significant. Similarly, our discussions and activities amply addressed our community and our unique language-based challenges. Many, if not all of the organizers for both workshops and the attendees were also members of the active DARIAH-EU Working Group on Multilingual DH.[6] Both groups share the objective of facilitating digitally enabled research in under-resourced languages and dialects. They aim to assess the adaptation of existing tools to under-resourced languages and develop new tools, programming libraries, datasets, and standards addressing the specific challenges of working in these languages. Their community-building activities include developing tutorials, holding annual meetings, and organizing networking workshops in person and/or online. As I mentioned earlier, the collaborative “writing sprint” I participated in as an attendee at the DH2023 pre-conference workshop, “Who Are the Users in Multilingual DH,” resulted in the article “Multilinguality in Action: Towards Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in Digital Humanities”.[7]

The DH2024 pre-conference workshop was more of a mini conference with introductions followed by a “fishbowl discussion” on topics ranging from controlled vocabularies in under-resourced languages, comparative translation studies, definitions of multilingualism and multilingual DH, corpus building and encoding, collaboration, and discussions about a possible group manifesto. We then broke into groups to discuss these topics in more detail before convening together to compare notes.

Readers keen on following the activities of ADHO’s Multilingual DH SIG and the DARIAH Working Group on Multilingual DH can find more information on the website Multilingual DH. The site also has information about the first Multilingual DH pre-conference workshop (at DH2019), “Towards Multilingualism in Digital Humanities: Achievements, Failures, and Good Practices in DH Projects with Non-Latin Scripts.” You can also join the associated mailing list and check out the group’s associated Github organization.

The organization’s annual international conference’s web presence is still young, but you can access DH2023’s robust online resources at its YouTube Channel, @dh_Graz137 (ADHO Digital Humanities 2023, with the conference’s Closing and Opening Ceremonies, Keynotes, Lunchtime Lectures, and curated playlists), and DH2024 Keynote presentations are available at @DHinDC2024.

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References

[1] In 2005, ADHOs annual conference adopted the practice of using a shorthand designation combining the initials “DH” with the conference year (e.g., as seen on social media as #DHyyyy), followed by the annual conference theme.

[2] Laura Estill, Jennifer Guilliano, et. al. “The Circus We Deserve?  A Front Row Look at the Organization of the Annual Academic Conference for the Digital Humanities.” DHQ 16:4 (2022).

[3] See “The Circus We Deserve” to read about these initiatives in more detail, together with a response to this article,  both published in DHQ 16:4 (2022). These are my sources for the ADHO annual conference background and proposed initiatives for change. See also “The Only Constant is Change: Current and Upcoming Modifications to ADHO’s Digital Humanities Conference,” a 7/6/23 ADHO website post that also references and links to these two DHQ articles.

[4] “The Circus We Deserve?” See paragraph 56. In 2014 the Call for Papers was published in twenty-three languages, but multilingual conference participation was ultimately low (4.1% of the presentations were given in French, Spanish, Italian, or German).

[5] “The Only Constant is Change.”

[6] DARIAH-EU is the European-based Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. Originally established in 2014, it integrates digital arts and humanities research across Europe.

[7] Alíz Horváth, Cosima Wagner, et.al, magazén 5:4 (2024). Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, Venice University Press. http://edizionicafoscari.it/it/edizioni4/riviste/magazen/2024/2/.