[Commlist] KCL DDH The Digital Conference 2026 call for papers

*KCL DDH The Digital Conference CALL FOR PAPERS*

Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the Digital 
(23-26 June 2026)

 From the 23rd to 26th June 2026, the Department of Digital Humanities 
at King’s College London will host an international conference exploring 
the evolving role of Digital Humanities in a world increasingly shaped 
by digital technologies. Coinciding with the 25th anniversary of Centre 
for Computing Humanities officially becoming a department of KCL, and 
15th anniversary of being renamed as Department of Digital Humanities in 
2011, we welcome scholars from around the world to critically reflect on 
what ‘digital’ entails in today’s world.

Digital technologies have transformed the ways we live, work, create, 
and connect. From online grassroots movements to open-source tools, from 
digital archives to experimental art and music created with code, the 
digital has become a vital part of how we express ourselves, tell 
stories, and shape our futures. In our daily lives, the digital enables 
new forms of community and care, especially for those historically 
excluded from institutional or geographic centres of power.

But these same technologies have also raised urgent questions. There is 
a growing concern across various disciplines and communities. Recent 
political, environmental and technological developments have shown that 
we cannot afford to treat “the digital” as neutral. It is shaped by 
geographies, specificities, regulatory environments, sociocultural 
contexts, and linguistic hierarchies, which condition how digital 
technologies are produced, used, and experienced across the globe. From 
the resurgence of extremist ideologies and algorithmic manipulation of 
public discourse, to the exploitative dynamics of platform economies and 
the environmental costs of large-scale computing, the digital now 
permeates nearly every aspect of our lives. Artificial intelligence is 
being used against workers, stealing their creative outputs and 
triggering a race to the bottom of working conditions. In addition to 
the socio-political impact of generative AI models, the deleterious 
environmental effects are also becoming increasingly clear.

At the same time, computational and digital methods have enabled new 
forms of collaborative, interdisciplinary, and public-facing humanities 
research. They are reshaping not only our methodological choices but 
also how we conceptualise methods themselves—prompting us to revisit 
questions of reliability and reproducibility. These methods offer 
powerful tools for analysis, visualisation, preservation, and 
dissemination, while also enriching humanities scholarship by scaling up 
our analyses and opening up new avenues of inquiry.

Unlike the underlying code, “the digital” is never binary. This is why, 
more than ever, we need to come together to discuss and debate its 
implications. There is a long tradition of critical research on digital 
methods and other issues concerning “the digital” at King’s, dating back 
to the early 1970s. The Department of Digital Humanities, established as 
the Centre for Computing in the Humanities in 1992, has been a key site 
for this work. Today it is home to a wide range of approaches to 
developing and applying digital methods in the humanities, as well as to 
interrogating the broader social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of 
the digital. Building on over fifty years of innovation and critical 
inquiry, this event invites scholars, practitioners, and communities to 
reflect on the role of Digital Humanities as both a methodological 
practice and a lens to understand and shape the digital world.

We invite proposals that explore (but are not limited to) the following 
themes:

1.Computational humanities and computing culture: computational history, 
music computing, geoanalytics, digital classics, computational 
linguistics, computational social science, cultural analytics, 
computational literary studies

2.Creative digital practice and the arts, music and the digital, 
arts-based methods

3.Design, Interfaces, and Interaction: UX/UI

4.Digital ecologies, environmental justice and sustainable digital futures

5.Digital gaming and play

6.Digital health, digital care, and transformation of the care industry

7.Digital knowledge and epistemologies and critical technical practices 
and digital methods

8.Digital labour and economies, platform studies

9.Digital media

10.Digital Research Infrastructures and funding

11.Embodiment and identity: the digital and the embodied, digital 
childhood & youth

12.Global and decolonial digital cultures, digital commons, digital 
audiences, creator cultures

13.Politics, power, and resistance in the digital age: digital politics, 
deplatformisation, the digital university, engaged digital research

We welcome contributions from across the humanities and beyond, from 
those who use and interrogate digital tools and those who develop them. 
We invite proposals for paper presentations (max. 15 mins) and panels 
(max. 4 x 15 mins) with a title and an abstract of no longer than 300 
words, along with a short biography, no longer than 50 words.

You can submit proposals via THIS FORM 
<https://airtable.com/appMKXTaROaUV7FZh/pag4TJRiA6HYq7sCf/form> until 
the deadline of 30/09/2025. We aim to notify acceptance of abstracts by 
15.11.2025.

Please note: The conference will be face-to-face only, with career 
plenary sessions instead of keynotes (a panel consisting of academics 
from every stage). We offer a limited number of  conference fee waivers, 
as well as limited numbers of partial bursaries for travel and 
accommodation. We will provide more information on these and conference 
fees after acceptance of abstracts have been sent out.

For any inquiries, please contact (thedigitalconference /at/ kcl.ac.uk).

  Webpage: 
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/digital-humanities-today-critical-inquiry-with-and-about-the-digital 
<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/digital-humanities-today-critical-inquiry-with-and-about-the-digital>

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