Abstracts

Monday, April 13, 2026

10:30 – 11:45 am – Panel

Tell Us A Story: Designing Digital Humanities Projects That Resonate

Victor Temprano (Independent Scholar, Vancouver, Canada)

Digital humanities projects often begin with a rush toward technology before their purpose is fully understood. From my experience building public-facing projects such as Native-Land.ca, Project ‘44, and Women of the Ancient World (in development), I’ve found that the most impactful digital work begins not with tools, but with clarity—who a project is for, what story it tells, and why it should exist at all.

This talk proposes a three-part framework for designing meaningful DH projects: Audience, Imagination, and Story.

Audience asks creators to narrow their focus. Who, realistically, are we trying to reach? Stakeholders, students, the general public, or motivated specialists all have different needs. Thinking carefully about how these users will find, use, and share a project is the first step toward creating something that truly connects.

Imagination invites creative freedom before technical constraint. Academics often worry about what is or isn’t “possible” digitally, but the ideation stage should be wide open. Creators should draw from diverse media and forms, explore emotional tone, and allow space for conceptual freedom before considering tools or platforms.

Story urges us to see digital projects as acts of public storytelling rather than repositories of information. Clear narrative framing can transform an academic project into something refreshing and immersive, encouraging curiosity and self-learning. Stories that surface ethical questions or hidden histories often make the deepest impact. They may even reveal when parts of a project are better left analog.

A small, well-told digital story can resonate more deeply than an ambitious but diffuse platform. This talk shares practical methods for scoping, ideation, and focus, drawn from over a decade of DH practice and software development, with one aim: not more digital work, but better digital work.

Recentering Consent in Archives as Data Projects: Notes from Medicine’s Visual Cultures

Sean Purcell (University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, USA)

This paper examines extant issues in archives as data projects by centralizing consent in biomedical libraries and archives. Responding to and building on Jessica Marie Johnson’s critique of archival datasets—collections of data that reaffirm and recreate the harmful logics that codified violent practices like the transatlantic slave trade—this paper outlines the overlapping problems which are reproduced when archival materials are transformed into computationally actionable datasets. Looking to a half-finished dataset developed for a dissertation in the history of medicine, this paper walks through an evolving approach to research ethics that began with an archival data project and ended with an ethical crisis.

 This paper describes the development of a dataset designed to quantify the visual material found in a corpus of English medical textbooks written at the turn of the twentieth century. The goal of this dataset was to count, describe, and organize the broader visual cultures associated with research into tuberculosis in this period. The problem that emerged was that many of the images—both photographs and illustrations—depended on the bodies of patients as part of their visual argument. As these patients probably did not consent to being subjected to biomedical research, let alone research done by a digital humanist a century later, it is unethical to continue to use their information, even if it is partial, fragmented, data that has been anonymized, objectified, and made computationally useful.

This paper will work through this ethical crisis from an postcolonial and postcustodial framework. Thinking about how medical science has a history of seeing its subjects as epistemic resources which can and should be mined for novel arguments, and thinking about how this extractive ideology is reproduced in data science contexts, this paper will consider how to reframe, recreate, or divest historical health data in ways that protect abused historical subjects, their communities, and their descendants.

Public Digital Humanities and Ethical Collaborations:  Archival Restitution in Brazos County Texas

Amy Earhart (Texas A&M University, College Station, USA)

The Millican Massacre, 1868 (MM) < https://dhrace.net/millican/> began as a pedagogical project, but has evolved to include a public humanities arm invested in supporting economic and social justice issues that impact local community members. This paper will discuss the ways that our digital research might engage local communities in self-directed social justice projects, moving from a model of scholarly extract to a community led partnership. Ethical partnering with historically exploited communities is what I call Archival Restitution, the practice of using our scholarly knowledge to support community led activities related to our research, rather than knowledge extraction. I will discuss how the MM project is a community collaboration built around a slowly established trust <Earhart, “Can we Trust the University?: Digital Humanities Collaborations with Historically Exploited Cultural Communities,” Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, 2018>. I have partnered with community leaders to obtain a Texas Historical Marker to honor those killed in the massacre, worked with local Black property holders to encourage media attention that highlights the loss of Black land to unscrupulous white developers <”Black-Owned Land Is Under Siege in the Brazos Valley,” Texas Monthly, 2023>, and collected data to challenge bias in local datasets, such as the county CAD land database which is being used to dilute Black land ownership rights. In each of these cases the community set the goal, and I utilized scholarship knowledge and connections to aid the community in achieving their goal. Using these examples, the paper will lay out a model of ethical partnership with local communities to resist long histories of racism.

12:45 – 1:45 pm – Panel

A Model for the Digital Edition of Inventories of Enslaved Persons

Eduard Arriaga (Clark University, Worcester, USA)

Blossom Machado Fehrs (Presenting) (University of North Florida, Jacksonville, USA)

Clayton McCarl (University of North Florida, Jacksonville, USA)

Siobhan Meï  (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA)

During the Fall 2025 semester, our team of four contributors-Clayton McCarl, Eduard Arriaga, Siobhan Meï, and myself, Blossom Machado Fehrs- proposed and created a micro-edition with Scholarly Editing, with the intent of defining a model for creating digital editions of the inventories of enslaved persons that appear in censuses, wills, and other colonial-era and nineteenth-century documents. This edition addresses two primary questions: how can editors approach such inventories in a way that respects the dual nature of those documents as both pieces of discourse and as collections of data, and how can we do so in a way that honors the humanity of the people enumerated? We present six separate lists, one in French from Saint Domingue (1778); one in Portuguese from Brazil (1872); two in Spanish, one from the Republic of New Granada (1845) and another from Cuba (1858), and two in English, one from Virginia (1783) and one from Florida (1857). We developed a TEI-XML markup scheme that seeks to dignify the people listed by developing structured metadata that emphasizes the condition of each individual as a human being, rather than as a unit of property. After working through challenges presented by both the documents themselves and the nature of the encoding language used, we designed and implemented an interface that allows users to interact with the inventories in both their original format and in non-linear ways that separate the individuals listed from the repressive structures of the documents.

This project builds upon a paper delivered by Clayton McCarl at the 2024 conference of the TEI Consortium in Buenos Aires, Argentina, titled “¿Cómo editar los censos de personas esclavizadas?” (“How to Edit Censuses of Enslaved Persons?”), which represents preliminary engagement with the theoretical and practical problems that this micro-edition addresses. 

Spatial mapping of segregation and settlement patterns in Lagos and Salvador since the 20th century

Adesoji Adedipe (University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA)

My digital humanities project does a critical spatial and textual analysis of how the residential spaces in the cities of Lagos, Nigeria and Salvador, Brazil have been laid out overtime from the colonial period, through the era of military dictatorship and the return to democracy in the same century. The project’s ultimate goal is mapping these cities and creating digital narratives. This is a socio spatial organization study which is connected to unequal health outcomes and how it impacts the well-being of low- and middle-income peoples in both states.

My project is qualitative research of spatial segregation in two cities on different sides of the Atlantic, one divided into the Island and Mainland by a natural body of water, the other separated by human settlement patterns and then connected by a human built public urban elevator.

My project proposes using digital mapping tools  to chronicle and unveil how historical epochs can reveal continuities, contestations and discontinuities of issues around segregation, housing, inequality, and  health outcomes. I will be using stories to explain the maps and to show the trends over time in various political epochs. I have collected historical maps of Lagos and Salvador overtime in this quest which will also show the layering of the maps.

I will utilize digital mapping to illuminate the causal processes at work in explaining why the same legacies of colonialism, (dating back to slavery in the case of Brazil ), socio-economic inequalities, and segregated settlement patterns have disproportionately affected the health of the middle- and lower-class peoples in both states. My work in progress centers on the colonial legacies of residential segregation and unequal health outcomes in the colonially founded cities of Lagos and Salvador.

Tagging the Gold Coast: Anti-Colonial Mapping and Digital Cultural Heritage in Gold Coast Novels

Akua Agyeiwaa Denkyi-Manieson (University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Lincoln, USA)

In this project, I explore how tagging and mapping place names in early Gold Coast (now Ghana) novels opens up new ways of seeing the colonial and anti-colonial geographies within them. Working with four texts, Marita or the Folly of Love (1885–1888), Ethiopia Unbound (1911), The Anglo-Fanti (1928), and Eighteenpence (1943), I track how the novels move between global sites such as Cambridge and Sierra Leone and local spaces like Cape Coast, Accra, and Kyebi. Tagging these place names revealed a shift from broad, outward-looking colonial landscapes to detailed depictions of Akan communities and their cultural worlds. Rather than treating tagging as a purely technical task, I frame it as a scholarly intervention that recovers overlooked spatial histories and contributes to digital cultural heritage work. My methods draw on XML tagging and geocoding, informed by digital humanities theory and archival practice. The outcome is not only a digital resource but also a way of teaching and interpreting these texts in relation to anti-colonial knowledge production. This paper reflects on what is at stake when we digitize African texts: who gets to map, preserve, and circulate them, and how digital methods can support broader commitments to decolonial scholarship and open access.

2:00 – 3:30 pm – Lightning Talk Panel

New England Jews and Nazi Youth: A CollectionBuilder Site

Kyra Dezjot (Fordham University, Bronx, USA)

This digital humanities project, New England Jews and Nazi Youth, deploys archival, spatial, and temporal mapping to illuminate the often-overlooked interaction between Nazi-affiliated youth groups in New England and neighboring Jewish communities between 1933–1939. Built using CollectionBuilder and harnessing a rich corpus of images, newspaper clippings, videos, and documents, the site situates these materials in a geographic and chronological framework—through interactive maps and timelines—that makes visible the proximity and overlap of Nazi youth camps and Jewish daily life. By allowing users to explore metadata (locations, subjects, dates) in multiple formats (CSV, JSON) the project underscores the ways in which Jewish communities responded to the ideological threat—not only through public protest or institutional policy, but also through everyday vigilance and community awareness. In emphasizing both the documentary record of American Nazism (its presence, spread, propaganda, organization) and the Jewish response (witness, resistance, social memory), the website offers a nuanced counter-narrative to dominant histories that treat Nazism as a distant European phenomenon. Through its open-access design, visual affordances, and integration of spatial-temporal data, the site exemplifies how digital humanities can deepen critical engagement with the history of antisemitism in the U.S., fostering new forms of scholarship and public understanding. Link to the site: https://kyradezjot.github.io/american-jews-draft/

The making of South Asian Archive of Digital Art (SADA)

Najam Ul Assar (Presenting) (University of British Columbia, Kelowna, Canada)
Megan Smith (University of British Columbia, Kelowna, Canada)

The South Asian Digital Arts Archive (SADA) is a community-driven, open-access platform designed to document, preserve, and reimagine digital art practices across South Asia. Emerging from doctoral research in Digital Arts & Humanities at the University of British Columbia, SADA foregrounds anti-colonial and post-colonial frameworks, feminist and queer perspectives, and multilingual, community-centred approaches to digital cultural heritage. It builds on the principle of “re-archiving” — a methodology that resists extractive, Eurocentric archival models and instead prioritises decentralised, sustainable, and participatory practices.

This lightning talk reflects on the making of SADA as both a scholarly and infrastructural intervention. It engages with pressing issues in global digital humanities: open data and preservation as resistance, resilience in the face of political instability, and the ethics of archiving under conditions of surveillance, censorship, and conflict. Drawing on over thirty interviews with digital artists from eight South Asian countries, SADA’s methodology maps the future of inclusive AI and also tool-making from a Global South lens.

Technically, SADA experiments with multilingual metadata, inclusive design, and minimal computing principles to ensure accessibility across borders and infrastructures. The project aligns with broader DH debates around materiality, sustainability, and global AI practices, while fostering transnational collaboration among artists, curators, and communities.

This talk demonstrates how postcolonial digital archives can reshape epistemic power, expand understandings of heritage, and contribute to a more equitable digital humanities.

Making “The Knowledge of the Old Location” accessible

Julia Goke (Université du Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg)

The Old Location in Windhoek was the largest Location in Namibia. This racially segregated area was a significant cultural and social hub for Namibia’s Black population. The forced relocation of its population to a new township called Katutura (Otjiherero: “Place where we don’t want to stay”) in 1959 led to protests that were violently suppressed by the South African government. This was a crucial moment in the Namibian struggle for independence and national women’s history. While most historical accounts focus on the forced resettlement and the protests before the Old Location was closed in 1968, this project seeks to highlight its history and cultural importance.

“The Knowledge of the Old Location” is a cooperative project between the University of Namibia, the National Archives of Namibia, and the C2DH (University of Luxembourg) that aims to develop an accessible and sustainable digital community archive focusing on the social history of the Old Location. As part of the project, my PhD considers the infrastructure of digitalized historical data and its accessibility in areas with lower internet connectivity. This also includes a commitment to principles of data sovereignty to ensure that the source communities retain control over their cultural heritage because an important part of this project is a deep awareness of data ethics and ethical collaboration practices between partners with varying levels of access to digital resources.

Direct engagement with local communities is as the heart of this project. The project therefore aims to make several private archives of former residents of the Old Location accessible to the public for the first time. This is thanks to a prototype of the IT-infrastructure I am developing for a research stay in April 2025, based on minimal computing approaches for optimal resource utilization.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in the teaching and learning of foreign languages: Insight from a public university

Akwasi Boateng (University of Education, Winneba, Winneba, Ghana, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa)

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools and applications are transforming human endeavors, including higher education. These applications and tools are changing language education in higher education. Although some studies have investigated how generative AI technologies influence teaching and learning in higher education, many studies have focused on the contexts of the Global North. Little work has been done on how AI as a form of communication innovation is changing teaching and learning dynamics in higher education in the Global South, especially Africa and Ghana. The few studies on AI in higher education institutions in Ghana have not explored how these technologies are transforming the teaching and learning of foreign languages in public universities. This study attempts to address this gap and contributes to the literature on this topic by exploring how lecturers and students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Education, Winneba, in Ghana use AI applications and tools to enhance their academic, teaching and learning activities. This qualitative research conducts interviews with foreign language lecturers and focus group discussions with students to ascertain their AI usage, applications and motivations, which drive their appropriation in academic, teaching and learning activities. The study draws conclusions from the data collected and analysis to contribute to the knowledge and literature on AI in language education, an understudied area in research in Ghana, owing to the novelty of these technologies and applications. The study makes recommendations on how foreign language lecturers and students in public universities can integrate and improve the use of AI in the teaching and learning of languages. It also highlights the limitation of the study and provides suggestions for future research on the topic. 

Disability Justice and Digital Public Humanities at the Rutgers Anti-Eugenics Lab

Moira Armstrong  (Rutgers University Newark, Newark, USA)

For the past few months, students with the Rutgers Anti-Eugenics Lab have been researching the histories and legacies of eugenics in New Jersey and at Rutgers University. Our work centers disability justice and its intersections, with an anti-racist, abolitionist, and queer liberationist lens on eugenics and its afterlives. In this lightning talk,  two students from the Lab will present the Lab’s work-in-progress digital public humanities website, an interdisciplinary hub that contextualizes historical archival findings with contemporary social science and disabled perspectives. The site seeks to demonstrate the past and present of eugenics and its legacies in higher education, healthcare, and other areas focused on the state of New Jersey, as well as envision how interdisciplinary knowledge and intersectional disability lived experience can inform reparative futures and anti-eugenic resistance, particularly in the United States today as eugenics experiences a resurgence. The site will include visualizations that demonstrate the geographic and topical spread of eugenics through network mapping and ArcGIS StoryMaps, track the temporal change in eugenic ideas and institutions through timelines and Ngram charts, and provide insight into research methods and processes by showing original archival documents and processes of coding, with an emphasis on interactivity and access to primary sources. We will also discuss the project’s partnership with New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) and how we are working through the challenges of doing public humanities in collaboration with people inside the prison industrial complex, where access to internet and technology are heavily restricted or forbidden.

Digital Narratives of Hospitality: A Data-driven Approach

Nitin Luthra (Duke University, Durham, USA)

Hospitality” refers to openness to strangers and foreigners. It has been an important concept in international relations and human rights discourses since the 18th century when the philosopher Kant argued for the universal right of every human to be welcomed by any state. However, as postcolonial scholars have noted, these ideas of asylum and hospitality become complicated when applied to non-White populations. Primary thinkers of hospitality like Kant, Levinas, and Derrida, focus mainly on the host (citizen) as the giver of hospitality, not the guest (immigrant, refugee, minority). As scholars of race, like Saidiya Hartman and Mimi Thi Nguyen have noted, the non-White guest is expected to be forever indebted and become an ideal representative of their race or social group. 

Because contemporary encounters with refugees are primarily mediated through the “affective economies” (Ahmed) of new media technologies that shape perception, circulation, and affective reception, an analysis of digital archives is indispensable for theorizing hospitality. Digital archives, such as Remembering Refuge and Archive of Immigrant Voices, not only document but filter and negotiate welcome (Derrida; Chouliaraki). I supplement close readings of refugee narratives with computational analysis of the rhetoric of gratitude. I hypothesize that distant reading 100+ prose narratives using a data-driven approach (sentence embeddings, topic modeling, and cosine similarity) demonstrates a significant measure of gratitude. Using these results, I argue that acknowledgment of hospitality functions as an invisible but crucial discursive demand in the structurally mediated discourse of hospitality.

Using the 4Rs to Address Epistemological and Ontological Issues in AI Design

Kenlea Pebbles (Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Lifeways & Cultures, Mount Pleasant, USA & Chapman University, Orange, USA)

As the use of AI is expanding to the monitoring of communities and land and water use by organizations such as NASA and more specific programs like the HIGSON project by USAFRICOM, the need to seriously consider the epistemological and ontological implications of ethical AI design and how to address issues within it is growing. While these organizations and programs are monitoring water and land use in diverse communities across nations and continents, the ethical issues of the epistemological/ontological (E/O) design of these AI tools in their data collection is central to respecting the communities through responsible and reciprocal land and water use.

I propose that using the Indigenous framework and heuristic of the 4Rs (Respect, Relationship, Responsibility, and Reciprocity) as an Indigenous framework is one way to address E/O design issues of AI. By addressing the AI ethical design issues (across linguistic, reality, cultural E/O frameworks), we can address the quality of data collected and analyzed. However, this is not a fast process as it requires community input, including using Indigenous qualitative and quantitative research methodologies (Wilson, 2008; Smith, 1999; Walter and Anderson, 2016). 

This evaluation of the E/O can be done by utilizing the 4Rs as a way of bridging the linguistic, reality, and cultural diversity. An example of how linguistic, reality. and cultural diversity can be bridged in an ethical way is shown by Marshall’s Two-eyed Seeing (2020). This process not only bridges ethical issues by inclusion of indigenizing AND decolonizing practices, it also shows how the humanities and the sciences intertwine. This presentation addresses how the 4Rs can be applied and measured in AI to measure change in E/O design and the reliability of data outcomes.

3:45 – 4:45 pm

Digital Passages: Mapping a Feminist Cold War Counter-Narrative

Songyao Chen (Towson University, Towson, USA)
Christina Gibson  (Towson University, Towson, USA)
Hong Li (Towson University, Towson, USA)
Ashley Todd-Diaz (Towson University, Towson, USA)

This talk presents “Digital Passages: Mapping a Feminist Cold War Counter-Narrative”, an ArcGIS StoryMap visualizing the life of Han Xiu (Teresa Buczacki), an American citizen raised in Cold War China. Using her memoirs, our project challenges dominant, state-controlled histories by centering on a woman’s transnational experience. We frame her story as feminist praxis, where personal accounts of survival, from rural campaigns in Shanxi to the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang, counter official state-building narratives. Her fight to reclaim her U.S. citizenship is presented as an act of reclaiming self-identification against a state that sought to define her. 

There are 4 presentations in this talk: 

• A Life in Counter-Narrative: The Transnational Journey of Han Xiu (Teresa Buczacki)
  • This presentation introduces the historical context for our project. We narrate the extraordinary life of Han Xiu, an American citizen raised in Mao’s China, drawing from her memoirs, The Unwanted and The Argo’s Voyage Home (Refraction). Her journey across competing ideologies provides a powerful counter-narrative to the male-dominated, state-centric histories of the Cold War. We explore how her personal struggle for identity and belonging challenges our understanding of citizenship, nationhood, and the human cost of geopolitical conflict, setting the stage for our digital humanities intervention. 
• Archiving Resistance: Metadata Strategies for Personal and Traumatic Narratives
  • This presentation details our metadata strategy for diverse materials, from Han Xiu’s memoirs to personal interviews. Mindful of the ethical responsibilities involved in working with a living author, this required a critical filtering of data. We present our ethical methodology as “archiving resistance”: a conscious decision to limit primary source metadata to Han Xiu’s published works and to draw contextual information exclusively from publicly available sources. This strategy was crucial for responsibly translating a sensitive, living narrative into a digital format, ensuring both the integrity of her story and respect for her as an author.  
• From Text to Map: The Visual Argument of a Digital Humanities Project
  • This presentation focuses on the creation of the ArcGIS StoryMap. We explain our design choices in translating Han Xiu’s literary narrative into an interactive, spatial format. We argue that the StoryMap functions as a “visual argument,” making the physical and emotional dislocation she experienced tangible to the user. By mapping her journey, we transform her testimony from a linear text into a dynamic visualization, offering a new mode of engagement with her story and its historical significance. 
• Feminist Praxis and Narrative Sovereignty: A Theoretical Framework for ‘Digital Passages’
  • This final presentation articulates the project’s theoretical foundation. We frame our work as a form of “feminist praxis” by centering a woman’s lived experience against the backdrop of masculine, state-building narratives. Furthermore, we analyze Han Xiu’s fight to reclaim her citizenship as an act of “narrative sovereignty”—a profound struggle to reclaim one’s self-identification from state apparatuses. This framework demonstrates how critical digital humanities can serve as a tool for amplifying marginalized voices and challenging official histories. 

5:00 – 6:00 pm – Panel

The Sacred and AI: Politics of Representation in Digital Artifacts

Sananda Sahoo (Western University, London, ON, Canada)

The inauguration of the Ram Temple in the Indian town of Ayodhya in 2024 helped visualize the entanglement of the sacred with artificial intelligence-powered systems of security and development. Ayodhya’s assemblage of current security measures includes drones, CCTV cameras with facial recognition technology, vehicle number plate recognition, and 3D mapping of the town’s road network. The government apparatus justifies the deployment of these extraordinary surveillance tools by invoking past threat perceptions from terrorists. The government has also announced green projects aided by emergent technology. On social media site X, AI narratives associated with Ayodhya are at once futuristic and look back to heritage. These technological systems of security and economic development normalize AI as part of the town’s infrastructure. The digital systems appeal to the affective nature of the pilgrimage site, leveraging faith based on the site’s mythic nature. 

The operationalization of these AI systems, however, also backgrounds the demolition of the 16th-century Mughal architecture, Babri Masjid, in 1992 at the site. The temple was built on the disputed site after a verdict from India’s highest court in 2019. Through curated digital representations of artifacts from official government channels, this paper analyzes visual, sound, and textual narratives that construct AI nationalism and disembodies critical historical studies from the site. 

The case study, therefore, highlights how the materiality of digital artifacts makes myth and politics tangible. It speaks to the Global Digital Humanities’ critical engagement with lived experience. Moreover, curating these digital artifacts is an effort to document digital ephemera, particularly on social media sites like X, as current modes of propaganda.

Counterdata Networks: Visualizing Feminist Resistance Under Digital Authoritarianism in Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom Movement

Niloufar Esmaeili  (The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, USA)

When 22-year-old Mahsa (Zhina) Amini died in Iranian morality police custody in September 2022, the #MahsaAmini hashtag was used 350+ million times coordinating Iran’s longest protest movement. Simultaneously, the Iranian regime deployed internet shutdowns, surveillance, and computational propaganda to suppress evidence. This presentation examines a GraphCommons network visualization project that documents the Women, Life, Freedom movement’s digital infrastructure as an act of what data feminist Catherine D’Ignazio calls “counterdata science”—challenging authoritarian information monopolies by making visible connection patterns states attempt to erase.

Using virtual ethnography methodology, this project maps how hashtags, activists, organizations, and supporters connected across Twitter and Instagram revealing patterns invisible to conventional documentation. The color-coded network visualization exposes how diaspora activists functioned as vital bridges maintaining information flow when domestic internet was severed for weeks, how multilingual networks connected Persian, Kurdish, English, and Arabic speakers, and how the movement’s digital infrastructure adapted to state repression in real time.

This project contributes to critical DH conversations about documentation under authoritarianism while raising urgent ethical questions: How do we archive resistance when documentation endangers activists? What does feminist data preservation look like when surveillance extends transnationally into diaspora communities? The visualization deliberately refuses institutional archiving, maintained instead under personal control to prioritize activist safety—demonstrating that in authoritarian contexts, the politics of who controls archives matters as much as what gets preserved.

Drawing on feminist DH principles, transnational feminist theory, and digital authoritarianism scholarship, this presentation argues that network visualization becomes activist practice itself in contexts where regimes control official narratives. By documenting transnational solidarity networks sustaining Iranian women’s resistance, the project demonstrates how Global South activists innovate digital documentation strategies under extreme constraint—offering methodological insights for documenting activism globally while centering ethical commitments to community governance of data and activist security over academic extraction.

6:15–8:00 pm – Poster Session

Redesigning a Native American Museum and Community Center Website

Kenlea Pebbles (Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Lifeways & Culture, Mount Pleasant, USA & Chapman University, Orange, USA)

The rhetorical presentation of history and community is extremely important to Indigenous museums and communities (King, 2017; Lonetree, 2012). I am working with the Ziibiwing Center (ZC) of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways on their website: a cultural heritage informatics extension of the Native American museum and a cultural center for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan (SCIT). As the ZC modifies the website that was created two decades ago, the new website needs to reflect the mission of ZC and meet the community needs of SCIT. This includes (1) developing the ZC information on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and (2) serve as the digital home for the inter-tribal Michigan division (MIGPRA) in addition to (3) developing a digital collection for the museum. We are redesigning the website to meet these new needs and meet the mission statement of the ZC, meeting community needs of SCIT and region, and serving as an educational outreach hub (K-higher ed).

 The website content needs to use indigenizing and decolonial methodologies in the construction of the website. As we have moved from wireframing the new site to drafting the whitepapers, we have three years to complete this new website to meet Universal Design needs within the communities served as well as constructing a responsible website that reinforces reciprocal relationships in a respectful and productive manner. Using the Indigenous framework of the 4Rs (Respect, Relationship, Responsibility, and Reciprocity), which comes from educational and rhetorical studies (Kirkness and Barnhardt,1991; Pidgeon, Archibald, and Hawkey, 2014; and Cull et al. 2018; York University, 2023; 4Rs Youth Movement, 2023), we can meet the indigenizing and decolonizing needs of the ZC. This presentation will explore how the rhetorical work of the ZC website design/ production encapsulates the 4Rs to enhance and serve the ZC communities. 

The Library as a DH Studio: Basia Kapolka

Basia Kapolka (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA)

As a digital humanities librarian, I aim to increase student engagement with digital tools and methods while also enhancing the visibility of library collections through compelling online exhibits. However, much of my instruction takes place within the constraints of academic coursework, where time limitations and competing priorities often prevent students from seeing digital projects through to completion.

To address this challenge, I developed a scalable model for student-led digital humanities work outside the classroom. In this model, I serve as project manager for a digital exhibit centered on a collection from the Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University. I hired two student workers with different skillsets, one in computer science and one in art history, to form a project team responsible for curating content and building the exhibit site. By managing the project through structured workflows and task breakdowns, I was able to accommodate students’ limited work hours while maintaining momentum and quality.

The result was a collaborative, interdisciplinary experience that provided students with hands-on training in digital humanities tools such as ArcGIS, GitHub, and Canopy, as well as exposure to metadata standards and user experience design. Students also worked closely with faculty, curators, and developers, gaining valuable insight into library collections and digital scholarship. The final product, An American’s Africa, is a completed digital exhibit that adds historical context and interpretive reflection to archival materials.

This presentation will share the structure, outcomes, and lessons learned from this project, offering a replicable model for libraries seeking to foster meaningful student engagement in digital humanities work. It will be of interest to librarians, educators, and DH practitioners looking for sustainable ways to integrate student labor, library collections, and digital scholarship.

Here is a link to the completed project site: https://nulib-ds.github.io/AnAmericansAfrica/

Feminist Project Construction as DH Pedagogy: Building the Gender Violence Database

Jami Ake (Washington University, St. Louis, USA)
Angelena Manova (Washington University, St. Louis, USA)
Shannon Rao (Washington University, St. Louis, USA)
Lyra Ren (Washington University, St. Louis, USA)

This presentation advocates for the deliberate integration of feminist principles into the making of digital humanities projects, not merely their end uses. We introduce the Gender Violence Database (GVD), a tool designed to bridge the research–practice divide in community-based responses to gender violence, and share strategies for embedding feminist practices throughout every stage of project development. Drawing on Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s Data Feminism, we highlight practices such as collaborative decision-making, student-led design and outreach, and open engagement with ethics and power. We also emphasize the importance of sustained, reflexive team dialogue to navigate the inevitable tensions of feminist project work—particularly those that emerge when such projects operate within neoliberal nonprofit structures, entrenched systems of information gatekeeping, and inequitable research priorities in the social sciences. By foregrounding process over product, we argue that feminist DH pedagogy rooted in project development can cultivate critical reflexivity, redistribute authority, and model socially engaged, justice-oriented learning. We offer the GVD as both a case study and a framework for teaching digital humanities as feminist practice.

Continuity and Adaptation: UChicago’s Library and Emerging Technologies Summer Camp’s Second Year

Elias Hubbard (University of Chicago, Chicago, USA)
Taylor Faires (University of Chicago, Chicago, USA)

In April 2024, the University of Chicago’s Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) officially opened its patron space in the Joseph Regenstein Library, marking the culmination of years of planning, construction, and staffing. With a full team in place for the first time since its conception in 2019, the Center aimed to position itself not only as a resource for students and faculty, but also as a collaborative partner for the rest of the library. However, amid a broader institutional push to adopt emerging technologies, many University of Chicago librarians voiced uncertainty about the term “Digital Scholarship,” and expressed a lack of clarity around the Center’s intended scope and activities. While the arrival of new roles such as GIS Librarian, Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Head of Research Data Management generated enthusiasm, some student-facing librarians, including subject specialists, remained unsure about when to refer patrons to the CDS or what types of support its staff could offer.

It was this issue that led the CDS team to begin planning a program for librarians that covered the basics of digital scholarship and provided spaces for discussion about the role of the CDS, potential areas of collaboration, as well as skepticism or concerns over emerging technology within the broader Library. These discussions led to the creation of LETS Camp (Library and Emerging Technologies Summer Camp) in the Summer of 2024, and it’s continuation as LETS Camp Light in the Summer of 2025. This poster explores the journey to build and maintain an internal digital literacy program at an academic library and the results of LETS Camp’s second year.

Tuesday, April 14th, 2026

11:15 – 12:15 pm – Panel

El cuerpo que no computa: deseo y algoritmo en la Sociedad de la Inteligencia

Yanina Torres (Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, Resistencia, Argentina)

En la actualidad, autores como Meyer (2023) consideran que estamos ingresando a una etapa denominada “Sociedad de la Inteligencia” en la que se produce la convivencia entre las inteligencias humana y artificial, y la valoración de la precisión, velocidad y capacidad de análisis de datos de esta última.

Sin embargo, este nuevo escenario conlleva un riesgo epistémico estructural: que se produzca el desplazamiento progresivo del cuerpo como umbral de conocimiento humano. Dado que la Inteligencia Artificial excluye elementos como la desesperación, el olvido, el dolor, la contradicción o el error vital, este desplazamiento no se constituye como una instancia neutral, sino que produce una transformación de subjetividades y una reconfiguración de relaciones de poder y del deseo a escala global.

A partir de la articulación de autores tales como Nietzsche, Byung-Chul Han, Éric Sadin y otros, se sostiene que la Inteligencia Artificial no posee la potencia irreductible del pensamiento humano, y la expansión del paradigma tecnocéntrico tiende a imponer formas de racionalidad que producen nuevas subjetividades funcionales, eliminando la consideración del cuerpo humano como fuente de saber, deseo y resistencia.

A partir de la pregunta: ¿qué se pierde ante la confusión de simulación con existencia?, se reflexiona sobre la reproducción de lógicas coloniales que invisibilizan las condiciones materiales y afectivas del conocer, privilegiando la eficiencia, la productividad, el rendimiento y la neutralidad técnica como formas “superiores” de inteligencia.

Este trabajo se inscribe como una intervención crítica desde el Sur global, a través de la propuesta de una epistemología encarnada como resistencia a la totalización algorítmica. Se propone pensar el lugar del cuerpo como umbral, no como resto, dentro del debate de las Humanidades Digitales.

Preserving Hate Responsibly: Ethical Frameworks for Publishing and Hosting Extremist Corpora

Marko Milosev

Digital Humanities projects are increasingly engaging with difficult archives, such as historical texts produced by extremist and radical right movements that document the language of hate, nationalism, and political violence. Yet the digitization and publication of such material raise complex ethical questions. While these corpora are invaluable for researchers studying propaganda, ideology, and the evolution of hate speech, their unrestricted availability risks normalizing the very ideologies they aim to critique, especially with the proliferation of LLM-s.

This talk explores the ethical tension between the imperative to preserve and understand history and the duty to prevent harm. Open-access advocates argue that transparency ensures accountability and enables critical study, while others warn that digital circulation and algorithmic amplification can transform archives into recruitment tools or sources of inspiration for extremist actors.

To navigate this dilemma, I outline three interrelated models of responsible practice. The Curated Archive approach embeds every document within critical framing and restricts access to verified researchers. The Antidote Model requires that extremist texts be accompanied by scholarly or historical resources that actively counter their narratives. Finally, the Redacted and Pedagogical Model replaces full-text access to the most dangerous materials with analytical summaries and metadata, prioritizing education and harm reduction.

Rather than proposing a single solution, this presentation argues for a layered, context-driven framework that treats curation as an ethical act. Preserving extremist material is necessary for understanding the past, but it must be done in ways that resist replication of its violence. By approaching such archives critically and globally, Digital Humanities can fulfill its dual mandate: to remember responsibly and to prevent the digital reanimation of hate.

Re-linking the Digital: Decolonial Praxis and the Ethics of AI in/from Africa

Iginio Gagliardone (Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa)

This paper interrogates how African scholarship and practice can reshape the ethics of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, re-centering the humanities as a critical force in imagining more just information societies. Drawing on ongoing research within the Wits SA-UK Chair in the Digital Humanities, it advances a decolonial framework of inquiry that combines computational tools with situated epistemologies. Using case studies from South Africa and Nigeria on information disorder and AI-for-social-good initiatives, the paper demonstrates how dominant frameworks—largely developed in and for the Global North—fail to capture the socio-historical complexity of digital practices in African contexts. Methodologically, it blends network analysis and ethnographic engagement to show how communities appropriate digital platforms to contest exclusion and articulate alternative moral orders. Theoretically, it expands debates on postcolonial computing and “critical cosmopolitan pluriversalism” (Mbembe, 2015), proposing “re-linking” as a mode of epistemic creativity rather than resistance alone. The paper thus contributes both to global AI ethics and to sustainable, plural approaches in DH—positioning African experiences not as data points for comparison but as sources of conceptual innovation for the global digital humanities.

12:30 – 1:30 pm – Panel

Memes, Memory, and Digital Coloniality: Tracing the Global Afterlives of South American Death Flights

Delfina Sol Martinez Pandiani  (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands)

This paper investigates how symbols of historical trauma from the Global South—specifically, the death flights carried out by South American military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s—have been appropriated, decontextualized, and globally circulated as far-right memes. Drawing from the frameworks of critical data studies, postcolonial digital humanities, and global media studies, the project explores how extrajudicial state violence is transformed into “humor” within alt-right internet cultures, particularly on platforms such as 4chan.

Utilizing a mixed-methods approach that combines natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and computer vision with close readings of memes, the study traces how these violent historical symbols migrate from local memory to transnational meme culture. By analyzing over ten years of content from /pol/ (2013–2023), the research uncovers how death flight imagery has been commodified into products like t-shirts, board games, and online merchandise—often re-entering Latin America stripped of historical context and weaponized for political extremism.

This memetic transformation is not merely digital irony; it reflects broader patterns of digital coloniality, where the Global North absorbs, distorts, and resells symbols of southern trauma for ideological and commercial purposes. The paper argues for a critical digital humanities approach that foregrounds ethical memory work and transregional accountability in the study of memes and digital culture.

By centering the Global South as both the origin and a recurring site of memetic recirculation, this project contributes to current debates on multilingualism, cultural resistance, and the role of DH methods in exposing how digital platforms facilitate the erasure and exploitation of postcolonial histories. It also speaks to ongoing conversations about AI-driven content moderation, data ethics, and the responsibilities of researchers in confronting online extremism and historical distortion.

Visualidades en disputa: análisis de las campañas #00BienalDeLaHabana y #NoALaBienalDeLaHabana en Instagram

Rossana Bouza Fajardo (Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México, Mexico)

Las crecientes tensiones entre el campo artístico independiente y la institucionalidad cultural en Cuba, agravadas por la censura y la masificación de Internet, han propiciado nuevas formas de resistencia digital. Esta ponencia examina el artivismo cubano a través de los hashtags #00BienalDeLaHabana (2018) y #NoALaBienalDeLaHabana (2021-2022) en Instagram. El objetivo es analizar cómo estas campañas configuran discursos críticos y generan otras formas de acción política.

La investigación se desarrolló desde una metodología mixta que combinó el análisis histórico-crítico con herramientas computacionales. Siguiendo las técnicas digitales propuestas por Gabriela Sued, se conformó un corpus de 300 publicaciones mediante el scraping en Instagram con el programa Apify. El material fue procesado textual y visualmente con Voyant Tools, Text Analyzer, SentiSight.AI e ImageX. Se adoptó el enfoque de pequeños datos planteado por Richard Rogers, donde el valor analítico no reside en la escala de la muestra, sino en su relevancia contextual. Esta aproximación permitió cartografiar el diseño, mapear redes transnacionales e identificar patrones.

Los hashtags , más allá de su función comunicativa o naturaleza efímera, reorganizaron el campo cultural cubano, abrieron nuevas vías para el arte político en este contexto autoritario y se conectaron con otras demandas de la sociedad civil. Como plantea Rancière, estas prácticas suspenden la experiencia sensata ordinaria al cuestionar las jerarquías tradicionales entre ver, decir y actuar.

La propuesta contribuye al campo de las Humanidades Digitales al compartir una metodología aplicable al análisis de artivismos en entornos restrictivos y reflexionar sobre el uso de tecnologías digitales como mecanismos de disenso. Asimismo, reflexiona sobre el potencial de los hashtags como vías para generar espacios intersticiales de resistencia e interpelar estructuras institucionales anquilosadas.

Mapping Dissent: Computational Analysis of Non-Violent Protest Events in Pakistan’s Hybrid Democracy

Ayaz Ahmed Siddiqui (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain)

This research uses computational text analysis to recover underrepresented forms of non-violent protests in Pakistan’s militarized hybrid democracy where meaningful political competition exists under serious restrictions on rights and liberties. While scholarship on South Asia often centres on elite narratives and spectacular events, everyday contention by students, workers, and civic groups remains largely invisible. Using Dawn, Pakistan’s newspaper of record, this study constructs a digital corpus of 8,434 protest reports spanning over the last decade, retrieved from Factiva. A two-step methodology that combines topic modelling with dependency-based semantic parsing is applied to identify recurring actor–action–target motifs. In line with the literature on contentious collective action, these motifs reveal who protests, how, and against whom. Results are cross-referenced with manually coded events from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) to enhance representativeness and link textual data to broader conflict dynamics.

Beyond these empirical findings, the project demonstrates how computational text analysis can extend research on social movements in data-scarce and politically constrained contexts. It advances inclusive approaches to contentious politics by integrating local media archives with global event catalogues, offering a replicable framework for mapping non-violent dissent. It contributes to digital humanities by making political life in underrepresented societies more visible within digital research infrastructures.

1:30–2:00 pm – Project Showcase

Round and Round: NYC Carousels and the Stories They Spin

Kelly Karst (Presenting) (CUNY Graduate Center, New York City, USA)
Carla Ordonez (CUNY Graduate Center, New York City, USA)
Leonard Santos (CUNY Graduate Center, New York City, USA)
Julissa Russo (CUNY Graduate Center, New York City, USA)

This project employs critical digital mapping to examine how urban amenities that generate joy, specifically carousels, are spatially distributed along lines of economic inequality in New York City. By creating an interactive digital exhibit and mapping tool, “Carousels of NYC” reveals how access to these nostalgic public spaces is stratified across neighborhoods, with placement often favoring wealthier communities while remaining inaccessible to areas with lower-income families and children.

The project combines geospatial visualization with demographic data layers (income levels, household composition) to illuminate these disparities, demonstrating how digital humanities methods can make visible the unequal distribution of public resources. Each mapped carousel includes practical information such as fees and accessibility details, transforming the tool into both an analytical instrument and community resource. This dual function exemplifies public and community-engaged digital humanities, serving families seeking accessible recreation while simultaneously documenting spatial injustice.

Developed within a graduate-level Digital Humanities course at CUNY, this student-centered project demonstrates how minimal digital approaches can address equity issues in urban environments. The resulting analysis offers concrete recommendations for more equitable carousel placement, inclusive fee structures, and enhanced community engagement, contributing to conversations about data-driven advocacy and open access as resistance against systemic inequality.

This work intersects with several symposium themes: it employs sustainable, accessible digital methods; centers community needs through public-facing tools; and demonstrates how digital humanities can illuminate and challenge spatial inequities that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. By focusing on children’s access to joy and play, the project ultimately questions whose experiences and needs shape urban planning decisions, advocating for more inclusive approaches to public amenity distribution.

AVOBMAT: A Sustainable and Multilingual Tool for the Analysis and Visualization of Bibliographic Metadata and Texts

Róbert Péter (University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary)

This paper introduces AVOBMAT (Analysis and Visualization of Bibliographic Metadata and Texts), a multilingual research tool that enables scalable, data-driven analysis of bibliographic data and texts using Natural Language Processing. AVOBMAT offers dynamic text and data mining features with interactive control over parameters at every stage—from preprocessing to analysis—supporting both close and distant reading. The beta version is hosted on the infrastructure of the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen at avobmat.hu.

AVOBMAT was designed as a sustainable service that encourages environmentally conscious use by, for example, allowing users to choose between small, large, and transformer language models and disabling the analytical modules that users do not need during the preprocessing phase.

Key features distinguishing AVOBMAT from similar tools include: (i) the use of transformer-based language models on scalable, cloud-based infrastructure; (ii) an integrated, user-friendly interface that combines metadata and text analysis; (iii) support for 24 languages; (iv) 19 configurable preprocessing parameters; (v) the ability to save and validate configurations; (vi) optional public sharing of private databases.

Users can search and filter datasets using faceted, advanced, or command-line modes and perform subsequent analyses on the selected data. Analytical modules include:

(i) metadata analysis (line, area, bar, pie, network);

(ii) lexical diversity;

(iii) n-gram viewer;

(iv) topic modelling;

(v) frequency analysis (including keyword-in-context);

(vi) named entity recognition, disambiguation, and linking (via Wikidata, ISNI, VIAF);

(vii) part-of-speech tagging;

(viii) keyword-in-context.

Reproducibility and transparency are ensured through import/export of parameter settings as templates or JSON files. Statistical results and visualizations can be exported in PNG and CSV formats.

AVOBMAT facilitates the exploration of large literary and historical corpora, revealing trends, overlooked themes, and hidden connections. Sample preprocessed databases include 3,793 DraCor dramas and 1,505 ELTeC novels in 13 languages, enriched with metadata such as character gender and author demographics.

Digital Dialogisms and Climate Grieving

Jolene Armstrong (Athabasca University, Edmonton, Canada)
Monique Tschofen (Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada)

Digital Dialogisms and Climate Grieving explores how interactive media can give form to the affective and philosophical challenges of the climate crisis. In this 15-minute presentation and project showcase, we introduce Solastalgia, a Scalar-based collaboration between two Canadian researchers whose geographies—one marked by floods, the other by wildfires—bear uneven witness to environmental change. Built at the intersection of interactive documentary, new media poetics, and citizen science, Solastalgia reimagines the epistolary genre as a dialogical exchange across two Scalar bands. Letters, soundscapes, data, mapping, personal and archival images move an inquiry into the twin devastations of water and fire, cultivating perception and response without collapsing complexity into a single narrative. The project’s conceptual cornerstone is Glenn Albrecht’s notion of solastalgia: the “existential and lived experience of negative environmental change, manifested  as an attack on one’s sense of place” (Bogard 2023 xxii). Through a call and response that veers into many different sources of knowledge and affective resonance, our collaboration translates the term into a correspondence of mourning and witnessing. Through this work, we seek to hold ecological grief as a shared, generative condition—one that demands new modes of listening, creation, and cohabitation. Solastalgia proposes digital dialogism as a method for re-imagining both environmental humanities scholarship and the possibilities of collective care in a world on fire

Building a Graphic Resource: The Creation of the Foundation of Literature through Graphic Narratives H-Spaces Project.

Brittany Atkins (Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA)
Julian Chambliss (Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA)
Ritesh Khandelwal (Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA)

Building a Graphic Resource is a project showcase exploring the Foundation of Literature through Graphic Narratives H-Spaces Project. This project leverages H-Net Commons to build a stable, accessible project to support teaching and learning about literary theory through comic media. This showcase will demonstrate how we are transforming a print-based syllabus into an interactive digital space using H-Net’s customizable “Spaces” environment. This site organizes comics-based teaching resources and archival material into a navigable format exploring poetry, short stories, novels, and other literary forms. Using embedded media, featured items, and open-access resources, we aim to model how digital infrastructures can support comics pedagogy.

We will highlight our workflow for creating pages, curating linked content, and incorporating visual media within the Spaces platform. Additionally, we’ll reflect on the opportunities and limitations of building within H-Net Commons, particularly in a global academic context where digital sustainability and access matter. We will also discuss possible pathways for further development of the project as uncertainty around digital resources continues to shape this project. This project speaks to the symposium’s focus on multimodal, multilingual, and inclusive DH practice. We envision not just as a resource but as a model for other educators and researchers seeking to build digital portfolios that extend the classroom and engage public audiences. Attendees will leave with practical ideas and strategies to support interdisciplinary digital humanities work.

2:00–2:30 pm – Project Showcase

Exploring New Structures for Minimal Computing: Introducing Rondo, a Minimal Single Page Application for Digital Projects

Nick Szydlowski (San José State University, San José, USA)

Minimal computing represents an important intervention into digital humanities practice, but its impact has been limited by an overreliance on a single technical architecture – the static site generator. Rondo (https://sjsu-library.github.io/rondo/) represents a new approach to building minimal digital projects which retains the values of minimal computing but adopts a single page application architecture, allowing users to build a complete site by editing a single Google Sheet or local XLSX file. This presentation will introduce Rondo and discuss how this approach expands on minimal computing by deliberately embracing the practice of gleaning free resources from the technology industry. The valorization of gleaning, a mode of praxis which builds on the work of filmmaker Agnès Varda, suggests new possibilities for minimal computing architectures that glean from available infrastructure, as well as an orientation that values re-use and work performed under material constraints. The presentation will also highlight the first production project created using this framework, “Running in Prayer: The History and Purpose of the California 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon Relay Team” a collaboration between San José State University Library’s Africana, Asian American, Chicano, & Native American Studies Center and the King Library Digital Humanities Center. This framework represents a way of working towards sustainable, highly diffused infrastructure capable of supporting community-owned digital humanities projects.

Reconstructing Colonial Spectacles: Towards a Digital Reimagining of the 1911 Delhi Durbar

Robin Thomas (Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey)

This study explores how digital reconstruction can be mobilized as an anti-colonial tool to reinterpret colonial spectacles that once visualized empire and domination. The focus of this reconstruction will be on the Delhi Durbar of 1911, which was the grand imperial coronation ceremony of the British monarch conducted in colonial India by the British Empire. As colonial ephemeral spectacles that staged imperial power through temporary architecture (dismantled immediately after the event), the Delhi Durbars combined South Asian durbar ritual, British coronation theatre, and world-fair display logics, offering a uniquely revealing lens into how imperial authority was theatrically staged and negotiated while it attempted innovative methods to simultaneously include the colonised under empire.

Using surviving architectural drawings, cartographic plans, and archival photographs, this study digitally reconstructs the 1911 Delhi Durbar as a navigable 3D model. This 3D reconstruction functions as both a research method and a decolonial intervention: providing a deeper understanding on how architecture, visibility, and hierarchy was engineered into imperial performance. By recreating an ephemeral colonial spectacle, the project exposes how imperial narratives were spatially encoded and invites new, decolonial readings of the colonial archive. Furthermore, by linking 3D digital modelling with postcolonial analysis, this study contributes to the ongoing conversations about digital cultural heritage, anti-colonial DH, and sustainable digital practice. It demonstrates how digital tools can bridge public and academic history by transforming static colonial records into interactive, accessible spaces of inquiry. Ultimately, the project advocates for digital humanities as a means of critically reimagining ephemeral architecture, particularly in the colonial context.

Disability, Memory, and Digital Storytelling: Representations of People Living with Sickle Cell in Nigerian Media

Sunday Adegbenro (University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA)

People living with sickle cell disease [SCD] in Nigeria experience stigma, (mis)representation and silence. Nigeria has the largest population of people living with SCD, and this (mis)representation shape how the society understands the lives of people with SCD. My project brings these representations together in one digital exhibit to make visible how SCD has been represented in Nigerian cultural and media spaces, and how these portrayals shape stigma, silence, and resilience.

The exhibit collects materials from newspapers, Nollywood films, advocacy campaigns, and digital platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. These sources show how sickle cell is portrayed in Nigerian life, from medical advice and awareness campaigns to popular culture and patient self-advocacy. The project uses ArcGIS StoryMaps to organize these materials in a public-facing digital exhibit. Each item is presented with narrative context, transcripts, and translations into Nigerian languages and reflect on what these sources reveal about disability, culture, and advocacy in Nigeria.

The exhibit also includes maps of advocacy activity and timelines of representation to show patterns across time and space. This research highlights the importance of digital storytelling as a tool of resistance and advocacy by showing how patients and communities present their own voices, resist harmful narratives, and negotiate the politics of health, memory, and justice.

The project pilots the process of reclaiming the lived experiences of people living with SCD in Nigeria and argues for placing Nigerian sickle cell narratives within global conversations about disability justice, accessibility, and community-engaged digital humanities.

Exploring the Underrepresented: Medieval Women and Digital Approaches

Marija Blašković  (Independent scholar, Carmel, USA)

Studying biographical details of individuals in aggregate, as prosopography does, requires a highly structured approach. The project FEMIber (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program, 2023-2025) aimed to bridge the gap between the male-centered digital humanities projects of medieval Iberia and the difficulty of exploring women, who have usually been studied individually and via close reading/methods of traditional philology. 

As a result, a gender-based recentering was applied to the Crónica de Castilla (c. 1300; ed. Rochwert-Zuili, 2010) in order to create a prosopographical database of all women referenced in the work. This chronicle was chosen because it mentions numerous women of diverse backgrounds, many of which were based on earlier Latin and Romance historiography, epic poems, and folkloric traditions. Since the goal is to study the social imaginary and not the work’s historicity (see Assmann, 1992), no distinction was made between documented, religious, or fictional figures. Furthermore, to highlight the work’s own storytelling, the generated database drew upon the concept of factoid (Bradley, Pasin, 2015).In this presentation, I am showcasing the final version of this relational database, which was published as an interactive platform in 2024 (https://femiber.upf.edu) and has since been used in university courses and open workshops. The possibility of applying multiple filters make searches more intuitive, while the results provide insights into the challenges related to data generation and labelling (proper identification and disambiguation, genealogical information, confessional belonging, etc.). The platform also has graphs that shed light on some underlying patterns of women’s representations in this chronicle while serving as a starting point for further analysis.

2:45 – 3:45 pm – Panel

Hacia una red de archivos del PLACTED: propuesta frente a la fragmentación del patrimonio documental

Celeste Viedma (UBA-FSOC-IIGG/CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina)

El pensamiento latinoamericano sobre planificación, ciencia, tecnología y desarrollo (PLACTED) conformó, durante las décadas de 1960 y 1970, un campo heterogéneo de reflexión y acción en torno a los modelos de desarrollo posibles para América Latina. Sus protagonistas fueron científicos e intelectuales que promovieron una mirada crítica sobre la dependencia tecnológica, cuestionaron la neutralidad de la ciencia y propusieron alternativas basadas en la planificación, la prospectiva y la participación popular. Si bien el impacto de estas experiencias fue considerable, su legado documental se encuentra hoy profundamente fragmentado.  

El patrimonio archivístico vinculado al PLACTED está disperso en bibliotecas universitarias, centros de investigación, organismos internacionales y repositorios digitales, con niveles muy desiguales de preservación, accesibilidad y tratamiento. Frente a este panorama, la ponencia propone la creación de una red de archivos del PLACTED como estrategia situada para enfrentar la fragmentación de este acervo documental y potenciar su circulación. Lejos de aspirar a la centralización o a la unificación normativa, esta red buscaría articular actores diversos en torno a principios comunes de cooperación técnica, documentación contextual y acceso abierto.

Desde la perspectiva de las Humanidades Digitales, una red de estas características permitiría explorar nuevas formas de organización del conocimiento y de activación de memorias intelectuales subalternizadas. A través de descripciones densas y cartografías relacionales, sería posible reconstruir los vínculos entre personas, instituciones, debates y documentos que configuraron el campo del PLACTED. Asimismo, abriría la puerta a proyectos colaborativos de análisis de redes y visualización de trayectorias, alineados con una política activa de democratización del patrimonio.   

Cabe señalar que la creación de repositorios, colecciones y archivos digitales ha sido un terreno fértil dentro del amplio campo de las Humanidades Digitales, al menos desde experiencias pioneras como el Women Writers Project iniciado en 1986. A lo largo de estas décadas, abundaron las propuestas que aspiraron a nutrir una “conversación global” o incluso a conformar una “biblioteca universal”. Sin embargo, junto a estos avances, se han evidenciado sesgos persistentes: raciales, de clase y, sobre todo, un eurocentrismo dominante. La iniciativa que aquí presentamos busca inscribirse en otra tradición, aquella que desde el Sur global procura reparar las desigualdades históricas en la producción y circulación de archivos. En este sentido, el panorama de precariedad que enfrentan muchas periferias tiene como contracara procesos sistemáticos de apropiación, que sustentan, por ejemplo, la existencia de grandes archivos latinoamericanos en instituciones europeas o estadounidenses, como el Instituto Iberoamericano de Berlín, el Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos de Ámsterdam o la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Texas.  

En este marco, resulta pertinente recuperar algunos antecedentes que orientan y fortalecen nuestra propuesta. La Digital Library of the Caribbean constituye un caso emblemático: una cooperativa de archivos que garantiza acceso a materiales culturales, históricos y de investigación del Caribe, dispersos en bibliotecas, centros y colecciones privadas de todo el mundo. Este proyecto se presenta explícitamente como un esfuerzo de “repatriación digital” frente a situaciones en las que los acervos no están bajo custodia de sus legítimos herederos, reflejando tensiones en torno a soberanías culturales. Otro ejemplo relevante es 1968, iniciativa del German Literature Archive concebida bajo la lógica de los global archives, que integra materiales conservados en Estados Unidos, Israel, Francia y América Latina, evidenciando el potencial de las redes transnacionales para reconstruir acontecimientos clave del siglo XX. Estos casos ilustran, en clave práctica, la necesidad de reconectar (en el sentido propuesto por Samir Amin) los fondos documentales de los intelectuales del Sur con los contextos múltiples que les dieron origen, desafío al que nuestra propuesta pretende contribuir.  

De estas experiencias derivan aprendizajes que conviene subrayar. Uno de ellos refiere a los límites del software y las infraestructuras digitales empleadas: la dificultad de inscribir los archivos en marcos que excedan las fronteras estatales nacionales es recurrente. En este sentido, propuestas como Records in Context ensayan formas alternativas de descripción archivística, pero dejan ver, a su vez, tensiones no resueltas. La coincidencia de estas discusiones con los planteos del PLACTED es significativa: nuevamente aparece la problemática de la difusión acrítica de tecnologías “llave en mano” provenientes de los países centrales, en este caso, en forma de dispositivos de estandarización y programación que perpetúan dependencias culturales. Retomando a Oscar Varsavsky, cabe preguntarse qué “estilo tecnológico” responde mejor a las necesidades de los archivos de las periferias, interrogante que requiere abordajes colaborativos e interdisciplinarios. Incorporar esta dimensión como línea de trabajo (en paralelo a la construcción de la red misma) se presenta, por lo tanto, como un objetivo central de nuestra propuesta.

Lady Plays the Blues Project: Recovering the Hidden Legacies of Black Women Blues Guitarists through Digital Black Feminist Praxis

Yoli Bergstrom-Lynch (USA)

Lady Plays the Blues Project is a grant-funded digital annotated bibliography and multimedia archive that uses digital Black feminist praxis to recover and center the hidden legacies of Black women guitarists who played downhome blues.

Dominant blues scholarship has long perpetuated a false binary: Black women sang the blues, while Black men played the guitar-driven blues of the rural South. This narrative, reinforced by the gendering of the guitar as male and the exclusionary practices of critics, scholars, producers, and archivists, has contributed to the erasure of Black women guitarists from the country blues canon. The result is a cultural memory in which blues guitar is imagined almost exclusively in male terms.

Lady Plays the Blues counters this history by centering the lives and sound labor of nine Black women country blues guitarists: Elizabeth Cotten, Memphis Minnie, Geeshie Wiley, Flora Molton, Etta Baker, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Algia Mae Hinton, Beverly “Guitar” Watkins, and Precious Bryant. Their contribution — often overlooked or dismissed — are foregrounded through a digital space designed to be both educational and transformative.

Built on Google Sites, the project includes: a digital annotated bibliography of 78 books; an annotated directory of archival collections and keyword maps; an interactive StoryMapJS visualizing the cultural geography of country blues; and comprehensive artist profiles with framing essays, interactive timelines, discographies and playlists, liner notes, sheet music, songbooks and lessons, interviews, photographs, and recorded performances — totaling more than 1,400 sources.

This presentation will briefly highlight the sociocultural and historical factors behind the erasure of blues guitar women from blues history, outline the project’s origins and goals, and share the public site I created to showcase these extraordinary guitar women.

4:00 – 5:00 – Panel

Cartografía Participativa multimodal digital sobre materiales escolares para la enseñanza secundaria. Saberes docentes y problematizaciones pedagógico-didácticas ante las “IA generativas”

Noelia Vanina Verdún (​​Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, Rio NEGRO, Argentina)

Presentamos un proyecto que busca documentar una Cartografía Participativa Digital multimodal sobre materiales escolares para la enseñanza de la Química, Biología y las Ciencias Sociales. Los materiales escolares digitales elaborados por docentes trabajadores/as de Argentina cobran existencia en dos grandes etapas, la primera es previa aparición generalizada de las apps “Inteligencia Artificial Generativa” (IAg) (2019- Julio/2022), y una segunda posterior a la existencia de dichas tecnologías (2023- julio 2025). Con el origen de la creación y planificación de los materiales escolares en ambas atapas diferentes de disposición de tecnologías, el proyecto busca avanzar con un trabajo conjunto con docentes en la curaduría didáctica y curricular de los materiales escolares para comprender cuan relativos son los efectos e influencias de las tendencias tecnológicas al momento. No hubo arbitrariedad ni obligación en el uso de IAg para el diseño y planificación, sin embargo, sí aparecieron algunas de las influencias y facilidades que ya estaban al interior de múltiples aplicaciones por parte del mercado. En este sentido el análisis didáctico crítico que interesa requiere conocer dimensiones en torno a la estética, diseño, perspectiva de género, medios y formatos digitales, textualidad, territorialidad, interculturalidad y claridad en los saberes contenidos curriculares que se espera enseñar. Participaron 20 docentes creadores y planificadores de propuestas (10 por cada período). Realizarán el trabajo de curaduría unos 60 docentes para los 20 propuestas antes mencionadas. Todas las propuestas tienen como destinatarios a adolescencias y jóvenes de la patagonia Argentina. El proyecto de cuya iniciativa busca cartografiar materiales escolares desde un análisis didáctico y desde la tecnología educativa crítica tiene el propósito de construir líneas de trabajo en torno a la formación profesional y el trabajo docente:

– una mayor autonomía y soberanía curricular ante la estandarización/homogeneización de las IAg;

 – la genuina construcción de saberes curriculares situados;

– evitar la enajenación automatizada del trabajo docente por un trabajo intelectual creativo de sus propios materiales escolares.

La Cartografía Participativa Digital será un gran material de trabajo propicio – en tanto metodología didáctica activa/colectiva- para la formación docente inicial y continua.

El equipo que acompaña es interdisciplinario.

Lic. Noelia V. Verdún

Asignaturas: Tecnología Educativa / Diseño y Evaluación de Materiales Didácticos/ Educación y Nuevas Tecnologías. Profesora e investigadora de la Escuela de Humanidades y Estudios Sociales. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Argentina

Especialista en Educación y Nuevas Tecnologías. Posgrados con perspectiva crítica en Estudios Sociales, Educación e Inteligencia Artificial Generativa. Integrante del Programa Doctoral en Ciencias Sociales con orientación socio antropología de la educación. Centro de Estudios Avanzados. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Becada CONICET y PERHID-CIN-Argentina.

Investigadora integrante del Grupo de Trabajo CLACSO: Capitalismo Digital, Políticas Educativas y Pedagogías Críticas.

Digital Playgrounds and Decolonial Praxis: Rethinking DH Pedagogy through Play, Process, and Power

Marina del Sol (Howard University, Washington, DC, USA)
Eliseo Jacob (Howard University, Washington, DC, USA)

This presentation proposes the digital playground as a decolonial, student-centered framework for pedagogy in the digital humanities (DH). Drawing on principles of minimal computing and critical DH, we conceptualize the digital playground as a low-tech, strengths-based, and process-driven space that resists dominant epistemologies and reimagines digital engagement as ethical, creative, and transformative.

By emphasizing play, productive failure, and experimentation, the concept of the digital playground challenges hierarchical, product-oriented logics that often govern academic and technological spaces. This model imagines digital learning spaces as embedded in practices of resistance and world-building, privileging reflection over performance and collaboration over competition. Through this lens, digital tools are not merely instruments of knowledge transmission but rather are contested sites of power that encode assumptions about language, identity, authorship, and access. Learning activities pair technical instruction with critical inquiry, encouraging students to engage with digital tools not only to gain skills but to interrogate the systems those tools represent. Class meetings are structured around low-stakes environments that encourage inquiry and risk-taking within a shared digital workspace. Withing this interactive space, students can brainstorm, sketch ideas, and co-create in real time as they experiment with foundational digital communication skills, such as embedding media, linking resources, and curating collaborative archives. Structured and scaffolded discussion paired with iterative reflection and peer feedback, supports the development ofdigital literacy skills and digital wellness.

Rooted in anti-colonial pedagogy and global DH conversations, the digital playground offers a practical, inclusive model for creating digital learning spaces. By privileging process over product, and reflection over performance, the digital playground becomes a means for unsettling structures of power, amplifying student voices, and fostering creative approaches rooted in justice and care.

Sustaining Community Archives through Student Research and Generative AI

Teresa Lobalsamo  (University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada)
Dellannia Segreti (University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada)

The presentation explores the evolution and impact of an open-access archive, Mapping Italian-Canadian Foodways — highlighting its origins, structure, and role within community-engaged digital pedagogy, along with recent efforts to extend this work through the integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Situated at the intersection of sustainable digital humanities, global AI practices, and student-centred pedagogy, Foodways demonstrates how a community-based DH project can adopt emerging technologies while sustaining, over the long term, the pedagogical and cultural values that originally inspired it.

Mapping Italian-Canadian Foodways (https://omeka.utm.utoronto.ca/s/foodways/page/home), hosted by the University of Toronto Mississauga, documents over one hundred years of Italian diaspora and culinary history across the province of Ontario, Canada. Emerging from community-engaged, student-driven research, the archive preserves the culinary heritage of Italian-Canadian communities through recorded oral histories, digitized artifacts, and historical- and geo-mapping. Designed as a sustainable pedagogical resource, the archive is continually expanded through student contributions in course-based assignments and research assistantships, and it serves as a reference guide in Italian cultural studies courses.

Over five years of fieldwork have revealed a recurring challenge: minimal preservation of physical materials within the Italian-Canadian community, resulting in gaps in both documentation and representation. In response, Foodways is exploring how GenAI can act as a sustainable and collaborative extension of its archival and critical work. The project is currently testing GenAI tools to reconstruct incomplete historical narratives, generate descriptive metadata for under-documented materials, and visualize cultural patterns across time and space. These early experiments demonstrate how GenAI can support, rather than supplant, human interpretation and contribute to more dynamic, inclusive models of cultural preservation.

Wednesday, April 15th, 2026

9:15 – 10:15 am – Panel

Voyant in an African Language: An AI-Driven, Reproducible Workflow for Translating Digital Humanities Tools for Underrepresented Languages

Augustine Farinola  (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)

While Voyant Tools has long supported multiple languages interfaces—including Arabic, Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and most recently, Gujarati—these translations were primarily achieved through manual, community-based efforts. Until now, underrepresented African languages have remained largely excluded due to limited Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources, lack of parallel corpora, the absence of scalable localisation frameworks, and a limited community of scholars with the background and support..

This project presents an AI-driven and fully reproducible methodology for translating the Voyant Tools interface into an African language—specifically Yoruba—using a transparent, open, and replicable workflow. The translation pipeline integrates multiple engines: large language models (LLMs) via the (OpenAI, 2023), NLLB-200 (Meta AI, 2024), XLM-R: (Conneau et al., 2019) for semantic similarity scoring, and UBC-NLP’s AfroLingu-MT for African language alignment. Implemented within a Jupyter Notebook environment, the workflow protects HTML tags and placeholders, performs back-translation and cross-model verification, enforces terminology consistency, and includes a human-in-the-loop validation phase.

Beyond translation, the project establishes a replicable template for other scholars and developers seeking to localise digital humanities software like Voyant into underrepresented languages—such as Amharic, Swahili, or isiZulu—using open-source AI resources. While texts in these languages cannot yet be fully analysed within Voyant due to limited NLP support, creating multilingual interface skins is a vital step toward linguistic accessibility, inclusivity, and the long-term goal of language justice in digital scholarship.

The workflow, accompanying scripts, and open-source outputs are shared publicly to encourage collaboration and reuse across the global DH community.

In the presentation we will:

• Introduce the general problem of translating digital humanities resources.
• Describe how Voyant handles different language interfaces and the challenge to adding new interfaces.
• Walk through our workflow which uses AI tools to automate part of the work while taking a “human-in-the-loop” approach.
• Discuss the use of specialized language models that can help translating into African languages.
• Conclude by calling for more translated tools and low-resource language utilities.

Small Code, Shared Work: A Minimal-Computing Approach to Linguistic Sovereignty in Transliterated Texts

Raafat Gilani

Digital humanities methods are often built for dominant, well-resourced languages. Transliterated and minority languages, where spellings shift, overlap with other tongues, and resist standardization, rarely fit these frameworks. Tools that treat such variation as “noise” inadvertently contribute to erasure, at precisely the moment when visibility is most urgent. This presentation introduces a deliberately lightweight alternative: an open-source extractor built in Python and accessible through a Streamlit interface. The tool relies on dictionary matching, offering two modes: “non-English” and “Kashmiri-only.” Rather than compressing logic into dense functions, it leaves loops visible so that even beginners can trace the workflow, replace the wordlists, and adapt it to their own languages. Crucially, the extractor is not designed to deliver perfect results. Instead, it errs on the side of over-inclusion, producing candidate lists that demand community refinement. This process of refinement is where sovereignty is practiced. Native speakers distinguish meaningful variants invisible to outsiders. Furthermore, the tool’s design allows for the inclusion of wordlists from linguistically proximate languages (in my case, Urdu and Hindi) to flag shared vocabulary. It doesn’t automate decisions but surfaces ambiguous terms for human judgment, turning a technical challenge into an act of critical interpretation. Through this approach, accuracy emerges not from opaque automation but from shared labor, making curation itself a collective, scholarly act. By privileging legibility over efficiency and variation over enforced normalization, the project demonstrates how small, transparent tools can support linguistic sovereignty. Though demonstrated here through Kashmiri, the workflow extends to other transliterated and under-resourced languages, offering a sustainable path toward inclusive, community-driven scholarship.

Fostering Sustainable Digital Ecologies for Archiving the Work of Grassroots Memory Initiatives in Post-conflict Contexts

Ricardo Velasco Trujillo (Clemson University, Greenville, USA)

This paper discusses the experience of a research-creation project aimed at understanding the types of digital archiving practices and infrastructures that can support community-based memory-building initiatives in post-conflict societies. It focuses on a collaborative model for archiving documentary materials and producing digital narratives with four grassroots initiatives in Colombia, grounded on activist research methodologies and the values of access, transparency, and knowledge democratization. The paper discusses how this model addresses persistent inequalities in access to digital resources that limit these initiatives’ ability to widely communicate their work and have a greater impact on their communities. It argues that the digital ecology constructed for this case study offers new possibilities for the sustainability of community memory and symbolic reparation initiatives developed in contexts of precarity, while also serving as a platform for public humanities research.

10:30 – 11:45 am – Panel

Construcción y desarrollo del CoDeCat: el corpus del endecasílabo catalán

Pere Garau Borràs (Universitat de les Illes Balears, Palma, Spain)

Esta propuesta pretende presentar a la comunidad científica el primer proyecto de construcción de un corpus métricamente anotado para la poesía catalana. Concretamente, se indaga en los mecanismos de creación del CoDeCat (Corpus del endecasílabo catalán) un corpus desarrollado específicamente para el estudio rítmico del endecasílabo catalán. El objetivo principal del CoDeCat ha sido obtener un corpus significativo de muestras del endecasílabo catalán, etiquetado rítmicamente, que abaste distintos autores, épocas, tradiciones y zonas geográficas y que disponga los datos de un modo sencillo, accesible y compatible con otros corpus de poesía métricamente anotados. El corpus, a su vez, se extiende diacrónicamente, abrazando desde el siglo XIV hasta el XXI. Las fuentes principales del corpus son otros corpus existentes como el Repertorio informatizzato dell’antica letteratura catalana de la Universià di Napoli Federico II, el Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana del Institut d’Estudis Catalans o el Corpus Literari Digital de la Càtedra Màrius Torres de la Universitat de Lleida, ediciones electrónicas o donaciones de materiales preimpresión en formatos digitales. Así, siguiendo propuestas como las de Navarro-Colorado (2019), Navarro-Colorado et al. (2016), Haider (2024), Hidley & Macrae-Gibson (2014), Plecháč & Kolár (2015), Plecháč et al. (2024) o Sanz-Lázaro (2022), se ha etiquetado automáticamente una selección de textos con el programa AIMeRiC (Garau, 2025). El resultado comprende una muestra de más de 170.000 endecasílabos.

Digital Humanities and Environment: Applying Distant Viewing Methodology to the Environmental Imagery of India

Ravi Kumar (Indian Institute of Technology, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, Dhanbad, India)

We have seen in the recent years, many environmental disasters have captured attention across different states of India. For Example, there have been repeated floods in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. Apart from this there has been a flow in visual documentation shared online. Images published in the newspapers has become a trusted source of information showing ecological crisis and the community resilience. This research uses the Distant Viewing method (Tylor Arnold & Lauren Tilton) to look at how this visual narrative shape the idea of “environmental degradation” in various regions of India. Using datasets of images (Obtained from using DH tool Python Scrapy) from popular newspapers (like, The Times of India, Hindustan Times etc.) between 2015 to 2025. The study combines computer vision analysis with textual metadata, using captions and geolocation tags. It explores the relationship between what is seen and what is said. By comparing the visual context with text. This research investigates whether regional, linguistic or thematic patterns appear in the digital representation of environmental change. Preliminary observations suggest that the images from the Northern India often focus on natural disasters and human loss. Whereas southern region highlights everyday ecological problems like deforestation and water scarcity. These differences point to wider cultural distinctions in how people see and discuss environmental issues in online spaces. Finally, this research shows how the distant viewing framework can connect computational analysis with cultural interpretation (for example captions like “Save Holy Ganga” or “Save Ganga River”). It offers new insights into the visual representation of environment in digital India.

12:30 – 1:30PM – Panel

Building the Dataset of U.S. Lynching Reports: Newspapers and Data-Driven Activism in the Anti-Lynching Movement

Matthew Kollmer (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA)

There is a long history of data-driven methods applied to confront the painful legacy of lynchings in the United States. It begins with Ida B. Wells who first utilized a “computation of lynching statistics” to draw attention to the issue in the 1890s (Wells 61). Wells drew data from annual lynching records published by the Chicago Tribune. In the decades that followed, Monroe Work and the Tuskegee Institute also compiled data drawn from newspapers. So, too, did the NAACP. These data became a critical tool for an international anti-lynching movement that grew throughout the period. The data were used to dispel myths that sought to excuse lynchings. They were used to prove how lynchings had become a national issue. Through intensive lobbying campaigns that wielded national data, the anti-lynching movement was able to combat racial violence across the country.

In this presentation, I will be tracing a history of the anti-lynching movement through an analysis of its data-driven activism. This history contextualizes–and is contextualized by–a pipeline I have built for identifying reports of lynchings in historical newspapers. This pipeline includes text-mining the Chronicling America archive, fine-tuning BERT to classify reports of racial violence, and enriching the extracted data for downstream tasks. In its current iteration, this project has identified over 50,000 lynching reports published between 1865 and 1921. Since newspapers were the primary source for lynching data, these reports uncover the information ecosystem that allowed the anti-lynching movement to compile and utilize its data. Because white mobs most often targeted Black communities, I have prioritized identifying lynching cases where victims were Black. Lynching was a threat to all marginalized groups, however, including immigrant groups, Native Americans, and people with disabilities. I will therefore conclude by outlining future plans to adapt this pipeline to identify reports based on other demographics, locations, and periods.

Curating shared knowledge about artifacts on Wikidata

Till Grallert (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany)

This presentation introduces community-centred approaches to curating knowledge about cultural artefacts outside and beyond the Global North’s hegemony over knowledge ecologies and socio-technical infrastructures. I will outline the processes and conceptual framework that led us to contribute bibliographic metadata on all Arabic periodicals published until 1930 to Wikidata, the world’s largest public and open knowledge graph. The data set originated with the scholarly crowd-sourcing project Jarāʾid. It comprises information on more than 3.000 periodicals, about 2.700 editors, and almost 350 holding institutions, gathering desperate information on what was published, when, where, and by whom, where to find it and if there are any known digital remediations. As a living union list of Arabic periodicals, the data set addresses the infrastructural weaknesses of library catalogues and discovery systems, as well as the epistemic violence of knowledge ecologies. These are exemplified by the absence of and lack of support for original scripts and languages in existing cataloguing data, interfaces, and search algorithms. Geo-fenced and and pay-walled platforms inaccessible to the societies of origin are another common feature. 

While the data set allows to answer questions such as “which periodicals could have reported on the series of urban food riots across the Eastern Mediterranean in summer 1910 and where would I find surviving copies?”, formalising and executing such queries requires significant technical infrastructures and practical skills. 

We demonstrate how Wikidata addresses all these issues in a five-star, linked-open-data environment with full support for multilingual data and interfaces, robust user management and version control. While this already surpasses anything even a lavishly funded research project in the humanities could achieve, the active user base of human and robotic editors is arguably its greatest strength. Thanks to their independent and unconnected efforts, we have been able to significantly expand our shared knowledge and data set about the first Arabic mass medium.

Archivos de resistencia y digitalidad: Puesta en archivo de la movilización social en Colombia, 2021

Ana María Tangarife Patiño (Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia)

En el año 2021 se dan una serie de movilizaciones en Colombia que convocaron a muchas personas y colectivos sociales para manifestarse en la calle en lo que se denominó como un estallido social para reinvidicar múltiples causas y como respuesta a un intento de reforma tributaria promovida por el gobierno de turno.

Estas movilizaciones tiene una materialidad importante en entornos digitales a través de la creación de imágenes, fotografías y otros registros audiovisuales que dieron cuenta de las dinámicas, estéticas y repertorios de acción de ese momento, y que consideramos de interés y urgencia preservar.

En este escenario surge el proyecto de investigación “Hacer eterno lo efímero: Puesta en archivo del Paro #28A”. Esta iniciativa surge en la línea de investigación en Memoria y Sociedad de la Escuela de Bibliotecología de la Universidad de Antioquia,  pero se extiende a la sociedad en general, impulsados por el convencimiento de que el Paro #28A fue un acontecimiento histórico, que algunas de las causas que le dieron origen siguen vigentes y que todavía no alcanzamos a vislumbrar las consecuencias.

Este archivo se materializa en la constitución de un archivo de objetos digitales que pueda ser vehículos para activación de las memorias, para el registro de la vida social y para reconocer relaciones afectivas, sociales y políticas. Esta iniciativa, sin embargo, ha enfrentado una serie de retos técnicos, operativos y hasta políticos, que nos llevan a plantear la reflexión sobre las posibilidades y difcultades para resistir en entornos digitales.

La presentación tiene como propósito hablar del proyecto y por plantear estos elementos de reflexión dentro de la línea de Datos abiertos, acceso abierto y la conservación de datos como resistencia.

1:45 – 2:45 pm

Hacer más con menos: experiencias de trabajo en el HD LAB

Gabriel Calarco (HD LAB, CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Nidia Hernández (HD LAB, CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Gimena del Rio Riande (HD LAB, CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
De León Romina  (HD LAB, CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Laura Volkind (HD LAB, CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina)

No existe aún una definición de minimal lab, pero si existiera un minimal lab podría ser definido como un espacio de experimentación e investigación en Humanidades Digitales que se rige por los principios de la minimal computing: hacer más con menos, pero también privilegiar la sostenibilidad, la autonomía tecnológica, la ciencia abierta y la comprensión profunda en el uso de herramientas digitales.

A diferencia de los laboratorios que dependen de grandes infraestructuras, HD LAB es un minimal lab que busca reducir los costos, favorecer la apropiación tecnológica por parte de sus integrantes, y maximizar la transparencia en los procesos. Es un entorno donde se privilegia el uso de software y estándares abiertos y frameworks estáticos (Jekyll, Collection Builder) para construir proyectos reproducibles, accesibles y sostenibles.

HD LAB también funciona como un espacio pedagógico, crítico y creativo, donde aprender la materialidad de lo digital, desde montar un escáner DIY hasta versionar código en GitHub en una Raspberry Pi. Creemos que estas prácticas facilitan la enseñanza, la preservación local y la transparencia, pero enfrentan nuevos retos: los modelos y servicios de IA, a menudo detrás de versiones premium, que extraen valor de corpus abiertos y pueden crear brechas de acceso que tensionan la idea de ciencia verdaderamente abierta.

En este panel traemos diferentes experiencias de trabajo del HD LAB del CONICET que se traducirán en tres exposiciones a cargo de varios de sus miembros: la creación de una biblioteca digital de textos coloniales, la puesta online de un catálogo de textos impresos y manuscritos del año 1998, la digitalización de un corpus de fanzines argentinos de la década del 90). Estos proyectos buscan definir un minimal lab no solo como un laboratorio con pocos recursos, sino como una declaración ética y epistemológica: una apuesta por la apertura, la sostenibilidad y la agencia humana en la producción de conocimiento digital.

Friday, 17 April 2026

9:00 – 9:50 am – Lightning Talk Panel

Humanidades digitales y comunicación global: redes y métricas de los cardenales del continente americano – EN: Digital Humanities and Global Communication: Networks and Metrics of the Cardinals of the American Continent

Camila Sánchez Frausto (Universidad de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico)
Rixio Gerardo Portillo Ríos (Universidad de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico)
Karla Sofia Peña Velazquez (Universidad de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico)

El auge de las redes sociales ha configurado un nuevo escenario de comunicación global en el que los actores públicos proyectan su identidad, visibilidad y credibilidad a través de entornos digitales. En este contexto, el estudio de las prácticas comunicativas mediante enfoques de las Humanidades Digitales permite comprender la interacción entre autoridad, representación y métricas de influencia. Este trabajo analiza la presencia digital de los cardenales del continente americano que participaron en el Cónclave 2025, con derecho a voto, a partir de sus perfiles personales en redes sociales, con el propósito de identificar patrones de participación, alcance y adaptación al ecosistema comunicativo contemporáneo.

Se aplicó un enfoque cuantitativo, descriptivo y no experimental, con diseño transversal. La población estuvo conformada por los 37 cardenales del continente americano (23 de América Latina, 10 de Estados Unidos y 4 de Canadá). La recolección de datos se efectuó entre el 11 de febrero y el 21 de abril de 2025. Se registraron variables como tipo de cuenta, imagen de perfil, verificación, número de seguidores y diversidad de plataformas activas.

Los resultados indican que el 51 % de los cardenales no poseen perfiles personales en redes sociales. Entre quienes sí los tienen, las plataformas más utilizadas son X (48,6 %), Facebook (45,9 %) e Instagram (29,7 %), con una presencia marginal en TikTok y YouTube (5,4 %). Solo el 5,4 % cuenta con verificación.

Desde la perspectiva de las Humanidades Digitales, el análisis evidencia cómo las figuras eclesiales se insertan en las lógicas globales de visibilidad y medición digital, donde los datos, la conectividad y las métricas configuran nuevas formas de autoridad simbólica. Este estudio aporta una lectura interdisciplinaria sobre la relación entre comunicación global, liderazgo y representación digital en el ámbito religioso contemporáneo.

Ética clínica y humanidades digitales, en contexto de filosofía clínica y terapia existencial digital

Adán Pérez Treviño (UDEM, Monterrey, Mexico)

Basados en la filosofía clínica, según la propuesta del brasileño Lucio Packter, y la tropicalización del mexicano Rafael De Gasperin, misma que se centra en la comprensión y esquematización de estructuras de pensamiento y situaciones existenciales, como lo es, por ejemplo, la crisis que provoca el sufrimiento humano, existe una terapia de acompañamiento existencial que se realiza por medios digitales, y que está teniendo un auge significativo más allá de Brasil, sobre todo luego de la pandemia.

Es imperante trabajar, no solo en la tropicalización que ya se está haciendo, sino también en una reflexión que nos conduzca a un marco ético para estas prácticas clínicas digitales, que se ofrecen a partir un entrenamiento no médico ni psicológico, y que, por ende, no necesariamente se comprenden en las deontologías tradicionales de aquellas prácticas clínicas o terapéuticas.

Es por ello que en esta ponencia exploramos la posibilidad de una ética adecuada a esta realidad, ya su praxis, que se ilustra por la experiencia e investigación que han realizado algunos teóricos en el contexto general de las humanidades digitales. Para esto, nos cuestionamos no solo su aplicabilidad, sino la necesidad de un marco normativo específico y nuevo, que pueda ser ilustrado por éticas como la discursiva, la ética del cuidado o, incluso, éticas tradicionales como el hedonismo o la teleología.

Sin una conclusión aún frente a estos cuestionamientos, y a los dilemas éticos que se derivan, esperamos que los trabajos existentes hasta ahora en ética digital, y específicamente en humanidades digitales, en las que se insertan las prácticas de filosofía clínica por medios virtuales, nos aproximen a rutas de posible solución, marcándonos el camino mediante algunos criterios de reflexión, propios y adecuados a la disciplina en cuestión. Aquí exploraremos dichos criterios, sus fundamentos, y sus condiciones de posibilidad.

Herramienta Visualsa: deconstruyendo el sabor con las Humanidades Digitales. Un acercamiento a la salsa a través de datos

Sarai Cuello Gutiérrez (Universidad de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico)

Desde la perspectiva de las Humanidades Digitales, esta investigación propone hacer explícitas las relaciones y conexiones existentes en el género musical salsa a través de la creación de una base de datos relacional que alberga información acerca de 17 de sus exponentes. El presente proyecto de visualización de la salsa como género musical se llevó a cabo por medio de la recopilación, estructuración y normalización de los datos de 17 artistas, reuniendo información sobre sus países de proveniencia, su participación en diferentes grupos musicales, la creación de composiciones y las ocupaciones e instrumentos que tocaban. Es a través de herramientas digitales que se ponen en evidencia sus enlaces y relaciones durante el periodo de 1964 a 1980 bajo el sello discográfico insignia Fania Records. Por consiguiente, esta investigación pretende ser un instrumento útil para el entendimiento de las conexiones contenidas en un producto tan propio del gentilicio latinoamericano como lo es la salsa.

Con la herramienta Visualsa se busca mapear al género musical de la salsa a través de instrumentos digitales que permitan localizar, recolectar, indexar y realizar un desglose de los enlaces entre los elementos que la componen, contribuyendo en este sentido a entender sus relaciones.

Las herramientas tecnológicas usadas en esta investigación permiten revelar los nexos que existen y que son, en ocasiones invisibles, de un elemento tan humano y social como la creación de un género musical.

11:30 – 12:50 am – Preserving Cultural Identity and Memory Panel

El reflejo de la cultura mexicana en tres videojuegos contemporáneos: Mexico 1921, Life Is Strange 2 y Mulaka

Bertrand Michel Stephane Lobjois  (Universidad de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico)
Kurt Lester Benze Hinojosa  (Universidad de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico)

La irrupción de los videojuegos como artefactos culturales y artísticos complejos ha motivado un creciente interés en su estudio desde las Humanidades Digitales. Este campo interdisciplinario busca entender la relación e impacto de las tecnologías de cómputo en el quehacer humanístico. Investigaciones recientes en México han demostrado el potencial de los videojuegos para el desarrollo de competencias cívicas y éticas, al fomentar la empatía, la conciencia crítica y la reflexión ante dilemas morales y situaciones de conflicto. No obstante, existe poca investigación sobre la manera específica en que México es retratado en los videojuegos, tanto en aquellos ambientados total como parcialmente en el país. Esta carencia justifica la necesidad de una investigación que aborde la representación de la cultura mexicana, identificando y analizando posibles discrepancias mediante herramientas humanísticas como la semiótica y la hermenéutica. El presente trabajo propone una exploración de esta cartografía cultural en tres títulos recientes: Mexico 1921. A Deep Slumber (publicado en 2024), Life is Strange 2 (2018) y Mulaka (2018). Mediante un análisis semiótico y hermenéutico, se busca determinar cómo se refleja la cultura mexicana, si se promueve una ética de la inclusión o, por el contrario, se incurre en la marginalización u othering, y de qué manera la narrativa interactiva facilita la comprensión de contextos históricos y sociales mexicanos. Esta exploración sienta las bases para futuras investigaciones que ubiquen a los videojuegos como vehículos importantes para la reflexión social y educativa en el contexto mexicano.

Voicing identity and territory in digital art

Annabel Castro (Universidad de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico)

The presentation examines four artworks reflecting on the indefinite detention of Mexican residents with Japanese heritage during WWII. It focuses specifically on the use of voice, human and AI generated, as conveyor of identity and territory as well as on the conceptual use of digital space and AI systems.

The first project, Outside-in: exiled at home, an installation that utilises machine learning to reflect on systematic discrimination, tears apart four classic fiction films continuously within a projection room. The system selects, separates and reassembles the fragments into new orders, evoking the condition of being robbed of your right to be in the place to which you belong. The second, Senninbari, is an algorithmic video projection that constitutes a landscape formed by the identity of the word doctor using it as an amulet. It uses Japanese literature and machine learning as identity elements in representing the former pandemic from the perspective of the territory of Morelos. The third, Castle Grounds, is an interactive map of voices portraying what monuments mean in two different geographies. One is Kumamoto castle in Japan and the other is situated in the municipality of Temixco in Morelos, Mexico. The one in Mexico, also a castle, was designed and constructed by a son to honor the memory of his deceased father’s most beloved tree (a ficus Moraceae). The father, a doctor, spent several years unjustly detained in the municipality’s segregation camp for citizens of Japanese heritage during WWII. The last and in progress artwork, There, in the hole, is a  landscape of voices pronouncing the same text. The specific text is about the transition into knowing how to sing, it belongs to the Chontal tradition and was translated to Spanish by Oguita Masanosuke, a former orthodontist based in Mexico City and Tehuantepec and born in 1898.

Mapping the Untranslatable: Decolonial Digital Humanities and Epistemic Resistance in Interdisciplinary Research

Moni Razavi  (University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada)

Interdisciplinary dialogue, though often celebrated as collaboration, rarely unfolds on equal terms. Some disciplines arrive as guests; others as hosts. This presentation argues that knowledge encounters in interdisciplinary spaces are structured by hierarchies of power, authority, legitimacy, and visibility that quietly shape such spaces, often imagined as equal and even. By using Digital Humanities (DH) methods, this project makes such asymmetries visible as a first step toward decolonizing interdisciplinary dialogues. 

My research turns to Adaptation Studies (AS) and Translation Studies (TS), two fields that engage in extensive interdisciplinary exchange yet rarely on equal footing. Using bibliometric and network analysis on more than 7,000 publications indexed in the Web of Science database with the Bibliometrix package in R, I visually reveal how TS, as a newly institutionalized discipline, imposes its Eurocentric, Anglocentric, and text-centric frameworks onto AS. This dynamic enacts what Santos (2014) calls “epistemicide”—the suppression of alternative ways of knowing through the dominance of one epistemic system. 

Adaptation scholars have long sought to move AS beyond such text-centrism, advocating for approaches that consider performance, embodiment, and multimodality. I argue that the path toward overcoming AS’s text-centrism lies in its epistemic delinking from TS and its Eurocentric models of knowledge. Drawing on Walter Mignolo’s (2007) concept of “delinking,” defined as the act of detaching from Eurocentric models of knowledge to reclaim epistemic autonomy, this presentation reimagines systematic bibliometric analysis and mapping as both critical and creative practices of resistance within interdisciplinary research.

By reframing data visualization as a decolonial interface, I position DH as a form of epistemic resistance, making visible the uneven ground of interdisciplinarity and charting pathways toward more plural and reciprocal knowledge ecologies. 

Looking Back Together: Crowdsourcing a Photographic Archive for Justice and Memor

Maria Laura Flores Barba (Western University, London, Canada)

This presentation introduces a participatory digital humanities project developed within the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador initiative. The project focuses on collaboratively annotating the Loretto Sisters’ photographic archive, which documents the repopulation of communities in Las Vueltas (Chalatenango) and La Bermuda (Cuscatlán) after the Salvadoran Civil War. Through a crowdsourcing platform, community members, survivors, and international collaborators identify people, places, and events depicted in the images, restoring agency and voice to those historically represented through external narratives.

Built upon long-term relationships of trust, the project embraces minimal and sustainable digital practices: it repurposes an already digitized collection, uses open-source tools, and privileges accessibility and data sovereignty over extractive technological approaches. In doing so, it responds to global concerns about AI, ethics, and representation by proposing a model of collaborative provenance grounded in anti-colonial and community-led methodologies.

By integrating oral testimony, local knowledge, and digital annotation, this project redefines the archive as a living, reparative space. It demonstrates how digital humanities can support resilience, dialogue, and justice in the aftermath of war, while fostering equitable collaboration between Global Majority communities and international partners. Ultimately, the project exemplifies how participatory and sustainable approaches to digital heritage can challenge dominant narratives, bridge human and technological infrastructures, and reimagine memory work as an act of collective reconstruction.

2:30 – 3:30 pm

Water Commons. Citizen Data and Artistic Practices for Hydrosolidarity

Joaquín Barriendos (Tecnologico de Monterrey, Guadalajara, Mexico)
Lisa Blackmore (University of Virginia)
Ericka Toledo (Water Center Ruta Azul)

This panel elaborates on the future of water as a more-than-human communal entity. The primary focus of this conversation circles around the role of citizen data, environmental digital humanities, and situated artistic/poetic practices in the promotion of hydrosolidarities (Boelens et al, 2025). Speakers will address case-studies from across the globe, covering three main areas: a) social pedagogies for the promotion of water as a common good (hydrocommons); b) co-learning with communities historically involved in the defense of water and climate justice; c) democratic participation of citizens and communities in the generation of technology-based environmental data and alternative digital humanities

Rivers of Data 

Lisa Blackmore (University of Virginia) 

This presentation examines the datafication of waterways in historical and contemporary context, reflecting on the ways that digital interfaces circulate and silo hydrological knowledge and the implications this has for hydrocitizenship. Through the analysis of three artistic projects—from Bogotá’s generative river soundworks, to reimagined satellite river imagery, to speculative AI-driven riverscapes—I explore how strategic interventions into textual and visual renderings of rivers can unsettle their technoscientific objectifications. These interventions render rivers sense-able and action-able, cultivating emergent hydrosolidarities that foster public capacity for restorative relations with water in the face of enclosure and instrumentalization.

Breathing Water

Ericka Jaguara Toledo (Tecnologico de Monterrey)

This work explores how arts-based methodologies can deepen environmental governance in natural protected areas. Focusing on Arteaga’s water forest in northeastern Mexico, the research integrates Theory U and Social Presencing Theater to map stakeholder constellations and reveal relational dynamics shaping water stewardship. Through the lens of hydropoetics, it seeks to sense and express water’s voice as a living participant in governance. Complemented by digital 4D mapping tools, this transdisciplinary approach merges art, systems thinking, and technology to cultivate collective awareness, empathy, and co-creative strategies for regenerating socio-ecological resilience in mountain forest ecosystems.

Hydro-poetics

Joaquin Barriendos (Tecnologico de Monterrey)

This paper explores the relation between environmental digital humanities and the future of hydro-poetics, an emerging field situated at the crossroads of water commonality, more-than-human aesthetics, and feminist new materialities. By using experimental art-based blue humanities, this presentation elaborates on the project Hydropoetic Data Station (2025), an art installation created by Future Ecologies Lab at Tecnologico de Monterrey, involving the collaboration of four institutions: Water Center, Internet of Water, Architecture and Cultures Center, and the Institute of Robotic Engineering and Intelligent Systems. Our goal is to analyze the role of Eco-Aesthetic Practices (EAP) and Collective Sensing Data (CSD) in promoting bio-regenerative poetic forms of co-existence with our bodies of water.