REVISED Deadline: March 15th, 11:59 PM Eastern Time

We are excited to announce that 2023’s Keystone DH Conference will be held June 16-17th at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Digital Humanities in Baltimore, MD. Keystone DH is an annual conference and a network of institutions and practitioners committed to advancing collaborative scholarship in digital humanities research and pedagogy across the Mid-Atlantic. It is the organizers’ hope that the event will primarily be in-person, with additional online accessibility for those who cannot be present.

Call for Papers:

The theme for this year’s conference will be Scale. Digital techniques have enabled scholars and practitioners both in and out of the academy to explore problems and topics well beyond the reach of traditional tools and methods: collaborations bring together far-flung participants; massive data sets can be assembled and analyzed with ease; accessible tools allow community-centered organizing while new approaches to teaching enable innovative classroom structures. At the same time, recent work from scholars including Catherine Knight Steele, Andre Brock and Shoshana Zuboff has created a new awareness of the perils of digital scale. Without care, data is easily stripped of its context, alienated from the communities it describes, and incorporated into oppressive structures of power.

We encourage presentations that explore questions of scale in the Digital Humanities—whether analysis based on a large data-set, an investigation of Silicon Valley labor practices, a pedagogical approach that moves between group sizes, or a critique of a digital methodology, tool, or technique. Proposals are also welcome on any aspect of digital technologies and their application to the humanities and/or social sciences beyond this theme. We highly encourage projects that focus on the collaborative nature of research and teaching. Senior scholars should foreground the labor of students, librarians, and/or the community that sustained the project.

These themes will be explored in greater depth by keynote speakers André Brock (speaking on the question of scale and distributed Blackness) and Ted Underwood (exploring the potential of large language models for literary criticism)

Presentations may take the form of short papers, community projects, panel discussions or roundtables, workshops, poster sessions, or showcase demonstrations. All panels and workshops will take place over 1.5 hours, unless otherwise requested. The conference will include allotted times for a poster session and showcase demonstrations. Please keep in mind that presentations and documents will be expected to meet accessibility guidelines. In the linked Google Form, please submit your name, email address, title, and type of your proposed presentation, as well as a proposal of 250-500 words. The proposal deadline is March 15th, 2023, and proposers will be notified by the end of the month.

Call for Projects

In addition to traditional paper presentations, Keystone DH also calls for submissions from those in the early stages of a digital project. Accepted projects will participate in a workshop in which the individual or group will be matched with researchers who have the technical skills and experience to advise them on the best path forward. Balancing a discussion of general approaches with discrete technical advice, these workshops aim to provide an introduction to the digital humanities community, as well as a clear set of steps for future work.

Examples of projects could include anything from a set of materials that applicants desire to explore, a specific digital product they hope to produce, or a technical problem they are struggling with. Proposals should be 250-400 words, and will describe all/any of the materials, methods, objectives, and governing questionings relevant to the project. They should also include a succinct statement of what the applicant hopes to achieve by participating in the workshop. In the linked Google Form, please submit your name, email address, title, and type of your project, as well as a description of 250-500 words. The proposal deadline is March 15th, 2023, and proposers will be notified by the end of the month.