Call for Proposals

ACH 2023 CFP

Deadline: February 1st 15th, 2023, 11:59:59 PM in GMT -12

Submit a proposal: ACH 2023 Conftool

The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) will hold ACH 2023, a virtual conference, from June 29-July 1, 2023.

Conference Focus

ACH 2023 is guided by our commitments to equity and justice. The conference recognizes that digital humanities scholarship is inextricably sociopolitical. Therefore, we have chosen to forgo a theme to emphasize the inherent sociopolitical nature of the work and encourage all proposal writers to explicitly address the sociopolitical stakes of their work.

ACH 2023 prioritizes proposals that focus on social justice in multiple contexts: anti-racist work, Indigenous studies, cultural and critical ethnic studies, intersectional feminism, postcolonial and decolonial studies, disability studies, and queer studies.

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

Conference Scope

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

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

As a conference committed to cross-disciplinary engagement, ACH 2023 welcomes interdisciplinary proposals. We are also especially interested in receiving proposals from participants with a range of expertise and a variety of roles, including alt-ac positions, employment outside of higher education, and graduate and undergraduate students. We further invite proposals from participants who are newcomers to digital humanities.

Conference Submission Types and Languages

We welcome the following submission types:

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

Lightning Talks (5 minutes): Highly focused presentations that succinctly introduce a topic, method, tool, project, or work-in-progress to catalyze ideas and foster follow-up discussion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please note that for the purposes of scheduling, we may suggest an alternative submission type or collaboration between related proposals. While there is no limit on the number of submissions, the program committee will not normally schedule more than two presentations from one presenting author.

Conference Proposal Requirements

Proposals will be submitted using ConfTool. Please create a new account to submit your proposal.

Proposals must include:

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

Proposal Review and Notification

ACH 2023 proposals will undergo open peer review. Names and affiliations of authors will be known to a proposal’s reviewer, while names and affiliations of the reviewer will be known to the authors. We are adopting open peer review for several reasons:

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

Therefore, our use of open peer review is intended to mitigate the implicit inequities in the blind review process. We recognize, however, that open peer review raises issues with power dynamics, such as concerns that emerging scholars may have about evaluating an established scholar. To mitigate these issues, the Program Committee will carefully and thoughtfully assign reviewers and reviewers will have the right to refuse to review a submission for any reason. We also recognize that open peer review could contribute to increased bias. To mitigate this, we encourage reviewers to evaluate their biases and will provide clear guidance for their role in the review process. We are grateful to DH2020 Program Committee Chairs Laura Estill and Jennifer Guiliano for their work on open peer review, which influenced our approach for DH Unbound 2022 and now ACH 2023.

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

  • 20% - Relevance to Conference Focus.

    • The proposal topic is connected to anti-racist work, Indigenous studies, cultural and critical ethnic studies, intersectional feminism, postcolonial and decolonial studies, queer studies and/or multilingualism

  • 20% -  Engagement with Relevant Scholarship.

    • The proposal engages explicitly with relevant scholarship and offers context within the current state of the fields in which it engages. Formal citations (in the proposal writer’s preferred style) are only required when using direct quotation.

  • 20% - Framework and Purpose.

    • The proposal offers clear theoretical, methodological, or pedagogy framework; concrete statement of purpose; and explicit articulation of the sociopolitical implications of the work.

  • 20% - Applicability, Significance, and Value.

    • The proposal articulates the applicability, significance, and value of the theoretical, methodological, and/or practical contribution to digital humanities generally.

  • 20% - Overall Recommendation.

    • The proposal is organized effectively and offers a clear articulation of presentation content.

The review period will begin on February 6, 2023 March 6, 2023 and end on March 6, 2023 March 27, 2023.

Notifications about acceptance or rejection will be made by March 20, 2023 April 19, 2023. Reviews will also be made available upon notification.

Copyright and Privacy

Submissions and reviews will not be made available to the public. The Program Committee will have access to all submissions and reviews. Reviewers will be able to view only the proposals assigned to them for review. Authors will be able to view reviews of their submissions after the review process concludes. Names of reviewers will be displayed on a slide in an alphabetical list during the opening session of the conference in gratitude for their contribution.

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

Code of Conduct

ACH 2023 is dedicated to creating a safe, respectful, and collegial conference environment for the benefit of everyone who attends and for the advancement of research and scholarship in the field. ACH 2023 has adapted the ACH Conference Code of Conduct:

ACH is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone regardless of gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, origin, or religion. By attending ACH 2023 events, you signal your commitment to contributing to a safe and inclusive experience for all. We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form, whether events are held virtually or face-to-face. Participants in ACH events violating these rules may be barred or banned from ACH 2023 activities at the discretion of the organizers.

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

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

ACH 2023 seeks to uphold these values throughout the submission and review process as well as during the conference itself. Please familiarize yourself with the reporting guidelines and our process for addressing violations.

Accessibility

ACH seeks to ensure that ACH 2023 is accessible for all participants. All synchronous sessions will make live transcription available to participants, and keynote and plenary sessions will also include sign language interpretation. We will provide guidelines for accessibility of sessions to all accepted participants. More information, along with a request for information about participant needs, will be circulated on April 20, 2023.

Conference Time Zone

ACH 2023 will be scheduled in Eastern Time. From June 29-July 1, sessions will be scheduled from approximately 10:00am-7:00pm Eastern Time.

Conference Registration and Bursaries

Registration for ACH 2023 will open around March 20, 2023 April 19, 2023.

The cost of running ACH 2023 is approximately $4,000. As a result, we must charge registration fees to cover the cost. Registration fees will cover the cost of running a virtual conference, which include conference submission management software, conference platforms for videoconferencing and spatial chat, honoraria for keynote and plenary events, and accessibility (sign language interpretation and remote captioning for keynotes and plenaries and live captioning for conference sessions). We have worked to keep the registration costs as low as possible while ensuring we are providing attendees with a positive conference experience.

ACH will offer a limited number of bursaries to support attendance by members who are contingently employed or are graduate students.

The registration fee schedule will be:

  • ACH or ADHO Joint Member: $50
  • Student ACH or ADHO Joint Member: $25
  • Regular Non-Member: $90
  • Student Non-Member: $40
  • Contingent/un-/underemployed: $40

Contact Information

For questions and concerns about the CFP, conference program, submissions, Code of Conduct, or accessibility, please contact the ACH 2023 Conference Chair at conference [at] ach [dot] org.

If you are interested in translating this call for proposals into another language, please contact the conference committee at conference [at] ach [dot] org.

Program Committee

Conference Chair: Pamella Lach (she/her/hers), San Diego State University

Program Committee Lead: Liz Grumbach (she/her/hers), Arizona State University

Platform Committee Co-Leads: Alex Wermer-Colan, Temple University & Andy Janco, University of Pennsylvania

Conference Committee Members: Caitlin Pollock (University of Michigan), Eduard Arriga (Clark University), Sarah Potvin (Texas A&M University)

Additional Program Committee members will be announced shortly.