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ACH 2024 (November 6-8, 2024)
Deadline: May 20 May 31, 2024, 11:59:59 PM in GMT-4
Submit a proposal: https://www.conftool.pro/ach2024
The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) will hold ACH 2024, a virtual conference, from November 6-8, 2024.
Conference Focus
Amid rapid societal and technological transformations and historic elections worldwide, ACH fosters dialogue, spaces, and solidarity on equity and justice across local, transborder, and global contexts. ACH 2024 underscores the importance of addressing societal challenges in the digital humanities and beyond, such as racial and gender discrimination, while also highlighting the ramifications of AI and environmental crises. Join us in navigating diverse political milieus and shaping a virtual conference that is just and inclusive.
ACH 2024 prioritizes proposals that focus on social justice in multiple contexts local, transborder, and global: 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:
- AI and its consequences
- Digital and computational approaches to humanistic research and pedagogy
- Digital cultural heritage
- Digital surveillance
- Digital humanities tools and infrastructures
- Digital librarianship
- Digital media, art, literature, history, music, film, and games
- Digital public humanities
- Environmental humanities & climate justice
- 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
- Multilingualism 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 2024 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 projects 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 share their presentation via our virtual conferencing platform, Work Adventure, which provides an interactive virtual world and ability to share video, audio, or images via the browser (platform is optimized for Google Chrome). Poster session presentations will include synchronous conversations as attendees “walk up” to the virtual poster room.
- 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): Artwork, creative data visualizations, performances, demonstrations and other critical interventions that engage conference issues, methods, and themes. Installation and performance presenters will share their presentation via our virtual conferencing platform, Work Adventure, which provides an interactive virtual world and ability to share video, audio, or images via the browser (platform is optimized for Google Chrome). Presentations will include synchronous conversation as attendees “walk up” to the virtual installation/performance room.
- 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, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Korean, we welcome proposals for contributions in all languages. Proposals will be reviewed in the language of submission. Presentations may be delivered in the language of the proposal, though we may have limited access to translators. 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 normally schedule up to 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 the 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 2024 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 anonymous 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 anonymous 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, ACH 2023, and now ACH 2024.
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 June 17 and end on July 19, 2024.
Notifications about acceptance or rejection will be made by August 30, 2024. 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.
Use of Generative AI in Proposals
Following the lead of KeystoneDH’s 2024 CFP, we’re open to the responsible use of generative AI: “Since generative AI is an important and timely area of investigation in digital humanities, we are interested in your experiments with it, but we expect our conference participants to take responsibility for authorship of proposals and presentations. We ask that conference applicants and presenters report their use of generative AI language tools, following arXiv’s AI policy.”
Use of generative AI should be cited according to professional standards, such as the MLA’s guidelines for citing generative AI.
Code of Conduct
ACH 2024 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 2024 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, religion, or employment status and role. By attending ACH 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, face-to-face, or on social media platforms. Participants in ACH events violating these rules may be barred or banned from ACH 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 2024 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 2024 is accessible to 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 the accessibility of sessions to all accepted participants. More information, along with a request for information about participant needs, will be circulated in advance.
Conference Time Zone
ACH 2024 will be scheduled in Central Time. From November 6-8, sessions will be scheduled from approximately 9:00 am – 6:00 pm Central Time.
Conference Registration and Bursaries
Registration for ACH 2024 will open on August 30, 2024.
Conference organizers have worked to keep the registration costs as low as possible while ensuring we are providing attendees with a positive conference experience. While organizing a virtual conference is far less expensive than an in-person or hybrid event, there are nonetheless costs for maintaining the conference submission management software, conference platforms, 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 are committed to ensuring that cost is not a barrier to participation in ACH 2024. ACH will offer a limited number of bursaries to support attendance by members without institutional support, including students, contingently employed, and un-/underemployed professionals. Bursary applications will open when proposal notifications are sent.
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 2024 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.
2024 Conference Committee
Conference Co-Chairs: Pamella Lach (San Diego State University) and Sylvia Fernández (University of Texas at San Antonio)
Program Co-Chairs: Maira E. Álvarez (University of Texas at Austin) and Rini Bhattacharya Mehta (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Technical Chair: Liz Grumbach (Arizona State University)
Communications Lead: Caterina Agostini (Indiana University Bloomington)
Volunteers Lead: Jessica BrodeFrank (University of Illinois Chicago)
Registration Lead: Anna Kijas (Tufts University)
Sponsorship and Promotion Lead: Eduard Arriaga (Clark University)
Regional Hub Lead: Matthew Hannah (Purdue University)
Additional Committee Members:
Andy Janco (University of Pennsylvania)
Dorothy Berry (National Museum of African American History & Culture)
John Knox (University of North Carolina at Wilmington)
Additional Program Committee members will be announced.