Call for Papers:

The Digital Conference:
Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the Digital
Department of Digital Humanities
King’s College London
June 23-26, 2026
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/digital-humanities-today-critical-inquiry-with-and-about-the-digital

Deadline for submission of abstracts: September 30, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Computational humanities and computing culture: computational history, music computing, geoanalytics, digital classics, computational linguistics, computational social science, cultural analytics, computational literary studies
2. Creative digital practice and the arts, music and the digital, arts-based methods
3. Design, Interfaces, and Interaction: UX/UI
4. Digital ecologies, environmental justice and sustainable digital futures
5. Digital gaming and play
6. Digital health, digital care, and transformation of the care industry
7. Digital knowledge and epistemologies and critical technical practices and digital methods
8. Digital labour and economies, platform studies
9. Digital media
10. Digital Research Infrastructures and funding
11. Embodiment and identity: the digital and the embodied, digital childhood & youth
12. Global and decolonial digital cultures, digital commons, digital audiences, creator cultures
13. Politics, power, and resistance in the digital age: digital politics, deplatformisation, the digital university, engaged digital research

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

You can submit proposals via THIS FORM until the deadline of 30/09/2025. We aim to notify acceptance of abstracts by 15/11/2025.

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

For any inquiries, please contact thedigitalconference@kcl.ac.uk.