6th DARIAH-HR International Conference
Digital Humanities & Heritage: Cultural Memory vs. Machine Memory
Conference Dates: 7–9 October 2026
Location: Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Faculty of Humanities, Pula, Croatia
Conference organisers: DARIAH-HR / Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia; DARIAH-IT / National Research Council (CNR), Florence, Italy; Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Faculty of Humanities, Pula, Croatia
Keynote speakers:
Cultural Memory, Machine Thinking, and Infrastructural Ethics
Speaker: Jennifer Edmond
Between Cultural Memory and Machine Memory: Five Levels of AI in Teaching
Speaker: Benedikt Perak
About the conference:
We are pleased to invite you to the 6th DARIAH-HR International Conference Digital Humanities & Heritage, which will be held at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Faculty of Humanities, from 7 to 9 October 2026.
This year’s conference, subtitled “Cultural Memory vs. Machine Memory”, invites reflection on how culture and heritage have been remembered, transmitted, interpreted, and reconfigured across different historical, social, and technological contexts. Cultural memory has never been a neutral repository of the past: it is shaped by state and institutional politics, ideological conditions, community practices, archival regimes, ethical frameworks, silences, exclusions, and other forms of mediation. In digital environments, however, these processes are increasingly reorganised through algorithmic systems, artificial intelligence, large-scale databases, automated classification, and machine-generated knowledge.
Digital technologies can support the preservation of fragile cultural materials and intangible cultural heritage, improve access to dispersed archives, enable new forms of research, and create innovative modes of public engagement with heritage. At the same time, they can also simplify, flatten, decontextualise, or manipulate the ways in which the past is organised and understood. The growing presence of AI in cultural heritage, research infrastructures, education, museums, archives, and creative practices therefore requires renewed critical attention.
As cultural memory increasingly relies on digital infrastructures, ensuring the resilience and security of digital heritage has emerged as a critical challenge. Memory institutions, repositories, and research infrastructures are now central to the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. Yet they are increasingly exposed to cyber threats and systemic risks, including cognitive warfare, which seeks to shape perceptions, beliefs, and collective memory through the manipulation of digital information ecosystems. Such risks pose significant challenges to epistemic resilience and democratic knowledge infrastructures, calling for renewed reflection on how digital memory infrastructures can ensure continuity, trustworthiness, and long-term access to knowledge for future generations.
The question “Cultural Memory vs. Machine Memory?” is not intended to propose a simple opposition between human and technological processes of memory construction. On the contrary, it invites discussion on the complex relations between human interpretation and machine processing, between contextual knowledge and computational abstraction, between cultural responsibility and technological acceleration. How do digital systems “remember”? What do they “forget”? Whose histories become visible, searchable, and reusable – and whose remain marginal, fragmented, or misrepresented? What happens when cultural memory is encoded into datasets, metadata schemas, prompts, models, and automated outputs? What can digital memory infrastructures do to foster epistemic resilience and protect collective memory?
Participation in the 6th Digital Humanities & Heritage conference is free of charge.
For additional questions, please contact:
dariah.hr@gmail.com