6th DARIAH-HR International Conference
Digital Humanities & Heritage: Cultural Memory vs. Machine Memory
CALL FOR PAPERS
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
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?
The conference invites scholars and researchers, cultural heritage professionals, artists, technologists, educators, and policymakers to examine the future of digital humanities and heritage in an age of machine-generated knowledge. Particular attention will be given to the ethical, epistemological, social, and cultural implications of AI and digital infrastructures, as well as to the role of the humanities in preserving critical interpretation, plurality, contextual sensitivity, and cultural responsibility.
We welcome theoretical, methodological, empirical, creative, and practice-based contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics. Contributions may focus on any area of the humanities, arts, and heritage, including language, literature, translation, archaeology, history, music, performance, visual culture, education, and cultural memory:
Cultural Memory, Archives, and Digital Infrastructures
- Cultural memory in digital and post-digital environments
- Archives, repositories, databases, and platforms as memory infrastructures
- Digitisation, preservation, access, sustainability, and the politics of selection
- Provenance data, digital asset histories, and the construction of memory infrastructures
Machine Memory, AI, and Algorithmic Knowledge
- Artificial intelligence and the transformation of cultural heritage research
- Machine learning, automated classification, and cultural interpretation
- Generative AI and the production of historical, cultural, and artistic narratives
- Bias, error, hallucination, distortion, forgetting, and the politics of data
Humanistic Interpretation in the Age of Automation
- The role of humanities scholarship in critically interpreting digital knowledge
- Context, ambiguity, uncertainty, and situated interpretation in digital research
- Digital approaches to language, literature, translation, discourse, and textual corpora
- Ethical, legal, and epistemological challenges of AI-supported scholarship
Heritage, Identity, and Public Engagement
- Digital heritage and the construction of cultural, national, regional, and community identities
- Heritage narratives between institutional memory, public participation, and shared authority
- Digital approaches to archaeological, historical, linguistic, literary, and musical heritage
- Public humanities, education, accessibility, digital literacy, and contested heritage
Art, Creativity, and Machine-Generated Culture
- AI and creative practices in the arts, design, performance, and media
- Machine-generated images, texts, sounds, music and their cultural implications
- Artistic responses to archives, memory, data, algorithms, and future memory practices
- Authorship, originality, and creativity in human-machine collaboration
Digital Humanities, Research Infrastructures, and Society
- Digital humanities infrastructures as spaces of collaboration and engagement
- European and regional infrastructures for digital arts, humanities, and heritage
- Interoperability, standards, open science, and responsible access to cultural materials
- Digital corpora, lexicons, editions, collections, and multimodal datasets as research resources
Critical Memory Infrastructures and Digital Resilience
- Cultural heritage infrastructures as Critical Research Infrastructures
- Resilience, continuity, recovery, and adaptation in digital memory ecosystems
- Federated architectures, workflow-driven environments, and trustworthy infrastructures for cultural heritage and knowledge preservation
- Resilient infrastructures for safeguarding digital heritage from cyber threats and other risks to digital memory.
Who can apply?
We invite researchers, students, heritage and GLAM professionals, artists, designers, educators, digital humanities practitioners, policymakers, representatives of the cultural and creative sectors, and other interested contributors to present their research, projects, methodologies, case studies, and critical reflections.
We particularly welcome interdisciplinary contributions that connect the humanities, including language and literary studies, linguistics, translation studies, archaeology, history, heritage studies, information sciences, cultural studies, arts, computer science, education, ethics, law, and public policy.
How to apply:
We invite proposals for individual presentations, posters, and panels.
Online presentations will not be available.
Abstracts for individual presentations and posters should be no more than 500 words. Panel proposals should include a short panel description of no more than 500 words, together with individual abstracts for each contribution.
All proposals should be submitted together with a concise biographical note of no more than 200 words and a photograph, preferably in square format and with enough space for circular cropping. Please see the other photographs in the biography section of our website: https://dhh.dariah.hr/biographies/.
Submission deadline: 30 June 2026
Notification of acceptance: early July 2026
All submissions should be submitted via the online submission form: https://forms.gle/LkBVZsQcvWNnSvh59.
We welcome submissions of completed, original, and unpublished research, as well as contributions presenting work in progress, experimental approaches, and ongoing projects. Authors of selected papers will be invited to prepare a submission for an edited, peer-reviewed volume.
Participation in the 6th Digital Humanities & Heritage conference is free of charge.
Important dates
- Abstract submission deadline: 30 June 2026
- Notification of acceptance: early July 2026
- Conference dates: 7–9 October 2026
For additional questions, please contact:
dariah.hr@gmail.com
We look forward to your submissions and to welcoming you in Pula.