DigiCAM25: Born-Digital Collections, Archives and Memory Senate House, University of London London, UK, April 2-4, 2025 |
| Conference website | https://www.sas.ac.uk/borndigital2025 |
| Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bdcam25 |
| Conference program | https://easychair.org/smart-program/BDCAM25/ |
| Submission deadline | June 7, 2024 |
Born-Digital Collections, Archives and Memory
Dates: Wednesday 2 to Friday 4 April 2025
Location: Senate House, University of London
Host: The Digital Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in collaboration with colleagues from Aarhus University, the British Library, and the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme at the British Museum
Organising Committee: Gabriel Bodard, Beatrice Cannelli, Michael Donnay, Paula Granados Garcia, Helle Strandgaard Jensen, Anna-Maria Sichani, Naomi Wells, and Stella Wisdom
Conference website: https://www.sas.ac.uk/borndigital2025
Overview
Digital research in the arts and humanities has traditionally focused on digitised objects and archives. However, born-digital cultural materials that originate and circulate across a range of formats and platforms are rapidly expanding and raising new opportunities and challenges for research, archiving and collecting communities. Collecting, accessing and sharing born-digital objects and data presents a range of complex technical, legal and ethical challenges that, if unaddressed, threaten the archival and research futures of these vital cultural materials and records of the 21st century. Moreover, the environments, contexts and formats through which born-digital records are mediated necessitate reconceptualising the materials and practices we associate with cultural heritage and memory.
Research and practitioner communities working with born-digital materials are growing and their interests are varied, from digital cultures and intangible cultural heritage to web archives, electronic literatures and social media. This international conference seeks to further an interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral discussion on how the born-digital transforms what and how we research in the humanities.
We invite contributions from researchers and practitioners involved in any way in accessing or developing born-digital collections and archives, and interested in exploring the novel and transformative effects of born-digital cultural heritage. Areas of particular (but not exclusive) interest include:
- A broad range of born-digital objects and formats:
- Web-based and networked heritage, including but not limited to websites, emails, social media platforms/content and other forms of personal communication
- Software-based heritage, such as video games, mobile applications, computer-based artworks and installations, including approaches to archiving, preserving and understanding their source code
- Born-digital narrative and artistic forms, such as electronic literature and born-digital art collections
- Emerging formats and multimodal born-digital cultural heritage
- Community-led and personal born-digital archives
- Physical, intangible and digitised cultural heritage that has been remediated in a transformative way in born-digital formats and platforms
- Theoretical, methodological and creative approaches to engaging with born-digital collections and archives:
- Approaches to researching the born-digital mediation of cultural memory
- Histories and historiographies of born-digital technologies
- Creative research uses and creative technologist approaches to born-digital materials
- Experimental research approaches to engaging with born-digital objects, data and collections
- Methodological reflections on using digital, quantitative and/or qualitative methods with born-digital objects, data and collections
- Novel approaches to conceptualising born-digital and/or hybrid cultural heritage and archives
- Critical approaches to born-digital archiving, curation and preservation:
- Critical archival studies and librarianship approaches to born-digital collections
- Preserving and understanding obsolete media formats, including but not limited to CD-ROMs, floppy disks and other forms of optical and magnetic media
- Preservation challenges associated with the platformisation of digital cultural production
- Semantic technology, ontologies, metadata standards, markup languages and born-digital curation
- Ethical approaches to collecting and accessing ‘difficult’ born-digital heritage, such as traumatic or offensive online materials
- Risks and opportunities of generative AI in the context of born-digital archiving
- Access, training and frameworks for born-digital archiving and collecting:
- Institutional, national and transnational approaches to born-digital archiving and collecting
- Legal, trustworthy, ethical and environmentally sustainable frameworks for born-digital archiving and collecting, including attention to cybersecurity and safety concerns
- Access, skills and training for born-digital research and archives
- Inequalities of access to born-digital collecting and archiving infrastructures, including linguistic, geographic, economic, legal, cultural, technological and institutional barriers
Options for Submissions
We welcome a number of different submission types. Please indicate the category of your presentation when submitting your proposal. Proposals should adhere to the word count indicated and be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair. References and/or bibliography are excluded from the word count.
There will be the option for some presentations to be delivered online. Please indicate on your submission whether you intend to present in-person or online, and please note we have a more limited capacity for online presenters.
- Conference papers (150-300 words)
- Presentations lasting 20 minutes. Papers will be grouped with others on similar subjects or themes to form a complete session. There will be time for questions at the end of each session.
- Panel sessions (100 word summary plus 150-200 words per paper)
- Proposals should consist of three or four 20-minute papers. There will be time for questions at the end of each session.
- Roundtables (200-300 word summary and 75-100 word bio for each speaker)
- Proposals should include between three to five speakers, inclusive of a moderator, and each session will be no more than 90 minutes.
- Posters, demos & showcases (100-200 words)
- These can be traditional printed posters, digital-only posters, digital tool showcases, or software demonstrations. Please indicate the form your presentation will take in your submission.
- If you propose a technical demonstration of some kind, please include details of technical equipment to be used and the nature of assistance (if any) required. We will be able to provide a limited number of external monitors for digital posters and demonstrations, but participants will be expected to provide any specialist equipment required for their demonstration. Where appropriate, posters and demos may be made available online for virtual attendees to access.
- Lightning talks (100-200 words)
- Talks will be no more than 5 minutes and can be used to jump-start a conversation, pitch a new project, find potential collaborations, or try out a new idea. Reports on completed projects would be more appropriately given as 20-minute papers.
- Workshops (150-300 words)
- Please include details about the format, length, proposed topic, and intended audience.
Proposals will be reviewed by members of the programme committee. The peer review process will be double-blind, so we ask that no names or affiliations appear on the submitted PDFs. The one exception is proposals for roundtable sessions, which should include the names of proposed participants.
All authors and reviewers will be required to adhere to the conference Code of Conduct.
The deadline for submission of proposals is 15 May 2024. We aim to complete peer review and notify successful and unsuccessful applicants by the end of July 2024. We plan to make a number of bursaries available to presenters to cover the cost of attendance and will share more details when notifications are sent.
Virtual Participation, Languages and Accessibility
The conference will primarily be an in-person event. However, we recognise the importance of remote participation to support inclusive access. We therefore plan to livestream portions of the programme for attendees to view online, and which will also be made available to view after conference. We will do our best to ensure that both in-person and virtual participants will have an enriching and enjoyable experience.
There will be the option for some presentations to be made online. Please indicate on your submission whether you intend to present in-person or online, and please note we have a more limited capacity for online presenters.
The working language of the conference will be English but within our capacity we would like to ensure the inclusion of those who would prefer to present in other languages. To support cross-language engagement, those who would like to present in another language will be asked to pre-record their presentations in the language of their choice and the organising committee will coordinate and cover the costs of translation into English prior to the event. In order to facilitate the peer review process, we would however ask that submissions be made in English or in one of the languages familiar to the organising committee, which are French, Spanish and Italian.
If you have any questions or additional accessibility recommendations or requirements, please contact the Organising Committee at borndigital@sas.ac.uk.
Programme Committee Members
- Abi L Glen - Our Heritage, Our Stories (OHOS)
- Alice Bell - Sheffield Hallam University
- Amy Spencer - Bath Spa University
- Anat Ben-David - Open University of Israel
- Andy Corrigan - Cambridge Digital Humanities
- Anisa Hawes - Programming Historian
- Anna Mladentseva - UCL/V&A
- Arran J Rees - University of Leeds
- Bethany Johnstone - UCL
- Caio Mello - School of Advanced Study
- Callum McKean - British Library
- Chijioke Okorie - University of Pretoria
- CJ Chen - Nanjing University
- Claire Taylor - University of Liverpool
- Clare George - Senate House Library
- Edward King - University of Bristol
- Emily Maemura - University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign
- Gábor Palkó - Eötvös Loránd University
- Gustavo Gomez-Mejia - Université de Tours, Prim
- Hannah Smyth - UCL
- Helena Byrne - British Library
- İdil Galip - University of Amsterdam
- Isabelle Gribomont - Université catholique de Louvain/Royal Library of Belgium (KBR)
- Jane Winters - School of Advanced Study
- Jenny Bunn - The National Archives
- Jenny Cearns - UCL
- Jessica Ogden - University of Bristol
- Jo Baines - UCL Special Collections
- Jody Butterworth - British Library
- Joseph Ford - School of Advanced Study
- Juan-José Boté-Vericad - Universitat de Barcelona
- JuEunhae Knox - University of Sheffield
- Katie Mackinnon - University of Toronto
- Kelly Foster - Whose Knowledge?
- Kyounghwa Yonnie Kim - Kanda University of International Studies
- Laura Molloy - CODATA (The Committee on Data of the International Science Council, Paris)
- Lisa Griffith - Digital Repository of Ireland
- Lucy Evans - Senate House Library
- Lyle Skains - Bournemouth University
- Max Odsbjerg Pedersen - Royal Danish Library
- Michael Popham - Digital Preservation Coalition
- Nanna Bonde Thylstrup - University of Copenhagen
- Natalie Kane - V&A
- Neil Stewart - School of Advanced Study
- Nick Webber - Birmingham City University
- Niels Brügger - Aarhus University
- Paul Gooding - University of Glasgow
- Peter Webster - University of Southampton
- Pip Willcox - Lambeth Palace Library
- Pragya Dhital - School of Advanced Study
- Reham Hosny - University of Cambridge/Minia University
- Rhiannon Lewis - School of Advanced Study/University of Glasgow
- Richard Nevell - Wikimedia UK
- Rosario Rogel-Salazar - Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México
- Samya Brata Roy - IIT Jodhpur/School of Advanced Study
- Sara Namusoga-Kaale - Makerere University
- Sara Thomas - Wikimedia UK
- Saskia Huc-Hepher - University of Westminster
- Shani Evenstein Sigalov - School of Advanced Study/Tel Aviv University
- Susan Aasman - University of Gronigen
- Thea Pitman - University of Leeds
- Thorsten Ries - The University of Texas, Austin
- Valérie Schafer - University of Luxembourg
- Vicky Garnett - DARIAH-EU/Trinity College Dublin
- Yannis Tzitzikas - University of Crete
Important Dates
Deadline for submissions [extended]: 07 June 2024
Notifications of acceptances by end of August 2024
Conference dates: 2-4 April 2025