Submissions, Topics and Important Dates
Digital Humanities has always defined itself in relation to its tools and to its conditions of work. In 2027, both have changed. Large Language Models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and Agentic Systems are mainstream and that has shifted what counts as a method, a contribution, and a reliable scholarly claim; while the material costs of these systems — manufacturing, water use, carbon emissions — have made visible what was previously easy to ignore: that digital scholarship is positioned not only in disciplines and institutions, but has a tangible ecological footprint. With the theme Where Is Digital Humanities?, DH Benelux 2027 invites the community to ask where — with whom, on what terms, and at what cost — DH does its work in the post-LLM moment.
This conference theme works along three axes. The disciplinary axis asks where DH is situated as a scholarly pursuit, as a method that travels across humanistic fields, as a discipline in its own right with its journals and departments, as a connective practice that holds otherwise scattered humanistic conversations in productive proximity. The publics axis asks where DH earns and maintains credibility with citizen scientists, heritage volunteers, and the broader public who fund and use the institutions around which much DH work is anchored. The machines axis asks where scholars operate within a research lifecycle that integrates generative systems, with all that this implies for reproducibility, trust, and sustainability.
Hence, the three axes are inseparable; for the question of where we stand vis-à-vis machines is also a question about disciplinary identity, about the publics with whom DH does its work, and about the planet on which it does so.
Submissions
DH Benelux 2027 welcomes contributions that critically examine the affordances and limitations and material costs of digital tools and methodologies in the post-LLM moment, that reflect on the disciplinary identity and sustainability of Digital Humanities as a field, and that present ongoing and completed work engaging with digital and computational humanities and from diverse methodological traditions, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed approaches.
We especially encourage submissions that connect across the three axes named above — for instance, on how disciplinary identity is reshaped by machine-mediated practice, on how public trust is implicated in the choice of computational methods, or on how the environmental costs of scholarship bear on the publics with whom DH does its work — and submissions that break down academic silos by connecting the humanities with cultural heritage institutions, citizen scientists, and other disciplines.
DH Benelux aims to bring together scholars and cultural professionals from across the spectrum of digital and computational humanities and from diverse methodological traditions, including qualitative, quantitative, or mixed approaches.
Submissions may cover (but are not limited to) one or more of the topics below:
- DH as method, as discipline, as connective practice: institutional histories and possible futures
- Curricula, careers, and the work conditions within/of digital scholarship
- Sustainability of practice and proposals: intellectual, infrastructural, and ecological viability
- Positionality and reflexivity in computational humanities
- Citizen science, crowdsourcing, and shared authority in participatory annotation
- Cultural-heritage institutions as research partners: collaborations, dependencies, and tensions
- Public trust in digitally mediated and model-augmented scholarship
- Data visualisation, storytelling, and research dissemination
- LLMs, RAG, xAI and agentic systems in the humanistic research lifecycle
- Reproducibility, citation, and archiving: scholarly conventions when models are versioned or deprecated
- « Hallucination », fabricated evidence, and the bar for scholarly claims
- The environmental costs of computational humanities: energy, water, carbon
- Ethics, bias, and accountability in digitally mediated scholarship
- Pedagogies and teaching-didactics for a post-LLM Digital Humanities
- Multilingual, multi-script, and minority-language DH in the model era
- Digital archives, preservation, and long-term access/reproducibility
Submission Procedure
Please submit your anonymized proposal via the DH Benelux 2027 EasyChair environment: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dhbene27.
Please note that at least one author of each accepted submission must register for the conference and present in person. No online presentation options are foreseen.
Instructions for anonymizing your proposal
Any information which might help identify authors should be anonymized. To this end, please:
- Do not include authors’ names and affiliations;
- Use placeholders for code and data repositories, e.g. https://anonymous.4open.science/, https://zenodo.org/record/xxxxx;
- Do not mention self-references in a way that can reveal the author’s identity, e.g. do not use “We previously demonstrated (Smith, 2002)” but “Smith (2022) previously demonstrated”.
Important Dates
Deadline: 7 December 2026 (23:59 CET). Please note that this deadline is firm*: no extensions will be granted, and late submissions will not be considered. *The system will be left open for updating your abstract for one additional week, while the reviewers are matched with the submissions. Ensure that your initial abstract has been submitted before the deadline.
Notification of acceptance: March 2027
Date of the (draft) program: 14 May 2027
DH Benelux 2027: 6 July 2027 (pre-conference workshops), 7-9 July 2027 (main conference)
Location: Université libre de Bruxelles – Brussels.
Submissions
Abstracts
We accept proposals (English) for six types of proposals: (1) oral presentations, (2) lightning talks, (3) posters, (4) demonstrations, (5) panels and (6) workshops.
Please indicate the category of presentation you are submitting, along with clear research questions, hypotheses and results (if available). However, the program chairs reserve the right to make the final decision on the presentation format when making the schedule.
References and/or bibliography: A list of references and/or a bibliography is a mandatory component of every submission. Proposals that fail to include one will be rejected by the Program Chairs at the screening stage. References and bibliography are excluded from the word count (see details below). Proposals may contain graphics and illustrations.
Presentation Formats
Oral presentations (proposals of between 1000 and 1500 words excl. references, presentation of 15 minutes): suitable for presenting empirical work, technical details, theorizing, cross- and multidisciplinary work, research methods and concise theoretical arguments. This format is particularly suited for ongoing and completed research. The stage of completion of the research must be clearly stated in the proposal.
Lightning talks (proposals of roughly 500 words excl. references, presentation of 5 minutes): well-suited for reporting early-stage and ongoing research, introducing ideas, presenting preliminary results, and presenting results from practical experimentation and proof of concepts. The presentations will be on-site.
Posters (proposals of 500 words excl. references): particularly suited for detailed technical explanations and clarifications, and for the showcasing of projects and research alike.
Demonstrations (proposals of between 500 and 750 words excl. references): demonstrations of prototypes, work in progress or finished software, hardware technology, tools, datasets, digital publications, and so forth. Demonstrations take place simultaneously with poster sessions and are meant to be interactive. Conference delegates will have the opportunity to mingle among the demonstration tables in an informal setting.
Panels (proposals of between 1000 and 1500 words excl. references, timeslot of 1.5 hrs): bring together experts on a particular challenge in the field of digital humanities. Panels will only be held on-site and should consist of 4-5 speakers each contributing their own perspective on the topic. Next to a general description of the subject, please provide the names, affiliations, and contributions of each participant. Proposals for panels should also mention how the speakers plan to engage the audience. Panels can include interactive elements, such as live polling, audience Q&A sessions, or other digital tools for interactive discussions. Please note that a limited number of spots will be available for panels during the conference.
Workshops (proposals of between 1000 and 1500 words excl. references): self-organised tracks scheduled on the day before the conference. The workshop slot is the place at DH Benelux 2027 for experiment. Beyond the conventional half- or full-day workshop on a relevant topic or innovative tool, we explicitly welcome alternative on-site formats – writing sprints, micro-workshops with pre-circulated papers, hackathons, data-modelling sessions, hands-on tool labs, unconferences, panel-and-make hybrids, or anything else that fits your aims. If your format is unusual, please use the proposal to explain why it suits the topic and what participants will take away from it. Please indicate in your proposal: the scientific scope and aims; the preferred format (in-person or fully virtual); the length (half day or full day); the expected number of participants; the working format envisaged; and a preliminary programme.
We encourage all proposals to make use of the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) to provide clarity and transparency on the roles of contributors. To ensure submissions remain anonymous and align with CRediT, we recommend either a) using the initials of contributors alongside their roles, or b) indicating – for example – that ’Person A’ was responsible for ’formal analysis’ and the ’supervision’ whilst ’Person B’ was responsible for ’data curation’, ’writing the initial draft’, et cetera. Note that CRediT declarations are excluded from word counts and should be placed at the bottom of the proposal.
All proposals need to be submitted anonymously. The proposals will be reviewed through a double-blind peer review process by the DH Benelux 2027 Program Committee. Accepted proposals will be published on the DH Benelux 2027 website. Authors of accepted proposals will be invited to submit a full research article for the DH Benelux Journal. A separate call for journal submissions will be made after the conference.
Evaluation
Proposals will be evaluated according to: relevance, clarity, novelty, and contribution. The Program Chairs reserve the right to desk-reject, without further review, any proposal that a) they determine falls outside the scope of DH Benelux 2027 (see the DH Benelux Founding Statement for guidance); b) is unreasonably overlength; or c) for oral presentations in particular, makes no effort to demonstrate the proposal’s connection to existing scholarship. We look forward to your contributions and the opportunity to share insights, engage in discussions, and strengthen the Digital Humanities community at the DH Benelux 2027 Conference!
AI Policy
Authors and reviewers should familiarise themselves with our policies on reviewing and the use of AI in writing and reviewing papers. Read this here.
CONTACT US
Should you have any questions about the information on this page, do not hesitate to contact us via email at dhbenelux2027@gmail.com
Instructions for preparing your manuscript
If you are unfamiliar with LaTeX, there are many online resources with documentation and tutorials on how to use LaTeX.1 There are specific instructions for preparing your article for the DH Benelux Journal.2.
Working with bibtex references
The DH Benelux Journal uses bibtex for references and citations. You can cite other work using bibtex keys . Your article should end with a section called ‘References’ that includes a link to your bibtex file that contains the bibliographic information of the work you cite (see below). Upon generating the print version with a LaTeX engine, references to the cited works are included.
Adding figures and tables
This section has two sub-sections.
Adding figures
If you include figures or tables, use reference keys (e.g. Figure 1), to create an unambiguous reference from the text to each figure and table, e.g. to Table 1.
Adding tables
| This | is the | header row |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | this is a cell in the first row |
| 3 | 4 | this is a cell in the second row |
- See https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Tutorials, especially the Learn LaTeX in 30 mintes: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Learn_LaTeX_in_30_minutes↩︎
- See http://journal.dhbenelux.org/submission/preparing-the-final-version-of-your-manuscript/↩︎