CFP: “The times they are a-changin’” in Digital Humanities – a mini-conference on the temporal dimension of data

Date: July 15th (DH2025 Pre-Conference Program)

Digital Humanities Conference “Accessibility and Citizenship” 2025, 14 - 18 July 2025, Lisbon, Portugal

Digital Humanities (DH) methods have advanced significantly in recent decades. However, several blind spots still persist across the field, the insufficient attention to temporal dynamics in data being one of them.

Temporal change plays an integral role in a number of disciplines within DH, affecting data, methodology, analyses, and the field itself (Glawion et al., 2025). Digital art history, especially provenance research, is challenged by changing or missing object information, such as varying titles (Kim, 2015) or attributions (Hofbauer, 2021), complicating access and tracing their (ownership) history over time and space. In geographical studies on mobility, this movement in space and time is mediated by practices of sense-making changing slowly over time (Creswell, 2010). Discourse analysis examines time frames around key public events that set specific communicative strategies in motion (Islentyeva, 2022), corpus-based studies employ quantitative linguistic analyses to generate meaningful time periods for studying linguistic change (e.g., Gries & Hilpert, 2008), and studies of register, text varieties associated with the situation of use (Biber & Conrad, 2019), are beginning to examine emergence and evolution of registers as cultural constructs (Gracheva et al., forthcoming). Digital Literary Studies raise questions about cultural evolution (Sobchuk, 2023), genre history (Wagner-Egelhaaf, 2014) and editorial histories of literary works (Bottigheimer, 1987) on the level of texts, the evolution of authorial style over the course of an author’s life (Piper, 2018) and different types of time-series data such as eye movements and EEG data in empirical studies of reader-response (Dimigen et al., 2011; Weitin et al., 2024).

We particularly invite proposals that relate to the theme of temporal change, including but not limited to the following questions: How should we address temporal change methodologically in DH? What role should visualizations play? Are time periods implemented to categorize data from the start (top-down), or are they the result of data-driven classification (bottom-up)? And how can we ensure that project data remains FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) across disciplines long after the project concludes?

Target audience: The mini-conference welcomes researchers from all career stages from diverse disciplines and backgrounds who are engaged with the temporal dimensions of data. We encourage submissions from those involved in DH, data analysis, historical studies, linguistic and literary research, art history, geo-spatial studies and related fields.

Submission types: The mini-conference invites submissions of finalized projects or work-in-progress reports on theoretical or methodological reflections, empirical studies, and/or practical applications on the topic of time in DH (15 min. + 15 min. discussions). Submissions can focus on but are not limited to the domains of “images & objects”, “text & language” and “place & space”.

Submission format and deadline: Submissions should include a presentation title, the presenter’s affiliation, and an abstract of max. 250 words (bibliography excluded). Please send your submission as a single PDF file to anastasia.glawion@fau.de. The submission deadline is April 10, 2025; acceptance notifications will be sent out by April 30, 2025.

For questions, please contact anastasia.glawion@fau.de .

Bibliography

Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2019). Register, genre, and style. Cambridge University Press.

Bottigheimer, R. B. (1987). Silenced women in the Grimm’s tales: The 'fit' between fairy tales and society in their historical context. In R. B. Bottigheimer (Ed.), Fairy tales and society: Illusion, allusion, and paradigm (pp. 115–133). University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812201505

Cresswell, T. (2010). Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(1), 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1068/d11407

Dimigen, O., Sommer, W., Hohlfeld, A., Jacobs, A. M., & Kliegl, R. (2011). Coregistration of eye movements and EEG in natural reading: Analyses and review. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(4), 552–572. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023885

Glawion, A., Kremer, D., Lang, S., Mahlberg, M., & Wagner, A. (2025). Applied digital humanities: Calling for a more engaged digital humanities. In Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum (DHd), Bielefeld, Book of Abstracts (pp. 298–301). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14942990

Gracheva, M., Keller, D., & Egbert, J. (forthcoming). Evolution of registers as cultural constructs: The case of blogs.

Gries, S. Th., & Hilpert, M. (2008). The identification of stages in diachronic data: Variability-based neighbor clustering. Corpora, 3(1), 59–81. https://doi.org/10.3366/E1749503208000075

Hofbauer, M. (2021). Cranach: Parerga und Paralipomena: Neues zu Lucas Cranach und seinen Söhnen. arthistoricum.net. https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.722

Islentyeva, A. (2022). British media representations of EU migrants before and after the EU referendum. CADAAD Journal, 14(2), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.21827/cadaad.14.2.41617

Kim, S. (2015). Bildtitel: Eine Kunstgeschichte des Bildtitels. Kovač.

Piper, A. (2018). Enumerations: Data and literary study. University of Chicago Press.

Sobchuk, O. (2023). Evolution of modern literature and film. In J. J. Tehrani, J. Kendal, & R. Kendal (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of cultural evolution (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198869252.013.45

Wagner-Egelhaaf, M. (2014). Literaturgeschichte als operative Fiktion. In M. Buschmeier (Ed.), Literaturgeschichte: Theorien - Modelle - Praktiken. Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (Vol. 138, pp. 86–101). http://d-nb.info/1032799404/04

Weitin, T., Fabian, T., Glawion, A., Brottrager, J., & Pilz, Z. (2024). Is bad fiction processed differently by the human brain? An electrophysiological study on reading experience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 17, Article 1333965. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1333965