Multilingual DH

Resources for doing digital humanities in many languages

ADHO DH2024 Pre-Conference Event

ADHO DH2024 Workshops “Multilingual DH Special Interest Group”**

Date & Time 5th August 2024, 10:00-14:00 EST

Location Our event will be in hybrid format: in-person at The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and online.

Workshop organizers: Till Grallert; till.grallert@hu-berlin.de; Merve Tekgürler; mtekgurl@stanford.edu; Maroussia Bednarkiewicz; maroussia.bednarkiewicz@uni-tuebingen.de; Alíz Horváth; aliz.horvath06@gmail.com;

Exposé

Supported by ADHO, our SIG aims to connect scholars using digital humanities tools and methods on and in languages other than English. While the human condition is one of multilingualism, the Anglophone-centricity of digital humanities continues to be an impediment to DH scholars who work on, or teach with, materials in other languages—not to speak of the vast majority of scholars whose first language isn’t English or who do not work in English at all. Tools and tutorials are almost all designed to primarily work with English and any interaction with computers will necessitate the use of Latin-script.

Against the backdrop of DH2024’s theme of “reinvention & responsibility”, we want to bring practitioners of multilingual DH from ADHO constituent organisations together in order to raise the profile of multilinguality and to learn from our respective experiences and approaches to the challenges and joys of multilingual DH in our specific geographic, linguistic and cultural contexts with the aim of making DH and ADHO a more openly multilingual endeavour.

Everybody is welcome to participate! Please fill out this Google Form. We are asking our presenting participants to indicate their interests to participate on the same form. They are expected to record a short initial intervention of around 5 minutes, to be shared a week before the mini conference with all the mini conference participants. We imagine these short initial interventions to address the issue of multilinguality. We provide a few questions related to the role that the Multilingual SIG can play in our academic lives. We put together the following guiding questions to get the discussion started. You do not have to respond to all of them and please feel free to include your own.

What are your main experiences within the domains of digital and computational humanities? What are some of your challenges and successes? How do we build a community that not only supports one another but also pushes our academic agendas forward? What is something that needs to be urgently addressed, institutionally? How do you see ADHO SIG improving your work? How would you like to contribute to the joint effort?

Workshop Format

The pre-conference event will consist of three parts. Leading up to the event, we are gathering interests from community members who would like to present a short intervention. These interventions will be recorded and uploaded on a private site to be shared with all participants ahead of time. Our goal in asking for recordings is to make sure that our communities can join us asynchronously and we can spend more time discussing and conversing among ourselves.

In the morning of the mini-conference we will kick off with a fishbowl discussion to identify common tropes and interests which we will then discuss in in-person and online break-out sessions. In the afternoon, we close with a plenary session.

This pre-conference event will give us, the multilingual DH community, to share our needs and interests with one another and help us guide our the role that the Multilingual SIG can play in our academic lives.

Please note that presenting at DH2024 is NOT a requirement for participation in the SIG event.