Digital Futures for Ancient Worlds

16 April 2026

Photo: Ahmed, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Daejeon at night

A mini‑conference at DH2026 brings together scholars of ancient and medieval cultures, museum professionals, librarians, curators, educators, and technical experts exploring how digital methods transform the study of the distant past. The Call for Papers is now open.

Digitisation and datafication are transforming how scholars engage with the ancient and medieval past. From deciphering damaged scrolls with artificial intelligence to building open‑access repositories of manuscripts, digital methods are reshaping the study, preservation, and public understanding of historical evidence. Yet these advances also raise critical questions about data quality, cultural sensitivity, accessibility, and ownership. These issues call for sustained dialogue between humanists and technologists.

An upcoming mini‑conference, co‑organised by Marina Sartori (CSMC) and Victoria G. D. Landau (University of Basel), will address these intersections of technology and tradition. ‘Distant Past(s) – Current Future(s): Digitization, Digital Objects and Datafication Approaches in Ancient and Medieval Studies’ offers a forum to exchange practices, challenges, and visions for the future of cultural heritage research. Topics include digitisation workflows, ethics and accessibility, data ownership, sustainability, and new methods for enhancing scholarly and public engagement. Contributions from related fields such as game and media studies, data science, and open‑access publishing are also welcome.

The organisers particularly encourage participation from researchers working beyond traditional ‘Classics’, engaging with the archaeology, languages, and cultures of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. By bringing together specialists from both the humanities and the technical sciences, the event seeks to strengthen collaboration within the Digital Humanities community and to reflect on the responsibilities and opportunities inherent in making the distant past accessible through digital means.

‘Distant Past(s) – Current Future(s)’ will take place in hybrid format on 28 July 2026 as part of the 36th annual meeting of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (DH2026), held at the Daejeon Convention Center in Daejeon, South Korea. Contributions can be submitted until 1 May 2026.

More information on the conference is available here.