ADHO DH2023 Graz
by Sefer Soydar
The annual Digital Humanities conference organized by Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) took place in Graz, Austria from the 10th to 14th of July 2023. This year’s theme “Collaboration as Opportunity” revealed the transformative power of collaboration across disciplines and borders, an emphasis was placed on the collaboration of neighboring countries and the work of South-Eastern European scholars.
The theme set the stage for an inspiring journey through the digital humanities landscape via showcasing a fusion of global expertise that emerges from the collaboration of regional hubs and the unity of diverse voices. DH 2023 offered an array of workshops and sessions covering a wide spectrum of digital humanities topics. A total of 70 sessions were held in 7 parallel tracks, with around 230 paper presentations and 16 panels. Plus, there were a total of 106 poster presentations displayed during the conference.
Conference opened with a keynote speech by Professor Sarah Kenderdine, École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, on digital museology. Several workshops took place during the conference varying on topics from digital lab practices, to using handwritten text recognition systems like Transkribus, to learning and incorporating several digital programs in research. Talks on the content and limits of digital humanities, different approaches and methods of it, along with several other topics like mapping, machine learning, stylometry were given by respected scholars across the globe. Conference ended with a closing keynote by Claire Fernandez on the role of civil society in Europe concerning digital rights. Among such a diverse list of international participants, where the emphasis was on the work of South-Eastern European scholars, the absence of Turkish scholars must be noted.
The diverse nature of topics of speeches and workshops made the DH 2023 conference a significant occurrence for both the professionals of the field and students starting their digital humanities journey. The next Digital Humanities conference will take place in Washington DC, USA from 6th to 9th of August, 2024 –where we hope to see more participation from Turkish scholars.