Special issue—Digital Humanities 2023: Collaboration as Opportunity

The 2023 edition of ADHO’s annual global conference ‘Digital Humanities’ took place in Graz under the theme of ‘Collaboration as Opportunity’. DH2023 showcased transdisciplinary and transnational collaboration, with a special focus on the thriving South-Eastern European Digital Humanities community. It explored how mutual empowerment and collaboration of neighbouring countries—regardless of continent and geopolitical placement—can transform regional hubs of expertise into international networks of excellent research, to the benefit of the global DH community. The programme committee, chaired by Toma Tasovac and Anne Baillot, accepted 361 submissions (125 short papers, 108 long papers, 112 posters, and 16 panels). It was the first on-site conference since the COVID-19 pandemic. There are several records of this: video interviews with participants and snapshots from the event can be found on YouTube, as well as recordings of the sessions via the DH Graz channel (https://www.youtube.com/@dh_graz137), curated by Sina Krottmaier and Thea Schaaf. There is also the Book of Abstracts, archived on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7961821), in which you can find how all 1,369 authors made the case for their research before the event. This special issue now collects what they thought about their topics after the conference. In this volume, you will find research in many well-established fields of DH: data modelling, linked data, and ontologies are covered by Massari et al., Andrews, Langeloh, Sagi et al., Romein et al., and Junginger. Textual analysis, corpus linguistics, and computational literary studies are topics of the contributions by Hall et al., Angermaier et al., Rafaeli et al., Takeuchi and Ogiso, Korecky-Kröll et al., and Kavčič et al. Visual analysis is done by Vignoli et al. and Llewellyn et al. Creation of digital resources in digital scholarly editions, archives, and bibliographies is done by Stangl et al., Bleier et al., Li and Li, Clement and Wintermeier, and VanderHart and Weigl. Finally, Schreibman et al., Kizhner et al., Hu et al., Bocanegra Barbecho, Horvàth et al., Sichani et al., and Winters et al. target the social, cultural, ethical, and community dimensions of DH. However, taking the topic of the conference into account, the contributions go far beyond this rather traditional reading of DH: They discuss community building (Winters et al.), joint international activities (Schreibman et al., Sichani et al.), and interlinguistic and intercultural data representations in shared infrastructures (Sagi et al., Langeloh, Stangl et al., Junginger, Romein et al., Kavčič et al.). Hu et al., Kizhner et al., and Li and Li address international and intercultural topics. Collaboration with non-academics is studied by Bocanegra Barbecho and Clement and Wintermeier. Transdisciplinary cooperation leads to the introduction of new technologies into the humanities by VanderHart and Weigl and Vignoli et al., and is at the core of continuous work on more or less established digital methods of DH (Hall et al., Rafaeli et al., Angermeier et al., Takeuchi and Ogiso, Korecky-Kröll et al., Horváth et al., and Andrews). Talking about collaboration: Managing a special issue can only be achieved by a team. We were eight (Georg Vogeler, Christof Schöch, Diane Jakacky, Elisa Cugliana, Anne Ladyem McDivitt, Miriam Peña Pimentel, Nadezhda Povroznik, and Edward Vanhoutte) and asked countless reviewers for their evaluation of the contributions. According to the reviewing principles of DSH, they are kept anonymous, but it is important to stress their unseen labour: thorough engagement with the text submitted and the research on the topic, careful, constructive, and appreciative comments take time. Collaboration is an opportunity here.