Nordic Digital Humanities Conference brought over 300 researchers and practitioners of digital humanities to Helsinki

Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference (DHN 2018) was organized at the University of Helsinki in March 7–9 2018. The conference, organized by HELDIG – the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities, brought together over 300 researchers and practitioners of digital humanities. As the digital humanities as a field is a complex mixture of partially overlapping domains, such as humanities computing, multimodal cultural heritage, and digital culture studies, the conference attracted guests from a variety of disciplines in humanities, language technology, and computer science.

The overarching theme for the conference was Open Science, emphasising the role of transparent and reproducible research practices, open dissemination of results, and new forms of collaboration, all greatly facilitated by digitalisation. At the same time, the conference aimed to extend the scope of digital humanities research covered, both into new areas, as well as beyond the Nordic and Baltic countries.

DHN 2018 called for papers particularly in the themes of History, Cultural Heritage, Games, and Future. The four keynote speakers of the conference were invited to highlight the interplay of these themes, with their topics being open and reproducible workflows, digital transformations in cultural heritage, technological utopianism, and game culture studies.

The conference encouraged submissions both for publication-ready texts and abstracts, to cater for the traditions of computer science and humanities. In total, 160 proposals were received, of which 57 (36%) were submitted as publication-ready texts. The conference programme was organized into four parallel sessions, with total 116 presentations and 37 posters in a poster session. The programme also included nine pre-conference workshops, which featured sessions in the form of tutorials, mini conferences, and panels. Part of the conference programme was organized as a public event, Di­gital & Crit­ical Fri­day at Tiedekulma, which also included three Open Sci­ence themed work­shops.

Overall, the DHN conference in 2018 continued to strengthen the nordic digital humanities community, with a 90-per-cent increase in proposals as well as accepted presentations, and a 60-per-cent increase in the number of participants compared to the previous year's DHN conference.

More information on DHN 2018:
http://heldig.fi/dhn-2018

Association of Digital Humanities in the Nordic countries (DHN):
http://dig-hum-nord.eu

Video recording of the Di­gital & Crit­ical Fri­day at Tiedekulma:
https://www.helsinki.fi/fi/unitube/video/20817

Conference proceedings:
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2084/

Book of abstracts:
http://heldig.fi/dhn2018/boa.pdf