ACH 2025 CFP



Deadline: April 5th, 2025, 11:59:59 PM in GMT-4 (EST)

Submit a proposal: ACH 2025 Conftool

The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) will hold ACH 2025, a virtual conference, from June 11-13, 2025.

Conference Focus

Amid rapid societal and technological transformations and historic elections worldwide, ACH fosters dialogue, spaces, and solidarity on equity and justice across local, transborder, and global contexts. ACH 2025 underscores the importance of addressing societal challenges in the digital humanities and beyond, such as racial and gender discrimination, while also highlighting the ramifications of computing and environmental crises. Join us in navigating diverse political milieus and shaping a virtual conference that is just and inclusive.

ACH 2025 values process- and relationship-oriented modes of working over the end result, fostering hope-making, and we seek to prioritize proposals that focus on care, community, and collaboration in diverse contexts. We are especially interested in receiving proposals from participants with a range of expertise and a variety of roles, including alt-ac positions, employment outside of higher education, and graduate and undergraduate students. We further invite proposals from participants who are newcomers to digital humanities.

Conference Scope

As a conference committed to cross-disciplinary engagement, ACH 2025 welcomes interdisciplinary proposals. Areas of digital humanities scholarship that are relevant to the conference include but are not limited to:

  • Collaborations for Community
  • Computational Creativity
  • Critical Making
  • Digital and computational approaches to humanistic research and pedagogy
  • Digital cultural heritage
  • Digital surveillance
  • Digital humanities tools and infrastructures
  • Digital librarianship
  • Digital media, art, literature, history, music, film, and games
  • Digital public humanities
  • Environmental humanities & climate justice
  • Humanistic and ethical approaches to data science and data visualization
  • Humanistic research on digital objects and cultures
  • Humanities knowledge infrastructures
  • Union, Labor and Organization in digital humanities
  • Machine Learning, including AI and LLMs and their implications
  • Multilingualism in digital humanities
  • Multimodal Scholarship
  • Resource creation, curation, and engagement
  • Use of digital technologies to write, publish, and review scholarship

Conference Submission Types and Languages

Papers and Panels will be presented through a video conferencing system; Creative Submissions may be presented through a video conferencing system or through Work Adventure.

We welcome the following submission types:

Creative Submissions:

Artwork, posters, data visualizations, installations, performances, demonstrations, workshops, tutorials, and other interventions that engage conference issues, methods, and themes on any relevant topic, project, or tool at any stage of development.

Papers (12-15 minutes):

Dynamic presentations that share experiments, works-in-progress, or sustained reflections on outcomes of more complete projects while engaging a range of participants and fostering connections and dialogue.

Panels (1 hour and 15 minutes):

Engaging sessions that facilitate dialogue between presentations, highlighting connections between projects, methods or themes and reserving a minimum of 15 minutes for discussion with the audience.

Conference Proposal Requirements

Proposals will be submitted using ConfTool. You will need an account to submit your proposal.

Abstracts must be 250-500 words in length. Abstracts should directly address the review criteria: relevance to conference focus; engagement with relevant scholarship; framework and purpose; applicability, significance, and value; and organization and clarity.

List of participants and contact information must be entered directly into ConfTool along with the submission abstract

You will be asked to choose keywords in ConfTool, which will be used to match your submission with reviewers. Please select the most relevant terms that describe your work.

Conference Format and Languages

While our CFP has been released in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Korean, we welcome proposals for contributions in all languages. Proposals will be reviewed in the language of submission. Presentations may be delivered in the language of the proposal, though we may have limited access to translators. Regardless of the language of your proposal, please ensure that your five keywords are in English to facilitate program scheduling.

Please note that for the purposes of scheduling, we may suggest an alternative submission type or collaboration between related proposals. While there is no limit on the number of submissions, the program committee will schedule at most two presentations from one presenting author.

Alternative Conference Platforms

The ACH virtual conference will take place through traditional video conferencing, as well as through our virtual conferencing platform, Work Adventure, which provides an interactive 2D animated world and the ability to share video, audio, or images via the browser (platform is optimized for Google Chrome). Presentations will include synchronous conversation as attendees “walk up” to the virtual installation/performance room.

Proposal Review and Notification

ACH 2025 proposals will undergo open peer review. Names and affiliations of authors will be known to a proposal’s reviewer, while names and affiliations of the reviewer will be known to the authors. We are adopting open peer review for several reasons: Lack of consensus about how to anonymize submissions, which leads to proposals that are identifiable; the public nature of digital humanities scholarship, which means that anonymized submissions are not, in fact, guaranteed to be anonymous; and the lack of accountability in anonymous peer review, which can promote incivility in the review process.

Therefore, our use of open peer review is intended to mitigate the implicit inequities in the anonymous review process. We recognize, however, that open peer review raises issues with power dynamics, such as concerns that emerging scholars may have about evaluating an established scholar. To address these issues, the Program Committee will carefully and thoughtfully assign reviewers; reviewers will have the right to refuse to review a submission for any reason. We also recognize that open peer review could contribute to increased bias. To mitigate this risk, we encourage reviewers to evaluate their biases and will provide clear guidance for their role in the review process. We remain grateful to DH2020 Program Committee Chairs Laura Estill and Jennifer Guiliano for their work on open peer review, which influenced our approach for DH Unbound 2022, ACH 2023, 2024, and now 2025.

Review Criteria

Our review criteria reflect the commitment to an expansive understanding of digital humanities and the sociopolitical nature of scholarship:

  • 20% – Relevance to Conference Focus: The proposal topic is connected to the themes of care, community, and/or collaboration in the field of digital humanities.

  • 20% – Engagement with Relevant Scholarship: The proposal engages explicitly with relevant scholarship and offers context within the current state of the fields in which it engages. Formal citations (in the proposal writer’s preferred style) are only required when using direct quotation.

  • 20% – Framework and Purpose: The proposal offers a clear theoretical, methodological, or pedagogical framework; concrete statement of purpose; and explicit articulation of the sociopolitical implications of the work.

  • 20% – Applicability, Significance, and Value: The proposal articulates the applicability, significance, and value of the theoretical, methodological, and/or practical contribution to digital humanities generally.

  • 20% – Overall Recommendation: The proposal is organized effectively and offers a clear articulation of presentation content.

The review period will begin on approximately April 1 and end on May 1, 2025.

Notifications about acceptance or rejection are anticipated to end by May 15, 2025. Reviews will also be made available upon notification.

Copyright and Privacy

Submissions and reviews will not be made available to the public. The Program Committee will have access to all submissions and reviews.

Reviewers will be able to view only the proposals assigned to them for review. Authors will be able to view reviews of their submissions after the review process concludes. Names of reviewers will be displayed on a slide in an alphabetical list during the opening session of the conference in gratitude for their contribution (unless the reviewer requests not to be cited).

Accepted proposals will be revised by authors and published in the online program along with their names and affiliations.

Use of Generative AI in Proposals

Following the lead of KeystoneDH’s 2025 CFP, we’re open to the responsible use of generative AI: “Since generative AI is an important and timely area of investigation in digital humanities, we are interested in your experiments with it, but we expect our conference participants to take responsibility for authorship of proposals and presentations. We ask that conference applicants and presenters report their use of generative AI language tools, following arXiv’s AI policy.”

Use of generative AI should be cited according to professional standards, such as the MLA’s guidelines for citing generative AI.

Code of Conduct

ACH 2025 is dedicated to creating a safe, respectful, and collegial conference environment for the benefit of everyone who attends and for the advancement of research and scholarship in the field. ACH 2025 has adapted the ACH Conference Code of Conduct:

ACH is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone regardless of gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, or employment status and role. By attending ACH events, you signal your commitment to contributing to a safe and inclusive experience for all. We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form, whether events are held virtually, face-to-face, or on social media platforms. Participants in ACH events violating these rules may be barred or banned from ACH activities at the discretion of the organizers.

Harassment includes but is not limited to: derogatory verbal comments; sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language; sexual and/or discriminatory text or audio-visual material in conference spaces (virtual or face-to-face), unless being critiqued in an academic context; deliberate intimidation; stalking; following; harassing photography or recording; questioning someone’s right to use the restroom of their choice; sustained disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact; and unwelcome sexual attention.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the event.

ACH 2025 seeks to uphold these values throughout the submission and review process as well as during the conference itself. Please familiarize yourself with the reporting guidelines and our process for addressing violations.

Accessibility

ACH seeks to ensure that ACH 2025 is accessible to all participants. All synchronous sessions will make live transcription available to participants, and keynote sessions will also include sign language interpretation. We will provide guidelines for the accessibility of sessions to all accepted participants. More information, along with a request for information about participant needs, will be circulated in advance.

Conference Time Zone

ACH 2025 will be scheduled in Central Time. From June 11-13, sessions will be scheduled from approximately 9:00 am – 6:00 pm Central Time.

Conference Registration and Bursaries

Registration for ACH 2025 will open on May 15th, 2025.

Conference organizers have worked to keep the registration costs as low as possible while ensuring we are providing attendees with a positive conference experience. While organizing a virtual conference is far less expensive than an in-person or hybrid event, there are nonetheless costs for maintaining the conference submission management software, conference platforms, honoraria for keynote and plenary events, and accessibility (sign language interpretation and remote captioning for keynotes and live captioning for conference sessions). We are committed to ensuring that cost is not a barrier to participation in ACH 2025.

ACH will offer a limited number of bursaries to support attendance by members without institutional support, including students, contingently employed, and un-/underemployed professionals. Bursary applications will open when proposal notifications are sent.

The registration fee schedule will be:

  • ACH Member: $50
  • Student ACH Member: $25
  • Regular Non-Member: $90
  • Student Non-Member: $40
  • Contingent/un-/underemployed: $40

Contact Information

For questions and concerns about the CFP, conference program, submissions, Code of Conduct, or accessibility, please contact the ACH 2025 Conference Chair at conference [at] ach [dot] org.

If you are interested in translating this call for proposals into another language, please contact the conference committee at conference [at] ach [dot] org.

2025 Conference Committee

  • Conference Co-Chairs: Alex Wermer-Colan (Temple University) and Dot Porter (University of Pennsylvania)
  • Program Co-Chairs: Jajwalya Karajgikar (University of Pennsylvania) and Sylvia Fernández (University of Texas at San Antonio)
  • Technical Chair: Andy Janco (Princeton University)
  • Communications Lead: Amanda Reagan (Clemson University)
  • Sponsorship and Promotion Lead: Katayoun Torabi (Texas A&M College of Arts and Sciences)