Call for Papers: Between Big Data and Obsolescence: Born-Digital Sources, Contemporary History, and the Politics of Access
Submit your proposal for the Ninth Conference on Digital History and Digital Humanities at GHI Washington (March 18, 2027 – March 19, 2027).
The IEG is co-organising the conference with the German Historical Institute Washington, the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) – University of Luxembourg, the Chair for Digital History Berlin at Humboldt-Universität, the Chair for Contemporary History at the Universität Mannheim, and NFDI4Memory.
Digital technologies have fundamentally transformed the production, circulation, preservation, management, and interpretation of historical sources. Contemporary history is increasingly confronted with sources that are not simply digitized versions of analog records, but born-digital traces. These sources are unstable, fragile, platform-dependent, and often inaccessible both for research and even to the institutions that initially produced them. At the same time, they constitute crucial evidence for political, social, cultural, legal, and economic histories of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This conference takes the problem of born-digital sources as a central challenge for contemporary history and digital history alike. It asks how historians, archivists, information scientists, legal scholars, and digital humanities practitioners can work together to ensure that born-digital materials will be accessible as sources for research, while also developing tools and strategies that support their critical analysis.
Submission deadline: September 6, 2026
Submission via conference platform: 9th Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History
Further information: Event – GHI Washington
