DARIAH Annual Event 2026 in Rome to explore open digital infrastructures for societal engagement
The DARIAH Annual Event 2026 is set to take place from May 26th to May 29th in Rome, Italy, hosted by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR). This event marks an important gathering for digital arts and humanities professionals, with May 26th dedicated to internal DARIAH meetings, followed by the main conference aiming to address the innovative theme: "Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement."
The conference's core focus is on digitally-enabled research through a public and participatory lens, examining questions surrounding the social and public benefits of such research and how it can foster new dialogues within the public sphere. This theme reflects a growing shift in humanities research towards open, flexible, and socially responsive scholarship, facilitated by digital infrastructures and collaborative networks. The organisers highlight the notion of hybridity, wherein disciplines, technological tools, and cultural practices interweave to create connectivity, whether between universities and society or through hybrid networks that blend physical and digital interactions to co-construct knowledge.
The call for papers invites a broad range of contributions, from scholarly reflections and case studies to theoretical and policy-oriented papers. Topics of particular interest include designing open and sustainable engagement platforms, fostering new collaborative models among academia, cultural memory institutions, and society, and exploring pedagogies for public-facing digital humanities education. Moreover, there is strong emphasis on evaluating public value and impact, preservation and resilience of digital knowledge infrastructures, and the role of citizen science and community-driven scholarship. Ethical and sustainable practices within participatory digital research, as well as intercultural and transnational perspectives, are also priorities.
This event resonates with broader movements in the digital humanities realm. For instance, the 6th Digital History in Sweden Conference recently explored similar themes around digital methods shaping historical knowledge dissemination and public engagement, discussing innovations like AI and citizen science. These discussions underscore the importance of inclusive access to digital archives and the role of participatory practices in shaping collective memory, paralleling the aims of the DARIAH Annual Event.
DARIAH itself, through its national members like DARIAH-BE in Belgium and DARIAH-DE in Germany, exemplifies a commitment to sustainable digital scholarship infrastructure. These organisations support the creation and networking of digital humanities centres and services, enabling resilient research ecosystems across Europe that align closely with the upcoming conference's theme of building infrastructures of engagement.
Other initiatives within the DARIAH network also reinforce the potential of digital tools for cultural heritage engagement. For example, the integration of 3D scanned historical artifacts into virtual museums and digital game environments exemplifies innovative, hybrid forms of public interaction and knowledge co-creation, key ideas expected to be explored at the Rome event.
As digital humanities continue to expand, challenges related to spatial data, linked open data, metadata, and ontology, as addressed in Nordic regional workshops, illustrate the evolving technical and scholarly complexities involved in building robust infrastructures for research. These efforts complement DARIAH’s broader vision of digital spaces as critical infrastructures for engaged scholarship that serves the public good.
The DARIAH Annual Event 2026 serves as a pivotal platform for bringing these diverse strands of digital humanities practice and theory together, fostering dialogue on how research infrastructures can be designed and governed to nurture generosity, participation, and shared creativity. The deadline for paper submissions is December 22, 2025, with registration opening mid-February 2026. This event promises to advance the conversation on how digital arts and humanities can meaningfully engage society and support sustainable, inclusive research ecosystems.