Day of DH events began all the way back in 2009, where scholars around the world would document the work they do in their Daily Life in the Digital Humanities. In the mid 2010s, Carleton College adopted this idea and transformed it into a one-day annual in-person conference, holding the first event in 2016.
Over time Day of DH @ Carleton has grown into a yearly hub for sharing DH work and community, where those engaged in digital scholarship in the upper midwest (and beyond) can share their work, forge connections with other DH practitioners, and learn new concepts and skills.
2016
Keynote: Evan Roberts (UMN – Twin Cities) was the first keynote speaker for Day of DH in 2016. His project, Measuring the ANZACs, examines how large-scale digitized military records from World War I (especially Australian and New Zealand Army Corps personal records) can be used for “big data” historical research, and what challenges and insights come with that approach.
Attendance: No exact numbers were recorded, but there were several regional institutions involved such as Macalester, St. Olaf, and the University of Minnesota.
Some Notable Lightning Round Talks:
- MaziArchaeological Project – Alex Knodell
- Minnesota Environments – George Vrtis (with Chris Wells)
- CS Comps in 3D – Jeff Ondich
- Carleton Guide to Medieval Rome – William North & Victoria Morse
- The Musical Geography of 1920s Paris – Louis Epstein
- Can I Get a Witness? An Exercise in Network Analysis – Rebecca Wingo
2017
Keynote: Dorothy Kim (Vassar College) addressed the place of learning, pedagogy, community, and activism in the Digital Humanities. She used the recurring debates over defining DH as a jumping off point for a much deeper inquiry about disciplinarity, the future of higher education, and what it is to be radically and diversely human in the digital age.
Attendance: Attendance increased significantly through expanded regional outreach. Over 50 participants attended from 8 institutions.
Some Notable Lightning Round Talks:
- Mapping Prejudice – Kirsten Delegard, Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, Ryan Mattke, Penny Petersen
- Empowering Emerging Artists through Web-based Portfolios – Kelly Connole and Stephen Mohring
- Assassins’ Creed and Sid Meier’s Civilization in the Classroom – Matt King
- Historical Recipes + Digital Collaborations – Emily Beck, Lois Hendrickson
- Witness to the Revolution: The Boston Massacre in 3D – Martin Hoffmann ’19, Serena Zabin, Austin Mason, and the students of HIST 212 and HIST 291: Boston Massacre 3D Game Dev
2018
Keynote: Jack Gieseking (Trinity College) was the keynote speaker for Day of DH in 2018. Gieseking spoke on Radical Mapping on behalf of public humanities, specifically through the queer lens. Gieseking spearheads projects of contemporary urban history – such as the NYC queer historical sites – in an effort to effectively record stories of the queer community.
Attendance: In its third year, the conference grew to nearly 75 attendees, representing about a 50% increase from 2017.
Some Notable Lightning Round Talks:
- Digital Archives and Maps in the Classroom Using Omeka – Kent Gerber
- DH at the Intro Level – Jack Norton
- Minnesota Digital Library-New Initiatives – Molly Huber
- Literary Sonic Signatures – Eric Alexander, Liz Nichols, and Estelle Beyer
- Make Books with the Minnesota Library Publishing Project – Barbara Fister
2019
Keynote: Siobhan Senier (University of New Hampshire) was keynote speaker for Day of DH in 2019. She spoke on the concept of “digital repatriation”, encouraging museums, libraries, and archives to “return” electronic copies of indigenous materials. Senier also addressed the growth of dawnlandvoices.org, which allows indigenous people to curate historic materials often not found in major collecting institutions.
Attendance: Attendance remained strong with approximately 75 attendees from 13 regional institutions.
Some Notable Lightning Round Talks:
- Dakota and the Giant Pile of Paper – Jeff Ondich, Cati Fortin
- Leveraging Big Data in Historical Research – Martin Hoffman, Austin Mason, and Serena Zabin
- ArcGIS in an English Classroom – Brooke Schmolke & Sierra Lomuto
- Sketchnoting for Better Learning – Rebecca Moss
- Curious City: In, Out, Above, Beyond Saint Paul – Ashley Nepp and students
2020 – COVID HIATUS
2020’s planned event had to be canceled following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in March of that year, which forced higher educational institutions to shift to remote learning and prevented in-person gatherings.
2021
Keynote: Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University) gave the keynote lecture in 2021. As a historian and Black Studies scholar, Johnson’s research focuses on Black diasporic freedom struggles from slavery to emancipation; as a digital humanist, she navigates ways digital and social media create historical narratives. DH Against Enclosure offers a grammar of refusal and a language of freedom for the [digital] humanities and an invitation to draw new lines over, under, and through to claim new relations.
Attendance: First fully virtual conference, due to the ongoing pandemic. Attendance increased to around 100 attendees from 25 institutions across the midwest and beyond.
Some Notable Lightning Round Talks:
- The “What’s Missing” Report – Christopher S Saladin, Loren Cowdery & Katherine Pierpont
- Digital Humanities at the American Museum of Asmat Art – Gretchen Burau
- Memories of Agricultural Yilan, Taiwan – Hsiang-Lin Shih
- Visualizing Du Bois: 100 Years Later – Lin Winton
- Mapping Influence in 20th Century Poetry with Kumu – Benjamin Voigt
2022
Keynote: Safiya Umoja Noble (UCLA) is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). Her work centers around algorithmic discrimination – specifically how search engines reinforce racism. This prompted her founding of the non-profit Equity Engine to accelerate investment in companies, education, and networks driven by women of color.
Attendance: The virtual format continued with approximately 110 attendees from 25 global institutions.
Some Notable Lightning Round Talks:
- Mapping Congregants of Color at Old South Church – Siena Leone-Getten, Miyuki Mihira, Molly Schwartz
- (Semi) Distant Reading the Medieval London Chronicles – George Shuffelton, Wrenna Fine, Yichu Wang, Grace Brindle
- Sojourners Trail: Gaming, Afrofuturism, and Immersive Education – Walter Greason, Megan Allas
- Bringing CARCAS to Life: The Digitization of Skeletal Research Collections at Carleton – Sarah Kennedy, Mathew Zappa, Aaron Heidgerken-Greene, Austin Mason
2023
Keynote: Quinn Dombrowski (Stanford University) gave the keynote in 2023 on building resistance through play, with an emphasis on breaking barriers within DH. Digital Humanities tools can be intimidating, and may be hard for people who do not see themselves as “tech-savvy people”. Dombrowski argued that we should take fun seriously, and that the collaborative and experimental nature of DH provides excellent conditions for fostering fun as a cornerstone of our work.
Attendance: In-person attendance returned post-pandemic, with hybrid participation for the first time. 78 people attended, with 56 in person and 22 online, representing 18 different institutions.
Some Notable Lightning Round Talks:
- Wordskies: A Research-based Word Cloud Generator – Gisele Nelson, Gitanjali Matthes, Eric Alexander
- Collections Up Close: Leveraging Digital Transcription for Close Examination of Primary Source Material – Jackie Beckey
- Photogrammetry of Cultural Artifacts – Mitch Ogden
- This War Game of Mine: Teaching Stories of War – Martin Lang
- Homeric Ship Model – Rob Hardy, Austin Mason, Sawyer Stone, Christopher Francese
2024
Keynote: Katherine Elkins (Kenyon College) gave the keynote in 2024. Elkins co-created the first ever human-centered AI curriculum at Kenyon College, where she co-founded both DH and AI Labs. She discussed the curriculum’s focus on AI fairness and safety and students use AI to model the shapes of stories and answer some of our most pressing questions.
Attendance: The hybrid model continued, with 80 attending, 16 of them virtually, from 22 international insitutions.
Some Notable Lightning Round Talks:
- From History Book Index to Digital Database – Erin Watson, Victoria Morse
- DH in the Classroom: Alternative Fashion Trends and Omeka – Bonnie Finn, Amelia Cheever
- The Levantine Ceramics Project – Peter J. Stone, Andrea M. Berlin
- Object Recognition in Historical Photographs with Artificial Intelligence – Charlie Goldberg, Zach Haala
- Visualizing Historical Maps: Projects from a Spatial Humanities Course – Chris Saladin, Aurelia Peterson-Rajalingam
2025
Keynote: Blaire Morseau (Michigan State University) is a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and co-director of the Indigenous Chicago project: a multifaceted and ongoing collaboration between the Newberry Library, the Chicago American Indian Community, and tribal nations who have ancestral ties to Chicago. She spoke on the use of Digital Humanities as an act of reclamation of Indigenous space and tribal sovereignty through Indigenous science fiction and futurisms and Native counter-mapping.
Attendance: Hybrid conference continued with 77 attending, 12 virtually, from 18 institutions.
Some Notable Light Round Talks:
- Mapping Japan: The Real and Imagined – Asuka Sango, George Conlan
- Humanities from a Digital Arts Perspective – Jane Dee Horwitz Parson
- The First Rescue Inhaler for Asthma was a Cigarette – Jack Quale
- Interactive Digital Narratives Showcase – Cuong Tran, Jane Dee Horwitz Parson, Anastasia Salter
- Bringing High Performance Computing to the Digital Liberal Arts – Wiebke Kuh, Ben Gottfried, Tam Perlman