First Call for Papers — DHASA Conference 2026

[Menno Van Zaanen]

First Call for Papers — DHASA Conference 2026
https://dh2026.digitalhumanities.org.za

Theme: Building the Methodological Commons: Plural Digital Humanities,
AI, and Socio-Technical Futures in Southern Africa

Conference: 17–20 November 2026 · University of Eswatini, Kwaluseni,
Kingdom of Eswatini


Important dates

Submission deadline: 20 August 2026
Date of notification: 21 September 2026
Camera-ready copy deadline: 19 October 2026
Conference: 17 November 2026 – 20 November 2026
Conference venue: University of Eswatini, Kwaluseni, Kingdom of
Eswatini


Co-located events

Several co-located events are currently being prepared, including
workshops and tutorials. These will be updated on the conference
website.


Submission types

Long papers — max 8 content pages (9 in final version), presented in
30-minute slots (incl. 10 min questions)
Short papers — max 5 content pages (6 in final version), presented in
15-minute slots (incl. 5 min questions)
Executive summaries — max 1 page, presented as posters


References and appendices are unlimited for long and short papers. All
submissions must be in PDF and follow the ACL style guide
(https://acl-org.github.io/ACLPUB/formatting.html). Submissions that do
not adhere to the style guide will be rejected. Submit via the
platform: https://dh2026.digitalhumanities.org.za/submission/

Accepted long and short papers will be published in the JDHASA journal;
executive summaries will appear in a book of summaries before the
conference. We particularly encourage submissions where the first
author is a student. Authors are encouraged to upload datasets to the
SADiLaR repository (https://repo.sadilar.org/); for difficulties,
contact Benito Trollip (benito....@nwu.ac.za).


About the conference

This conference foregrounds DH as method-making and infrastructure-
building — not only tool use. It invites scholarship that advances
shared practices (methods, standards, datasets, workflows, pedagogies)
while staying attentive to the politics of computation, language,
heritage, and knowledge-making in Southern Africa. It also explicitly
welcomes critical engagements with AI as an epistemic and cultural
force shaping humanities inquiry. Contributions are welcome from across
the humanities and allied fields, as well as from computer scientists,
data scientists, designers, librarians, archivists, journalists,
educators, and community practitioners.


Subthemes (non-exclusive; interdisciplinary contributions encouraged)

- AI in the humanities, responsibly
- Southern African language technologies and linguistic justice
- Decolonial, Indigenous, and community-engaged DH
- Digital heritage, archives, history, and memory work
- Critical platform studies, media, and computational publics
- Pedagogy, curriculum, and capacity-building
- Infrastructure, sustainability, and open scholarly ecosystems

The full call for papers, including detailed subtheme descriptions and
co-located events, is available at
https://dh2026.digitalhumanities.org.za

--
Prof Menno van Zaanen menno.v...@nwu.ac.za
Professor in Digital Humanities
South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
https://www.sadilar.org
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