CFP: Places, Spaces, Sites: Mapping Critical Intersections in Digital Humanities

Full details http://idrh.ku.edu/dhforum2016
The 2016 DH Forum will take place on Saturday, October 1, following a full day of (gratis) Digital Humanities workshops on Friday, September 30. Paper proposals are due Friday, June 10.
Notions of place, space, and site are theorized and put into practice in distinct ways across various academic fields. Spatial technologies and location services and tools, along with the rise of geo-humanities work, are bringing the tensions among ideas of place, space, and site to the surface. Moreover, a turn towards internationalization and the global has been taking place in Digital Humanities scholarship and practice, further complicating our notions of space and place. Digital Humanities has the capacity to bring these tensions together in both conflicting and harmonious ways. The 2016 DH Forum seeks to explore the intersections, mutual critiques and/or coincidences among fields, and their practices and conceptual tenets.
Place in Digital Humanities has largely been explored in terms of its relevance or pertinence in departments, on campuses, in classrooms, in libraries, etc. In a global perspective, places can be viewed as sites of distinct academic practice (DH and otherwise), influenced by geopolitical, linguistic and social asymmetries, colonial histories, and neocolonial exploitation. The web, virtual spaces of collaboration, and online communities are reinventing and complicating our understanding of space and our place in the world. Furthermore, various notions surrounding the ideas of place, space, and site are at the center of the geo-spatial turn seen in many areas of Digital Humanities.
Still, what place, space, and site are remains subject to deeper reflection and articulation, even more so as their traditional definitions intersect with the digital. What are the implications of digital media and forms of data collection and encoding place/space/site? What are the challenges posed by historical notions of place/space/site to current thinking and technologies? Places/spaces/sites have overlapping physical, symbolic, affective, cultural, political, or metaphorical dimensions–how do spatial technologies help or hinder how we interrogate and represent them? What is the role of networked technologies to delineate, imagine, and create places/spaces? How does place determine our place in the world? What is the impact of race, gender and gender expression, age, able bodiedness and disability, language, ethnicity, and geopolitics on ideas of place/space/site? Does a place/site exist in a world we perceive to be in constant movement? How do notions of the local and the global complicate our thinking about place/space/site?
We welcome proposals on projects, research results, or critical/theoretical approaches that address such questions. Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Locative and spatial narratives
• Location aware technologies
• Migration and refugee digital studies
• Border digital studies
• Local/global uses of digital media
• DH infrastructure and practice in global/local contexts
• Commemorative sites, collective memory and the digital humanities
• Online communities
• Placemaking
• Community building
• Digital archaeology
• Methodologies for analyzing unstructured data in a spatial context
• Virtual worlds
• Recreations of historical and fictional places/spaces
• Indigenous, queer, and/or feminist mapping strategies or projects
• GIS and historical GIS applications in the humanities

DH Forum Student Showcase: We encourage graduate students to submit abstracts of papers or poster presentations. Up to three of the student presentations will be selected for a Student Showcase based on the quality, originality, clarity of the written abstracts, along with their alignment with the DH Forum theme and expected future impact. The presenters will be awarded $200 each at the conference. Students should identify themselves as such at the time of abstract submission to be considered for the showcase and award. For a paper to be eligible, at least fifty percent of the research reported in the paper must be performed by one or more student authors, and the student must be the primary presenter of the paper at the conference.
Please submit 500 word abstracts in PDF format to idrh@ku.edu by June 10, 2016.