13th edition of the DH Benelux Conference (2026)

2026 CONFERENCE THEME

The Digital Humanities Benelux 2026 conference at Maastricht University invites participants to explore the intersection of digital technologies and storytelling. 

With our theme Digital Storytelling, we aim to explore how digital tools, approaches and methodologies are reshaping the ways we create, analyse, preserve and share stories across disciplines, cultures and time.

DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Storytelling is fundamental to human experience; stories help us make sense of the world, preserve and narrate our heritage, construct identities, and imagine possible futures. Digital technologies have revolutionised how we engage with stories both as creators and audiences.  At the same time, technology development for research, teaching and public outreach is increasingly aware of diverse user needs and integrates narrative elements in the different stages of tool creation (e.g., through design thinking) or in their interfaces and functionalities.

From computational analyses of large textual corpora and interactive multimodal narratives to virtual exhibitions, immersive listening and extended reality experiences, digital storytelling encourages new literacies and approaches to narrative forms and functions; it expands our fora, techniques, and audiences for narrative creation and reception. In addition, the stories we tell about digital technologies themselves – their histories, potential, limitations, blackboxes, and futures – shape how we understand and deploy these tools in digital humanities scholarship. Ultimately, we can reflect on the narratives that inform and reproduce understandings of Digital Humanities scholarship: which stories do we tell about ourselves and each other?  

CONTRIBUTIONS

DHBenelux 2026 welcomes contributions that critically examine the affordances and limitations of digital tools and methodologies for narrative analysis and creation, explore how digital storytelling can serve as a form of knowledge production and dissemination, and present reflections on ongoing and completed digital storytelling projects. We especially encourage submissions that highlight how digital storytelling can break down academic silos, foster collaborations across disciplines, and connect the humanities with diverse societal actors and other disciplines. DHBenelux aims to bring together scholars and cultural professionals from across the spectrum of digital and computational humanities and from diverse methodological traditions, including qualitative, quantitative, or mixed approaches.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions may cover (but are not limited to) one or more of the topics below:

• Narrative analysis through distant reading and visualisation
• Quantitative text analysis for narrative generation and interpretation (e.g., machine learning, NLP, utilization of LLMs and stylometry)
• Digital archives and preservation
• Non-linear and interactive narratives
• Multimodal storytelling
• AI and narrative construction
• Ethics and biases in constructing digital stories
• Digital Storytelling in research dissemination
• Critical approaches to digital narratives
• Digital pedagogy
• Social justice and digital voices
• Data visualisation as narrative
• Turning Data into Stories
• Immersive digital narratives (e.g., 3D and Extended Reality)
• Creative approaches in Digital Humanities research praxis
• Tool development and coding integrating narrative principles and user interactions