DARIAH Annual Event “Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement” (Italia)

The theme of DARIAH’s 2026 Annual Event is to explore digitally-enabled research through a public and participatory lens, focusing on who our research is for, what are its social and public benefits, and how research can serve to create new dialogues within the public sphere. We seek to foster exchanges on how digital infrastructures, networks and collaborative methods can enable and sustain forms of scholarship that are open, flexible and socially responsive. A way to frame this is through the concept of hybridity: an intermingling of ‘disciplines, technological and cultural practices’ which embed within them the goal of connectivity. This may be connectivity of the university or memory institutions with society through collaborative and joint engagements,¹ or it might be providing alternative spaces for/where people can connect and interact through a hybrid network of physical and technology-mediated encounters to co-construct knowledge.’²

This notion of engaged scholarship has the power to make a positive contribution to the quality of human life, civic engagement, and public value, while producing knowledge that is beneficial and urgently needed to tackle societal issues.³ Engaged research can also enhance the quality of research itself, while improving the social and economic impacts for all participants.⁴ Participatory projects have proved their potential in empowering participants – and the universities and memory institutions that run them – to explore cultural meanings, values and contexts, enriching their knowledge of both past and present, while strengthening the social fabric and fostering new forms of learning, participation and co-creation.⁵

The very heart of our research, addressing key questions of cultural heritage, shared memory and societal justice, touches the core of what it means to be a member of a community: be it local, national, or international. What we do as humanists is not just important, but critical for healthy democratic societies. We have an obligation to ensure that our research is conducted in an ethical manner, that we communicate with society at large when sharing our results, and that we ensure that our research infrastructure is resilient to guarantee that we pass on our knowledge to future generations.

Engaged research enacted through networked media challenges the very notion of ‘the public’ — one that is no longer confined by time and space.⁶ In her 2021 book Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good, Kathleen Fitzpatrick describes this as conducting research not simply in public, but in conversation with the public⁷ with the goal of developing knowledge spaces⁸ in which research is created and shared, providing new forms of learning, knowledge production,  and collaboration.

We are looking for scholarly reflections, concrete experiences and case studies, theoretical contributions, and policy considerations that examine how digital, social and institutional infrastructures can support engaged research, and nurture generosity, participation and shared creativity in the digital arts and humanities.

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions on a variety of topics, including but not limited to:

• Infrastructures of engagement: designing open, inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable platforms
• New models of collaboration across academia, memory institutions, and society
• Pedagogies of engagement and public-facing (digital) humanities education
• Mapping engagement: Evaluating and evidencing public value and impact in digital research
• Preservation, stewardship, and resilience in digital knowledge infrastructures
• Co-creation, citizen science, public and participatory humanities, and community-driven, engaged scholarship
• Policy and governance frameworks for sustaining participatory infrastructures
• Creative and artistic practices as forms of public engagement and dialogue
• The role of digital archives and participatory practices in shaping collective memory and identity
• Ethical and sustainable approaches to participatory digital-enabled  research
• Implementing CARE: Designing digital infrastructures that foster trust, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility
• Intercultural and transnational perspectives on public digital humanities
• Research infrastructure as critical Infrastructure – strategies to build resilient infrastructure for engagement and public good