POST: Acceptances to Digital Humanities 2015 (series)

Each year, Scott Weingart (Indiana University) analyzes the publicly available data surrounding the accepted submissions to the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization’s Digital Humanities conference. This year, he’s drafted a series of posts that individually tackle different aspects of the data and we’ve reproduced the tl;dr for each here:

Part 1:

Part 1 is about sheer numbers of acceptances to DH2015 and comparisons with previous years. DH is still growing, but the conference locale likely prohibited a larger conference this year than last. Acceptance rates are higher this year than previous years. Long papers still reign supreme. Papers with more authors are more likely to be accepted.

Part 2:

This post’s about the topical coverage of DH2015 in Australia. If you’re curious about how the landscape compares to previous years, see this post. You’ll see a lot of text, literature, and visualizations this year, as well as archives and digitisation projects. You won’t see a lot of presentations in other languages, or presentations focused on non-text sources. Gender studies is pretty much nonexistent. If you want to get accepted, submit pieces about visualization, text/data, literature, or archives. If you want to get rejected, submit pieces about pedagogy, games, knowledge representation, anthropology, or cultural studies.

Part 3:

There’s a disparity between gender diversity in authorship and attendance at DH2015; attendees are diverse, authors aren’t. That said, the geography of attendance is actually pretty encouraging this year. A lot of this work draws a project on the history of DH conferences I’m undertaking with the inimitable Nickoal Eichmann. She’s been integral on the research of everything you read about conferences pre-2013.

Part 4:

Women are (nearly but not quite) as likely as men to be accepted by peer reviewers at DH conferences, but names foreign to the US are less likely than either men or women to be accepted to these conferences. Some topics are more likely to be written on by women (gender, culture, teaching DH, creative arts & art history, GLAM, institutions), and others more likely to be discussed by men (standards, archaeology, stylometry, programming/software).