CFP: Japanese Association for Digital Humanities 2026

The Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH) seeks proposals for its 2026 conference, “Whose World, Whose Data? Sustainability in Digital Umwelts” to be held September 11-13, 2026, at Kyushu University. From the call for proposals:

Digital data do not exist in isolation. They come to life only within specific contexts of use, interpretation, infrastructure, and care. Following Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt, this conference understands data as embedded in situated worlds of meaning—worlds shaped by disciplines, institutions, technologies, cultures, languages, and communities. Umwelt is the contextually constituted world in which data gain meaning through use and interpretation.

Under the theme “Whose World, Whose Data? Sustainability in Digital Umwelts,” this conference invites participants to rethink digital sustainability not simply as long-term preservation or technical endurance, but as a question of whose worlds are sustained, transformed, or allowed to fade through digital practices.

Sustainability, from this perspective, is not only about keeping data alive. It is also about circulation, reuse, reinterpretation, care, neglect, and even release. Data may migrate across multiple digital Umwelts—archives, platforms, communities, disciplines—changing their meanings and functions along the way. At the same time, some data may lose relevance, remain unused, or demand ethical reconsideration regarding their continued existence.

This conference provides a forum to explore how digital humanities can engage with these questions across various theoretical, methodological, practical, ethical, and regional perspectives. Contributions may be theoretical, methodological, empirical, technical, practice-based, reflective, ethical, or regional, and interdisciplinary approaches are especially encouraged.

Topics of Interest (include, but are not limited to)
We welcome papers, panels, posters, and other formats addressing topics such as:

• Digital sustainability through adaptation, transformation, and reuse
• Data lifecycles, circulation, reuse, and transformation
• Umwelt, context, and situated meaning in digital humanities
• AI and Machine Learning as distinct digital Umwelts
• Whose data are preserved, and whose are marginalized or lost
• Community-based archives and local knowledge infrastructures
• Indigenous, minority, and endangered-language data practices
• Ethical questions of care, ownership, access, and responsibility
• Data governance, power, and institutional environments
• Infrastructure, platforms, and their implicit “worlds”
• Forgetting, obsolescence, deletion, and non-use as design choices
• Cross-cultural and cross-regional perspectives on digital data
• Environmental, social, and cultural sustainability in DH
• Rethinking archives, databases, and collections as living worlds

Proposals can be interactive presentations, short papers (10 minutes), long papers (20 minutes), or panels (90 minutes). Abstracts should be 500-1000 words in English. Proposals should be submitted to the JADH 2026 ConfTool site (TBA) by April 15, 2026, at 11:59 PM (HAST).