CFP: Shaping Knowledge Communities in the Digital Humanities

Current and former instructors, organizers, and attendees of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), hosted by the University of Victoria from 2003-2024, are invited to contribute proposals for “Shaping Knowledge Communities in the Digital Humanities,” a special issue of IDEAH Commemorating and Celebrating DHSI Victoria. From the call for proposals, circulated on the DHSI listserv:

How does an academic field evolve over time? More specifically, how do communities of practice come together to nurture and develop their shared interests into a robust disciplinary movement? This special issue aims to look at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) as a site of disciplinary convergence and evolution.

Hosted at the University of Victoria from 2003-2024, and founded at Vancouver Island University in 2001, DHSI has become a landmark space for community building, learning, pedagogy, and project development. Scholars from across the globe traveled to Victoria (many returning year after year) to share their expertise and participate in week-long courses covering a wide range of technical, theoretical, and curricular topics in DH. In 2025, DHSI initiated a new chapter at the Université de Montréal. This move, coupled with the upcoming 25 year anniversary of the Institute, offer an ideal opportunity to reflect on the legacy of DHSI-Victoria and consider how this community might shift and change within its new iteration. Overall, this issue asks: how can delineated community events such as the long-running DHSI generate, contribute to, and perhaps even shape a discipline?

We invite contributions from current and former instructors, organizers, and attendees, reflecting on the various projects and scholarship collaborations that launched at or were made possible through the Institute. We encourage essays that reflect on the impact of knowledge communities in relation to the growing institutionalization of DH as a field, the shaping of best practices for project development, interdisciplinary collaboration, and long-term institutional buy-in. Although this special issue is intended to celebrate DHSI-Victoria, essays should envision a broad audience of DH practitioners.

In order to reflect both institutional memory as well as new perspectives in the field, we welcome submissions by established, emerging, and early career scholars whose work, collaborations, and partnerships have taken shape through a DH training institute or workshop. We particularly encourage perspectives from BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ scholars, those working on disability and accessibility justice, scholars from the Global South, Minority Serving Institutions, and non-academic community organizations.

Instructors and former participants of DHSI-Victoria are invited to submit argument-driven papers, provocations, and calls to action that explore topics such as:

• the trajectory of building and sustaining DH-oriented knowledge communities (including through a lens of collective knowledge construction or intentional community-building in academia)
• how knowledge communities integrate, respond to, and ideally reflect inclusivity, equity, and collaboration
• prioritizing equity, diversity, and inclusivity without tokenizing and/or burdening members of under-represented communities
• how a field is shaped over time, including the development of DH as a field through the lens of community, skill-building spaces
• the importance of delineated “middle spaces” for learning, teaching, and collaborating
• challenges involved in institutional (and cross-institutional) support for developing fields
• flattened hierarchies encouraged in institute/workshop environments vs. applying/adapting to rigid institutional structures
• pedagogy and co-creation in a “newly” institutionalized field
• DH and institutional memory

This special issue will feature both formal academic essays, blog-style reflections, and dialogues between collaborators. If your work engages with data visualization or takes other creative approaches to reflecting on the state of the field, please reach out to the editors to discuss what may be possible. In particular, we envision contributors attending to one of three sections:

• Institutional Concerns and Sustainability: Contributors whose projects got started or evolved at DHSI reflect on the role of institutional, academic, and even national infrastructural support in building and maintaining their projects. Although not a call for case studies, of particular interest here are reflections on projects and project teams who managed to sustain a web presence over time or successfully sunsetted/archived their work. We also invite reflections on failure, resource limitations, and provocations regarding the shortcomings of DH as an institutionalized field.
• Community Praxis: Contributors discuss how they were able to bring back knowledge gained at DHSI to their local spaces to build coalitions; institutionalize best practices for DH scholarship; argue for financial support; or make curricular interventions. Here, too, we invite reflections on the barriers to establishing knowledge communities, with particular attention to equity and representation.
• Conversations: collaborators (e.g. co-instructors, colleagues, or a project team) share their perspectives via short dialogue-form pieces discussing how they see their work in relation to growing or changing community values. These dialogues may occur over email or else may be extracted from transcripts of video calls.

Projected Timeline
Please submit a 250-word abstract and 75-word short bio by 1 October 2025 to asilva@york.cuny.edu.

1 October: Abstracts due
15 October: Accepted papers notified
30 January 2026: Contributor essays due
~April/May 2026: Editors’ Feedback and Peer Review
August 2026: Final drafts following peer review
~February 2026: Anticipated publication