​7th Annual University of Kansas Digital Humanities Forum
September 28-29, 2017
Lawrence, Kansas

This year’s DH Forum will focus on the theory and practice of digital storytelling as it relates to humanities research, teaching and learning. In particular, we seek innovative approaches and examples of digital storytelling that address questions related to democratizing DH practices, communicating knowledge and research, and representing underrepresented languages, places and peoples.

Storytelling is fundamental to human experience and used for creative expression, communication, and self-conception at the personal, community, and international levels. Narratives and stories represent how we understand the world and provide the matrix in which arguments cohere. Digital media hardware and software have expanded the forums and techniques available for the creation and reception of compelling narratives and have encouraged new literacies and approaches to narrative form and function.

Digital stories may engage audiences across various media in a multi-modal ways, encourage new forms of interaction with data and code, and take advantage of the interactive possibilities of the Web and mobile platforms. Some digital stories interweave the affordances of digital media with storytelling practices and poetics to produce co-created, algorithmic, location-based, and non-linear narratives. Other digital stories take advantage of the proliferation of digital networks to tell personal or untold stories or to communicate complex knowledge about human experiences in immediate and interactive ways.

We welcome proposals for

• paper/research presentations (approx. 20 minute presentations);
• panel or discussion sessions (30-60 minutes, with multiple participants);
• workshops on digital storytelling tools, platforms, methods and pedagogy (1 – 3 hour sessions);
• creative works of digital storytelling that may be displayed as part of an exhibition session.

Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• The connection between digital storytelling, knowledge production, and humanities scholarship;
• How can digital storytelling facilitate telling stories of underrepresented languages, places and people;
• Innovative examples of Indigenous and minoritized stories, multilingual and non-English language stories, and local and regional histories;
• Digital storytelling for public humanities and civic engagement;
• Digital stories for scholarly communication and broader impact initiatives (including communicating your scholarship to wide audiences in new ways);
• Digital storytelling within museums, cultural institutions, or exhibition spaces;
• Ethics and best practices in digital storytelling;
• Storytelling with open datasets;
• Techniques, successes/failures, case studies and impact stories of digital storytelling;
• Methods and genres, including oral histories, podcasting, locative media, multimedia & transmedia narratives, social media, video games, computational narratives, data visualization, electronic literature and others;
• Maps as stories and/or mapping stories;
• Tools and platforms for digital storytelling including innovations in virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D modeling, artificial intelligence, or other emerging technologies;
• Innovations in expanded media, creative or artistic works.

Please submit a 500-word maximum abstract of your proposed session by June 15, 2017.