Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 435.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2026-04-27 07:31:08+00:00
From: Bárbara Romero Ferrón <barbara.romero_ferron@leuphana.de>
Subject: - Extended - CFP: Cultural Complexity and Computational Approaches
We have secured funding to cover participants’ fees, so the conference is now
free. In light of this, we have extended the submission deadline.
CFP: Cultural Complexity and Computational Approaches – Complexhibit2026
(Málaga, 30 Jun–2 Jul 26)
University of Málaga, Spain, 29.06.–01.07.2026
Submission deadline: 15.05.2026 New Deadline
Complexity is a general property of cultural systems across historical periods.
Cultural life has long unfolded through dense interdependencies among
institutions and patronage regimes, media and material infrastructures, markets
and circuits of exchange, publics and interpretive communities, and the norms
and policies that govern cultural legitimacy. Across time—whether in early
modern correspondence networks, nineteenth-century print cultures, or today’s
platform-mediated environments—these interacting forces constitute cultural
ecosystems whose dynamics are non-linear, multi-scalar, and historically
stratified. They generate emergent phenomena such as canon formation and
marginalization, reputational cascades, diffusion and imitation, cycles of
attention, unequal circulation, and durable asymmetries of access and
preservation.
Over recent decades, the increasing data mediation of cultural activity and the
rise of digital infrastructures have made some of these dynamics more visible,
more rapid, and in certain domains more measurable—while also introducing new
regimes of visibility, new feedback loops, and new forms of inequality.
Contemporary technological developments—mass digitization, networked cultural
infrastructures, machine-readable standards, and advances in AI and data
science—reconfigure cultural ecosystems in ways that increase systemic
complexity while simultaneously extending our capacity to render that complexity
analytically tractable. They enable the formalization of cultural knowledge, the
modeling of systemic dynamics, and the testing of claims against evidence at
scales and resolutions that earlier scholarship could only approximate. This
shift makes computational approaches methodologically salient not as a
replacement for interpretation, but as a means to articulate interpretive
arguments with explicit models, traceable assumptions, and empirical
accountability.
Against this background, the conference advances a deliberately reflexive
research problem:
What does it mean to study culture—rigorously and critically—when we
conceptualize cultural ecosystems as complex systems that can be formally
represented, computationally modeled, and empirically evaluated?
A second, closely related question follows:
How can we develop computational forms of cultural inquiry that are
simultaneously system-sensitive and historically grounded—capable of formal
representation, modeling, and evaluation—without collapsing cultural
interpretation into mere measurement?
The conference is anchored in the Complexhibit Project, which develops methods
for the semantic integration of heterogeneous sources—such as catalogues,
curatorial texts, reviews, institutional records, and digital traces—to enable
enriched, comparative analysis of the exhibition domain across contexts and
scales. Building on this framework, the conference welcomes contributions that
extend complexity-informed perspectives to broader cultural ecosystems,
including arts and heritage, cultural industries, archives and libraries,
education, mediation, platform cultures, communities, and cultural policy.
The event also commemorates the tenth anniversary of eHAD 2016, the IV
International Meeting of Researchers in Digital Art History (Málaga, 2016),
broadening its legacy from Digital Art History to computational approaches
centered on cultural complexity across historical periods.
Keynote Speakers
* Lynn Rother, Lichtenberg-Professor for Provenance Studies and founding
director of the Provenance Lab, Leuphana University (Germany). Her research
combines art history, museum practice, and data science to investigate
provenance, restitution, and cultural infrastructures.
* Carlos Eduardo Maldonado, Professor of Complexity Science, Universidad El
Bosque (Colombia). A leading figure in complexity studies in Latin America, his
work addresses the theoretical and philosophical foundations of complexity
science and the epistemology of complex systems.
Thematic Clusters (non-exhaustive)
I) Cultural Dynamics and Historical Change
This cluster welcomes research that conceptualizes culture as a system of
interacting forces unfolding across multiple scales and historical horizons. We
invite work on how cultural forms, reputations, institutions, and interpretive
communities emerge, stabilize, and transform over time through circulation,
conflict, selection, and accumulation. Relevant topics include dynamics of
visibility and invisibility, canon formation and revision, diffusion and
imitation, attention cycles, and structural inequalities in access and
circulation. We are especially interested in approaches that preserve historical
specificity while enabling comparative or long-range analysis—through temporal
modeling, event-based perspectives, or other frameworks suited to path
dependence, thresholds, and turning points.
II) Cultural Infrastructures, Knowledge, and Evidence
Culture becomes knowable through infrastructures of description and
preservation: catalogues, archives, standards, classification regimes, and
institutional policies. This cluster invites contributions that examine how such
infrastructures shape cultural memory and legibility, including their epistemic
and political consequences. We welcome work on formal representations of
cultural knowledge and the challenges of integrating heterogeneous sources
across institutions and time: interoperability, conceptual modeling, data
quality, and the management of uncertainty. We particularly value contributions
that foreground evidence and traceability—provenance, versioning, missingness,
and the limits of inference—so that computational claims can be evaluated as
historically situated knowledge practices.
III) Cultural Discourse and Interpretation
Culture is also an ecosystem of discourse: criticism, catalogues, press,
scholarship, correspondence, institutional writing, and platform-mediated
conversation. This cluster invites research that investigates interpretation at
scale—how meanings, valuations, and controversies circulate and become
authoritative across genres, institutions, languages, and historical contexts.
We welcome work that treats discourse not merely as “textual data,” but as a
site where cultural power, legitimacy, and epistemic authority are negotiated.
IV) Responsibility, Data Governance, and Sustainability
Computational cultural inquiry raises questions of responsibility that are
inseparable from methodological rigor. This cluster foregrounds the governance
conditions under which cultural data is produced, structured, maintained, and
operationalized, including legal constraints, institutional adoption, and the
political consequences of automation. We invite contributions that address
rights and licensing, sustainability of infrastructures, and critical analyses
of bias and epistemic inequality—especially how standards, datasets, and models
may reproduce historical exclusions or generate new forms of invisibility.
Submission Types
*Paper Presentations (20 min): Extended abstract, 500–800 words (PDF), with
title, author information, and clear research question.
* Panels / Roundtables (90 min): Rationale (250–400 words), 3–5 guiding
questions, participant bios.
*Workshops (Day 1, morning, 2-3 hours): Objectives, intended audience,
relevance to conference themes, format.
Important Dates
*Submission deadline: 15 May 2026 (23:59 CET)
* Notifications: 25 May 2026
* Conference: 30 June; 1-2 July 2026
General Information
* Submissions may address any historical period and any cultural domain
(arts, heritage, cultural industries, archives, libraries, policy, platform
cultures).
* Language: English or Spanish (working language: English).
* Registration fee (accepted contributions): Free.
* Proceedings: Book of abstracts; selected contributions invited to a
special issue / edited volume.
* Submit proposals to:
digitalarthistory@uma.es<mailto:digitalarthistory@uma.es>
More information at: https://complexhibit.eu/es_es/complexhibit-2026-conference/
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