A conference summary by Erik Renz (@erre1998)
From July 14 to 18, 2025, the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas at Universidade Nova de Lisboa opened its doors for the 36th conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. For part of the now well-attuned team from the comparatively young DH scene in Rostock, consisting of Ulrike Henny-Krahmer, Nils Kellner, Marc Lemke, and Erik Renz, this meant a trip from the Baltic Sea coast to the Atlantic Ocean to present the results of their research and gather new professional inspiration under this year's slogan “Building access and accessibility, open science to all citizens”.
The Portuguese capital proved to be the perfect backdrop for a conference that focused this year on accessibility and openness. Between historic azulejos and modern lecture halls, discussions quickly arose that were true to the conference motto about the role, responsibility, and future of digital humanities. The Rostock team took advantage of this opportunity: project presentations, reunions with well-known colleagues from the DH community, new contacts, and lively discussions about current developments characterized the conference days. All this was only interrupted by walks through the charming streets of Lisbon and the obligatory enjoyment of the famous Pastéis de Nata.
After two intensive days of workshops ranging from practical exercises in automated text recognition of historical manuscripts through to theoretical discussions on ontologies and knowledge graphs for narrative structures, as well as fundamental ethical debates on research integrity and collaborative approaches in the digital humanities, and an opening keynote that captivated the audience with reflections on the use of AI-supported transformer models in historical research, while exploring the possibilities of interpretatively complex ‘algorithmic reading’ of complex source corpora, the actual conference began on Wednesday morning with the first sessions.
Nils Kellner then moderated the session “Digital Mapping & Crowdsourcing for Cultural Heritage & Dialect Studies”, in which he and Marc Lemke presented the paper “They crossed the valley of Catamarca: A study of narrative space in novel openings”. The two team members of the CANSpiN project, which has been funded by the DFG since 2023, presented a case study focusing on the similarities and differences between novel openings. Using digital text annotation and spatial analysis, they examined novel openings from the 19th and 20th centuries in German and Spanish. Their findings show, for example, that spatial description patterns function as indicators of narratological characteristics: an early peak in spatial references indicates an initial description of space, while a decline marks the position of the first character events. This descriptive focus on space, illustrative depiction, and atmosphere at the beginning of stories proved to be characteristic of fiction and varies between different fictional subgenres.
Meanwhile, Ulrike Henny-Krahmer and Caroline Müller took a different approach to the same topic with their poster “Nature versus Artefacts: Places and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Novels from Spain and Latin America”, which could be viewed during the multi-day poster session in front of the faculty building – under bright sunshine. The study of literary texts presented here focused on both named and unnamed places – i.e., those that are not identified by proper names – as both are highly relevant to the setting of the novels and the plot. For the study presented, 200 texts (100 from Spain, 100 from Latin America) from the period 1840 to 1920 were examined for the natural spaces, objects, and artifacts that appear in them. In keeping with this thematic focus, Henny-Krahmer then went on to moderate the session “Spatial Analysis for Literature, Fiction and Travel Writing” on Thursday.
On Thursday, Fernanda Alvares Freire (Berlin/Darmstadt), associate member of the Rostock Digital Humanities Working Group (RosDH), also presented the long paper „Modernização da infraestrutura do portal da 'edição digital de Fernando Pessoa projetos e publicações' em parceria com o consórcio Text+“ The presentation, given in Portuguese and co-authored by Henny-Krahmer and Renz, highlighted the work on sustainability and modernization of the digital infrastructure within the framework of the “Pessoa Digital” cooperation project. A prior visit to the bronze statue of the poet in Chiado Square – for whom “literature was the most pleasant way to ignore life” – provided a fitting cultural program for this presentation.
Erik Renz, who not only contributed to two of the above-mentioned contributions, was also the recipient of one of the early-career travel grants that have been regularly awarded by the Association for Digital Humanities in German-speaking Countries (DHd). These grants enable researchers in the early stages of their careers to participate in such (international) meetings. The DHd therefore deserves sincere gratitude for awarding these scholarships, which not only promote individual research biographies but also strengthen the future of the German-speaking digital humanities community as a whole.
The DH2025 conference in Lisbon provided the Rostock team with an ideal platform for international exchange and the presentation of their research. Above all, however, it shows once again that the multinational DH community is characterized especially by a productive mixture of scientific curiosity and cultural urge to explore. Just as sailors once set out from Lisbon to discover new worlds, digital humanists today are exploring new shores of knowledge in their own way – from the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic – and beyond.