The Hong Kong Association for Digital Humanities (HKADH) is pleased to announce its second international conference, to be organised by the Chinese University of Hong Kong on January 23 – 25, 2026.
Additionally, the New Horizons for AI Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities Conference will be organised by the University of Chicago Hong Kong on January 26 – 27, 2026, at the University of Chicago Francis and Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong. Participants are recommended to attend both events.
HKADH 2026 Call for Papers
Distant Reading | Viewing | Perceiving in the Age of AI
As the AI Revolution gains pace, practitioners in multiple fields are presented with an array of new opportunities and challenges. This includes ever easier and more powerful tools for analyzing large corpora of texts, images and other data. This has vastly expanded our ability to engage in distant reading, viewing and perceiving (to borrow and build on terms made famous by Franco Moretti, Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold). At the same time, there have emerged urgent ethical, epistemological and methodological questions about authorship, authenticity, bias, and the interpretive limits of machine-assisted analysis, some new, others longstanding. This conference will take a kaleidoscopic approach to these and other pressing questions in digital humanities, cultural analytics and related fields in Asia and globally.
Abstracts submitted should be 500 – 1000 words in length in English. Please submit abstracts via the COMS website. Submissions are peer-reviewed on a continuous basis.
30 September 2025
Confirmed Keynotes
Andrew Piper, McGill University
Lauren Tilton, University of Richmond
HSU Chia Wei, artist
Special Attention
Special attention will be given to advances in machine learning and AI, specifically their implications for distant reading, viewing, and perceiving. Topics include:
- transformer-based large language models (LLMs)
- computer vision
- text-to-image generators
- multimodal AI
- retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- AI agents/ agentic AI
Given Hong Kong’s strategic position, we especially welcome digital humanities research pertaining to Sinophone corpora, East/West comparisons, and projects focused on Hong Kong, Macau, and the Greater Bay Area. However, we are open to scholars working on any region and language.
Topics of Interest
HKADH2026 welcomes submissions on all aspects of digital humanities, including but not limited to:
VR humanities; data mining and information design; cultural analytics; computational literary studies; multilingual digital humanities; corpus linguistics; critical infrastructure studies; digital history; electronic literature; software studies; digital archaeology; digital art history; digital media studies; digital materiality; public humanities; and digital humanities pedagogy
Presentation Formats
Interactive Workshops are hands-on demonstrations of new technology, software tools, and digital humanities projects that provide attendees with practical experience with innovative tools and methods.
Posters are ideal for presenting work-in-progress. Poster sessions facilitate interactive discussions with attendees in an interactive format, allowing for immediate feedback and networking opportunities.
Short Papers (10 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for questions) are for sharing early-stage research and receiving constructive feedback.
Organized Panels (105 minutes), comprised of two to three long papers focused on a joint theme and up to two discussants, require a collective submission of 500-word abstracts along with a 500-word overview of the session’s topic and its relevance to academic discourses in the digital humanities.
Roundtables (105 minutes) with up to five speakers foster in-depth discussions on a specific topic. The organizer must submit a 500-word abstract outlining the session’s theme, its significance, and confirmation of participation from all speakers.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit your proposals through the online submission system: https://coms.app/2026-hkadh/
An individual may participate in up to two sessions.
Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025
- Acceptance Notifications will be sent out via e-mail: November 3, 2025
- Conference Date: January 23 – 25, 2026