The use of digital methods within the arts, humanities and cultural heritage can lead to cultural empowerment for scholars, students and citizens. Through the theme “Digital Cultural Empowerment”, the conference encourages submissions that bridge the gaps between humanities corpora and actual digital practices used to understand, analyse, and share them. This includes digital dissemination of patrimonial content, participatory experiences, environments that improve digital literacy, and research that evaluates the effectiveness of such kind of projects. We also welcome submissions that study the underlying challenges and issues of such cultural empowerment processes, for example the joining of Western and non Western scholarship, or the maintenance of the core-values of the humanities (critical sense, close reading, excellency in details) while articulating them with new opportunities offered by the digital revolution (distant reading, large scale of information data sets, data visualisation).

Melissa Terras, Claire Clivaz and Frédéric Kaplan

Comments? Reactions? It is interesting to look at the diverse translations of our English title in the multilingual call for proposals: the interpretations are quite diverse. Notably the Greek one is very close to our ideas.

Arabic: ألتمكين الرقمي الثقافي; Bulgarian: Дигитално Културно Упълномощаване; Catalan:  Potenciació Cultural Digital; Chinese: 數位文化賦權; English: Digital Cultural Empowerment: French: La montée en puissance de la culture numérique; Friulan: Kültürel Güçlendirme; German: Befähigung und Bewusstheit durch digitale Kultur; Greek: Ψηφιακή Πολιτιστική Ενδυνάμωση; Hebrew: העצמה תרבותית דיגיטלית; Hungarian: A digitális kultúra ereje; Italian; Presa di Coscienza Culturale e Digitale; Japanese: デジタル文化エンパワーメント; Norwegian; title not translated; Persian: توانمند سازی فرهنگی دیجیتال; Polish: Upodmiotowienie Kultury Cyfrowej; Portuguese: title not translated; Romontsch sursilvan: Cumpetenza e qualificaziun ellas scienzas humanas digitalas; Russian; Цифровое культурное применение; Serbian: Дигитално културно оснаживање; Spanish; Empoderamiento cultural digital; Turkish: Kültürel Güçlendirme; Welsh: Ymbweriad Diwylliannol Digidol