DH Benelux 2026

We’re pleased to announce that the 13th edition of the DH Benelux Conference will take place in Maastricht at Maastricht University.

The annual DH Benelux Conference serves as a platform for the community of interdisciplinary Digital Humanities researchers to meet, present and discuss their latest research findings and to demonstrate tools and projects.

The Digital Humanities Benelux 2026 conference at Maastricht University invites participants to explore the intersection of digital technologies and storytelling.

With our theme Digital Storytelling, we aim to explore how digital tools, approaches and methodologies are reshaping the ways we create, analyse, preserve and share stories across disciplines, cultures and time.

DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Storytelling is fundamental to human experience; stories help us make sense of the world, preserve and narrate our heritage, construct identities, and imagine possible futures. Digital technologies have revolutionised how we engage with stories both as creators and audiences. At the same time, technology development for research, teaching and public outreach is increasingly aware of diverse user needs and integrates narrative elements in the different stages of tool creation (e.g., through design thinking) or in their interfaces and functionalities.

From computational analyses of large textual corpora and interactive multimodal narratives to virtual exhibitions, immersive listening and extended reality experiences, digital storytelling encourages new literacies and approaches to narrative forms and functions; it expands our fora, techniques, and audiences for narrative creation and reception. In addition, the stories we tell about digital technologies themselves – their histories, potential, limitations, blackboxes, and futures – shape how we understand and deploy these tools in digital humanities scholarship. Ultimately, we can reflect on the narratives that inform and reproduce understandings of Digital Humanities scholarship: which stories do we tell about ourselves and each other?