Transformations. A DARIAH Journal: Call for Contributions for Special Issue

Archiving Otherwise: Digital Methods, Decolonial Approaches, and Transnational Perspectives on Colonial Heritage Collections

Colonial archives were not neutral repositories. They were instruments of administration, surveillance, and knowledge extraction, built to document and consolidate imperial power (Trouillot 2015). Today, those same archives that are digitised, searchable, and increasingly processed by computational tools present a paradox: the infrastructure that once served dispossession is now being repurposed as a resource for decolonization (Jeurgens and Karabinos 2020). How that repurposing is done, by whom, for whom, and with what methods, is far from settled. This special issue of Transformations. A DARIAH Journal invites contributions that engage critically and practically with the digital afterlives of colonial heritage collections. It asks: What happens when language technologies and computational pipelines meet collections that were made under conditions of coercion? How do we create metadata for archival materials without reinscribing the categories that produced them? And how can transnational comparison across former colonies and colonising nations generate new insights that national digital heritage infrastructures cannot?

Colonial digital heritage research is, at its core, a methodological challenge. Practitioners working in this space must constantly make and document decisions: how to process historical scripts and multilingual sources; how to build metadata schemas that do not reproduce colonial taxonomies; how to design workflows that are auditable and reusable across partner institutions with different legal and access regimes. This Special Issue welcomes submissions that document workflows, data pipelines, tool descriptions, and annotation schemes, alongside more traditional scholarly argumentation (please see types of submissions). We are particularly interested in contributions that sit at the intersection of methodological transparency and decolonial intent, that show their working, make their limitations visible, and reflect on the ethical dimensions of digital archival practice.

Programme Committee of Special Issue

Dr Lorella Viola, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Dr Aodhán Kelly, Atlantic Technological University

Target Audience

This call for contributions to Transformations special issue invites computational humanists and digital humanities researchers working on historical collections, archivists and information scientists, especially those working in GLAM institutions, postcolonial and colonial historians, researchers in critical data studies and AI ethics, particularly those working on bias in training data, annotation politics, and the downstream effects of applying language models to historically produced text, as well as practitioners and community researchers from formerly colonised territories, and heritage institutions (national archives, colonial collections, museums with contested holdings) looking for evidence-based methodological frameworks they can actually implement.

Types of Submissions

We welcome the submission of a diversity of research outputs:

• research articles (30,000 – 50,000 characters, including bibliography, spaces and footnotes)

• data papers (18,000 – 24,000 characters, including bibliography, spaces and footnotes)

• workflow papers (18,000 – 24,000 characters, including bibliography, spaces and footnotes)

We kindly invite all contributors to refer to the Author’s Section, Author Guidelines and the Data Policy of the Journal before submitting their contribution. We strongly encourage authors to consult all three resources before beginning work on their submissions, as they provide essential information on expectations, requirements, and best practices.

The Author’s Section offers additional information about the submission steps as well as about each of the three submission types: research article, data paper and workflow paper. The Author Guidelines further detail the technical and scholarly requirements for all submission types. Finally, the Data Policy of the Journal outlines the publication requirements for the data and other digital research objects associated with the submission, which must be made available whenever legally, ethically, and technically possible.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

The CfP invites contributions on topics including but not limited to:

• Critical and ethical frameworks for computational approaches to contested cultural heritage

• Workflows and pipelines for processing colonial archival materials, including text, image, and audiovisual content

• Metadata generation, classification, and the politics of archival description

• Language technologies applied to multilingual, underrepresented, or historically marginalised textual sources

• Data collections derived from colonial archives, with attention to provenance, licensing, and reuse conditions

• Annotation practices and representational choices in digital colonial heritage projects

• Tool descriptions for archive analysis, accessibility, or counter-narrative work

• User studies and community engagement around digital heritage access

• Transnational comparisons of archival materials, policies, and practices across former colonial contexts

• Open Science, open data, and reproducibility in colonial heritage research

When submitting your contribution, you must choose the right Volume: “Special Issue” and the appropriate section (research articles, data papers or workflows) corresponding to the type of submission.

Editorial timeline

• CfP (to special issue): 1 October 2026 – 4 May 2027 (no extension)

• Peer review: May – August 2027

• Copy editing & Formatting: September – November 2027

• Target publication: December 2027

Please submit your article here

Contact

transformations@episciences.org

Editorial Board of Transformations. A DARIAH Journal

Toma Tasovac, Editor-in-Chief
Françoise Gouzi, Managing Editor
Anne Baillot, Managing Editor
Megan Black, Managing Editor
Eliza Papaki, Outreach and Communications Officer