Daejeon, July 27–31
Mapping DH is an initiative that aims to document the gradual establishment and current state of the global Digital Humanities community. This new resource is available online at https://mapping-dh.wikibase.cloud/. The key intention of this poster is to help us raise awareness and build a global community of users and contributors around the Mapping DH platform at DH2026.
Figure 1: Map of centers, labs, study programmes currently included in Mapping DH.
There is ongoing interest in the history of DH, whether with respect to the institutional history, to the people involved, or to developments in specific geographic areas or subfields of DH (e.g. Gouglas et al. 2013; Chen and Hsueh 2014; Nyhan and Flinn 2016; Sprugnoli et al. 2019, Zaagsma et al. 2025, Wuttke et al. 2026).
Some notable initiatives that are making specific kinds of relevant data available, and that Mapping DH references, include the Index of DH Conferences, the DH Course Registry, the CenterNet List of Centers, the Tapor3 tool registry and many other sources of information.See https://dh-abstracts.library.virginia.edu/, https://dhcr.clarin-dariah.eu/, https://dhcenternet.org/centers/, https://tapor.ca/home. All Mapping DH data sources: https://mapping-dh.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Data_Sources. Mapping DH does not aim to compete with these intitative; rather, it aims to re-use part of their data and, above all, link to the entries they provide.
Mapping DH is an initiative that aims to document the gradual establishment and current state of the global Digital Humanities community (see Figure 1). It does so with a focus on the various initiatives and institutions, as well as the people involved in them, that together make up this community.
The ambition of Mapping DH is to reach complete geographic and temporal coverage. Its scope includes the following kinds of entities, as far as they have a direct involvement with Digital Humanities understood broadly:
In addition to these entities, the scope also includes the people involved in leading or coordinating any of these entities, wether currently or in the past. Indivdual projects, publications, and funding programmes are out of scope.
Mapping DH aims to be a hub for information on DH that can serve as a starting point for research into the history of the DH community (for an example, see Figure 2). Rather than centralising information on the platform, we extensively use external identifiers and resources, linking out to related initiatives providing richer, more detailed information on specific aspects of Digital Humanities. This effectively creates a network of information resources on Digital Humanities.
At the technical level, Mapping DH is a Wikibase instance, meaning all information is gathered following the Linked Open Data paradigm and using authority data and taxonomies. This implies an explicit data model for all entities and properties. It also means the platform is inherently open, networked, collaborative and multilingual.Goals and scope of Mapping DH: https://mapping-dh.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Goals_and_scope.
Figure 2: Timeline of Digital Humanities journals, 1965–2025.
With its broad temporal and geographic scope, Mapping DH has set itself an ambitious target. We are convinced that this can only be achieved if the community building this resource is equally global. Only in this way can Mapping DH overcome the Western-centric perspective it currently has and become truly multilingual and multicultural. For this reason, we would like to build a global community of contributors to Mapping DH and are calling for volunteers to join the Mapping DH community and become contributors to the data on the platform.
Whether you would like to make small but crucial contributions – like fixing errors, adding missing information or translating names into multiple languages – or whether you would like to make more sustained contributions – such as rethinking the data model or participating in the platform's governance structure – all are welcome! Creating an account on the platform is free and easy and documentation of the data model is available. However, the best ways to contribute and collaborate will need to be etablished collectively as the community of contributors grows.
Beyond data contributions, we would also like to discuss with members of the DH community how we can critically investigate, refine and rethink our data model in order to make all kinds of initiatives in the global Digital Humanities community visible and understandable on Mapping DH.
Finally, we would like to discuss with members of the Digital Humanities community what a governance model suitable for such a platform should look like, in order to make sure that thresholds for contribution remain low, the voices of all contributors can be heard, broadly-shared goals can be defined, and transparent and lightweight decision-making processes can be moderated in a way that benefits all.
In conclusion, we hope to use the poster at the DH2026 conference to launch awareness about the Mapping DH platform and initiative and start growing a global community of contributors around it.