Visualization continues to expand its role across Digital Humanities (DH), serving not only as a medium for exploration, ideation, and communication, but increasingly as an arena in which diverse communities negotiate approaches, values and epistemologies (Dörk 2025, Hinrichs et al. 2017, Jänicke et al. 2020, Lamqaddam et al., 2020, Morini et al. 2025). As argued in previous workshops and unconferences, DH scholars are no longer asking whether to use visualization, but how to do so critically, deliberately, and in ways that engage the broader ecosystem of stakeholders: researchers, designers, tool builders, educators, librarians, cultural heritage institutions, applied partners, and the wider public (Panagiotidou et al. 2025a, 2025b).
Over the past decade, the VIS4DH community has helped articulate and scaffold this discourse, largely from the perspective of the visualization research community. However, building sustainable bridges across DH and VIS communities requires new venues, formats, and mechanisms for broader engagement, integration of communities, and shared agenda-setting - a reciprocity-based initiative we refer to as VIS*H.
The proposed 2026 mini-conference focusing on engagement and community futures extends this trajectory, providing a structured yet participatory space to:
- foster user- and community-centered approaches to VIS*H,
- collaboratively shape the emerging structure and activities of a prospective ADHO Special Interest Group on Visualization & the Humanities (SIG VIS*H).
This event builds on the success of the unconference held in DH 2025, shifting from broad community mapping toward community consolidation, and strategic field building.
Goals & Objectives
The mini-conference aims to strengthen and shape the emerging VIS*H community within ADHO through collaborative, user-driven processes. Its objectives are:
- Community building and field mapping: Bring together stakeholders from DH, VIS, HCI and design to connect, exchange perspectives, and jointly map the current VIS*H landscape of actors, practices, tools, challenges, and emerging directions.
- User-driven requirements gathering: Collect participants’ needs, priorities, and expectations through surveys and participatory discussions, forming an understanding of what the gaps are in current VIS*H research, methods, and infrastructures.
- Co-creation of a SIG plan & activity framework: Use the insights gathered to collaboratively shape the structure, scope, and preferred activities of a prospective ADHO VIS*H SIG, ensuring its mission and offerings reflect community preferences and long-term aspirations.
- Shared Strategic Output: Synthesize results into a white paper outlining requirements, field challenges, strategic opportunities, and a community-defined roadmap for the SIG and future VIS*H initiatives.
Format
We propose a mini-conference combining structured segments with open, collaborative, and participatory elements. The event is conceived as a working forum in which participants actively shape priorities, structures, and next steps through shared discussion and decision-making.
Pre-conference activities
To support community engagement and agenda-setting:
- Mini-survey circulated to DH participants and VIS*H networks on:
- background & roles
- visualization needs & challenges
- preferred SIG activities
- The survey output will seed breakout topics and feed into the white paper.
On-site activities
Opening plenary
- Overview of VIS*H activities at ADHO and IEEE VIS
- Summary of the SIG application process
- Review of community input from the pre-conference survey
Possible breakout conversations
- Core topics for the SIG
- Scholarly vs. applied activity formats
- Integration of DH / CS / H communities
- User-centered design priorities
- AI+VIS*H opportunities & challenges
- Mapping the VIS*H landscape
- Future outreach and networking strategies
- Identification of “grand future VIS*H challenges”
Interactive decision-making:
- Consensus-building on SIG structure, activity types, and focus domains
- Community prioritization of white paper sections and strategic directions
Synthesis:
- Compilation of findings
- Identification of writing teams for the white paper
- Next steps toward formal SIG establishment
Post-Event Activities
- Draft circulation of the white paper for community review
- Online follow-up meeting(s) to finalize SIG application progress
- Publication of results on an open platform
Technical Requirements
- Plenary room for 50-60 participants
- Flexible seating for breakout groups
- Large writable surface (whiteboard or paper wall) for mapping & documentation
- Projector and audio system
- Optional: tables for tool demos or poster-style project discussions
Intended Audience
Open to all DH participants, with particular relevance for:
- visualization scholars
- humanities researchers who use or design visualizations
- humanities researchers interested in design and information representation
- GLAM professionals
- students and educators interested in VIS*H
- tool developers and infrastructure providers
Both experts and newcomers are explicitly welcome. The proposed mini-conference speaks directly to the conference theme Engagement by emphasizing visualization as a shared interpretive infrastructure across DH practices (Hinrichs et al. 2017, Jänicke et al. 2020). Whether in supporting translingual exchange (Kussmaul 2005), enabling reflective annotation of small and heterogeneous datasets (Kleymann / Stange 2021, VIS4DH 2021), or shaping access to and understanding of cultural memory (Windhager et al. 2018, Vancisin et al. 2023), visualization plays a central role in how scholars, institutions, and publics engage with data and digital initiatives. The unconference format makes engagement itself the method, combining dialogic participation with critical attention to the social and epistemic consequences of technical choices.
Organizers
- Houda Lamqaddam (University of Amsterdam, NL, h.lamqaddam@uva.nl, https://hlmqa.github.io) does research at the intersection of data, technology, and humanistic inquiry, with a focus on integrating computational methods such as data visualization, computer vision, and machine learning into the study of the humanities.
- Florian Windhager (University for Continuing Education Krems, AT, florian.windhager@donau-uni.ac.at, https://www.donau-uni.ac.at/en/florian.windhager) works on visualization challenges in digital humanities, history, and cultural heritage fields.
- Linda Freyberg (DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, DE, l.freyberg@dipf.de, https://www.dipf.de/de/institut/personen/freyberg-linda ) investigates (conceptual) visualization questions at the intersection of digital humanities, (non-textual) research data, and semiotics.