What Can 30 Years of Conference Papers Tell Us About the Digital Humanities?

The humanities are characterized by questions associated with human values, interpretation, and expression. The digital humanities (DH) pertain to the ways in which humans use media and computational methods for similar purposes. This paper presents a dataset of Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) conference papers presented between 1990 and 2020. First, I provide select background information about my work. Second, I describe how I collected data and provide statistics showing that, over time, DH has become more collaborative. Specifically, I describe a subset of 2,489 paper abstracts. Third, I conclude that over the past three decades years, DH scholars have increasingly written about topics not focused on text, continue providing an inclusive environment for non-dominant topics (e.g., pedagogy), and are increasingly interested in engaging with issues pertaining to ethics, at-risk populations, and minority groups.