Ninth Conference on Digital History and Digital Humanities
Location: German Historical Institute Washington
Date: March 18–19, 2027
Deadline for Submissions: September 6, 2026

Co-convened with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), the Chair for Digital History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz, the Chair for Contemporary History at the University of Mannheim, and NFDI4Memory.

Digital technologies have fundamentally transformed the production, circulation, preservation, management, and interpretation of historical sources. Contemporary history is increasingly confronted with sources that are not simply digitized versions of analog records, but born-digital traces: emails, databases, social media posts, websites, digital images, messaging apps, spreadsheets, geodata, audiovisual files, code, metadata, and AI-generated content. These sources are unstable, fragile, platform-dependent, and often inaccessible both for research and even to the institutions that initially produced them. At the same time, they constitute crucial evidence for political, social, cultural, legal, and economic histories of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This conference takes the problem of born-digital sources as a central challenge for contemporary history and digital history alike. It asks how historians, archivists, information scientists, legal scholars, and digital humanities practitioners can work together to ensure that born-digital materials will be accessible as sources for research, while also developing tools and strategies that support their critical analysis.

One of the starting points for this conference in the German context is the position paper “NFDI4Memory: Damit wir auch zukünftig eine Vergangenheit haben” (Ensuring that the Future Has a Past). The authors argue for much closer cooperation between archival science and historical research in response to the changing conditions of the production of historical evidence. The mass availability of cataloging and metadata, they note, produces volumes of information that humans can no longer productively oversee, requiring new digital tools for enrichment, standardization, and analysis. Such tools are already being adopted in both archives and research communities. 

Comparative perspectives reveal that the preservation of born-digital records depends on distinct professional cultures, legal frameworks, and institutional responsibilities. In the United States, for example, records management, including electronic records management, has long served as an important bridge between administrators, archivists, and, potentially, historians. For government records, standards are shaped by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), including guidelines for official social media records, as well as by state archives. Private and non-governmental organizations often develop their own practices, resulting in a more uneven landscape of preservation, access, and accountability. Yet even where standards exist, major challenges remain: records managers may lack enforcement authority; institutions may lack funding, staffing, and technical infrastructures; and political priorities may undermine commitments to transparency and preservation. These problems point to broader international differences in how born-digital records are managed, preserved, and made available as future historical evidence. For more than two decades, scholars and practitioners have warned that overcoming divides between archivists, historians, records managers, and computer scientists is essential if we are to avoid the losses associated with a possible “digital dark age,” as Roy Rosenzweig already argued in 2003.

The challenges become even more urgent when we shift our focus from archives to producers of born-digital records, including government agencies, legislative bodies, and courts. Even more complex are challenges for institutions not subject to federal and state electronic records management requirements and guidelines, such as political parties, corporations, NGOs, and media organizations. Common problems include a lack of guidelines, a lack of enforcement abilities, a lack of staffing and training, and a lack of affordable platforms and infrastructures. Records disappear in deletion routines, remain locked in proprietary systems, or become inaccessible due to changing software environments, legal restrictions, platform obsolescence, or phaseouts. Whether in democratic or in authoritarian regimes, political decisions and developments influence whether governments are committed to ensuring transparency, oversight, and accountability governed by processes accountable to the public, or whether electronic traces of evidence may be repressed or destroyed. 

Born-digital records are therefore not merely a technical or archival concern. They are central to public accountability, democratic transparency, and the very possibility of writing contemporary history. Or as Sarah Weicksel, Executive Director of the American Historical Association (AHA), recently observed in an interview with the Max Weber Foundation’s “Weltweit vor Ort”: “Part of the question, then, is whether the American public and researchers from around the world will have access to a full and complete accounting of governmental actions and records, both through the executive branch and throughout other branches of government.”

The transformation process requires new skills and offers new opportunities for researchers. Traditional methods and working practices must expand, and new research questions and opportunities are emerging. The advent of born-digital data has given rise to entirely new categories of sources, raising new questions about data management and analytics, as well as enhanced methods of source criticism. Born-digital materials therefore force us to rethink traditional historical and archival training, and disciplinary and professional boundaries between historical scholars, information and data professionals, including archivists, digital humanists, and computer scientists. What does it require to preserve a database, a social media feed, a messaging thread, or a dynamic website? How can historians reconstruct the provenance, integrity, and context of digital records? What forms of digital source criticism are needed when documents are produced, modified, enriched, compressed, deleted, or algorithmically reordered by technical systems? How should we treat AI-generated images, texts, videos, and synthetic media as sources of contemporary history? And how can historians respond when politically significant digital records vanish before they ever become archival objects?

Submission Guidelines 

The conference aims to create a forum for sustained exchange between those who preserve born-digital materials and those who interpret them as historical sources. By bringing together archival, methodological, technical, and historiographical perspectives, we seek to ask not only how born-digital records can be saved, but also how they can be made meaningful for contemporary history. We especially welcome contributions that combine methodological reflection with concrete case studies, project presentations, or hands-on approaches.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Digital forensics and born-digital evidence
  How can methods from digital forensics help historians and memory workers identify, preserve, authenticate, and interpret born-digital materials? What can forensic approaches reveal about deleted files, metadata, file systems, version histories, timestamps, or chains of custody? How can such methods be made accessible for historical research without reducing sources to purely technical artifacts?
• Digital source criticism 
  Born-digital sources require new forms of source criticism. Contributions may address provenance, authenticity, metadata, platform infrastructures, interface effects, algorithmic mediation, software dependencies, and the interpretive challenges of large-scale digital corpora. We are particularly interested in approaches that connect computational methods with hermeneutic interpretation. How can historians critically analyze sources that are too large, dynamic, or complex to be read through conventional methods alone?
• Working with born-digital governmental sources
  Present your in-progress or finished project based on the aforementioned new types of sources. What institutional, technological, and methodological challenges did you encounter? Are there advantages to the sources’ genuinely digital nature, which is unburdened by the time-consuming and error-prone aspects of retrodigitization?
• AI-generated content as sources of contemporary history
  Generative AI has rapidly become part of everyday communication, political campaigning, cultural production, journalism, administration, education, and memory work. How should historians approach AI-generated text, images, audio, video, or code as historical sources? What evidentiary status do synthetic media have? How can scholars distinguish, contextualize, and interpret AI-generated materials, especially when provenance is uncertain or deliberately obscured?
• Democratic fragility, deletion, and political accountability
  Digital records are central to democratic accountability, yet they are also vulnerable to deletion, manipulation, privatization, and selective preservation. We invite papers that examine the disappearance of data by political actors, the fragility of administrative records, the destruction or withholding of digital evidence, and the challenges of documenting political decision-making in digital environments. How can historians, archives, journalists, and civil society organizations respond when records disappear before they can be preserved?
• Archives, infrastructures, and national differences
  The preservation of born-digital sources depends on legal frameworks, archival mandates, technical infrastructures, institutional cultures, and funding structures. We welcome comparative perspectives on national, regional, and institutional differences in the collection, preservation, and accessibility of born-digital records. How do archives in different countries deal with government records, web archives, social media, email collections, or digital audiovisual materials? What can be learned from transnational comparison?
• Ethics, law, and data protection
  Born-digital sources raise pressing ethical and legal questions. How can researchers balance public interest, privacy, consent, copyright, data protection, and the right to be forgotten? What responsibilities do historians have when working with personal digital traces, leaked materials, or sensitive administrative data?
• Access, platforms, and the privatization of historical evidence
  Many born-digital sources are produced on commercial platforms that restrict access to researchers. Social media data, search engine results, messaging apps, and platform moderation records are often unavailable, incomplete, expensive, or legally difficult to obtain. Contributions may address the epistemological and political consequences of restricted data access. What kinds of contemporary history become impossible to write when platform data is inaccessible? What alternative methods, collaborations, or advocacy strategies are available?

We invite proposals in two formats:

1. Individual presentations of 20 minutes. Papers may present case studies, methodological interventions, archival projects, theoretical reflections, or comparative perspectives.
2. Workshops of 90 minutes for hands-on presentations of projects, tools, workflows, methods, or skills. Workshops may introduce participants to digital forensic methods, born-digital archival workflows, web archiving, metadata analysis, platform research, AI source criticism, or other practical approaches.

Proposals should include a title, an abstract of no more than 500 words (introducing state-of-the-art, research questions and objectives), a short biographical note of no more than 150 words, and an indication of the preferred format: workshop or individual presentation. Workshop proposals should also include a brief description of the intended structure and any technical requirements. Please submit your proposal to our conference platform https://app.smartsheet.eu/b/form/019e0327d9be7cc5b158b9b7cab2fc4f by September 6, 2026. 

Registration and Contact Information

Although we favor in-person attendance of participants and presenters, facilities for hybrid participation will be provided with the aim of making the event as inclusive as possible. Accommodations will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers (for one presenter per paper or workshop). Participants will make their own travel arrangements; funding subsidies for travel are available upon request for selected scholars, especially those who might not otherwise be able to attend the workshop, including junior scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources. For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Daniel Burckhardt, burckhardt@ghi-dc.org. For questions about logistics (travel and accommodation), please contact our event coordinator Nicola Hofstetter, hofstetter-phelps@ghi-dc.org.

Conference Committee

• Daniel Burckhardt, GHI Washington
• Andreas Fickers, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)
• Philipp Gassert, Chair for Contemporary History at the University of Mannheim
• Katharina Hering, GHI Washington
• Torsten Hiltmann, Chair for Digital History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Jana Keck, GHI Washington
• Atiba Pertilla, GHI Washington
• Thorsten Wübbena, Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz

Contact Information

For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Daniel Burckhardt, burckhardt@ghi-dc.org. For questions about logistics (travel and accommodation), please contact our event coordinator Nicola Hofstetter, hofstetter-phelps@ghi-dc.org.

Contact Email

burckhardt@ghi-dc.org

URL: https://www.ghi-dc.org/events/event/date/between-big-data-and-obsolescence-born-digital-sources-contemporary-history-and-the-politics-of-access