About – Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is an umbrella organization whose goals are to promote and support digital research and teaching across arts and humanities disciplines, drawing together humanists engaged in digital and computer-assisted research, teaching, creation, dissemination, and beyond, in all areas reflected by its diverse membership. ADHO supports initiatives for publication, presentation, collaboration, and training; recognizes and supports excellence in these endeavors; and acts as a community-based consultative and advisory force.

ADHO embraces and coordinates activity across its constituent organizations (listed here in order of their joining the Alliance): the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities / Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN), centerNet, the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH), the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH), Humanistica, L’association francophone des humanités numériques/digitales (Humanistica), the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA), the Taiwanese Association for Digital Humanities (TADH), the Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD), Association for Digital Humanities in the German Speaking Areas (DHd), Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations (DHARTI), and the Korean Association for Digital Humanities / 한국디지털인문학협의회 (KADH).

Members in ADHO societies are those at the forefront of areas such as textual analysis, electronic publication, document encoding, textual studies and theory, new media studies and multimedia, digital libraries, applied augmented reality, interactive gaming, and beyond. We are researchers and lecturers in humanities computing and in academic departments such as English, History, French, Modern Languages, Linguistics, Philosophy, Theatre, Music, Computer Science, and the Visual Arts. We are resource specialists working in libraries and archival centres, humanities computing groups, and other professional arenas. We are academic administrators, and members of the private and public sectors. We are independent scholars, students, graduate students, and research assistants. We are from countries in every hemisphere.

ADHO organizations offer several membership options, including standard membership (which includes a print subscription to Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing, LLC), membership only society fee (which does not include the DSH/LLC subscription), senior rate, student rate, and developing country rate.

To learn more about ADHO membership, please see our Frequently Asked Questions for individuals and organizations. To learn more about the experiences of 2019-20 ADHO officers, watch the Demystifying ADHO Forum from DH2020 and read the accompanying Twitter thread.

Purpose and Activities

ADHO’s principal purposes are:

To further, support, and promote digital humanities research and education.
To serve as a community-based advisory force for the digital humanities.
To encourage excellence in digital humanities research, publication, partnership, and education.

We fulfill these purposes with the following:

A collaborative framework to enable our Constituent Organizations to work together.
An organizational infrastructure to support and promote the development of digital humanities around the world.
Public advocacy for the digital humanities
A strong, well supported annual Digital Humanities conference.
A strategic approach to digital humanities publications and publication venues.
Encouragement of cultural and linguistic diversity, locally and globally.
Support for young digital humanities scholars.

Constituent Organizations

The following organizations are current members of ADHO:

Governance

The current governance structure is described and diagramed here. Here is a list of current officers, committees, and committee members. Details about how we function can be found in our Governance Protocol.

History

EADH, the oldest of the ADHO Constituent Organisations, was founded in 1973 as the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. The second oldest is ACH, founded in 1978. The two organizations formed an early alliance, often holding joint conferences and engaging in productive dialogues and collaborations.

The formal effort to establish ADHO began in Tübingen, at the ALLC/ACH conference in 2002: a Steering Committee was appointed at the ALLC/ACH meeting in 2004, in Gothenburg, Sweden. At the 2005 meeting in Victoria, British Columbia, the executive committees of the ACH and ALLC approved the governance and conference protocols and nominated their first representatives to the ‘official’ ADHO Steering Committee and various ADHO standing committees. The 2006 conference was the first formally designated as “Digital Humanities” still the name of our flagship conference. In 2007, the ADHO Steering Committee voted to enfranchise The Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI, now CSDH/SCHN, which had been founded in 1986 as the Consortium for Computers in the Humanities / Consortium pour ordinateurs en sciences humaines).

In 2012, centerNet and aaDH became full constituent organizations in ADHO, followed in January 2013 by JADH and Humanistica in 2016. DHASA joined in 2017; TADH and RedHD in 2018; and DHd in 2021. In July 2023, ADHO welcomed DHARTI and KADH.

The Stichting ADHO Foundation (established in the Netherlands in 2013) serves as the legal entity for ADHO.

Acknowledgments

Since 2023, the ADHO website has been managed by the current Communication Officer. The language versioning of the website into our official languages is in progress and carried out by our MLMC Chair, together with the MLMC Fellows. New translations will be added once they become available.

This website was initially developed in English between 2020-2022 by Hannah L. Jacobs (2020-2023 Communications Officer) with support from Simon Wiles (Infrastructure Chair) and former Communications Fellows Anna Sofia Lippolis and Erdal Ayan. Initial Spanish and French translations, as well as a glossary of digital humanities terms, were prepared in 2022 by Lidia Ponce de la Vega, Jade Parent and Marilou Plamondon under the supervision of Marie-France Guénette (Professeure adjointe, Département de langues, linguistique et traduction, Université Laval) and Cecily Raynor (2020-2023 MLMC Chair).

This website is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.