Preserving Abundance: The Challenge of Saving Everything
Date: 14-15 June 2017
Venue: University of Sussex, Brighton

The Sussex Humanities Lab (SHL) and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) are pleased to announce that the second ‘Digital Preservation for Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities’ conference (DPASSH 2017) will be held at the University of Sussex, Brighton, 14-15 June 2017.

DPASSH is a response to the problem of digital preservation within the arts and social sciences domains. It seeks to address the complexities of long-term digital preservation of the full variety of research materials; and to encourage a long term dialogue around the issues created by such preservation.

- October 2016 – Call for papers issues

- deadline for submission is midnight Sunday 11 December 2016 (GMT). Please note this deadline will not be extended.

- Paper acceptance notification – 6 March 2017

- 14 – 15 June 2017 – Conference takes place at Conference Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton (Falmer Campus).

The collaboration between SHL and DRI focuses on two major challenges for long-term digital preservation: maintaining access to the form and functionality of digital objects, and managing, filtering, interpreting, and critically engaging with these petabytes of information, now and in the future. While developments in long-term digital preservation enable ongoing access, the question of how these developments impact the way we interact with, use, reuse, investigate, and interpret our heritage, remains. What, for example, are the cultural and scholarly repercussions of saving “everything”? DPASSH 2017 will, for instance, explore the implications of asking disciplines that evolved in a world of scarcity, to engage with an expanding abundance of historical records.

As such, DPASSH 2017 will focus on both the technical, cultural, and societal challenges of digital preservation and the impact on research when (and if) everything is saved. It asks: now that the human record is digital, what methods, approaches, tools, or skills will researchers, and society, require to understand these colossal datasets?

Submissions are particularly sought from researchers, practitioners, and scholars in the fields of digital history, digital humanities, digital materiality, digital performance, digital arts and music, cultural heritage and research institutions, as well as libraries, archives and industry. We also invite submissions for papers that critically reflect on any area relating to digital preservation in the humanities and social sciences, arts, and cultural heritage domains.

Conference themes include but are not limited to: Preserving digital humanities research; Capturing and archiving artistic performance; Methods and tools for computational humanities and/or digital history; Preservation metadata as research objects; Linking research data and ‘publication’; Stakeholder engagement and community approaches to preservation; Advocacy and national approaches to sustainability and open access; Aesthetics of preservation and content curation; Preservation and Trust; Technical challenges posed by datasets in arts/humanities/social sciences;Preservation and discovery infrastructures, software and tools.