The mini-conference “Distant Past(s) – Current Future(s): Digitization, Digital Objects and Datafication Approaches in Ancient and Medieval Studies” will take place on Tuesday, 28 July 2026, from 09:00 to 17:30 KST, as a pre-conference event of DH2026 “Engagement” in Daejeon, South Korea.
Organized by Marina Sartori and Victoria G. D. Landau, the event brings together scholars of ancient civilizations and medieval studies, museum professionals, librarians, curators, collection custodians and caretakers, educators, and technical experts working at the intersection of past evidence and digital approaches.
The conference aims to provide a forum for exchange around digital humanities practices, methodologies, tools, and infrastructures as they relate to ancient and medieval topics, objects, and materials. Open discussions will address issues including ethics, accessibility, open and closed data, data reuse, modelling, mapping, object and data ownership, imaging such as IIIF, engagement, curation, and sustainability.
The organizers especially welcome participation from scholars and practitioners working beyond traditional “Classics” frameworks, including archaeology of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania, historical ethnology and anthropology, digital historical linguistics, game and media studies, metadata science, and open-access publishing.
The event will be held in hybrid format at the Daejeon Convention Center and on Zoom. In-person participants must register for DH2026. Virtual participation is free and does not require DH2026 registration. All talks are planned to be recorded and made available after the conference.
The program includes presentations on digital corpora, medieval databases, Dante commentary workbenches, Bayesian approaches to Byzantine Cappadocia, inclusive museum text rewriting, digital scholarly editions, computational text analysis, Egyptian Book of the Dead reconstruction, epigraphic gazetteers, maps of ancient conflicts, Byzantine seal monograms, manuscript fragments, Korean heritage archiving, digital twins, and integrated knowledge bases.
Participant registration deadline: 1 July 2026, 23:59 UTC+1.
For more information and registration, please visit the mini-conference website:
https://vlandau.notion.site/distant-pasts-current-futures-2026