DHH 2026 in Pula: Cultural and Machine Memory at the Centre of Debate
From 7 to 9 October 2026, the Faculty of Humanities at Juraj Dobrila University of Pula hosted the 6th DARIAH-HR International Conference Digital Humanities & Heritage (DHH 2026). The theme Cultural Memory vs. Machine Memory brought together more than 100 participants from Croatia, other European countries and the wider international research community.
Over three days, the programme included four workshops, seven blocks of parallel sessions, nearly twenty poster presentations, a roundtable and two keynote lectures. It connected researchers in the humanities and social sciences, professionals from archives, libraries, museums and other cultural heritage institutions, technology specialists, artists and representatives of research infrastructures.
The presentations and discussions examined how digital systems, algorithms and artificial intelligence are changing the creation, preservation, connection and interpretation of knowledge. The theme was further developed in two keynote lectures: Jennifer Edmond’s Cultural Memory, Machine Thinking, and Infrastructural Ethics and Benedikt Perak’s Between Cultural Memory and Machine Memory: Five Levels of AI in Teaching. The roundtable Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education, the Humanities and the Arts: Opportunities, Challenges and New Perspectives addressed the use of AI in teaching, research and creative work, together with questions of authorship, responsibility and critical literacy.
The conference was organised by DARIAH-HR and the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, DARIAH-IT and the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), and the Faculty of Humanities at Juraj Dobrila University of Pula.
We thank all presenters, poster authors, workshop facilitators, roundtable participants, session chairs, members of the Programme and Organising Committees, and volunteers. We are also grateful to Fabrizio Fioretti and Paola Orlić for their welcoming remarks; to Sven Tomašek and the Società artistico culturale Marco Garbin choir, conducted by Ana Debeljuh Giudici, for their musical contributions; and to tour guide Nenad Stojkovski for introducing the participants to Pula.
Our thanks also go to the Historical and Maritime Museum of Istria and the Archaeological Museum of Istria for offering free admission to conference participants, and to Tourism Office Pula for its organisational support.
Conference photographs are available in the DHH 2026 photo gallery, while the complete programme and further information can be found on the conference website.
Authors who presented a paper or poster at DHH 2025 or DHH 2026 are invited to submit a manuscript for the joint DHH 2025–2026 Conference Proceedings. The submission deadline is 17 January 2027.
The DHH 2023–2024 Conference Proceedings have also been published and are available for free download in PDF format, while the DHH 2026 Book of Abstracts will soon be published on the conference publications page.
