DHKO 2025: Infrastructure and interface

About the conference

This year's conference has the theme “Infrastructure and Interface”. With this, we wish to encompass all humanistically oriented research on, with and about infrastructures and interfaces. From visual epistemology, via digital media and materials, to research infrastructures and organisation of culture. And not least archives, museums and libraries as infrastructures and interfaces for digital humanities research for past, present, and future.

Infrastructure is both relational and ecological—it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms.    -- Susan Leigh Star (1999) 

Alan Liu further defines digital humanities as a field that is unique in its ability to conceptualise, interpret and critique infrastructure (Liu, 2018). The humanities have in recent years had its “infrastructural turn,” with a rediscovery (and redevelopment) of structural thinking. Within digital humanities and digital cultural research, this means a focus on materiality, connections and the physical preconditions for digital communication. Shannon Mattern (2014) defines infrastructure as: “The casting, staging and direction that determine what happens on the stage, and that allow it to function as a stage”. 

Digital research and cultural infrastructure has over the past year also gained renewed political relevance. Just two years ago, Poell, Nieborg and Duffy (2022) could argue that “an interest in the material structure of how apps and platforms operate in the background” was apparently far more important to examine when this infrastructure was located in China “than in discussions of Silicon Valley-born platforms.” This is no longer the case, and DHKO wishes with this conference to open up new thoughts about both how infrastructure structures culture and research (the theoretical perspective) and how best to organise culture and research in a changed political landscape (the practical perspective).  

We live in a time of infomediaries (Morris, 2015), and where now more than ever it is important to understand how something comes into being, what we see, when we see it and when (and how) we get access.  Additionally, what kind of data we get access to, and how we use these data, as well as what humanistic knowledge can be produced with the data. While infrastructures create and maintain systems, the interfaces give access and interaction with the systems.

We are in “a situation where the computer's interface seemingly becomes omnipresent and invisible, and where it at once is embedded in everyday objects and characterized by hidden exchanges of information between objects” (Andersen and Pold 2018). At the other end of digital culture's material prerequisites, we find namely the interface (and infrastructures also create interfaces), and in the interface lies much power. Here, technographic media studies and human-computer-interactions (HCI) have been fields that contribute to understanding technology discursively through studies of the places where human meets machine.

As Grant Bollmer (2018) points out, “Often, the goal of interface design is to make technologies invisible, blending into the everyday architecture of our lives. Yet we only interact with digital media based on the physical qualities of our technologies.” The physical preconditions for digital humanities and cultural organisations are thus the main focus for this year's conference. We invite participants to study something as infrastructure or interface or as part of an infrastructure or affected by interfaces, or the infrastructure or interface itself.

Registration

The registration is now closed, but you are welcome to stop by for the talks and keynotes.

Programme Wednesday 15.10.

If the title of a talk is in Norwegian, the talk will be in Norwegian. All workshops are in Norwegian. Click on the room name for link to a map of the campus.

Programme Thursday 16.10.

Keynote infrastructure: Jack Andersen – Organizing Information, Technological Change and Ideological Contestation

Jack Andersen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Copenhagen University. His research focuses on how classification practices, particularly in digital media, influence the categorization, understanding, and treatment of information, individuals, and groups in society. Andersen investigates the social, cultural, and political implications of these practices, which range from algorithms to digital archiving. His work incorporates concepts from rhetorical genre theory, classification theory, cultural techniques, communication and media theory, as well as cultural and social theory.

In 2025 he co-edited a new book called Exploring Contemporary Classification Practices. Based on this book, he will give a keynote on systems of classification, media technologies, and cultural institutions (such as libraries, archives, and museums) and how they respond to challenges, including classificatory bias, truth, neutrality, institutional tradition, and technological innovation. The scholarly discussion on the classification and organization of knowledge has developed with digital technologies from a bibliographic paradigm into something much wider, as the need for metadata and classification has become critical for usability and legitimacy. Raising awareness of classification practices in modern culture serves to emphasize how sorting things into categories is both an everyday accomplishment and a highly cultural and political activity with consequences for those who are classified and for those who classify.

Keynote interface: Jordan Magnuson – Game Poems and Born-Videogame Poetics

Jordan Magnuson is a game designer and media artist whose work explores how videogames can express human experience in poetic and culturally resonant ways. For over fifteen years, he has created award-winning independent games, "game poems," and other interactive works. He is the editor of  Game Poems, an online literary magazine dedicated to exploring the artistic and poetic potential of short-form videogames.

To suggest that videogames can be poems feels like an "outrage against decorum," to quote game scholar Piotr Kubiński. Poems, after all, are made up of words, where games are made up of 1s and 0s and flashing lights. Dig deeper, and the differences only seem to grow: games are associated with fast action and object-oriented outer experience, while poetry is often bound to slowness, ambiguity, and the exploration of inner life. Yet I want to suggest that these apparent contradictions stem less from the inherent properties of the media themselves than from the rigid taxonomies and preconceived notions of family resemblance that tend to frame our encounters with them. When we encounter something labelled a "poem," we pay one kind of attention; when we encounter something labelled a "videogame," we pay another--and it becomes difficult to imagine a space between.

I propose that thinking of poems and games as interfaces can help us bridge this gap. Poems can be understood not simply as collections of lyrical words, but as interfaces between language and subjective human experience. Videogames, similarly, can be understood as interfaces between code and human experience. If we approach them in this way, there is no reason why games cannot also serve as poetic interfaces, mediating subjective experience, metaphor, rhythm, ambiguity, and ritual through gameplay and interaction.

Drawing on frameworks from poetry studies, digital humanities, and computational media, and looking at examples from lyric poetry, digital poetry, and experimental videogames, I will explore what makes the "interface of poetry" tick, and examine how these same characteristics can be made to operate in videogames--even in games that don't feature any words. My aim is to show how interface perspectives can "make familiar objects be as if they were not familiar" (Percy Shelley) and sketch a born-videogame poetics that might be useful to digital culture scholars and practitioners alike.

Practical information

There is no conference fee, but participants will have to pay their own travel, stay and meals. The conference location is in central Hamar, and in addition to a student cafeteria on site, grocery shops and cafés are to be found nearby.

The conference takes place at the University of Inland Norway, campus Hamar, in walkable distance from Hamar train station. Hamar is on line RE10 between Drammen/Asker and Lillehammer or F6 between Oslo S and Trondheim, less than an hour from Oslo Airport Gardermoen. For travel information, see: vy.no or entur.no

How to get from the station to the main entrance to campus:

There are several hotels in walking distance from the conference site: 

• Thon Hotell Victoria
• Scandic Hamar
• Clarion Hotell Astoria
• Vikingskipet hotell og spiseri

There are also more hotels on the outskirts of Hamar, if you arrive by car.

Call for papers

For more information, see: Call for papers DHKO 2025

Submitted abstracts should be maximum 1600 characters (approximately 300 words). Two types of presentation are available. 20-minute presentations with 10 minutes for discussion, and shorter idea presentations of 10 minutes with 5 minutes for questions/discussion. Abstracts should specify the length of the presentation. Abstracts for workshops should also be maximum 1600 characters (approximately 300 words). Please indicate here whether the desired workshop length should be 45min or 2x45 min.

Please send all abstracts to: dhko2025@inn.no

Questions?

Ask the organisers: dhko2025@inn.no