The three-day national gathering will bring together researchers, educators, students, institutional leaders, information and infrastructure specialists, policymakers, public-sector representatives, community organisations and other stakeholders working at the intersection of digital methods and humanities scholarship.
Under the theme “Research, Collaborate, Shape the Future”, the summit is designed as a working event rather than a conventional conference. It aims to create a national platform for dialogue, collaboration and collective problem-solving while advancing the role of digital humanities in South Africa’s research, education, cultural and knowledge ecosystems.
At its centre is the development of a South African digital humanities position paper: an evidence-based statement outlining the current state of the digital humanities discipline in South Africa, challenges and opportunities it faces, and what needs to happen next.
“This summit provides an opportunity for the South African digital humanities community to come together and articulate a shared position on the field. A key outcome will be a South African digital humanities position paper that captures where we are, what needs to change and what we collectively believe should happen next,” says Professor Menno van Zaanen, digital humanities professor at the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR).
The summit will explore how we define digital humanities in South Africa, what makes African digital humanities distinctive, and how digital humanities interacts with its environment, such as indigenous languages, knowledge systems and the educational curricula.
Defining the field will be the starting point. The summit will also consider where the field sits within existing disciplines, curricula and qualification structures – because clarity about the field is essential to how it is taught, recognised and supported.
Ten working groups will examine the roles of libraries and archives, digital preservation, interdisciplinary research, public knowledge, community knowledge, and new technologies. Each group will bring a different perspective, but the issues intersect.
Working groups will also address critical questions: What resources are available now? Where are the gaps? What changes are needed? Who is responsible for making these changes?
The summit will unfold across three days.
Digital humanities does not belong to one discipline, institution or sector. Its development depends on connections between researchers and communities, universities and policymakers, archives and technologies, and established scholarship and new forms of knowledge production.
The Digital Humanities Cluster Summit 2026 is an invitation to research, collaborate and collectively shape the future of digital humanities in South Africa. Its success will depend on bringing different disciplines, institutions and communities into the conversation and turning shared questions into shared solutions.
For SADiLaR, which is jointly organising the summit with UNISA, Nelson Mandela University and North-West University, the event presents an important opportunity to strengthen collaboration and build a shared understanding of how digital humanities can contribute to the country’s research and knowledge landscape.
The summit represents an important step towards building a stronger, more connected and nationally relevant digital humanities community.
The summit also recognises that the future of digital humanities cannot be shaped by a single discipline, institution or sector. Collaboration lies at the heart of the summit, bringing together diverse perspectives to explore how digital approaches can support humanities scholarship, teaching, preservation, public engagement and knowledge production.
Participants are therefore encouraged not only to share existing research and experiences, but also to identify common challenges, explore opportunities for collaboration and contribute towards solutions that can strengthen the South African digital humanities ecosystem.
