Six Stanford Library workers, along with colleagues from Stanford and around the world -- digital humanists all -- trekked to the University of Nebraska (in lovely Lincoln), last week to participate in the international Digital Humanities 2013 conference.  This annual event, now in its fortieth year, is the primary gathering place for scholars, coders, designers, librarians, and students active in the large and growing field; we in the Stanford Libraries ourselves played host to the Digital Humanities 2011 conference.

Ben Albritton, of Digital Library Systems and Services, co-presented "A Comparative Kalendar: Building a Research Tool for Medieval Books of Hours from Distributed Resources." Karl Grossner, a Digital Humanities Developer in Academic Computing Services, presented "Computing Place: The Case of City Nature," a paper on his  soon-to-launch project CityNature.  Mike Widner (Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages), spoke about his NEH-funded project "Bibliopedia, Linked Open Data, and the Web of Scholarly Citations."  Finally, Mark Algee-Hewitt, co-associate director of the Stanford Literary Lab and a frequent collaborator with the Libraries, gave a paper on "Tropes, Context and Computation: An approach to digital poetics."  This was a remarkably strong showing by Stanford people at the highly competitive conference.

But a conference is much more than just its presentations.  Jacque Hettel, of the Digital Initiatives Group, chaired one of the conference sessions, running a veritable scholarly three-ring circus that included papers on network analysis, literary geography, and corpus studies.  Jason Heppler (Academic Technology Specialist in History, and also a PhD student at the Univeristy of Nebraska), Glen Worthey (Digital Humanities Librarian), and Elijah Meeks (Digital Humanities Specialist) were all extremely active contributors as well, whether as fonts of local knowledge, thoughtful audience discussants, or members of the numerous committees and professional society boards that meet during the conference.  

Finally, all of these Stanford colleagues appeared as scholars whose work was frequently cited during the conference, both on the page and from the stage.  DH2013 was full of vibrant discussion and passionate professional work, and the Stanford Libraries' contributions were palpable and widely acknowledged.