It’s been eight years!

It’s 2017 at the DH conference in Montreal. At a workshop “to connect different tools and services in order to build a tool infrastructure for historical research” organized by me, Dirk Wintergrün, and Robert Casties, a couple of the attendees decide that it would be worthwhile to try to connect more frequently in order to exchange ideas and experiences. We start out simple: a GitHub organization, a Slack workspace, and a mailing list. But that’s all that it takes. DHTech is born. Now, 8 years later, a short retrospective seems in order to reflect on how far we have come since then and where else we want to go.

Many people have contributed to and supported DHTech over the years. Some have left the digital humanities space or even academia since then, others needed to focus on other aspects of their professional life. There is the DHTech Steering Committee that was started when DHTech became a ADHO Special Interest Group in 2021. And while some of the Steering Committee members have rotated off the committee due to other responsibilities requiring their attention, new ones have joined us with new ideas. We are eternally grateful for all of the contributions, big and small, that all these people have made. DHTech would not be what it is without them.

So what are we doing?

At the time of writing this blog post, the DHTech general Slack channel has 385 members. Posts on our blog on the DHTech website date back to 2017, when we announced the first virtual meetup we ever held! It was a meetup on CI/CD with GitHub Actions, Travis-CI, and Jenkins. Since then we have held 20 more virtual meetups with topics ranging from project presentations, framework introductions, specific technologies, and more community focused subjects such as training and education or code review. These virtual get-togethers were supplemented by in-person events at conferences. We have held several workshops at the annual DH conference (such as “How can you trust your code?” at DH2023) and more recently we have organized two mini-conferences at DH2024 and DH2025.

But DHTech not only brings people together, it also advocates for the individuals that do technical work in DH projects. One of our first achievements was the “DH RSE Workshop White Paper” that was written at the DH conference in 2019. Furthermore, we have run two community surveys—one in 2020, and more recently a follow up survey in 2025. The results of the 2025 survey were presented as a poster at DH2025. Multiple papers have been published by DHTech members as a follow up to a workshop or as an outcome of a DHTech activity such as:

• Damerow, J., R. S. Koeser, J. C. Carver, M. Vogl (2024). Code review in digital humanities. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 40 (Supplement_1), i18-i26. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqae052

And:

• Koeser, R. S., J. Damerow, R. Casties, and C. Crawford. 2025. “Undate: Humanistic Dates for Computation: Because Reality Is Frequently Inaccurate.” Computational Humanities Research 1 (January): e5. https://doi.org/10.1017/chr.2025.10006.

Most recently, DHTech organized a symposium at DH2025 which was accompanied by proceedings for which presenters could submit a written version of their presentation. The proceedings will be published later this year, highlighting the diversity of technical work accomplished in the digital humanities.

Beyond these activities, DHTech publishes a bi-monthly newsletter, maintains a bibliography of relevant literature, hosts a job board to publicize jobs in the digital humanities tech space, and maintains the blog you are currently reading. DHTech also has two working groups, the Code Review Working Group and the Education & Training Working Group. Both groups provide and develop resources for the digital humanities tech community. The Code Review Working Group facilitates peer code review, while the Education & Training Working Group develops resources related to research software engineering best practices. Anyone interested in those topics is welcome to join the working groups.

Last but not least, DHTech maintains several community projects. These projects are maintained by DHTech community members. The Awesome Digital Humanities list was the first one that DHTech started and it is maintained by Moritz Mähr and Diego Siqueira. Undate, in contrast, is a Python package to deal with uncertain dates. It was started at a hackathon organized by DHTech and is maintained by Rebecca S. Koeser. The newest member to the family is hugo-bibliography, a Hugo plugin to add bibliographies to Hugo-based websites that is being maintained by Tatsat Jah.

What comes next?

While we have made a lot of progress over the years, advocating for the people doing technical work in DH projects and providing a space to connect and learn from each other, there is still a lot left to do. Questions we still need to answer range from “how can we help projects become sustainable and overcome the bus factor of one issue?”, over “how can we help DH projects be better prepared for any software development work they may plan”, to “how can we better educate people about best practices in research software engineering?”. We still need to reach more people, especially in areas other than North America and Europe—tell your colleagues to join us if you know anyone in these places! And in general, how can we better engage with our community members?

Additionally, there is the obvious question—whether you like it or not—what role does AI play for the work we are doing? How does it change the way we create software and how we teach and train? How can we ensure, the individuals just starting out in this field will be able to judge and troubleshoot systems developed by AI? What differences might there be to software development in other fields of research or in the private sector? So many questions, so few answers.

Lastly, one of the issues close to our hearts is how can technical aspects of DH work be better represented at the DH conference? We’ve organized events during the pre-conference workshop days but we strongly believe that this kind of work should be more visibly present at the main conference. And we are making progress—2026 will be the first year that the DH conference will have a technical track! How exciting!

What can you do?

Whatever you think will work for you! Just lurking on Slack? Go for it! Joining a few of our meetups? That would be awesome! But maybe you want to help organize a meetup or a workshop at a conference? We would love to have you help. Or maybe you are interested in the topics of our working groups? Join their channel, join the meetings. It’s really rewarding when you see things come together! And if you feel really motivated and want to be more involved in all things DHTech related, nominate yourself for the Steering Committee! It’s work, yes, but it’s also extremely rewarding!

Final Thoughts

DHTech is a great community with many amazing people. I’ve seen it grow from just a handful of excited individuals to over 300 members. I’ve met great colleagues, made some friends, worked on exciting projects and initiatives, and I think we need DHTech now more than ever. Join us if you haven’t yet, stay put if you have, and keep pushing with us if you have some energy to spare!