Over the last decade the annual Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts (DRHA) conferences have constructed an unusual kind of meeting place for the Humanities: a space in which researchers, curators, and distributors of digital resources could meet and share perspectives on their complementary agendas. Last year, that forum was expanded to include participants from the creative and performing arts, giving the event a new flavour and a new direction. This year, the conference aims to explore further major issues at the interface between traditional humanities scholarship and the creative arts, by focusing on their differing or complementary approaches to the deployment of digital technologies. Can the Arts and the Humanities share expertise? Are they divided by a common tongue? To what extent are they developing common technical solutions to different problem areas? As in previous years, the conference will articulate these questions by showcasing the very best in current practice across the widest spectrum of digital applications in the arts and humanities and by fostering informed but accessible debate amongst professionals.

Ron Herrema, De Montfort University
THE AUTOMATED 8-CHANNEL AMERICA BLESSER

The Programme Committee for DRHA 2007 is now soliciting imaginative and provocative contributions for the conference addressing such topics as:

the benefits and the challenges of using digital resources in creative work, in teaching and learning, and in scholarship;
the challenges and opportunities associated with scale and sustainability in the digital arena;
new insights and new forms of expression arising from the integration of digital resources in the arts, humanities, and sciences;
social and political issues surrounding digital resource provision in the context of global ICT developments;
the implications of "born-digital" resources for curators, consumers, and performers;
training methods and best practice for digital arts and humanities practitioners.

Other themes include: interactivity and performance; digital media in time and space; integration and deployment of existing digital resources in new contexts; policies and strategies for digital deployment, both commercial and non-commercial; cataloguing and metadata aspects of resource discovery; encoding standards; intellectual property rights; funding, cost-recovery, and charging mechanisms; digitisation techniques and problems.

Format: The conference will take up three intensive days, comprising presentation of academic papers and technical reports, performance and installation events, software and product demonstrations, debates and training sessions. The atmosphere will be informal, the discussion energetic. Leading practitioners and representatives of key funding agencies, such as the Arts Councils, the AHRC, the JISC, and the AHDS will be amongst the participants. We hope that from this occasion a new consensus will emerge based on real life experience of the application of digital techniques and resources in the Humanities and Arts.

Timetable: Proposals are now invited for academic papers, themed panel sessions and reports of work in progress.Your proposal should be no fewer than 500 words and no longer than 2000; closing date for proposals is May 20th 2007. All proposals will be reviewed by an independent panel of reviewers, and notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 13th June 2007. All accepted proposals will be included in the Conference preprint volume, and will also be considered for a post-conference publication.

Cost and accommodation: Further information can be found on the Registration and Accommodation page.

Sponsors: The conference is sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Data Service.

For more official information, please visit http://www.dartington.ac.uk/drha07/index.asp?uid=5.