Multilingual DH in the UK and Ireland: Summary Report and Future Recommendations

This report presents a summary of the work of the Multilingual Digital Humanities in the UK and Ireland Community Interest Group (CIG), an initiative belonging to the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association. Our CIG aims to foster multilingualism within and beyond the UK and Ireland’s Digital Humanities communities and here we present our analysis of the current state of the art on this topic, with future recommendations.

Here we draw largely on the results of an online public workshop organised by the Multilingual Digital Humanities in the UK and Ireland Community Interest Group on Friday 24th November 2023. The workshop included both open participation and invited contributions from DH researchers who have taken a leading role in furthering multilingual DH research locally and internationally. Those who attended the workshop were invited to share their own ideas and recommendations for raising the visibility of and expanding multilingual DH by answering a series of questions around the languages they speak and use in their research, obstacles and barriers they faced in embedding multilingualism in their research communities, guidelines/models of best practice which influenced them or specific actions they felt the association should take to support and foster multilingual awareness and performance.

The report explores six main areas: Creating language-inclusive DH spaces; Supporting the development and dissemination of multilingual DH tools and resources; Supporting under-resourced languages of the UK and Ireland; Multilingual DH, digital cultures and digital theory; Supporting cross-sector and cross-institution multilingual DH work; Multilingual DH advocacy work in and beyond the UK and Ireland. In the conclusions, we provide initial recommendations to the UK and Ireland DH community, which we plan to build on in CIG future activities.