Applied Digital Humanities: Calling for a more engaged Digital Humanities

When the Russian Federation attacked Ukraine in February 2022, a handful of Digital Humanities scholars were quick to react. Anna Kijas, Quinn Dombrowski, and Sebastian Majstorovic launched the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online volunteer initiative (SUCHO). Soon SUCHO would connect over 1,500 volunteers and save over 51 TB of data constituting contemporary Ukrainian online cultural heritage. Later, they would also sent equipment to various institutions in Ukraine, including archives and museums. The humanitarian impact of this initiative is hard to overstate and it motivates to think about the nature and purposes of Digital Humanities. In this paper we want to call for an Applied Digital Humanities – a Digital Humanities research that emphasizes its humanities perspective; it is research with a humanities purpose, aiming to tackle real-world challenges by drawing on innovative digital methods and approaches.