Complexity is a general property of cultural systems across historical
periods. Cultural life has long unfolded through dense interdependencies
among institutions and patronage regimes, media and material
infrastructures, markets and circuits of exchange, publics and
interpretive communities, and the norms and policies that govern
cultural legitimacy. Across time—whether in early modern correspondence
networks, nineteenth-century print cultures, or today’s
platform-mediated environments—these interacting forces constitute
cultural ecosystems whose dynamics are non-linear, multi-scalar, and
historically stratified. They generate emergent phenomena such as canon
formation and marginalization, reputational cascades, diffusion and
imitation, cycles of attention, unequal circulation, and durable
asymmetries of access and preservation.
Over recent decades, the increasing data mediation of cultural activity
and the rise of digital infrastructures have made some of these dynamics
more visible, more rapid, and in certain domains more measurable—while
also introducing new regimes of visibility, new feedback loops, and new
forms of inequality. Contemporary technological developments—mass
digitization, networked cultural infrastructures, machine-readable
standards, and advances in AI and data science—reconfigure cultural
ecosystems in ways that increase systemic complexity while
simultaneously extending our capacity to render that complexity
analytically tractable. They enable the formalization of cultural
knowledge, the modeling of systemic dynamics, and the testing of claims
against evidence at scales and resolutions that earlier scholarship
could only approximate. This shift makes computational approaches
methodologically salient not as a replacement for interpretation, but as
a means to articulate interpretive arguments with explicit models,
traceable assumptions, and empirical accountability.
Against this background, the conference advances a deliberately
reflexive research problem: What does it mean to study
culture—rigorously and critically—when we conceptualize cultural
ecosystems as complex systems that can be formally represented,
computationally modeled, and empirically evaluated?
A second, closely related question follows: How can we develop
computational forms of cultural inquiry that are simultaneously
system-sensitive and historically grounded—capable of formal
representation, modeling, and evaluation—without collapsing cultural
interpretation into mere measurement?
Submission Types
– Paper Presentations (20 min): Extended abstract, 1,000–1,500 words
(PDF), with title, author information, and clear research question.
– Panels / Roundtables (90 min): Rationale (250–400 words), 3–5 guiding
questions, participant bios.
– Workshops (Day 1, morning, 2-3 hours): Objectives, intended audience,
relevance to conference themes, format.
General Information
– Submissions may address any historical period and any cultural domain
(arts, heritage, cultural industries, archives, libraries, policy,
platform cultures).
– Language: English or Spanish (working language: English).
– Registration fee (accepted contributions): €180.
– Proceedings: Book of abstracts; selected contributions invited to a
special issue / edited volume.
– Submit proposals to: digitalarthistory@uma.es
Important Dates
– Submission deadline: 26 April 2026 (23:59 CET)
– Notifications: 5 May 2026
– Conference: 30 June -2 July 2026, Màlaga, Spain
More information at:
https://complexhibit.eu/es_es/complexhibit-2026-conference/