"The stench of sewers mixed with mud, puddles, the smell of the odd crack of lightning, wind tugging at tiles, power lines, empty nests; the stifling heat behind the low ill-fitting windows... impatient, annoyed half-words of lovers embracing..." (László Krasznahorkai)

These words by last year's Nobel laureate in literature demonstrate the power of multimodality. Through the cavalcade of smells, sounds, and colours, they not only take us to an apocalyptic world; the multimodal experience also opens up imagination and brings us closer to understanding this world. Humanities scholarship has long recognised this power of multimodality. Historians have complemented their traditionally text-based research with inquiries into smells, soundscapes, and emotions. Art historians have often approached their subjects by fusing material and visual modalities. Multimodality has also shaped other humanistic fields such as literary studies, linguistics, musicology, film studies, and anthropology. Today, the latest developments in computer science promise to make multimodality as a research approach even more powerful.

This international conference at the University of Luxembourg will showcase the state of the art in multimodal research in the humanities. While the conference aims to be as broad in scope as multimodality itself, we particularly invite submissions applying computational methods. Within this focus, we encourage submissions that address, among others, the following questions:

• How can computational models help us scale up multimodal approaches?
• What are the ethical and epistemological implications of computational methods in multimodal research?
• What new insights can we gain by combining multimodal approaches with computer science?
• What methodological challenges does the computational turn in multimodal research bring about?

Beyond the computational turn, we also invite non-computational contributions from any field of the humanities. The Multimodality and Humanities conference aims to be an open forum that gives space to exchange of ideas and methods under the broad umbrella of multimodality.

We will publish the book of abstracts on Zenodo. We will also publish a selection of papers in a special issue of a peer reviewed journal in the field of Digital Humanities.

Submission format

We invite 750 word proposals for 20-minute presentations; please submit your proposal with the short bio of the main presenter to Easychair.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: 15 January, 2027
• Notification: 31 March, 2027
• Conference program published and registration open: 31 April, 2027
• Registration closing: 31 May, 2027
• Conference dates: 15 - 18 June, 2027

Organizing committee at the University of Luxembourg

• Gabor Mihaly Toth (chair)
• Ellen Charlesworth
• Silvana Lozito
• Vy Cao

Scientific Committee

• Huw Jones (Cambridge University)
• Martin Wynne (University of Oxford & CLARIN)
• Melvin Wevers (University of Amsterdam)
• Thomas Smits (University of Amsterdam)
• Taylor Arnold (University of Richmond)

Venue

The conference requires a registration fee, which does not cover travel and accommodation costs.n Participants are responsible for arranging their own travel and accommodation. However, the organizers will pre-book a limited number of rooms in a nearby hotel for speakers.

The event is supported and partially funded by the CLARIN European Research Infrastructure Consortium. CLARIN is a digital infrastructure offering data, tools and services to support research based on language resources, and is keen to support research involving datasets, tools and methods which go beyond textual resources.