Introduction

In July 2017, McGill University and Université de Montréal hosted the 2017 conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). The four local organizers (Forest, Raynor, Sinatra, and Sinclair) welcomed over 900 delegates on the McGill campus in downtown Montreal for 4 days of intellectual exchanges, a deep engagement with practical and theoretical aspects of Digital Humanities, and the question of open access highlighted in our chosen theme ‘Access/Accès’. This was the first time two Quebec universities jointly hosted the annual Digital Humanities (DH) gathering, and only the third time the conference had taken place in Canada since the founding of ADHO over 30 years ago (first in Toronto in 1997, and then in Victoria in 2005). The conference was also officially bilingual in French and English for the first time, since Canada is a bilingual country. The ADHO is an umbrella organization whose goals are to promote and support digital research and teaching across arts and humanities disciplines, drawing together humanists engaged in digital and computer-assisted research, teaching, creation, dissemination, and beyond, in all areas reflected by its diverse membership. ADHO supports initiatives for publication, presentation, collaboration, and training; recognizes and supports excellence in these endeavours; and acts as a community-based consultative and advisory force. In doing so, ADHO embraces and coordinates activity across its constituent organizations: the European Association for Digital Humanities (founded in 1973 as the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (founded in 1978), the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques (founded in 1986 as the Consortium for Computers in the Humanities/Consortium pour ordinateurs en sciences humaines), centerNet, the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, Humanistica: l’association francophone des humanités numériques, Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa, Red de Humanidades Digitales, and the Taiwanese Association for Digital Humanities. The overarching goal of our conference was to bring together established and emerging leaders to take stock of what Digital Humanities looks like today and envision its future directions. Related, specific objectives were to (1) nurture knowledge exchanges and connections between scholars and graduate students, as well as underemployed community members, from all around the world; (2) highlight cutting edge experiments from within and beyond the field; and (3) showcase the relevance of Digital Humanities for public scholarship. To achieve these objectives, the programme committee and the local organizers invited contributions that focus on knowledge mobilization, public-facing scholarship, collaboration among scholars and communities, open access to code, software, research and results, and aspects of digital humanities research and publication involving accessibility technologies. As with other DH conferences, the main audience of our event comprised established and new scholars, including students, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. Presenters and attendees had opportunities to contribute to, and benefit from, state of the art Digital Humanities scholarship and to shape a discussion of the field’s future. A conference like ours was an important mix of theoretical and practical work and represents an opportunity for wide-ranging dialogue, information gathering, and comparative analysis outside of daily pressures and constraints. The selection of papers published in this special issue fittingly gives an overview of the final programme prepared by the Program committee under the leadership of Diane Jakacki. There will also be a separate publication of posters presented at the conference for the first time this year (to be published on the Érudit platform in the fall of 2019).

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