Friday Frontiers Spring Series 2026

We are happy to announce the Friday Frontiers Spring Series 2026!

Session 1

Friday 6th March, 10.30am WET / 11.30am CET / 12.30pm EET

Title: “Can this be done?” New research tools for studying human interaction

Speakers: Stefan Lindgren & Carolina Larsson, Lund University

Registration: https://dariah.zoom.us/meeting/register/OTW1rrYUQpSE9cb2GLauig

Presentation description: This presentation aims to demonstrate a new workflow for using motion capture to study human movement and interaction. The workflow arose from a collaboration with Riksteatern Crea, a theatre group in Sweden that creates stage productions in sign language designed for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing audiences alike. They asked whether it is possible to transfer the complex movements of a sign-language performer to a digital avatar that could be projected onto a stage and interact in real time with both the audience and live actors. The answer was yes. Here we outline the development of a simplified, more efficient workflow for researchers studying human interaction through body movement and gesture using motion capture devices of different kinds and a free game developing software called Unreal Engine.

Session 2

Friday 10th April, 10.30am WEST / 11.30am CEST / 12.30 EEST

Title: Mytholudics: Games and Myth Speaker: Dom Ford, University of Bergen

Registration: https://dariah.zoom.us/meeting/register/829zNVouQZKUG0zr7wQmpA Presentation Description: Games create worlds made of many different elements, but also of rules, systems and structures for how we act in them. So how can we make sense of them? Mytholudics: Games and Myth lays out an approach to understanding games using theories from myth and folklore. Myth is understood not as an object or a kind of story, but as a way of expressing meaning, a way in which we produce a model for understanding the world and things in it. This talk lays out this approach and how it can help you analyse and conceptualise gameworlds. The framework helps to see games and their worlds in the whole. Stories, gameplay, systems, rules, spatial configurations and art styles can all be considered together as contributing to the meaning of the game.

Session 3

Friday 8th May, 10.30am WEST / 11.30am CEST / 12.30 EEST

Title: Feminist Digital Humanities: Intersections in Practice Speakers: Monika Barget (University of Maastricht), Jenny Bergenmar (University of Gothenburg), & Susan Schreibman (University of Maastricht)

Registration: https://dariah.zoom.us/meeting/register/1Rib0DoaQaKSYM8nwOvOiw Presentation Description: In April 2025 Feminist Digital Humanities: Intersections in Practice was published by The University of Illinois Press. It is an edited collection (which is available open access and can be downloaded here) divided into three main sections: Readings, Infrastructures and Pedagogies. The thread that runs through this collection is a theorisation of feminist DH practice as sites of possibility for exploring, exposing, and revaluing marginalized forms of knowledge production through new modes and processes of meaning making. Each chapter also reflects on what it means to be a feminist and a technologist through definitions of feminisms that are brought into conversation with DH scholarship. Feminist DH practices are presented as sites of possibility for exploring, exposing, and revaluing marginalized forms of knowledge production by enacting new modes and processes of meaning making. An overriding focus of the collection is to demonstrate how feminist lenses attuned to issues of intersectionality and gender can uncover structural inequities and present opportunities for social and intellectual change. This talk will have a three-part focus. The first part will reflect on the collection as a whole, and how it intersects with current feminist thought and DH practice. The second part will explore the Readings section through the chapter Feminist DH: A Historical Perspective Excavating the Lives of Women of the Past by Monika Barget and Susan Schreibman which explores how the Irish digital humanities project Letters 1916–1923 adopted a feminist approach to surface marginalized women’s voices in a heterogeneous historical collection of letters dominated by male voices. The third part will focus on Jenny Bergenmar’s co-authored chapter Infrastructures for Diversity: Feminist and Queer Interventions in Nordic Digital Humanities from the Infrastructures Section, which explores how DH infrastructures in institutional frameworks can make space for feminist, queer, and activist perspectives, methods, and collaborations.