The effort to establish the alliance began in Tübingen, Germany, at the ALLC/ACH conference in 2002: a steering committee was appointed at the ALLC/ACH meeting in 2004, in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the executive committees of the ACH and Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing approved the governance and conference protocols at the 2005 meeting in Victoria, Canada. The Association for Computers and the Humanities was also included. In 2007, the Alliance Steering Committee voted to enfranchise The Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs of Canada. In 2012, centerNet, a network of digital humanities centers, became a "constituent organization" affiliated with ADHO, followed by the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities in 2013 and the French-speaking Association for Digital Humanities, Humanistica, in 2016. ADHO gained legal status as the Stichting ADHO Foundation in 2013.
Mission
The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations is an umbrella organisation 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; recognises and supports excellence in these endeavours; and acts as a community-based consultative and advisory force. Members in ADHO societies are those at the forefront of areas such as textual analysis, electronic publication, document encoding, textual studiesand theory, new media studies and multimedia, digital libraries, applied augmented reality, interactive gaming, and beyond. Members include researchers and lecturers in humanities computing and in academic departments such as English, History, French, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Theatre, Music, Computer Science, and Visual Arts and resource specialists working in libraries, archival centers, and with humanities computing groups.
Conference
The Alliance oversees a joint annual conference, which began as the ACH/ALLC conference, and is now known as the Digital Humanities conference.
The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations sponsors special interest groups to facilitate the sharing of ideas about new and innovative problems. Current SIGs include:
AVinDH for Audiovisual materials and their use in the digital humanities
GO::DH, or Global Outlook :: Digital Humanities, to increase global communication and collaboration
GeoHumanities to focus on spatial perspectives, which can also be linked temporally
Text Technology'', a free electronic journal published by McMaster University published from 2004 through 2007
Awards
Roberto Busa Prize honors leaders in the field of humanities computing and is given in honor of Italian Father Roberto Busa who won the first award in 1998 at Debrecen, Hungary. Subsequent winners included:
Antonio Zampolli Prize is awarded every three years to an important project or for a major accomplishment. Paul Fortier Prize is given to the best young scholar paper at the annual Digital Humanities conference. Lisa Lena Opas-Hanninen Young Scholar Prize recognizes a young scholar for their scholarship or contribution using digital technology at a humanities conference.
