Digital Humanities 2016: What the Conference Challenges Mean for the DH Community

The paper shows how digital humanities develop in the context of Digital Humanities 2016 conference, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). The aim of the paper is 1) to demonstrate how the conference grew out of meetings in the UK and USA, to show the conflict between the periphery and central academic traditions, and to emphasize the impact of academic standards on the conference paper selection; 2) to review several DH2016 papers including those presented by 12 Russian authors. After a brief review of the papers selected for publishing in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities following DH2014 in Lausanne (Switzerland), the paper considers potential reasons for a slow uptake of Digital Humanities conference attendees working beyond the USA, Canada and Western Europe. The second part of the paper reviews several digital humanities fields looking at several papers including those of 12 Russian authors. The conclusion states that the relative growth of Russian speakers at the annual ADHO's conference shows that Russian DH community is quite able to meaningfully contribute to digital humanities development.