Call for Contributions

This year, you can contribute to VIS4DH 2025 in two ways - you can submit to the workshop’s Paper track, or you can submit to the Agora track, which calls for provocations, artworks, work in progress, or lab talks. Our call for submissions is open to all fields of the (digital) humanities and social sciences, and to all areas of visualization research and practice. The workshop is intended to put different ways of seeing, knowing, articulating, and transforming arguments into dialogue in order to foster and intensify collaborations between humanities and visualization researchers.

Visualizing Peace and Conflict

While the workshop theme for VIS4DH’25 remains open to all submissions exploring the intersection of the humanities and visualization, we especially invite contributions related to the theme Visualizing Peace and Conflict as a response to the global increase of violence and armed conflict (see ucdp.uu.se/encyclopedia). At the same time, however, submissions do not need to focus explicitly on conflict between warring parties. We also encourage submissions related to ideological, civil, social, environmental, or epistemic conflicts and the potential for their resolution to address a broader theme/trend of intensified division worldwide. The topic aims to bring together researchers in international relations, peace & conflict resolution, sociology, anthropology, digital humanities, and visualization to present and discuss how research approaches in these areas can critically inform one another and contribute to new ways of studying conflict and its peaceful resolution. Besides general contributions at the intersection of visualization and (digital) humanities that provide theoretical and/or applied perspectives, with this year’s theme, we invite work around (but not limited to) the following questions:

• How can visualization techniques make cultural phenomena which are substantially structured or driven by tensions, antagonisms, controversies, or conflicts visible and negotiable?
• How can visualization tools be designed to inform or support the resolution of conflicts?
• What visual strategies can be employed to highlight how political conflicts frequently translate into representational or interpretive conflicts (e.g., generating contested or conflicting descriptions, datasets, framings, rhetorics, or other design choices)?
• What role do disagreements play in collaborative research and visualization processes, and how might those be productively visualized rather than resolved or hidden?

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Paper Track

For our paper track, we seek works from scholars in visualization, the humanities, social science, and the arts who use visualization as part of analyzing and interrogating human culture. Submissions will present original research ideas or results as they relate to visualization for the digital humanities. Each submission should clearly state its specific contribution to this growing field of research.

Submission format

Submissions will take the form of short papers. Papers should not exceed 5 pages excluding references. Submissions are meant to describe and critically discuss work at the intersection of visualization and humanities research, including applied case studies, empirical results, and/or theoretical perspectives. We welcome contributions that highlight the difficulties (and proposed solutions) of designing visualizations in the context of humanities research and/or applying concepts from humanities research to foster visualization research and design.

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their papers at the workshop. A lively discussion with workshop participants will follow all presentations. Accepted papers will be available in PDF format from our website, and authors are expected to submit their papers to preprint servers such as arXiv.org. Accepted papers also have the option of publishing their work at IEEE Xplore.

Note that VIS 2025 will be an in-person event, and at least one author of each paper has to register for the conference and present.

Submitting a paper

Paper submissions should be in PDF format following the two-column IEEE VGTC Conference Style Template (see link for templates in Word or LaTeX). Papers should be submitted via PCS. The submission deadline is June 30, 2025 (23:59 AoE). Notifications will be sent on August 2, 2025. The camera-ready deadline to submit the final version of the papers is August 11, 2025.

Submissions to the Paper Track will be optionally double-blind. Authors wishing to submit their work double-blind should remove author information from the cover page of their submitted document and take care to avoid identifying information in the submission itself.

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Agora Track

In addition to papers, the agora track invites more open, discursive contributions — inspired by the atmosphere of ancient Greek marketplaces where citizens gathered to exchange ideas, challenge perspectives, and shape the future. Just like its historical namesake, this track is designed as a space for open dialogue, provocative positions, and cross-disciplinary exchange. Submissions to the Agora track are meant to capture alternate forms of participation beyond a standard conference paper. Potential submission types include:

• Provocation Talk: An articulation of a strongly held viewpoint or particular perspective related to this year’s workshop theme.
• Lab Showcase: An overview or exhibition of a research lab, center, or other cross-disciplinary initiative that employs visualization in the digital humanities.
• Work in Progress / Artistic Contribution: Works in progress, artworks, work demos, performances, or art criticism, especially those that engage with this year’s theme.

Submissions will be assessed based on their likelihood of showcasing engaging work, or provoking fruitful discussion. Accepted authors will be invited to present their work as part of a series of short talks, demonstrations, or panels. Accepted work will also be showcased on the workshop website. A submission will consist of a title and short abstract (max. 1 page) detailing the intended submission format and content, submitted via a Google Form by August 22 (23:59 AoE).

Note that VIS 2025 will be an in-person event and at least one presenter of the submission needs to attend the event in person and be registered for the conference.