Organized by: iArtHis_Lab Research Group (within the framework of the Complexhibit project) in collaboration with the Telefónica–UMA Chair.
Scientific Coordination: Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega (UMA) and M.ª Luisa Díez Platas (UNIR).
Technical Secretariat: Ángel Lumbreras Fernández (UMA)
Organizing Committee: M.ª Mar Roldán García (UMA); Bárbara Romero-Ferrón (Leuphana University); María Marcos Cobaleda (UMA); David Ruiz Torres (UMA); María Ortiz Tello (UMA).
Complexity is a general property of cultural systems across historical periods. Cultural life has long unfolded through dense interdependencies among institutions and patronage regimes, media and material infrastructures, markets and circuits of exchange, publics and interpretive communities, and the norms and policies that govern cultural legitimacy. Across time—whether in early modern correspondence networks, nineteenth-century print cultures, or today’s platform-mediated environments—these interacting forces constitute cultural ecosystems whose dynamics are non-linear, multi-scalar, and historically stratified. They generate emergent phenomena such as canon formation and marginalization, reputational cascades, diffusion and imitation, cycles of attention, unequal circulation, and durable asymmetries of access and preservation.
Over recent decades, the increasing data mediation of cultural activity and the rise of digital infrastructures have made some of these dynamics more visible, more rapid, and in certain domains more measurable—while also introducing new regimes of visibility, new feedback loops, and new forms of inequality. Contemporary technological developments—mass digitization, networked cultural infrastructures, machine-readable standards, and advances in AI and data science—reconfigure cultural ecosystems in ways that increase systemic complexity while simultaneously extending our capacity to render that complexity analytically tractable. They enable the formalization of cultural knowledge, the modeling of systemic dynamics, and the testing of claims against evidence at scales and resolutions that earlier scholarship could only approximate. This shift makes computational approaches methodologically salient not as a replacement for interpretation, but as a means to articulate interpretive arguments with explicit models, traceable assumptions, and empirical accountability.
Against this background, the conference advances a deliberately reflexive research problem:
What does it mean to study culture—rigorously and critically—when we conceptualize cultural ecosystems as complex systems that can be formally represented, computationally modeled, and empirically evaluated?
A second, closely related question follows:
How can we develop computational forms of cultural inquiry that are simultaneously system-sensitive and historically grounded—capable of formal representation, modeling, and evaluation—without collapsing cultural interpretation into mere measurement?
The conference is anchored in the Complexhibit Project, which develops methods for the semantic integration of heterogeneous sources—such as catalogues, curatorial texts, reviews, institutional records, and digital traces—to enable enriched, comparative analysis of the exhibition domain across contexts and scales. Building on this framework, the conference welcomes contributions that extend complexity-informed perspectives to broader cultural ecosystems, including arts and heritage, cultural industries, archives and libraries, education, mediation, platform cultures, communities, and cultural policy.
Complexhibit2026 also commemorates the tenth anniversary of eHAD 2016 (Málaga, 15–16 December 2016), the IV International Meeting of Researchers in Digital Art History, organized by iArtHis_Lab (University of Málaga). eHAD 2016 was an early international forum explicitly devoted to Digital Art History and to research at the intersection of art-historical inquiry, computational technologies, and digital media. y commemorating this milestone, the present conference acknowledges that genealogy and extends it—broadening the lens from Digital Art History to cultural ecosystems more generally, and from “digital” methods to computational approaches centered on cultural complexity across historical periods.
The conference is situated within a consolidated research landscape spanning (i) systems-oriented cultural theory and cultural sociology; (ii) the methodological and epistemic debates of Digital Humanities around scale, evidence, and interpretation; (iii) complexity science and network-based approaches to cultural history; and (iv) Semantic Web traditions in knowledge organization and cultural interoperability.
Computational approaches are central not as an end in themselves, but as a means to theorize, model, and evaluate cultural complexity with explicit assumptions and interpretive accountability. Therefore, “computational” designates more than a toolkit; it signals a methodological and epistemic orientation that foregrounds:
This cluster welcomes research that conceptualizes culture as a system of interacting forces unfolding across multiple scales and historical horizons. We invite work on how cultural forms, reputations, institutions, and interpretive communities emerge, stabilize, and transform over time through circulation, conflict, selection, and accumulation. Relevant topics include dynamics of visibility and invisibility, canon formation and revision, diffusion and imitation, attention cycles, and structural inequalities in access and circulation. We are especially interested in approaches that preserve historical specificity while enabling comparative or long-range analysis—through temporal modeling, event-based perspectives, or other frameworks suited to path dependence, thresholds, and turning points.
Culture becomes knowable through infrastructures of description and preservation: catalogues, archives, standards, classification regimes, and institutional policies. This cluster invites contributions that examine how such infrastructures shape cultural memory and legibility, including their epistemic and political consequences. We welcome work on formal representations of cultural knowledge and the challenges of integrating heterogeneous sources across institutions and time: interoperability, conceptual modeling, data quality, and the management of uncertainty. We particularly value contributions that foreground evidence and traceability—provenance, versioning, missingness, and the limits of inference—so that computational claims can be evaluated as historically situated knowledge practices.
Culture is also an ecosystem of discourse: criticism, catalogues, press, scholarship, correspondence, institutional writing, and platform-mediated conversation. This cluster invites research that investigates interpretation at scale—how meanings, valuations, and controversies circulate and become authoritative across genres, institutions, languages, and historical contexts. We welcome work that treats discourse not merely as “textual data,” but as a site where cultural power, legitimacy, and epistemic authority are negotiated.
Computational cultural inquiry raises questions of responsibility that are inseparable from methodological rigor. This cluster foregrounds the governance conditions under which cultural data is produced, structured, maintained, and operationalized, including legal constraints, institutional adoption, and the political consequences of automation. We invite contributions that address rights and licensing, sustainability of infrastructures, and critical analyses of bias and epistemic inequality—especially how standards, datasets, and models may reproduce historical exclusions or generate new forms of invisibility.
Submissions should engage with at least one of the following dimensions—ideally integrating several—while maintaining clarity about interpretive stakes and methodological boundaries:
The event is designed to converge formal representation (semantic structures), systemic modeling (complexity-sensitive methods), and critical interpretation (theory-informed reading) under explicit regimes of evaluation, uncertainty, and responsibility. Therefore, while the conference welcomes datasets, visualizations, and analytic pipelines, it is especially interested in work that leverages them to advance complexity-driven explanations of cultural ecosystems. Submissions are encouraged to articulate a complexity-oriented research question (e.g., involving feedback, emergence, non-linearity, path dependence, or multi-scale structure) and to show how computational approaches support formalization, modeling, and evaluation. Contributions that translate outputs into a coherent systemic argument—grounded in historical context and interpretive accountability—will be particularly well aligned with the conference scope.
Lynn Rother is Lichtenberg-Professor for Provenance Studies and founding director of the Provenance Lab at Leuphana University (Lüneburg, Germany). Her research combines art history, museum practice, and data science to investigate the social lives of art objects, with a focus on provenance, restitution, and critical approaches to cultural infrastructures. Previously, she held research positions at The Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Berlin State Museums.
Carlos Eduardo Maldonado is Professor of Complexity Science at Universidad El Bosque (Bogotá, Colombia) and a leading figure in complexity studies in Latin America. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from KU Leuven (Belgium) and has conducted postdoctoral research at the universities of Pittsburgh, Cambridge, and the Catholic University of America. His work addresses the theoretical and philosophical foundations of complexity science, non-classical logics, and the epistemology of complex systems.
We invite research papers and scholarly contributions that advance the study of cultural complexity through computational means. Submissions may include, but are not limited to:
Submission requirements:
Panels are conceived as structured scholarly conversations, not as sequences of mini-lectures. Panels should be designed to consolidate:
Panels that bring together disciplinary plurality (complexity science, digital humanities, semantic web, NLP, cultural theory, GLAM research and practice) and that aim for concrete outcomes are particularly encouraged.
Format: 90 minutes total, with an explicit plan for moderation and audience engagement.
Submission requirements:
The conference will host a limited number of hands-on workshops on Day 1 (morning), prior to the official opening in the afternoon. Workshops are intended as intensive sessions focused on methods, infrastructures, and transferable skills relevant to the conference themes—for example: knowledge graph construction and validation, ontology design for cultural domains, NLP pipelines for cultural corpora, temporal or network analysis, evaluation and error analysis, provenance and uncertainty modeling, or reproducible workflows for cultural data.
Workshops should combine conceptual framing with practical components (e.g., guided exercises, demos, shared datasets, notebooks) and should be designed for an academic audience with heterogeneous backgrounds.
Recommended duration: 2 hours.
Submission requirements:
Optional but encouraged: link to draft materials or prior versions of the workshop, accessibility considerations, and plans for participants without a technical setup.
Authors of accepted papers, panels, and workshops will be required to pay a conference fee of €180. The fee covers conference participation and organizational costs. Further details on registration procedures and deadlines will be provided in the acceptance notification.
Book of abstracts; selected contributions invited to a special issue / edited volume (subject to editorial review).
