Workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities 2026 (COMHUM 2026)

9-10 September 2026

The third edition of the COMHUM workshop will take place on 9 and 10 September 2026 at the University of Lausanne (UNIL)

Special track: computation and video games

Without doubt, the digital has become an integral part of our everyday experience, whether it is due to our use of digital devices, the ever-increasing amounts of data collected and processed by said devices, or the prevalence of LLMs and AI agents in most websites or softwares. Academia and the humanities have never been more digital, which pushes digital humanities to frontiers beyond computational approaches to humanities or the application of humanities research methods to the digital. In this context, the COMHUM workshop series positions itself as an international forum primarily devoted to the following research questions:

(1) which formal or computational approaches can help address the particular challenges posed by the growing presence of the digital in humanities, e.g., digital artifacts, software, LLMs, and computer-generated data? In these cases and beyond,

(2) which methods are most appropriate to tackle the challenges posed by humanities research and how can they be applied to concrete research questions?

The first day will be devoted to the specific topic of computation and video games. This topic explores computational methods for analyzing video games as well as humanities approaches to computation in video games. It has a number of ramifications in a variety of disciplines, including software studies, critical code studies, literary analysis, digital humanities, and game studies. It is of particular interest for a number of research initiatives at UNIL and in neighboring institutions. COMHUM 2026 will be a perfect opportunity to bring together researchers from various communities studying video games using computational approaches or studying computation in video games, to review the state of the art in this domain and to outline its future developments.

In the spirit of the previous editions of the COMHUM workshop, the second day will be open to submissions on any topic pertaining to theoretical or applied research on computational methods for humanities research broadly conceived.

The program will consist of invited and contributed talks. The official language of the workshop is English. Contributions can be submitted in English or French.

Topics

The topics of the workshop are divided into two tracks. The special track focuses on formal and computational approaches to video games as digital artifacts as well as humanities approaches to computation in video games. This can include research related to the development and use of computational methods for video game analysis, including reverse engineering, decompiling and data collection, or analysis of computation and the emergence of code in video games, including their influence on narrative, gameplay and design.

Topics in the special track include, but are not limited to:

• Methods for data extraction in video games (e.g. telemetry, assets, models, code)
• Computational methods for video game analysis (including spatial, representational and narrative aspects)
• Analyses of intersection of computational approaches and the study of video games
• Humanities approaches to computation of video games (including software)

In addition, an open track welcomes submissions on formal and computational aspects related to the development and use of computational methods in the humanities in general (with a particular interest for the disciplines represented in the Faculty of Arts of UNIL, such as literature, linguistics, history, history of art, cinema studies, archaeology or philosophy).

Topics in the open track include, but are not limited to:

• Theoretical issues of formal modeling in the humanities
• Knowledge representation in the humanities
• Data structures addressing specific problems in the humanities (including text and markup)
• Computational methods in the humanities (e.g., for language and literary studies,  historical studies, or multimodal data)
• Applications of computer vision, image analysis and spatial analysis in the humanities

Submissions

We invite researchers to submit abstracts of 500 to 1000 words (excluding references). Abstracts will be reviewed double-blind by the members of the program committee, and all submissions will receive at least two independent reviews. Abstracts submitted at review stage must not contain the authors’ names, affiliations, or any information that may disclose the authors’ identity.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to present their research at the workshop as a talk, and the abstracts will be published in the book of abstracts of the workshop.

The abstracts must use the ACL format (LaTeX, Word). Abstracts must be submitted electronically in PDF format. For abstract submissions we use EasyChair.

Authors of accepted contributions can be invited, after the conference, to submit a full paper version (6–16 pages), which, after peer-review, will be published in an open-access, electronic conference volume endowed with persistent identifiers (to be confirmed soon).