The cross-institutional Digital Curriculum Project has since 2020 been funded by the Danish Ministry of Education and Science. We are therefore happy to announce that Mikkel Leihardt, Director General for the Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science, will deliver the opening remarks at the conference. He will be setting the stage for the conference by highlighting the important issues facing higher education in Denmark in light of the ongoing digitalization of society. Through his talk, we will learn more about how the ministry has worked to put digital competencies on the national agenda, and what are seen as relevant future strategic efforts.

Teaching digital competencies involves more than just developing relevant professional skills. It also encompasses a societal and civic dimension, requiring that students gain the ability to understand and engage thoughtfully and proactively with digital issues that extend beyond their core expertise. 

In his keynote, Peter Lauritsen, Professor in Science and Technology Studies and Center Director of SHAPE, will explore how digitalization is not only a matter of acquiring job-related technical skills but also includes the capability to reflect on and respond to broader digital challenges. He will discuss strategies for fostering digital citizenship through education, emphasizing the importance of integrating both technical and civic competencies to prepare individuals for active and informed participation in a digital society. 

Over the past decade, digital humanities has had a varied impact, both across and within disciplines. However, a clearer understanding is emerging regarding the essential methods and resources that students should be introduced to. Additionally, there is growing insight into how educators can enhance student engagement by integrating their own research into teaching. In this talk, I will draw on examples from comparative literature to illustrate how disciplines can evolve—rather than undergo a revolution—through multiple levels of engagement with digital research methods.

Embedding digital competencies in educational programs places new demands on technical infrastructure, support, and competency development amongst educators. The variety of the technological landscape and associated legal issues call for ongoing reflection, exchange of experiences, and cross-institutional collaboration. 

In his keynote, Kristoffer Nielbo, Director of the Centre for Humanities Computing, will discuss how him and his group are navigating this problem space and are pioneering digital solutions for research-based teaching in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

New research methods and questions, emerging alongside generative AI, demand a rethinking and adaptation of the curriculum in educational programs. This applies to the competencies students should acquire and how generative AI can be embedded into the curriculum to enable students to build the desired competencies. 

In their keynote, Niels Lehmann and Tina Bering Keiding will address this complex problem space and unpack how the digital curriculum is shaped by generative AI but also will be shaped through collegial competence development, curricular models, and leadership.

Cities are on track to become the primary environment for human groups – a process that started millennia ago and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. They are also known for their spectacular tendency to collapse, sometimes taking whole empires down with them. Archaeology provides us with the longest and most comprehensive record of urban activity, evolution, and decline, but it's a record that has not yet been explored to its full potential. To understand the complex processes and webs of interactions that shape the ups and downs of urban dynamics, we need vast amounts of humanities data and robust formal methods. 

In this keynote, Izabela Romanowska, Senior Researcher at CHC, will dive into the world of humanities' big(gish) data and computational methods that allow us to draw lessons on urban resilience from the past that are directly applicable to the present. She will discuss aggregating large comparative datasets across continents and millennia, using top-notch simulation methods, and counteracting the common view of the past as a collection of interesting yet largely irrelevant anecdotes. In the process, Izabela will introduce a recently launched ERC project "The Model City" and discuss why combining humanities skills and a computational toolkit is a winning formula to address some of the biggest challenges we face nowadays.