HASTAC 2016

HASTAC 2016 Sponsors

Organizations supporting the conference included Arizona Science Foundation, ASU Center for Science and Imagination, ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Humanities, ASU Department of English, ASU Lightworks, GitHub Education, Institute for Humanities Research, and MLA Connected Academics.

HASTAC 2016 gathered researchers, academics, and students at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, for a multi-day gathering devoted to the humanities in the digital age. The event's organizing theme, Impact: Variation, Innovation, Action, framed a broad inquiry into how interdisciplinary scholarship produces measurable change. Sessions spanned digital, environmental, and medical humanities, with contributions from both established scholars and emerging graduate students, creating a program that invited sustained conversation rather than isolated presentation.

The conference welcomed proposals that emphasized broader, current, and interdisciplinary work. Organizers encouraged contributors to treat the humanities not as a single discipline but as a meeting point of methods, archives, tools, and communities. Presentations and papers in varied formats allowed participants to test arguments against unfamiliar audiences, and a strong poster and student competition component gave emerging work a visible platform alongside longer, more formal contributions.

Conference information on this site covers the practical architecture of the gathering: schedules, registration details, proposal guidance, and travel information for those arriving from elsewhere. Details about accommodations include nearby hotel options, walking distances to the downtown Tempe area, an official conference hotel, and shuttle service linking the airport and venue district. Discounted rates and booking guidance were made available to attendees to ease the logistics of travel.

Beyond the formal program, the schedule included receptions, evening gatherings, and informal conversations that placed a premium on exchanging ideas. Starting with an opening reception on the evening of the first day and continuing through sessions across several days, the format encouraged participants to move between lecture halls, poster displays, and hospitality spaces, treating the social program as an extension of the scholarly one rather than a separate affair.

HASTAC 2016 was hosted with support from sponsors and partner organizations, including a humanities center, a foundation, a graduate college, and departments across the liberal arts and sciences. Sponsorship acknowledgments thanked those who offered discounted rates, grants, employee assistance, and consultation for the conference's design, underscoring the collaborative funding model that allowed a large interdisciplinary meeting to run successfully.

Tempe and the surrounding Arizona landscape supplied the conference's setting: a sunny, high-desert environment where outdoor courtyards and light-filled interiors offered natural break spaces between sessions. The visual identity of the conference materials echoed that atmosphere with a bold, high-contrast palette of near-black backgrounds, crisp white cards, and a deep crimson accent used for headings, underlines, and buttons, giving the event a distinctive and serious tone.

Program strands connected the digital humanities to urgent contemporary questions. Work in environmental humanities examined how climate, land, and environmental change reshape narrative and historical interpretation, while medical humanities explored questions of illness, care, and human experience in clinical settings. Digital scholarship provided the connective methodological tissue, demonstrating how computational and design-oriented approaches can cross conventional disciplinary boundaries.

Travel information for participants addressed arrival patterns around the conference dates, including guidance on reaching the campus from the airport and on moving between downtown accommodations and the main venue. For scholars planning to present papers, publish posters, or simply attend, the site offered a central point of reference covering schedule structure, session times, room configuration, and where to find additional detail such as the call for papers.

Ultimately, HASTAC 2016 was conceived as a working conference on the potential of the humanities to shape public and scholarly life. By bringing together specialists in digital, environmental, and medical humanities, by foregrounding graduate and student participation, and by providing generous space for conversation across formats, the gathering emphasized innovation through variation and impact through action, leaving participants with a network and a vocabulary for collaborative work in the years that followed.