Call for Submissions

Overview

We are delighted to invite you to present your work at the 3rd International Workshop on Digital Language Archives held online as part of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2025 on December 15, 2025. The workshop will consist of 2 live session(s) scheduled to accommodate participants from different time zones across the world. Session recordings and transcripts will be available for workshop participants.

This interactive virtual workshop seeks to address a growing need. It will explore a broad scope of issues related to digital language archives -- digital libraries that preserve, curate, and provide online access to language data. 

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers, practitioners, educators, and students from around the world who are already working or are interested in working in different areas related to collecting, archiving, curating, organizing, and providing access to born-digital or digitized language data, and evaluation of digital language archives. Workshop participants will interact and explore challenges and solutions to facilitate: 

1. discovery of information resources in digital language archives, 

2. effective and efficient access to them, and 

3. reuse of the valuable content in education and research. 

The workshop is intended to advance and sustain interdisciplinary partnerships between information professionals and researchers, linguists, historians, anthropologists, educators, language communities (notably Indigenous and underrepresented), students, and other interested audiences, which are crucial for the development of digital language archives.

The event is the third one in the series of biennial international workshops focused on digital language archives and organized as part of ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries: LangArc-2021 and LangArc-2023.

Topics

The topics that we would like to call for submissions include but are not limited to:

• user studies, including examinations of user needs, usability, and user experience evaluations in digital language archives;

• legislative, administrative, economic, and other factors affecting digital language archives;

• theory and history of digital language archives;

• archivists’ partnerships with language communities for providing access to language materials in their local cultural and historical collections;

• ethical issues in digital language archives, including issues related to providing access to legacy and family materials, materials for which provenance is unknown or sketchy;

• approaches, methods and techniques for collection development (including selection and digitization of materials, self-deposit and mediated deposit practices), information architecture, information organization, metadata, information retrieval (including multi-lingual and cross-lingual), quality assurance in digital language archives;

• evaluations (case studies and comparative analyses) of various features of digital language archives; digital language archive stewardship training and curriculum development initiatives;

• use of emerging capabilities of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools in the workflows of digital language archives.

Submission Details

You are invited to submit original contributions that are not previously published. The workshop submissions are expected to be extended abstracts between 1500 and 2000 words and would typically include:

• research question(s) and/or problem(s),

• background and brief review of relevant literature,

• methods / design of research or practical implementation project,

• findings or results (could be preliminary for submissions reporting work-in-progress) and their brief discussion,

• a statement of significance, and

• conclusions and future work (optional for the work-in-progress submissions).

The deadline to submit extended abstracts is November 2, 2025. 

Submissions will be made through the EasyChair system (submission link to be posted soon). 

To ensure quality, all submissions will be peer-reviewed. Authors are instructed not to remove their names, affiliation(s) or contact details from the text of the initial submission, and to anonymize any references that would reveal the authorship. These details will be added in the final versions of accepted submissions that will be published in the LangArc-2025 workshop proceedings.

At least one of the authors of each accepted submission must register using the JCDL 2025 registration page to present at the LangArc-2025 virtual workshop held on December 15, 2025 and have the paper published in the LangArc-2025 Proceedings that will be published online as Open Access peer-reviewed publication and available, together with LangArc-2021 and LanArc-2023 proceedings.

Important Dates

• November 2, 2025, anywhere on Earth (AoE): deadline for submission of extended abstracts (1500-2000 words)

• November 20, 2025, AoE: notification of acceptance; reviewers' feedback returned to authors of submission

• December 1, 2025, AoE: registration deadline for authors of accepted submissions (at least one author must be registered for JCDL 2025 conference at https://2025.jcdl.org/registration/)

• December 12, 2025, AoE: deadline for submission of the final version of accepted short paper (revised based on reviewers' feedback) for publication in workshop proceedings

• December 15, 2025: LangArc-2025 workshop is held

• December 15-19, 2025: JCDL 2025 main conference.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please contact organizers of this workshop:

·         Oksana L. Zavalina (Oksana.Zavalina@unt.edu), Professor, Department of Information Science, College of Information, University of North Texas.

·         Shobhana L. Chelliah (schellia@iu.edu), Professor, Department of Linguistics, Indiana University Bloomington

·         Mary Burke (MaryBurke@my.unt.edu), Department of Information Science, College of Information, University of North Texas