2026Q3 Reports: SIGHUM

2026 Report SIGHUM

Summary SIGHUM brings together researchers interested in computational linguistics applications to all aspects of the humanities and the social sciences, and provides a forum for communication between ACL researchers and other communities and organisations acting in the digital humanities and computational social sciences. The board, elected in July 2024, continues to strengthen the group’s impact and broaden the community through a variety of initiatives and activities.

Membership The group membership continued to grow, going from 425 members on 14 June 2023 to 469 members on 28 June 2024, to 492 members in June 2025, to now reaching 519 members in June 2026. Our mailing list ([1](https://groups.google.com/g/sighum)) remains actively used to disseminate information and foster community engagement, with a consistent number of messages exchanged.

Officers President: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Saarland University (elected July 2024) Secretary: Lorella Viola, University of Luxembourg (elected July 2024) Liaison Representative: Craig Messner, University of South Carolina (elected July 2024)

Activities In addition to regular board meetings, SIGHUM continued its commitment to engaging the community through events and outreach:

The LaTeCH-CLfL Workshop 2026 was held successfully in Rabat at EACL, serving as the annual workshop and hosting the SIGHUM business meeting. SIGHUM will move its social media presence to BlueSky to better reach its members. A community-wide survey was conducted to understand members’ demographics and interests, informing future planning. The results were presented at the business meeting.

Plans Looking ahead, SIGHUM aims to endorse more events based on community suggestions and to further engage with emerging research areas and collaborations. We have also undertaken a focused endeavor to better represent the community at the main conference events. This includes ongoing discussions among key actors working on and organizing workshops and tutorials related to language variation and change, aiming to increase visibility and coordination of these research strands within the broader ACL community.

Funding We are pleased to announce that we obtained funding of 5k USD from Schmidt Sciences, ensuring continued support for interdisciplinary and impactful research at the intersection of computational linguistics and the humanities. This year, we used some of this funding for our invited speaker.

Website and social media The group’s website ([2](https://sighum.wordpress.com/)) continues to provide information on officers, events, policies, and blog updates.

Mailing list The SIGHUM mailing list remains a core communication channel, hosted via Google Groups: [3](https://groups.google.com/g/sighum/)