Digital Humanities has rapidly evolved in Hungary from early experiments to a robust field supported by universities and national research institutions. This panel brings together four scholars to discuss the emergence, institutionalization, and community building of DH in Hungary, highlighting historical foundations alongside recent developments. Their combined perspectives reflect on how digital scholarship in Hungary has built infrastructures not only for academic innovation, but also for public engagement, collaborative knowledge creation, and wider societal relevance.

Institutionalizing DH at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University): As Hungary’s oldest continuously operating university, ELTE has played a key role in pioneering DH locally. A Centre for Digital Humanities was established at ELTE’s Faculty of Humanities in 2017, and by 2020 a dedicated Department of Digital Humanities was in place under the leadership of Dr. Gábor Palkó. Dr. Palkó – a literary scholar and digital humanist – now heads this department and directs the National Laboratory for Digital Heritage (DH-LAB). His contribution will detail how ELTE integrated DH into its curriculum and research, and how the inter-institutional DH-LAB initiative is advancing new methodologies for processing and preserving cultural heritage. Dr. Palkó also leads the research network initiating the Hungarian DARIAH membership. These efforts exemplify how national infrastructures can serve as platforms for public-facing humanities research, linking memory institutions, libraries, and universities in shared stewardship of cultural data. In his presentation he will discuss opportunities for community building made possible by Hungary's future DARIAH membership, and how transnational collaboration and digital networks can support open and socially responsive forms of scholarship.

DH in the Research Centre for the Humanities (ELTE): Dr. Zsófia Fellegi will discuss DH efforts within ELTE-RCH’s Institute of Literary Studies of, where she leads digital philology projects. The institute’s DigiPhil group has been at the forefront of developing born-digital critical editions and semantic text annotations, ensuring that literary works and archives are accessible in digital form. These efforts align with international open science practices, implementing FAIR data principles and collaborative virtual research environments. They also demonstrate how digital editorial work can act as a form of public engagement and cultural memory work. Notably, ELTE RCH researchers have partnered in DH-LAB and earned recognition for innovative projects – for example, an AI-based system for processing manuscripts of 19th-century poet János Arany, which was awarded a national Social Innovation Prize. Dr. Fellegi’s contribution highlights how Hungary’s research infrastructure is supporting humanities scholars with tools for textual analysis, long-term preservation, and public access to cultural knowledge.

Origins of DH at the University of Debrecen: Dr. István Szekrényes will provide a historical account of how digital humanities took root at the University of Debrecen, one of Hungary’s major regional universities. He will highlight foundational efforts led by Dr. László Hunyadi, including early projects in computational linguistics, digital text editing, and humanities computing. These initiatives not only catalyzed interdisciplinary collaborations among technologists, philologists, and librarians, but also laid the groundwork for a model of socially connected scholarship that remains relevant today. Debrecen was home to the first center for the Digital Humanities in Hungary, focusing on computational linguistics and digital editing, and also hosted the country’s first international conference on computational linguistics. These developments culminated in the formal integration of DH into the university’s academic structures. Dr. Szekrényes’s talk will shed light on how these local innovations helped establish DH as a recognized discipline and contributed to the national evolution of the field.

Iván Horváth’s Legacy and DH in Szeged and Budapest: Finally, Dr. Levente Seláf’s contribution will connect the past to the present by focusing on the works and influence of Iván Horváth and their relevance to Digital Humanities. Iván Horváth was one of Hungary’s earliest adopters of computing in the humanities. He was among the first to recognize and apply the possibilities of informatics and the internet in literary scholarship, playing a defining role in digital literary studies from as early as the 1970s. Horváth’s pioneering projects included creating online critical editions and computational analyses of Hungarian texts, long before “digital humanities” became a common label. His work anticipated a participatory approach to scholarship, where digital editions were not just research outputs but tools for public engagement, reuse, and education. Dr. Seláf will discuss how Horváth’s work – like his data-driven approaches to studying poetry and historical literature – laid groundwork for DH endeavors in Szeged and beyond, particularly those envisioning cultural data as a shared resource and foster inclusive engagement with literary heritage.