Conference proceedings consist of collections of papers presented at academic conferences and workshops. Proceedings allow for the dissemination and citation of work that has been presented to and reviewed by experts within a field. Proceedings can be published as a special issue or section of an existing journal, as a printed book, or—as is increasingly the case in many fields—in special-purpose digital publication venues. Papers within proceedings are normally peer-reviewed as part of the conference itself, written in formats that can be easily adapted to archival forms (i.e., LaTeX converted into PDF or Markdown converted into PDF or HTML), and are not copyedited. These features make them ideal for quickly disseminating research in an open platform. The role of conference proceedings differs significantly across fields. For example, while for many social sciences proceedings are considered pre-cursors to longer papers in the more prestigious journals, in computer science proceedings have become the de facto form of publication in most domains.
Open platforms for conference proceedings are frequently hosted by scholarly associations. For example: IEEE Conference Proceedings Archive, the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) Anthology, and the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) International Conference Proceedings Series. There is currently no comparable option for proceedings for DH conferences and workshops. This has left conference organizers to either (a) self-host their proceedings without the benefits of scholarly indices or other tools for search and discovery, or (b) to have to work within the strict confines of adjacent fields to publish within existing archives. We expect the Anthology of Computers and the Humanities to fill these gaps.