30 000 events on Calenda!

There are now 30 000 events listed on Calenda, one of the most widely used online calendars for the humanities and social sciences. Our team is taking this opportunity to look back on the platform’s history and how it has changed, and to show you how it can be used as an archive.

A brief history of Calenda

Calenda was created in 2000 and initially run on a voluntary basis by a group of young history and sociology researchers, who themselves identified and published event announcements. Their aim was to keep track of what was going on in the world of academia and to facilitate the sharing and circulation of information between researchers – and doctoral students – as well as between disciplines.

Since 2003 users have been responsible for publishing new announcements, using an online form to submit their events to Calenda. The aim is therefore for users to use the platform autonomously. Thanks to this form, users retain control over their announcement by choosing how it is categorised as well as its keywords, links to references, etc. At the same time, the role of the team has moved towards structuring editorial content and validating the academic credentials of announcements. This was reflected in the creation of a professional team of staff in 2008, led by an editor in chief and supported by a platform-specific academic committee.

After several years of rapid growth, 2012 was a turning point for Calenda, with the launch of a new, more ergonomic interface and a faceted search engine to make it easier to browse the platform. Calenda also became a multilingual platform. It is now possible to browse in three languages: English, French and Portuguese. The platform tells readers if an announcement is available in other language(s), thereby enriching the browsing experience. Forty languages are on offer to the academic community and the languages in which an announcement has been published are shown as tabs on the page of each event.

As an international platform, Calenda has continued to grow and develop. It now enjoys a standing that goes well beyond the borders of the French-speaking world.

Fifteen years of online archives in the humanities and social sciences

Calenda’s success can be put down to the fact that it is a platform by the academic community for the academic community. It is now home to some 30 000 events in the humanities and social sciences (calls for papers, conferences, study days, seminars, prizes, vacancies, summer schools), covering over 100 countries between 2000 and 2015.

This success has been underpinned by a few basic principles:

• Citability: Each announcement has a stable URL and remains permanently accessible online;
• Full coverage: The Calenda team publishes an announcement for each type of event. This means that the organisers of a conference can announce a call for papers and later on announce the event’s programme. The team completes announcements if need be so as to ensure that they are as precise and exhaustive as possible.

Calenda therefore publishes the detailed programmes of academic events. In this sense it is unique in that it provides a history of research in the humanities and social sciences in the 21st century.

If you use Calenda to stay abreast of upcoming events in your areas of research, you can also use our search engine to compile a list of all the scholarly events you have attended over the last 15 years. In the same way, the platform also allows you to see which events other researchers have been involved in. This archive function can also be used as a historical source to study the changes that have taken place in research over the last 15 years, from the emergence of new topics (such as the environment) to the development of new types of events (such as summer schools, etc.).

Thank you to all our users for making Calenda a leading calendar and archive for the humanities and social sciences!

More information about Calenda on this blog

“A thousand blogs in the Hypotheses catalogue”, Delphine Cavallo, 22 June 2009
> http://oep.hypotheses.org/1612

“Summer schools make their debut on Calenda”, Calenda team, 1 August 2014
> http://oep.hypotheses.org/1586

“Calenda et les disciplines scientifiques”, Karim Hammou, 12 July 2010
> http://leo.hypotheses.org/4689

“Calenda et les événements scientifiques dans le monde”, Karim Hammou, 30 October 2011
> http://leo.hypotheses.org/7484

“Le nouveau Calenda est en ligne”, Delphine Cavallo, 26 October 2012
> https://leo.hypotheses.org/9639

• Read this post in French :  http://leo.hypotheses.org/12603