Harkening back to the “big tent” metaphor (e.g. Terras 2013) which characterized debates about the inclusivity of the field ten years ago, the topic of ‘openness’ in the conference theme invites associations of ‘blue skies’, endless horizons, and the sense that everything is possible – in terms of participation, dissemination and objects of observation. This notion is complicated by several issues that discourses of cultural criticism have identified in the Digital Humanities in recent years (although they are not exclusive to the field): Among them monolingualism (Fiormonte 2021), a heritage of colonialism (Risam 2019) and gender imbalance (Gao et al. 2022, 330), to name but a few.