This panel presents the newly established DARIAH South-East European Regional Hub (DARIAH-SEE) as a live experiment in building infrastructures of engagement in the periphery of Europe, where digital capacity is uneven, resources are fragmented, and yet cultural and research potential is strong. Engaging contributions from Croatia, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Bulgaria, the panel reflects on the first steps of the Hub from multiple national and institutional perspectives, asking what kinds of collaboration become possible – and what kinds of frictions become visible – when a region chooses to organise itself as a shared space for digital arts and humanities.

DARIAH-SEE did not emerge from a blank slate. It builds on prior efforts of the Western Balkan Hub, which demonstrated that regional coordination can foster new DARIAH memberships, establish open communication channels between ministries, universities, and GLAM institutions, and – perhaps most importantly – weave communities of researchers who recognise each other’s constraints and ambitions. At the same time, the shift from the politically loaded “Balkan” (and Middle East) label to a broader South-East European framework signals a desire for a more inclusive geography that reflects existing collaborations reaching towards Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean and other neighbouring regions.

Using this trajectory as a point of departure, the panel addresses the conference theme directly, especially contributing to the discourse of “new models of collaboration across academia, memory institutions, and society.” The panel will consider how a Regional Hub can function as a genuinely participatory infrastructure rather than merely another governance layer. What does “engagement” mean in settings where basic digitisation and infrastructure work are still ongoing, where small teams carry local heritage responsibilities while also participating in transnational projects, and where the language of capacity building can easily reproduce centre–periphery hierarchies?

Short contributions will present examples from different South-East European contexts, addressing the building, scaling, and coordination of research infrastructures and regional hubs, alongside collaborative and participatory approaches to cultural heritage (including citizen-science and crowdsourcing practices), engagement with lesser-known, “difficult” and contested heritage, gendered dimensions of memory and documentary heritage, mapping societal engagement, and the integration of research infrastructures into academic teaching, curricula, and wider capacity-building.

Taken together, these cases will be used to map diverse national “landscapes” of digital humanities and heritage, highlight gaps and asymmetries, and illustrate practical strategies for sharing expertise, co-designing educational materials, and opening clearer pathways into DARIAH for institutions in non-member countries.

By combining grounded institutional experience with a critical, reflective discussion, the panel argues that DARIAH-SEE can help reconfigure South-East Europe from a set of widening (“less developed”) digital peripheries into a connected, self-defined region that actively contributes to shaping what engaged, socially responsive research infrastructures in Europe can be.

PRESENTATIONS:

• Scaling Collaboration: Regional Hubs in the DARIAH Research Infrastructure (Koraljka Kuzman Šlogar and Dimitar Iliev)

• DARIAH-HR as a Case of Bottom-Up Infrastructure Building in South-East Europe (Anamarija Žugić Borić and Ivana Štokov)

• Digital Humanities for ancient monuments, historical documents, and shared cultural heritage over two millennia (Dobromir Dobri)

• Her Words, Our Digital Heritage: Digitising Women’s Manuscripts with DARIAH-BiH (Lana Šehović)

• Mapping societal engagement initiatives in Eastern Mediterranean (Georgios Artopoulos and Vasiliki Koukounidou)

• Integrating Research Infrastructures into Academic Practice through Educational Initiatives in DARIAH-SI (Vojko Gorjanc and Katja Meden)

• Creating common space, promoting engagement and supporting DH education through RI-based thematic activities: a reflection (Panos Constantopoulos)