This paper examines the development of a public exhibition opening in September 2026 at the National Library of Ireland, designed to create new pathways for heritage preservation and public engagement. Beatrice's Irish Voice is a hybrid, digitally-enhanced exhibition paired with an open workshop series, forming part of a multi-venue program spanning Dublin's leading cultural institutions, including Trinity College Dublin, the Museum of Literature Ireland, and the Italian Cultural Institute in Dublin. The exhibition invites audiences to explore centuries of cultural exchange between Italy and Ireland by examining how Irish women engaged with Dante and Italian literary culture as readers, travelers, and writers.

The paper reflects on the key decisions, challenges, and innovative solutions that emerged during the National Library of Ireland's development of new methodological approaches to digitally-enhanced participatory scholarship.

I begging by illustrating the bespoke digitization project designed in collaboration with National Library of Ireland curators. The initiative centers on Irish and British women's Dante scholarship from 1875 to 1938, including works by Julia Kavanagh, Eleanor Hull, Marion Mulhall, Rose Nolan Ferrall, and Alice Curtayne. These translations, critical studies, and comparative scholarship reveal forgotten networks of cultural exchange during periods of nation-building.

The project expands the library's digitized collection of rare materials while creating a dynamic digital exhibit accessible through library e-readers and displays. The exhibition employs a hybrid model that combines physical panels displaying original objects with digital infrastructure featuring interactive timelines and geographic maps. By interlinking this material with my Leverhulme-funded Modern Beatrices Archive (http://modernbeatricesarchive.org/), the exhibition situates these works within the broader transnational formation of Dante's female readership and women's dantismo across Britain, Ireland, Italy, and the United States.

I then turn to the public workshops, which will extend the digitization project by engaging participants in developing a digital story and time map of the Dante Society of Ireland (1908-1912). Using ancestry records, urban maps, and archival documents, participants analyze meeting reports across seven Irish newspapers (Evening Irish Times, Irish Times, Irish Independent, Freeman's Journal, Dublin Daily Express, Irish Weekly, and Ulster Examiner) to reconstruct membership networks through the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

This archival work reveals connections between Irish Dante scholarship and Italian cultural diplomacy, tracing the visiting scholars and political figures who shaped transnational intellectual exchange. Mirroring the Society's own participatory ethos, the workshops transform archival discovery into collective investigation, interrogating whose cultural contributions have been preserved and how institutional networks shaped Irish literary culture. By doing so, they demonstrate how digital humanities infrastructure can foster ongoing community scholarship rather than remaining a static resource.

Ultimately, the paper reflects on how the project shapes collective memory by involving communities in reinterpreting heritage and making marginalized voices accessible. It offers national libraries a model for preserving fragile collections while creating engaged, public-facing scholarship that delivers tangible public value.

How can digital archives help societies confront contested pasts without merely replicating traditional historiography? Designing participatory digital commons can be a way to transcend the concept of digital archives as static repositories but make them sites of active, multi-voiced memory. Ideally, digital archives also challenge dominant interpretation frameworks and offer an important counterpoint to extractive (social media) platforms. This paper explores how the Irish Letters 1916-1923 project, through its infrastructure and ethos, can serve as a model for participatory knowledge infrastructures.

Letters 1916-1923 is Ireland’s first participatory digital humanities project begun in September 2013 as Letters 1916. The digital archive gathered correspondence (including postcards and telegrams) dated between November 1915 and October 1916, with the Irish Easter Rising (April 1916) as its midpoint. The project expanded its time frame several years later to encompass much of the Irish Revolutionary period. At the time of writing there are approximately 7000 letters in the database (with approximately 4500 fully transcribed and available to the public). Choosing letters as the focus of the project was prescient. As a genre, the epistolary form created a strong historical connection and emotional bond to the lives of those who lived a century ago.

In creating the Letters 1916-1923 digital archive, an iterative and participatory design approach was taken (Schreibman, et al., 2018). Project collaborators ranged from individuals interested in the period, educators and their students, families who held letters wishing to make the lives of their relations part of a national narrative, to those in institutions who wished their holdings to be part of a larger corpus. As it invited the public to engage with letters as both historical artifacts and personal narratives, the project disrupted what Luc Boltanski has termed the "illusion of innocence", a willful ignorance that enables established narratives to suppress uncomfortable truths (Barget, 2018). As such, Letters 1916-1923 encourages collaborators and users to confront the many complexities of Ireland’s revolutionary period by design.

Letters 1916-1923 moved beyond the crowdsourcing model, which has been criticised as extractive when work gets outsourced to those with lesser skill than individuals within the academy and/or the project team (Open Objects, 2012). Rather, Letters 1916-1923 invited public co-creation through a robust outreach agenda, increasingly focusing on digital literacy through country-wide workshops, with a focus on reaching out to those who are systemically technically marginalised. This established public involvement as a scholarly practice that challenged limiting beliefs about who our scholarship is for and embraced the role of the humanities as a public good.

The mutual benefit was immense. Not only did Letters 1916-1923 fulfill its goal to convey a mosaic of life lived, messy and complex, it was instrumental in reclaiming or reviving unheard voices and lost narratives. In this way, the project sets a model for a digital archive that does not just study the public good but enacts it, which ties in with current re-discoveries of the commons in fields as diverse as ecology and economy. (Bollier, 2025).

Our paper will outline the recent developments and current status of Nomisma.org, with a particular focus on the opportunities and challenges inherent in maintaining a community-based digital infrastructure. In addition to reporting on progress in terms of content and technology, we address a number of internal and less visible issues that are nonetheless central to the long-term sustainability and scholarly usefulness of Nomisma.org. The paper will focus on the following key aspects:

• Expanding in different directions: While Nomisma.org started mainly with Greek and Roman numismatics – where we will also present the most recent developments – it has increasingly incorporated other fields, such as Celtic as well as medieval and modern European numismatics, and forgeries. At the same time, there is a growing emphasis on linking numismatic objects more closely to their archaeological contexts, thereby strengthening connections between numismatics and material culture research more broadly.

• Handling of visual aspects: This includes symbols, monograms, and other visual elements on numismatic objects, and the question of how such features can be described and shared across different projects. In this context, the Imagines Nummorum project (https://www.imagines-nummorum.eu/en) is developing a hierarchical iconographic thesaurus for Greek numismatics, providing a more fine-grained semantic framework for the description and analysis of coin imagery.

• Handling of uncertain and vague statements: While this is a general aspect and not bound to numismatics, it is particularly relevant to the field. Nomisma.org has been developing and discussing approaches to and solutions for this problem for more than a decade. Collaborations with other initiatives, such as the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) in Germany, especially NFDI4Objects (https://www.nfdi4objects.net/en/about/), aim to further refine these solutions and ensure interoperability with related data infrastructures.

• Internal restructuring efforts: The expansion into multiple numismatic subfields has led to a growing number of concepts within the Nomisma.org ID namespace (vocabulary), often with terms whose meanings vary across scholarly traditions. For example, the word 'stater' carries different meanings in Greek and Celtic numismatics. Because of this, Nomisma.org provides two different IDs for it. In parallel, the ontology has been extended over time with additional properties, prompting a recent reorganisation to improve clarity and usability.

• Increasing need for documentation and training: In response to the growing complexity of the infrastructure, there is an increasing demand to develop enhanced documentation and training materials for the utilisation of Nomisma.org. This endeavour is undertaken within the framework of the Nomisma.org Cookbook (https://nomisma.hypotheses.org/nomisma-org/the-nomisma-org-cookbook), which serves as a compendium of best practices and practical guide for users and contributors.

This paper explores how domain-specific bibliographic metadata can act as a tool for cultural transformation within libraries and digital humanities infrastructures, with a particular emphasis on queer literature and its publics. Drawing on the Swedish project Queerlit and on ongoing international collaborations around the Linked Open Data thesaurus Homosaurus, the paper demonstrates how participatory metadata practices can foster inclusive and ethical resources for the co-construction of queer literary history and cultural memory.

In the project Queerlit, a bibliographic database containing Swedish queer fiction was created. Furthermore, a domain-specific thesaurus (QLIT) tailored to LGBTQI+ themes, identities, and narrative motifs was developed for use in the database. Identifying and indexing queer motifs has long been vital both for scholarship and for queer readers seeking recognition, connection, and community in literature (Cifor and Rawson 2022). Fiction –unlike historical documentation – does not carry a truth claim, yet it plays a central role in shaping queer cultural memory. Historically, queer communities have engaged in what McKinney (2020) terms information activism, producing subject guides, reading lists, and community-based catalogues to counter barriers to access. Today, grassroots digitization practices on blogs, forums, and social media continue this tradition: readers collectively tag, describe, and circulate queer fiction, generating vernacular knowledge structures parallel to institutional metadata.

The Queerlit project built on these practices, positioning community-generated knowledge as a foundational layer for scholarly and infrastructural development. The QLIT thesaurus builds on the Homosaurus, a LOD thesaurus of over 3,600 interconnected LGBTQ+ concepts, originally developed in the Netherlands and now maintained by the Digital Transgender Archive in the United States. Designed for interoperability across archives, libraries, and digital humanities projects, it offers a shared semantic framework that can bridge local collections and global knowledge infrastructures. A recent initiative aims to make the Homosaurus multilingual, with translations underway in Swedish, Dutch, German, French, and Japanese. The Swedish translation, initially developed within Queerlit and expanded within the Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities (GRIDH), has followed a deliberately collaborative and community-based workflow.

This workflow combines online consultations, in-person workshops, and outreach to organizations, activists, students, librarians, and researchers. Expertise from cultural domains such as racialized and diasporic identities, and medical discourse, and vernaculars of sexual practices has been integrated into translation choices, emphasising both linguistic precision and community legitimacy. As part of this process, large language models such as ChatGPT were used as assistive tools for generating preliminary drafts and identifying terminological inconsistencies, without replacing human judgment or community authority.

By bringing together domain-specific metadata construction, community-driven translation, and interoperable LOD infrastructures, this paper argues that what we call transformative metadata practices not only enhance discovery and accessibility but also create hybrid spaces where institutional and community knowledge interconnect, generating more inclusive and socially responsive infrastructures. Transformative metadata refers to metadata practices that do not simply describe materials but intentionally revise and expand existing metadata systems, drawing on community knowledge and more accurately reflecting lived experience.