Digital cultural heritage - a key component of the wider digital humanities ecosystem - has seen major advances in digitisation and access. Yet public engagement remains limited. The challenge now is to move from access to meaningful experience and reuse. This paper proposes a practical blueprint for achieving this shift at scale.

A structural issue underlies the current gap. Museums, as primary holders of cultural content, focus on preservation and curation. Meanwhile, the sectors with the greatest public reach - education, tourism, gaming, and social media – seem to have little incentive to transform open collections into content. As a result, cultural heritage sits inside institutional systems, while public engagement happens elsewhere.

Digital heritage projects have long attempted to bridge this divide through creative pilots. Yet most remain one-off experiments - inspiring but difficult to transfer, scale, or sustain. Their impact dissipates as soon as project funding ends. Digital Research Infrastructures such as DARIAH, CLARIN, and E-RIHS offer more sustainable bridging environments, though further effort is needed to strengthen public engagement.

A useful analogue comes from a different field: open government data. Dumpawar showed that open data did not create public value merely by being published. Impact emerged only after a distinct role - the data intermediary - became recognised and supported (2015). Intermediaries translated raw datasets into meaningful applications, narratives, tools, and services, enabling reuse across sectors. The digital heritage ecosystem appears to be roughly ten years behind this trajectory.

Drawing on this insight, we identify the missing structural function in digital heritage: the bridge actor - an entity capable of linking cultural collections with public-facing sectors and shaping the conditions for meaningful reuse. A bridge actor requires several capacities:

1. Creative and cross-sector capacity to design compelling public experiences and work with educators, tourism bodies, creators, and media platforms.
2. Respect for heritage values and rights, including provenance, licensing clarity, GDPR, and sensitivity to contested heritage.
3. Standards, interoperability, and inclusivity awareness, ensuring alignment with European research infrastructures, multilinguality, accessibility, and responsible reuse frameworks.
4. Understanding of public-facing sectors, recognising how heritage strengthens value chains in education, tourism, creative industries, XR, games, and social media ecosystems.
5. A sustainability mindset, building engagement models focused on long-term viability rather than one-off project cycles.
6. Interpretive capacity, translating digital collections into narratives, interfaces, formats, and participatory experiences that make cultural data legible to the public.
7. Critical capacity, identifying gaps, biases, and contextual absences in digitised collections to support responsible and inclusive engagement.

The evolution of open government data shows that real public value emerges only when ecosystems formally recognise and support an intermediary role. Digital heritage now stands at the same inflection point. To move beyond digitisation toward meaningful public use, Europe must explicitly name and sustain the bridge actor - the function that translates cultural data into sector-ready, socially resonant experiences. By embedding this role through policy and funding, digital collections can shift from static assets to resources that are actively used, interpreted, and meaningful in everyday life.

Our research investigates how language conditions direct attention to science in public policy communication, asking whether the language of policy documents affects the visibility of scientific evidence. We approach this question as both an empirical study and a reflection on how public digital documentation systems can foster more inclusive pathways between science and society.

Using the Overton database—a large-scale aggregator of multilingual policy literature—we analyzed 2.25 million policy documents (2009–2024) from Spain, Germany, France, and Sweden. Combining computational text analysis with manual auditing, we measured the prevalence and volume of scientific citations as linguistic traces of direct attention to science. Zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) models captured citation sparsity, while multilingual audits validated automated citation detection across languages.

The findings expose that, across countries, English-language policy documents cited science nearly five times as often and forty times as intensively as their counterparts in national languages. However, this pattern varied: while English documents from Germany, France and Sweden were strongly citation-rich, English outputs from Spain showed the opposite tendency, revealing that institutional culture—not language alone—drives attention to science.

Yet across all contexts, a linguistic gap persists: science circulates globally in English, while policy operates multilingually, thereby affecting how public institutions document evidence. Such "linguistic attention gap” matters not only for reliability, but for epistemic justice and social equity. When public records of scientific reasoning in politics are available only in English, non‑English‑speaking citizens, journalists, and practitioners are excluded from full participation in the evidence base that informs policies affecting them.

To close this gap, multilingual public infrastructures—policy repositories and evidence portals—are more than technical supports: they are institutional choices that shape democratic engagement. Building on debates in the digital humanities and the social sciences, we argue that inclusive citation and dissemination systems can narrow the “English advantage” by embedding standardized referencing templates and multilingual editorial workflows. Such infrastructures would not only disseminate scientific evidence across languages but also preserve bibliographic fidelity.

The linguistic attention gap requires intervention at multiple points in the knowledge production chain: from how scientific outputs are published to how policy documents are authored and disseminated. Concretely, this means training the actors who bridge research and policy—librarians, researchers, and policymakers—in publishing accessible, FAIR-compliant data that can circulate across language boundaries. It means developing multilingual citation standards that preserve bibliographic fidelity during translation and adaptation. Extending beyond top-down policymaking, we envision digital infrastructures that see citizens not as information recipients but co-curators of knowledge visibility.

In sum, our work offers both methodological and civic implications: it operationalizes attention to science as a measurable feature of public communication. It reframes the language gap as a shared societal infrastructure challenge. By aligning open data platforms, computational analysis, and community-engaged policy design, we contribute to a vision in which digital scholarship becomes a multilingual public good—ensuring that when policy “speaks science,” it does so in every language of the communities it serves.

In the landscape of cultural heritage, private archives have traditionally functioned as guarded repositories of corporate memory. As a partial response to the chronic understaffing and resource gap of smaller institutions devoted to the preservation of historical documents (King et al., 2016), the digital turn has offered an unprecedented opportunity to redefine the role of archives as places where the public actively participates in the co-creation of a social form of historical knowledge (Keane, 2017). The Archivio Storico Ricordi—the historic legacy of the Ricordi music publishing house, home to one of the most important private collections of Italian opera—has addressed this challenge by developing digital projects that place the user at the center of the archival process.

Our paper analyzes three distinct models of participatory interaction implemented by the Archive, demonstrating how digital tools can nurture generosity and shared creativity in the preservation of the musical past. The first model is a form of collaborative transcription, exemplified by the “Lettere di Casa Ricordi” project. Facing the immense task of transcribing thousands of handwritten letters, the Archive developed a workflow that allows external contributors to submit transcriptions. This initiative has successfully engaged a diverse community—ranging from musicologists to amateur enthusiasts—transforming the solitary act of reading into a collective effort of deciphering and validating historical sources. The second model explores the possibilities opened up by open ecosystem integrations, applied in the “Riviste Ricordi” project through the collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. Rather than building a siloed platform, the Archive chose to upload its historical periodicals to Wikisource. This strategy activates the “volunteer philologist,” engaging the vast Wikimedia community in proofreading OCR text and creating hyperlinked data. It represents a shift from institutional control to community stewardship, ensuring that the content remains open, accessible, and constantly improved by the public. The third project “Puccini Online” focuses on a model of active co-creation as a core principle of the notion of Public History. Conceived as an aggregator of key documentary sources (held by both cultural institutions and individual citizens) and as an infrastructure integrating heterogeneous digital records, the portal calls upon the global community of Puccini lovers to actively expand the archive’s boundaries. By facilitating the submission of private documents and local histories related to the composer, the portal acts as a bridge between the institutional archive and the distributed, personal memories held by the public, crowdsourcing the collective memory of Giacomo Puccini’s legacy (Noiret, 2022).

Together, these initiatives illustrate a comprehensive strategy for digital engagement. They show that successful public history in a private archive requires flexible infrastructures capable of accommodating different levels of participation—from mechanical correction to scholarly transcription and original contribution (Zhang & Dong, 2024). By presenting these cases, we aim to discuss the challenges and rewards of this participatory turn, offering a roadmap for other institutions seeking to build meaningful connections with their audiences through digital means.

Public discourse shapes how societies understand complex topics like climate change, migration and identity. Yet while research has generated rich insights into framing, media effects and polarization, we still lack integrated ways of tracing how narratives take hold and compete across time and institutional settings (Brüggemann & Meyer 2023; Kreiss & McGregor 2024). This paper presents HONE (How Narratives Emerge), a theoretically motivated research project that deliberately engineers its methods and infrastructure to serve the public sphere. While its core scientific question is whether complex systems approaches can model language effectively, the project is designed from the outset around public-produced material, civic relevance and the development of engagement-enabling research infrastructures.

This paper argues that engaged digital humanities requires more than participatory formats alone (e.g. citizen science, co-creation initiatives). It also requires conceptual and technical infrastructures that make society-generated data legible in practice, i.e. engaged research must develop methods, models and interfaces capable of rendering complex social and cultural processes observable, interpretable and discussable. HONE is presented as a concrete case of how such infrastructures can be deliberately designed.

HONE takes society-produced meaning-making as its core object. It models public discourse as a complex system, but develops ad hoc approaches suited to public-generated language rather than importing models built for numerical or behavioral data. Narratives, framings and rhetorical choices are treated not as surface features, but as constitutive dynamics through which public discourse evolves.

This orientation is reflected in the project’s grounding in digital collections from European memory institutions, including parliamentary speeches, digitized newspapers and broadcast metadata. These archives are approached not simply as repositories of texts, but as records of collective meaning-making through which societies construct memory, negotiate identity and frame political reality.

Methodologically, HONE is built as an interdisciplinary infrastructure rather than a standalone analytical pipeline. Linguists, digital humanists and complexity scientists co-design how discourse is described and modeled. Linguistic and cultural expertise is embedded directly into the research infrastructure itself: in the definition of annotation categories, in decisions about what counts as a narrative unit, and in how discursive features are operationalized for modeling.

An integral component of the project is the development of public-facing visual models that make discursive dynamics observable. These include interactive network views of how framings move between speakers and institutions, and temporal maps showing how narratives rise, stabilize or fragment. Because complex systems dynamics such as emergence, non-linearity and amplification routinely defy intuitive understanding (with tangible societal consequences, such as misinterpretations of pandemic spread) HONE treats visualization not as dissemination, but as engagement infrastructure. These interfaces are designed to support public discussion, allowing users to trace how small rhetorical shifts can accumulate into large-scale changes.

HONE demonstrates how theoretically grounded digital humanities research can be deliberately designed with a civic function in mind: to support public sense-making and institutional mediation in a discursive environment increasingly shaped by polarization and misinformation (Kubin & von Sikorski 2021; Muñoz et al. 2024).