Ensuring equitable access to cultural heritage remains a major challenge for digital research infrastructures, particularly for users with special needs. Despite advances in digital tools and platforms, Deaf communities are still often excluded from fully engaging with archaeological knowledge and museum interpretation due to the lack of accessible resources and shared terminology in sign languages.

Within this context, AGLAIA – ARIADNE Glossary in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and International Sign (IS) for Archaeology is an initiative led by ARIADNE Research Infrastructure and developed within the framework of the European project ATRIUM, where accessibility and engagement with non-professional communities are key priorities. AGLAIA aims to provide a curated and validated glossary of archaeological terms in LIS and IS to support inclusive guided tours, museum interpretation, and educational activities.

AGLAIA was developed as part of the ATRIUM project, with the support of the international ARIADNE network, which brings together nearly 40 archaeological institutions worldwide. An initial corpus of approximately 200 specialised terms was identified across five conceptual areas (methodological approaches, artefacts and materials, cultural and social concepts, analytical frameworks, and chronological contexts). From this corpus, a scientific committee selected 50 key terms considered essential for public communication in museums and archaeological sites. These terms were prioritised for their ability to convey conceptual meaning without excessive technical complexity, ensuring both clarity and usability in real-world contexts.

The development process followed a co-creation approach involving domain experts, accessibility specialists, Deaf translators, and sign-language interpreters. This methodology ensured scientific accuracy while addressing the communicative needs of end users. Within this framework, International Sign plays a central role in the initiative. It is not a fully standardised language, but rather an auxiliary communication system used in international contexts to facilitate understanding among signers who do not share a common national sign language.

The resulting materials are currently available as openly accessible video resources on the ARIADNE Research Infrastructure YouTube channel, organised into dedicated playlists for LIS and IS. In addition, the glossary is being deposited in Zenodo, where persistent identifiers (PIDs) are assigned to the deposited materials to support long-term access, citation, and reuse.

The initiative is designed to support both Deaf users and sign-language interpreters, particularly in contexts where specialised archaeological terminology is required. It has already been presented at the ATRIUM public event held during tourismA (Florence, 2026), where it was introduced to cultural heritage professionals, researchers, and Deaf participants, receiving very positive and enthusiastic feedback from end users.

AGLAIA demonstrates how digital infrastructures, community engagement, and accessibility expertise can converge to create inclusive knowledge resources. Its impact extends beyond individual visitor experiences, offering a scalable model for cultural institutions and research projects seeking to integrate accessibility into their digital strategies. The approach developed in AGLAIA can be adapted to other specialised domains, contributing to a broader transformation in how knowledge is produced, communicated, and accessed within Europe’s cultural heritage landscape.

Participatory digital humanities challenge traditional authorship by making research a co-created and socially accountable process. Yet, as participation increasingly relies on complex digital infrastructures, including platforms, algorithms, and AI-driven tools, the ethical foundations of trust, authorship, and accountability remain fragile. This paper asks a fundamental question: who owns participation when knowledge is co-produced across institutions, communities, and automated systems?

Grounded in the CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics), this contribution argues that ethical and sustainable participatory research requires a rethinking of infrastructure itself, not merely as technical support, but as a moral and relational framework. The paper explores the potential of blockchain as infrastructure of care: socio-technical systems designed to sustain transparency, and accountability in participatory digital humanities.

Rather than presenting blockchain as a tool for efficiency or automation, the paper conceptualizes it as a mechanism of relational accountability. In contrast to existing mechanisms for authorship attribution, such as Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), which primarily ensure identification and linkage, and may prove insufficient in capturing the dynamic, distributed, and multi-agent nature of participatory knowledge production, blockchain-based systems enable the distributed certification of contributions, the traceability of collaborative processes, and the verification of evolving authorship relations across heterogeneous agents. In participatory research contexts, particularly those involving community partners, citizen humanities, and public-facing digital archives, blockchain-based certification can provide verifiable attribution of authorship, provenance, and contribution histories without relying solely on centralized institutional authority. This certification is understood not as proprietary ownership, but as protective recognition: a way to acknowledge and safeguard diverse intellectual and cultural contributions while allowing knowledge to circulate openly. A possible application of this approach can be envisioned in collaborative digital archives, where contributions from researchers, community members, and AI systems are recorded, validated, and made transparently traceable over time.

The relevance of such infrastructures becomes even more pronounced in an AI-mediated research ecosystem. As AI systems participate in content generation, annotation, classification, and interpretation, traditional notions of authorship and responsibility are further destabilized. The paper argues that blockchain-based infrastructures can function as counter-infrastructures to AI opacity, making visible the human, collective, and situated labor that automated systems often obscure. Blockchain and AI are not competing technologies, but interacting layers within a broader knowledge ecology that demands explicit ethical governance.

Adopting a critical perspective, the paper also interrogates the environmental, social, and political costs of blockchain infrastructures. Drawing on critical infrastructure studies and public digital humanities scholarship, it proposes criteria for CARE-aligned infrastructures: low-energy architectures, transparent and participatory governance models, accessibility beyond technical elites, and long-term stewardship commitments. These criteria aim to ensure that trust infrastructures do not reproduce existing inequalities or extractive practices under the guise of innovation. From a feasibility perspective, such infrastructures can be envisioned as incremental and interoperable layers built upon existing digital research ecosystems, enabling gradual adoption across communities and institutions rather than requiring immediate large-scale transformation.

Ultimately, this paper contends that trust is not a neutral by-product of technology, but a value that must be deliberately designed, negotiated, and maintained.

As GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) institutions rapidly digitise their collections to increase reach, a critical gap remains in understanding how these initiatives serve linguistically diverse local communities, especially beyond assessing footfall metrics. Contemporary research suggests that digital humanities initiatives, especially those offering participatory engagement, can significantly enhance the engagement and accessibility of cultural heritage within Indian GLAM institutions (Gandhi, 2024; Bonney et. al, 2009). However, limited work actually utilises such approaches to assess the visitor engagement or accessibility in India. This paper presents a participatory action research (Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020; Cornish, 2023) that shifts the evaluation authority from heritage experts to heritage site visitors and community translators. We collected the artefact descriptions from a museum in Jodhpur (a cultural heritage city in Western India), which were available in Hindi and English. We then extended their accessibility to the native ‘Marwari’ speaking audience using a mix of three types of translation strategies: (1) human translations by native speakers, (2) machine translations using state-of-the-art Machine Translation (MT) systems, and (3) human post-edits of machine output by native speakers. We then evaluated the engagement of these respective outputs through a mixed-methods approach, presenting all three versions to local visitors of the museum (n=50) and receiving their preferences on a Likert scale, supplemented by a corresponding set of MCQs to validate the assessment.

Our methodology is grounded in two key conference themes: A) Co-creation and participatory digital humanities (Ma et al, 2025), and B) Mapping engagement and evidencing public value. By positioning community speakers as co-creators rather than passive consumers or data sources, and by utilising visitor preferences as a measure of "engagement value", we address the question: Does engagement in vernacular languages, within the context of heritage sites, enhance institutional and cultural accessibility? This finding is critical for understanding the public value of vernacular translations of cultural heritage site artefacts. The results of this study help depart from the technopositivist approach, which presumes machine efficiency without centring on the agency of the native and/or the intended audiences. Our work delivers future insights and directions for policymakers and researchers who wish to enhance engagement with heritage institutions for the vernacular audience. Besides, our findings also reveal significant limitations of commercial MT systems to perform desirably in cultural and heritage domains.

If you are looking for a community-driven scholarly publication model, Diamond Open Access is a reliable option with many advantages. Namely, the model charges no fees to either authors or readers, treating scientific knowledge as a public good rather than a commercial commodity. What is more, the Diamond model draws on the work of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs) that provide institutional support for journals (Armengou et al. 2023). In the perspective of global engagement, this approach makes multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for scholars, practitioners as well as for non-affiliated scholars, easing its adoption in lesser-resourced countries (Raju & Nkrumah Kuagbedzi 2025).

These practical and ethical considerations were seminal in the choice of a publication venue for DARIAH’s journal Transformations. The newly published overlay journal is hosted by the French publishing platform Episciences and includes contributions based on a variety of digital approaches in the arts and humanities. Concretely, the publication process is backed by public Open Access repositories (Pinfield 2009, Rousi & Laakso 2022). The journal has developed a demanding editorial process (Transformations Editorial Board 2025) giving way to high quality publications (Baillot 2025). The dialogue between authors, reviewers and editors is a key component (Gouzi 2025), and Transformations benefits from the community-building work conducted by DARIAH over the past decades.

Technology alone is insufficient to sustain the Diamond-OA ecosystem across Europe, and research infrastructures can empower actors to address the related challenges collaboratively. In 2025, OPERAS launched the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) programme to provide support and bridge the competence gap between editors and IPSPs. The EDCH empowers the community with a dedicated Training Platform and a Registry & Forum as well as with specialized guidelines (Maryl et al. 2024).

National and disciplinary specificities play a key role in the adoption of community-driven publication practices. In a country like Germany where a rigid publishing culture has long been dominant, the digital transformation is now facilitating the adoption of more open practices. Open Science has become part of national funding strategies (DFG 2025a; DFG 2025b). The national funding for the service centre for Diamond-OA (SeDOA, Stäcker et al. 2025) has now established a digital research infrastructure to support Diamond-OA across all disciplines. Through the integration of the review database infrastructure zbMATH Open (Deb et al. 2025), the example of a field marked by a long history in preprint-based open-access publishing paves the way for other disciplines. The mathematical community strives to create a public, non-proprietary, global digital mathematical library. The role of open publication structures is key here: for both the mathematics community and the arts and humanities, Episciences is a major provider of a Diamond-OA technical infrastructure, used across borders, consortia, and communities.

Interdisciplinary and international approaches foster innovative dialogues and open the horizons of long-time enclosed publication practices. In this paper, we will show how infrastructures play a key role in providing the backbone to sustain this development – both at a technical level and in terms of community-building.