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).

Engaged digital humanities is often discussed in terms of participatory formats such as citizen science, crowdsourcing and co-creation projects. While these are vital, they capture only one dimension of engagement. This paper argues that engagement is also, and crucially, a matter of infrastructural design: of how institutions, resources, tools and expertise are organized to support sustained interaction between research, memory institutions and society.

Digital humanities infrastructures play a critical and under-examined role in shaping how research connects with society because they function as integrative systems. They determine how institutions work together, how cultural data is structured and accessed, and when and where questions of public use, responsibility, and inclusion are addressed. These decisions shape engagement long before any public-facing project begins.

The paper offers a situated reflection on what it means to build infrastructures of engagement in a small national context, drawing on the experience of the Icelandic Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts (MSHL/CDHA). MSHL brings together fifteen highly heterogeneous partner institutions, spanning universities, national and local museums, archives, libraries and media organizations. This breadth is unusual even by European digital humanities standards and has enabled collaboration across institutions with very different mandates.

Rather than focusing on individual projects, this paper examines MSHL itself as an engagement infrastructure: a coordinating layer that connects institutional ecosystems, stabilizes collaboration, and aligns research practices with public-facing cultural work. From this experience, we distill a set of transferable design principles for engaged digital humanities infrastructures.

First, engagement benefits from heterogeneous institutional design. Bringing together institutions with fundamentally different mandates (research, preservation, mediation, broadcasting, education) creates conditions for hybridity, where disciplinary, technical and cultural practices for public engagement are co-developed rather than aligned post hoc.

Second, engagement depends on shared infrastructure, not only shared goals. Pooling equipment, platforms and expertise lowers institutional boundaries and turns collaboration into routine practice. This is visible in the shared operation of high-resolution digitization equipment between Reykjavík City Museum, the National Museum and the University Hospital, where the same infrastructure supports very different collections and audiences. It is also evident in the VR equipment initially developed in a Nordplus project and subsequently made available more broadly through MSHL’s mediation, allowing students and partners to reuse tools beyond the original project context.

Third, sustained engagement requires dedicated coordinating entities. Durable centers and networks are necessary to mediate between institutional cultures, maintain infrastructures and carry relationships beyond individual funding cycles. This is evident in the ongoing development of a national name authority register linking people and places across institutions.

The Icelandic case is not presented as a model to replicate, but as a lens that makes infrastructural dynamics unusually visible due to the small scale of the institutional landscape. The paper contributes concrete design insights to current discussions on infrastructures of engagement; it argues that if digital humanities is to operate “with and for society”, engagement must be conceived not only as participation, but as a property of how research infrastructures themselves are built.

Processes of evaluating the societal impact of research infrastructures (RIs) often reproduce what Amartya Sen (Equality of What?, 1980) identified as a “category error”: mistaking the means of for its ends. In the Digital Humanities, this manifests in an emphasis on quantifiable metrics – data volume, code repositories, user statistics – as if access to digital resources automatically translated into capability, understanding, or empowerment. Yet access without usable meaning does not constitute impact. To move beyond this resource-centric view, we must conceptualise infrastructures not only as technical assemblages but as enablers of human agency.

This paper develops such a conceptual shift by adopting Ingrid Robeyns’ Modular View of the Capability Approach (Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017) as a framework for analysing research infrastructures. Robeyns articulates a clear distinction between resources and functionings – that is, between what individuals have access to and what they can actually do or be as a result. Between these poles lie conversion factors: personal, social, and environmental conditions that determine whether resources yield valued outcomes. Within the Digital Humanities, infrastructures can be understood as precisely such conversion factors. Their role is not limited to storing or processing data but extends to creating the epistemic and institutional conditions that allow diverse users to transform data into knowledge.

This reconceptualisation helps address a central challenge identified by Edmond and Lehmann (“Digital humanities, knowledge complexity, and the five ‘aporias’ of digital research”, 2021): the “aporia” between processability (the machine’s need for standardised, decontextualised inputs) and context (the humanist’s commitment to interpretive depth and situated meaning). Digital infrastructures are often caught between these two imperatives, flattening complexity in the name of interoperability while aspiring to support nuanced cultural analysis. When approached through Robeyns’ lens, an infrastructure’s value no longer depends on technical efficiency alone but on its capacity to mediate this aporia – to convert raw, processable data into conditions for “participatory sense-making” (Edmond, Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research, 2020).

Treating infrastructures as conversion factors shifts evaluative focus from quantities to capabilities. What matters is not merely how much data are opened or processed, but whether infrastructures expand the ability of communities – scholars, heritage professionals, and citizens – to engage critically with cultural materials and co-construct interpretations of the past. Such a perspective reframes impact as a function of epistemic inclusion: infrastructures succeed when they bridge between technical processability and social intelligibility, between data availability and interpretive agency.

By integrating Robeyns’ modular framework with Digital Humanities debates on infrastructural power and epistemic mediation, this paper offers DARIAH a theoretical vocabulary for rethinking impact. It positions infrastructure-as-conversion-factor as a conceptual tool for evaluating not only what infrastructures make possible technically, but what they make achievable socially. Doing so redefines the societal value of research infrastructures as the extent to which they transform access into capability, and data into collective understanding.