Historic music rooms, hybrid spaces of art, architecture, and performance, played an important role in shaping modern European sociability and aesthetic experience. In Portugal, these environments are now primarily accessible through visual and textual records, such as illustrated magazines, postcards, fragmentary documentary sources, and some remaining artworks that still capture the interplay between domestic interiors, musical instruments, and cultural identity [1-3].

Developed as part of an ongoing doctoral research project in Heritage Studies - History of Art, this study explores some of the potential of digital humanities methods and tools to reconstruct and interpret historic music rooms as sensory and social environments. The focus of this presentation lies on Portuguese press coverage (see figure 1), specifically Illustração Portugueza [4], of comparable spaces within a selected chronological framework (1903-1924), to elucidate the relationship between residential architectures and the cultural and artistic practices in place at the time of the foundation of the first museological nucleus of musical instruments in Portugal.

The applied strategy consists of using open-source software and services, such as the Wikimedia ecosystem of tools and data infrastructures, which are capable of supporting complex, relational, and dynamic forms of knowledge representation [5-8]. To this end, a Wikibase cloud instance is created and run by CODA as a collaborative platform for art history and music research. Then, qualitative and quantitative data and metadata from approximately one thousand issues of Illustração Portugueza are cleaned and transformed into a semantically rich and structured dataset. Next, Wikidata, the world's largest and connected multilingual semantic database, is used to model the data and metadata, as well as to reconcile controlled vocabularies as linked open data. The Wikidata Query Service software package is used as the main SPARQL endpoint to query against the Wikidata dataset and to produce both question- and data-driven knowledge graphs, chronograms, and maps, among other visualisations, for further analysis and interpretations.

Our research is grounded in a strong commitment to Open Science, as advocated by the European Commission [9], and to the FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) [10]. Together, these frameworks support open access to research outputs, collaborative infrastructures, and citizen engagement, while also fostering transparent and reproducible research practices.

By integrating the results of this research into the forthcoming exhibition programme of the Museu Nacional da Música (National Music Museum, Mafra, Lisbon), the project extends beyond academia to create participatory interfaces for public dialogue and co-creation. Visitors will be invited to explore reconstructions of music rooms and to contribute with interpretive insights, fostering reciprocal knowledge exchange between researchers, curators, and the public.

This presentation explores how digitisation and data-driven interpretation can activate new infrastructures of engagement, reconnecting audiences with musical, visual and architectural heritage. Furthermore, it addresses challenges of linking knowledge, open science, accessibility, and sustainability; and argues that historically grounded, digitally mediated approaches can enhance civic participation and cultural awareness, positioning digital art history research as an active contributor to living heritage.