This poster and demo contribution presents HUM data lab (HUMAL), an emerging digital humanities laboratory in Estonia designed around the concrete, day-to-day workflows of humanities research projects rather than around abstract or universalised models of “best practice”. HUMAL is part of the Estonian Research and Cultural Data Infrastructure. Emerging within Estonia’s highly networked but small-scale research ecosystem, HUMAL responds to the need for infrastructures that are flexible, relational, and closely aligned with how humanities research is actually conducted across institutions, languages, and sectors.

HUMAL takes as its starting point the observation that digitally enabled humanities research is inherently hybrid: it interweaves disciplinary traditions, technical systems, institutional constraints, and social relations, and it unfolds through iterative, negotiated processes rather than linear pipelines. By foregrounding lived research practices, HUMAL aims to support engaged, socially responsive scholarship that remains open to participation, adaptation, and reuse.

HUMAL operates as a connective infrastructure linking researchers, memory institutions, and wider publics through a combination of digital services, collaborative methods, and community-oriented events. Instead of imposing a single platform logic, HUMAL provides modular support for research workflows such as data discovery and reuse, metadata creation, annotation, enrichment and publication. These workflows are co-designed with research teams and evolve over the lifecycle of projects, reflecting specific epistemic needs, available skills, and ethical considerations. In this sense, HUMAL functions as an infrastructure of engagement, where technical choices are inseparable from social and institutional arrangements. This approach is particularly relevant in a multilingual environment such as Estonia, where research infrastructures must mediate between local knowledge production and international research networks.

A central component of HUMAL is community building as infrastructure. Regular meetings, workshops, and events such as hackathons create hybrid spaces in which researchers, developers, and cultural heritage professionals collaboratively explore research questions, tools, and data. These encounters serve not only as training or dissemination activities, but as sites of co-construction, where knowledge, methods, and trust are developed collectively. By making workflows visible and discussable, HUMAL fosters a culture of generosity and shared problem-solving that lowers barriers to participation, particularly for early-career researchers and smaller projects.

The demo component of this contribution showcases selected HUMAL-supported workflows from ongoing research projects, illustrating how infrastructural services, documentation, and community practices intersect in practice. Rather than presenting finished tools alone, the demo emphasises processes: how research questions translate into technical and organisational decisions, how feedback loops operate, and how infrastructures remain adaptable over time.

By situating infrastructure within real research contexts and social relations, HUMAL contributes to broader discussions on participatory digital humanities, research infrastructure as critical infrastructure, and the evaluation of public value and impact. The contribution invites dialogue on how focusing on concrete workflows and community practices can help digital humanities infrastructures remain resilient, inclusive, and meaningfully engaged with society.