Conference Agenda

Ensuring equitable access to cultural heritage remains a major challenge for digital research infrastructures, particularly for citizens with special needs. Despite significant advances in digital methods and platforms, deaf and visually impaired communities are still frequently excluded from fully engaging with archaeological knowledge and museum interpretation. Within this context, the ATRIUM project addresses accessibility as a core value, with a specific focus on inclusive practices that enable meaningful participation across diverse user communities. AGLAIA – ARIADNE Glossary in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and International Sign (IS) for Archaeology, an initiative developed by the ARIADNE Research Infrastructure to enhance accessibility for deaf users in museum and archaeological contexts.

Across Europe, an estimated 750,000 deaf individuals use national and international sign languages, while in Italy alone approximately 40,000 people use Italian Sign Language (LIS), a number that increases substantially when hearing signers are included. However, access to archaeological content remains limited by the scarcity of specialised materials in sign languages and by the absence of shared, validated terminology suitable for public-facing contexts. AGLAIA responds to this gap by developing a glossary of commonly used archaeological terms presented in both LIS and IS, specifically designed for guided tours, museum interpretation, and educational settings.

International Sign plays a central role in this initiative. IS 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. Characterised by simplified grammar, strong reliance on visual communication (head movement, facial expression), classifiers, and non-manual elements, IS evolves over time through lexical innovation, borrowing from national sign languages, and adaptation to new concepts. These features make IS particularly effective for transnational cultural settings, while simultaneously posing challenges in terms of terminological consistency and precision.

The glossary builds upon the international archaeological network of ARIADNE, which brings together nearly 40 institutions worldwide. An initial corpus of 200 specialised archaeological terms was identified, covering five major conceptual categories: methodological approaches, artefacts and materials, cultural and social concepts, analytical and interpretive frameworks, and chronological contexts. From this corpus, a scientific committee selected a refined set of 50 terms considered essential for the comprehension and enjoyment of archaeological content by deaf visitors.

A key methodological principle was the prioritisation of terms that are general yet not generic, capable of conveying conceptual complexity without excessive technical jargon. This museum-oriented perspective aimed to balance scientific accuracy with communicative clarity. The selected terms were then evaluated by a specialised technical committee with expertise in International Sign, ensuring communicative effectiveness, terminological coherence, and contextual relevance.

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. By fostering shared terminology and inclusive practices, AGLAIA contributes to a broader transformation in how archaeological 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.

This paper draws from collaborative work to develop the Queer Heritage South (QHS) digital archive,[1] as well as research carried out through the Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities project (FSF) (AHRC-IRC funded 2021-24).[2] It juxtaposes national and grassroots digital initiatives and argues for infrastructure development that is responsive to local epistemologies, and community priorities. As such it foregrounds socially and environmentally reflexive methodologies that resist extractive or universalising logics, advocating instead for digital infrastructures that are politically accountable, culturally attuned, and generative through participatory practices, including for example, co-creation of metadata.

As stated, a central element of this discussion is the development of the QHS digital archive. Developed collaboratively with QHS and the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, this community‑led digital archive, through its participatory approach, challenges conventional archival epistemologies.[3] Within this context, the creation of the archive and elements of archival practices, are as important as the archival output. That is, we prioritise process over product, evident in the way that metadata is often affective rather than objective. Such practices demonstrate how archival description can foreground lived experience, emotional resonance, and cultural specificity, rather than reproduce authoritative or exclusionary knowledge structures.[4] This approach exposes the limits of standardised metadata schemas and highlights the necessity of infrastructures capable of accommodating situated, relational, and plural forms of knowing. In addition, and following from Ann Cvetkovich’s (2003) assertions in An Archive of Feeling that archives of trauma and “feeling” are intrinsically emotive, it proposes the need for affective metadata as an extension of preexisting categories of metadata (e.g. administrative, technical, descriptive).[5] This provision directly correlates with queer, feminist, decolonial contexts in which (digital) archives of are used both as forms of restorative justice, as well as deliberate acts of subversion. As such, the archival “value” of objects and collections in these contexts are often emotional connection and collective memory rather than an intrinsic historic value.

Building on the principles developed through FSF, the paper adopts stack politics as an analytical framework, considering the socio‑technical layers of digital systems not as neutral assemblages but as politically charged terrains where values, assumptions, and power relations are encoded. Referring to experiments in FSF to build an autonomous feminist server, the paper ultimately contends that sustainable digital arts and humanities work require infrastructures that not only function technically but also align ethically, and emotionally, with the communities they aim to support.[6]

[1] https://www.queerheritagesouth.co.uk/s/queer-heritage-south/page/home

[2] https://fullstackfeminismdh.pubpub.org/

[3] Webb, S. (2022) ‘Preserving Queer Voices’ in T. Stylianou-Lambert, A. Bounia & A. Heraclidou (Ed.), Emerging Technologies and Museums: Mediating Difficult Heritage (pp. 42-64). New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781800733756-004

[4] See Watson, B.M (2024) ‘Trans Metadata Collective’ in The Full Stack Feminism Toolkit, https://doi.org/10.21428/6094d7d2.0b475ede and Webb, S., (2023) ‘Inclusive Data: Metadata and Descriptive Language’, in The Full Stack Feminism Toolkit, https://doi.org/10.21428/6094d7d2.436744f0

[5] Cvetkovich, A. (2003) Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

[6] Chevalier, C., Fubara-Manuel, I. and Webb, S. (forthcoming 2026) ‘The (im)possibility of Autonomous Feminist Infrastructures’ in Digital Humanities Quarterly)

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.