A Network of Places is an ongoing Swedish research and development collaboration (concluding in early 2026) that explores what becomes possible when cultural heritage institutions and open knowledge infrastructures jointly build interoperable, public-facing data. Led by ArkDes (the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design) together with Nationalmuseum, Tekniska museet, the Swedish National Heritage Board’s archive, and Wikimedia Sverige, the project addresses a familiar barrier in the GLAM sector: rich collections remain distributed across separate databases, described with incompatible metadata models, and therefore hard to discover, connect, and analyze.

When data is interlinked, it creates opportunities for researchers to carry out more in-depth analyses of heritage data. To demonstrate these possibilities, part of the project also involved examining how the methods we applied were perceived from a research perspective.

Our demo showcases the outcomes and working methods of the project, with a focus on place-centred linking as a practical infrastructure of engagement. We will demonstrate how collection and archival records from partner institutions can be connected through shared geographical metadata and published as Linked Open Data, using Wikidata and the wider Wikimedia ecosystem as a hub for identifiers, cross-institutional linking, and public reuse. This hybrid approach creates connectivity across disciplines and between cultural heritage institutions and society.

The demo will include:

1. A guided walkthrough of our workflow, highlighting the different role of the cultural heritage institutions and Wikimedia Sverige,

2. Interactive data visualisations that make the "network of places" tangible,

3. A perspective of a researcher who engaged with the datasets to explore cross-collection patterns

The goal is to showcase the results of a multi-institutional collaboration carried out in the spirit of free and open knowledge, inspiring the participants to reflect on their own contributions to the free knowledge ecosystem.

Archaeological field documentation is still largely based on handwritten context sheets. While this method is well established, it can be time-consuming and difficult to use in typical excavation conditions, such as wet or muddy environments. Handwritten recording can also present accessibility challenges for some archaeologists, for example for those with dyslexia. Recent advances in automatic speech recognition offer new possibilities for supporting field documentation through voice input. This poster and demo present a sound-based approach to recording archaeological context sheets using speech-to-text technologies. The work explores the use of voice recordings as an additional data type within archaeological documentation workflows. The main aim is to support data entry for context sheets by allowing archaeologists to dictate information instead of writing it by hand. The focus is on free-text fields such as context descriptions and interpretations, which are often the most time-consuming to complete and benefit from more natural and detailed expression. Speech-based input may also encourage more complete descriptions by reducing the need for shorthand or abbreviated notes. By using speech, archaeologists can potentially document their observations more efficiently while remaining engaged with excavation activities.

A browser-based web application was developed to support this approach. The application allows users to create and complete digital context sheets using spoken input through their phones or laptops (Figure 1). The system is designed for use in the field and runs entirely in the web browser, without requiring specialised hardware or software installation. The resulting transcriptions can be reviewed and edited through a simple dashboard interface, which also provides options to manage, update, and export completed context sheets (Figure 2). An export function generates data in CSV format, enabling integration with existing archiving systems, which supports the reuse of data.

To support development and testing, a small speech dataset was created using readings based on existing archaeological context sheet descriptions. This material was used to evaluate automatic speech recognition performance in an archaeological domain and to inform interface design. Initial field trials of the web app were carried out during the 2025 excavation season at the Toumba Serron site in Greece. These trials highlighted the importance of low-latency speech recognition for practical field use and led to the adoption of a faster speech-to-text model, improving responsiveness and usability.

The demo session will showcase the web application and its workflow, including live voice-based entry of context sheet data, review and correction of transcriptions, and export of results for reuse in downstream systems. The poster will outline the motivation, technical approach, and lessons learned from early testing. Together, they illustrate how sound-based documentation can complement existing archaeological recording practices and support more flexible, accessible, and efficient field workflows at the intersection of cultural heritage, digital humanities, and language technologies.

https://ibb.co/R4BLZnQr

Figure 1: Interface for adding a new context sheet using voice commands

https://ibb.co/4Z6nWJQF

Figure 2: User dashboard listing completed context forms, with options to edit, delete, and export

This demo and poster proposal responds to the DARIAH Annual Event 2026 theme by framing FAIR training materials as a key component of digital humanities infrastructures of engagement. Training resources enable participation, skills development, and sustained interaction between researchers, cultural heritage professionals, and wider publics. We present the design principles and architecture of the H2IOSC Training Infrastructure[1] (Italy), focusing on how FAIR-oriented training libraries and distributed digital collections can support engaged Digital Arts and Humanities practices. Particular attention is given to the potential alignment between national initiatives and ERIC-level infrastructures, without assuming full technical integration.

Background and Motivation

The DARIAH 2026 call highlights the need for infrastructures that support engaged, inclusive, and socially embedded digital arts and humanities. While much attention is devoted to research data and tools, training materials are often treated as secondary outputs, despite their central role in enabling access to digital methods and fostering community participation.

By treating training materials as first-class digital objects, curated according to FAIR principles, [1] training can function as a stable and reusable infrastructure that supports engagement over time, across institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

Fig. 1 – The catalogue of multidisciplinary courses available in e-learning on the H2IOSC Learning Environment

Objectives

The proposal aims to:

1. show how FAIR training materials can act as infrastructural elements for engagement and capacity building;
2. discuss the role of distributed digital libraries and the importance of selective aggregation for training resources;
3. reflect on the relationship between national training infrastructures and European research infrastructures, identifying opportunities and open challenges.

Fig. 2 – Reusable and modular training materials available for download on the H2IOSC Training Library

Approach

The demo and poster are structured around three conceptual dimensions:

1. FAIR Training Materials as Engagement Infrastructure

Using the H2IOSC Training Infrastructure as a case study, we illustrate how training modules are curated with persistent identifiers, rich metadata, versioning, and open licences. This approach enhances discoverability, transparency, and pedagogical reuse, supporting diverse communities including researchers, students, educators, and cultural heritage practitioners.

2. Distributed Training Libraries and Harvesting Scenarios

The infrastructure is designed to operate within a distributed ecosystem of digital libraries [2], where training materials remain locally managed yet can, in principle, be selectively harvested through standard protocols and APIs. Rather than presenting a fully implemented solution, the demo discusses design choices and scenarios for aggregation that avoid centralisation while enabling thematic discovery and reuse.

3. National and ERIC-Level Perspectives

The contribution reflects on how national initiatives such as H2IOSC can complement ERIC-level infrastructures like DARIAH by providing high-quality, curated training content. While technical harvesting into services such as DARIAH-Campus has not yet been implemented, the proposal outlines conceptual interoperability pathways and shared metadata practices that could support future alignment.

Contribution to DARIAH 2026

This demo and poster contribute to DARIAH 2026 by:

• positioning training as an infrastructure of engagement rather than a peripheral activity;
• supporting participatory and inclusive digital humanities practices;
• addressing sustainability and governance in distributed infrastructures;
• encouraging dialogue between national and European initiatives.

[1] https://www.h2iosc.cnr.it/training-infrastructure/

Research in the Digital Humanities increasingly demands tools that go beyond scholarly analysis to foster participation, public accessibility, and new forms of dialogue. The TIDO Viewer (https://editions.sub.uni-goettingen.de/tido) addresses this need as a generic, highly configurable open-source application for digital editions and text-centered research. By decoupling the presentation layer from underlying data storage, TIDO serves as an inclusive interface where students, cultural heritage communities, and the public can explore and co-construct understanding of historical texts.

Developed as part of a modular infrastructure (https://editions.sub.uni-goettingen.de) at the Göttingen State and University Library, TIDO leverages the TextAPI (https://editions.sub.uni-goettingen.de/textapi) — a standardized, IIIF-inspired specification. This ensures that scholarly data remains interoperable and accessible across different institutional repositories. A defining feature of TIDO is its dynamic, panel-based workspace, which allows users to engage with multiple text versions (diplomatic, normalized, translations) and high-resolution manuscript images side-by-side. This design reflects the DARIAH mission of creating open and flexible platforms: instead of a fixed scholarly viewpoint, TIDO offers a hybrid space where users can selectively activate layered annotations ranging from critical apparatuses to semantic markup based on their specific interests and expertise.

A key innovation presented is TIDO’s ability to visualize complex relational structures. When intertextual links, editorial alignments, or citations are exposed via the TextAPI (supported by backends like TextLPG), TIDO makes these connections operational. Users can interactively navigate across textual boundaries, enabling a form of "discovery" that is inherently collaborative and transcends the limitations of traditional print or siloed digital editions.

To ensure long-term resilience and community adoption, TIDO is developed as an open-source React application. This allows other institutions to not only use the viewer but also to contribute to its development, fostering a collaborative ecosystem of shared Digital Humanities tools. By providing a transparent and extensible codebase (https://github.com/subugoe/tido), TIDO serves as a model for sustainable, community-driven research infrastructure.

This contribution will be presented as a poster accompanied by a live demonstration, illustrating TIDO’s functionality, configurability, and integration within a standards-based ecosystem at the Göttingen State and University Library. The presentation aims to stimulate discussion on sustainable and socially responsive infrastructures for textual scholarship. It invites researchers, cultural heritage institutions, and the public to explore, use, and contribute to the ecosystem. We will show how the TIDO Viewer enables more interactive and inclusive engagement with textual heritage. By making complex textual structures accessible, TIDO supports collaboration and allows participants to explore and co-create knowledge from historical texts.

Folklore research often starts from difficult material conditions: collections are scattered across institutions, described with inconsistent metadata, and frequently available only as scans. In multilingual settings, this fragmentation is amplified by mixed cataloguing traditions and uneven documentation. As a result, researchers and heritage professionals spend substantial time on basic tasks—finding relevant items, assessing text usability, and manually assigning categories—before they can ask interpretive questions.

This poster and demo present a locally deployable tool that helps turn fragmented folklore material into a research-ready corpus while keeping the decision process transparent. The project is demonstrated on a corpus of Russian-language magic folktales preserved in an Estonian archive. Working across languages and institutional traditions, it provides a transnational, intercultural case study of how public digital humanities can be supported by pragmatic, resilient infrastructure. The workflow has three goals: make text available from scans in a way that can be inspected, consolidate metadata into a stable index suitable for citation and analysis, and enable automatic, verifiable type prediction for new tales using an existing, expert-assigned typology.

First, the pipeline produces machine-readable text from scanned pages and generates a simple quality log that documents processing status and known issues for each item. Second, it builds a corpus index with stable identifiers for texts and volumes and a consolidated set of descriptive fields that researchers typically need (e.g., provenance signals and archive-facing descriptions). This index serves as the backbone for searching, sampling, and reporting, and supports stewardship through consistent identifiers and documented processing outcomes.

Third, the corpus already contains reference tale-type labels (assigned according to the Aarne–Thompson–Uther, ATU, index). The tool leverages these labels as training data to build a model that can predict the most likely type(s) for an unseen tale. For each input text, it outputs a shortlist of three candidate types. For a curated subset, the system also provides short textual evidence (“quotes from the tale”) that supports each candidate, enabling rapid expert verification. The intention is not to re-classify the archive, but to demonstrate a reusable baseline for extending typological access to additional, external, or newly digitised tales.

To support reuse and collaboration, the project exports corpus metadata in widely used linked-data formats (RDF/Turtle and JSON-LD) and provides example queries and basic validation rules to ensure that key fields are present and consistent. Overall, the contribution aims to lower the entry barrier to working with under-documented folklore materials and to create a trustworthy bridge between digitisation outcomes, archival description, and research workflows.

State of the system: work in progress, master thesis project; the poster will be accompanied by an in-person software demonstration.

project repo https://github.com/eugeniavd/magic_tagger

Diverse educational offers serve and foster a diverse community. In Austria, the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH), an institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, uses and maintains its function as a national DARIAH node by engaging and supporting the local community with a global perspective through a number of training formats tailored to its specific needs: Our educational offer is public-facing and open to everybody interested in topics that concern our local DH community in and around Vienna. Therefore, this poster showcases two modes of engagement orchestrated by the ACDH’s ERIC’s and Education (E&E), a subunit of the DH Research & Infrastructure research unit. While the in-person events take place locally at our headquarters in Vienna, we aim to reach out globally by offering a sustainable, inclusive and open digital training offer by streaming events via YouTube live, and training resources on DARIAH-Campus.

The on-site mode, ACDH Lectures and ACDH Tool Galleries, focus on the suggestions from and the needs of our local community. Topics are discussed in-house and with our communities of practice such as CLARIAH-AT, and are realised as tailored yearly education cycles. For example, the ACDH lecture series is not only a public lecture but serves DH students at the University of Vienna at least once a year.

The digital mode, training materials on DARIAH-Campus and lecture streams on YouTube, showcases the ACDH’s engagement in distributing local developments on a global scale. DARIAH-Campus is a discovery framework and hosting platform for learning resources: “It was developed as a pilot in the context of the H2020-funded project DESIR (DARIAH-ERIC Sustainability Refined). Today, it is one of the core services of DARIAH. Its goal is to widen access to open, inclusive, high-quality learning materials that aim to enhance creativity, skills, technology and knowledge in the digitally-enabled arts and humanities”. The platform has been technically developed, curated, maintained at the ACDH since its inception in 2019 and E&E members have joined the editorial team in 2023, focussing on learning material developed within their respective communities and projects that the ACDH and DARIAH are involved in. This way, we can expand the portfolio while actively engaging our community as training resource authors and offering unique supporting structures.

The poster showcases how adding training resources derived from formats like the on-site ACDH lectures to digital DARIAH-Campus demonstrate the iterative processes that enable the systematic enhancement of existing learning materials—not only in terms of content to ensure that they are not merely didactically functional but capable of conveying knowledge in diverse and engaging ways. At the same time, the platform itself requires regular revision and curation to meet evolving technical requirements that underpin digital reusability. To this end, adaptable and interoperable formats such as MDX are employed for learning content, and the use of GitHub for content management further contributes to transparency and traceability in reuse.

This reusability is part of the FAIR principles that underpin not only DARIAH-Campus but other educational activities at the ACDH, too.

The Jókai-Garden Virtual Reconstruction Project is an interdisciplinary digital heritage initiative, which combines results of scientific research, public collection services, and cultural knowledge dissemination. The project reconstructs the historical garden of the novelist Mór Jókai (1825–1904) at Sváb Hill (Budapest) as a hybrid physical–virtual space. Beyond reconstruction, the project demonstrates that plants function as transnational concepts, shaped by diverse cultural representations across time and space. The poster presents the project from three interrelated perspectives: (1) physical and virtual implementation, (2) collaborative research frameworks, and (3) the integration of natural and human sciences in a public collection environment.

1. Physical and Virtual Implementation

The project combines on-site interpretation with digital accessibility through QR-coded information boards placed in the real life garden. These connect historical photographs and concise explanatory texts to the project’s virtual interface (jokaikert.oszk.hu), enabling visitors to access extended content on mobile devices and desktop computers. The hybrid approach integrates spatial experience with virtual exploration, combining historical research with an educational scientific style supported by visual materials, hyperlinks, and interactive quiz elements.

A long-term collaboration with the Duna–Ipoly National Park reinforces the physical dimension of the project. Existing guided tours focusing on forestry and ornithology are extended through the hybrid framework, allowing the garden to be interpreted simultaneously as a literary, historical, and ecological site. In parallel, the digital interface promotes the services of public collections and introduces users to archival research, data discovery, and digital cultural heritage infrastructures.

2. Local, National, and International Perspectives

The project is based on close cooperation between local and national public collections. The Hillside Local History Collection (Budapest, 12th District) contributed a villa reconstruction developed through intensive archival and microhistorical research, resulting in a detailed 3D model. The National Széchényi Library carried out the historical garden reconstruction using its own materials, supplemented by plant-related objects and visual sources from national and international museum collections.

This multilevel collaboration demonstrates how local microhistory can be embedded in national narratives and connected to international heritage. It also highlights the scalability and transferability of digital reconstruction methods across institutional and disciplinary contexts.

3. Natural and Human Sciences in Dialogue

As a project of a public collection, the Jókai-Garden serves as a platform for dialogue between the natural sciences, the humanities, and the fine arts, drawing on approaches from materiality studies and the history of knowledge. Plant profiles form a core element of the project, presenting botanical and geographical data alongside medical, economic, and symbolic interpretations. These entries contextualize plants within history, literature, fine art, and folklore at both Hungarian and international levels.

Each plant is examined through diverse source types, including visual materials (artworks, applied art objects, botanical illustrations), audio sources (e.g. folk songs), and textual materials ranging from historical non-fiction to literary works. The website connects multiple public collection databases and platforms, including the National Széchényi Library’s repositories (e.g. MEK, DKA) and the Library’s Digital Humanities Platform (dHUpla; www.dhupla.hu).

Context

The Biblissima+ project (2021–2029) is a France 2030–funded initiative focused on the study and dissemination of ancient written cultures across all periods and regions. While aggregating and interconnecting scientific and heritage data, Biblissima+ aims to move beyond a Western Europe–centred intellectual history and foster an intercultural and transnational perspective. Although the majority of resources accessible through the portal originate from Western Europe and the Mediterranean basin, the infrastructure opens up through project funding, including manuscripts from the Maghreb, Dunhuang, and the UXIL chair on Novgorod Chronicle (Old Slavonic). Providing access to original sources, describing, editing and translating them with scholarly integrity, while ensuring their long-term transmission, is essential for the communities directly concerned, particularly regarding the dignity and preservation of minority cultures and the geopolitical dimension of cultural history. It is crucial to broadly understand the history of humanity and the planet, beyond textual studies (e.g. climatology, astronomy, environmental history).

In 2026, the project will become a national research infrastructure bringing together research laboratories and heritage institutions, with among its missions an emphasis on Public Engagement, playing an essential role.

1/ Five strategies to open up the infrastructure towards a more collective and engaged research

The poster highlights strategies for the collective construction of the infrastructure, ensuring its shared ownership, continuous scientific and technical renewal.

– Producing open data (digitizing artifacts, catalogs, editions, eScriptorium: Biblissima-Data),
– Ensuring interoperability on the Biblissima portal, creating the connected Biblissima-Text platform (Biblissima-Portal),
– Structuring cross-disciplinary data-oriented communities, renewing research questions and tools (Biblissima-Communities),
– Strengthening the science-society engagement (Biblissima-Public Engagement),

– Developing financial and environmental sustainability (Biblissima-Sustainability).

These missions converge towards an aim of inclusiveness, anchoring the communities at its core, illustrated with examples of participatory governance in a spirit of international scientific openness.

2/ “Biblissima-Public Engagement”

The introduction of an outreach function reflects the aim to build a resilient infrastructure by developing its uses and public value, which legitimize the long-term funding. Deeply linked to Biblissima's transformation into an infrastructure, the Public Engagement strategy is in development. First steps include:
1/ Connecting projects within a national knowledge-sharing website, Odysseum, developed with the French Ministry of National Education and the École normale supérieure – PSL, intended for diverse target audiences.

2/ Training in ancient languages, including the rarest ones, in conjunction with the Institute for Linguistic Heritage and Diversity (EPHE-PSL).

3/ Personalised training for decision-makers, politicians, diplomats, non-specialist colleagues, curators and creation of a pool of experts.

4/ Analyzing the socio-economic impact of the infrastructure and developing indicators to assess societal benefits and guide public policies.

In addition, Biblissima explores further ways to facilitate access to its research data, including real-time transcription and translation, improved accessibility for users with visual impairments, and participatory approaches such as citizen science.

Conclusion

Starting from an aggregation of interests and expanding, the Biblissima infrastructure enables a shift from a knowledge base to a knowledge space fostering the critical co-construction of knowledge and digital tools enabling their analysis.

WikiCite is a long‑standing community initiative within the Wikimedia ecosystem dedicated to building an open, structured, and multilingual bibliographic infrastructure through Wikidata (Nielsen et al., 2016; Rasberry et al., 2019; Lubiana et al, 2025), a central hub for free metadata on the semantic web (Sardo & Bianchini, 2021). Since its launch in 2016, and thanks to the grants provided by the Wikimedia Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Ayers & Klein, 2021), WikiCite has brought together researchers, research evaluators, librarians and GLAM professionals, developers, and open‑knowledge advocates to collaboratively model citations, scholarly works, authors, publishers, and research outputs as linked open data.

After the end of its first 5-year-phase, marked by the disruption of the old format of conferences by the COVID-19 pandemic, WikiCite entered a phase of distributed activity (Marchetti & Pellizzari, 2024), marked also by major infrastructural changes in Wikidata, specifically the announced 2025 split of the Wikidata Query Service into scholarly and non-scholarly graphs (Lubiana et al, 2025), driven by scalability constraints. This interest prompted a reboot effort that culminated with the hosting of the international 2025 WikiCite Conference in Bern, organized with the main support of Wikimedia Switzerland and the Swiss National Library (Figure 1). This hybrid event re‑established WikiCite as a physical and virtual node for the Wikimedia bibliographic data community. More than a traditional academic meeting, the conference was intentionally designed as a participatory “knowledge space” for co‑creation, dialogue, and collaborative problem‑solving across institutional, disciplinary, and community boundaries.

A major outcome of the 2025 reboot was the development of a new strategic White Paper, authored collectively by the participants and afterwards shared with all interested stakeholders. This document serves as a state‑of‑the‑art report on the relaunch of this major community platform as a living framework for future development. It addresses themes that stress the importance of ongoing interactions between different stakeholders, such as: round-tripping between institutional and community platforms, multilingual authority control, integration with ontologies and controlled vocabularies, the challenges of defining a software infrastructure for sustaining WikiCite and Wikibase, the relationship between the GLAM sectors and Wikidata, and the future approaches to Wikidata scalability thanks to Wikibase and new ecosystems.

The poster will visually map these emerging trends and present:

1. The renewed WikiCite conference format, emphasizing hybridity, co‑creation, and community‑institution collaboration (Figure 2).

2. Key insights and visual summaries from the 2025 White Paper, including conceptual diagrams of the 40 talks in English (Figure 3).

3. Ongoing initiatives and post‑conference developments, showing the ongoing impact of the discourse started in Bern in different areas of research and activity.

By presenting the WikiCite reboot within the broader landscape, this poster aims to open a dialogue with the DARIAH community about shared challenges and opportunities. We seek feedback, collaboration, and critical engagement from the DARIAH network to strengthen this participatory model and to explore how open, community‑driven bibliographic infrastructures can support more equitable, transparent, and resilient forms of knowledge production.

DigitalSEE (Digital South-Eastern Europe) is a digital research initiative and virtual repository dedicated to documenting, interpreting, and contextualizing textual and visual representations of artifacts and monuments across the Balkans from the Early Modern period to the late 19th century. By bringing together diverse sources, the project provides an integrated environment for exploring how cultural heritage has been recorded, transmitted, lost, and reimagined in a region shaped by complex linguistic and political dynamics. A central aim of DigitalSEE is to connect dispersed materials, foster scholarly interaction, and encourage reflective engagement with how past observers encountered the landscapes and monuments of the Ottoman Balkans.

Research begins with the systematic collection of evidence related to a monument, site, or theme, followed by cross-verification through source tracing and comparison with archaeological and historical data. The corpus spans multiple languages, including Latin, German, French, English, and Ottoman Turkish. This multilingual range reveals how descriptions of the same artifact or location were shaped by linguistic choices, cultural expectations, and the positionality of individual travelers. By integrating original and modern place names alongside multilingual metadata and gazetteer links, the project enables navigation across textual traditions while remaining attentive to translation and historical nuance.

A distinctive feature of DigitalSEE is its focus on small-scale, heterogeneous datasets. Rather than aggregating large corpora, the project prioritizes carefully curated entries that preserve uncertainty, contradiction, and interpretive openness. The dataset currently includes approximately 150 records drawn primarily from 17th and 18th-century travelogues. These observations,often fragmentary or uneven,form a layered record of how monuments were perceived over time. Comparing repetitions, omissions, and inconsistencies provides insight into processes such as destruction, reuse of building materials, altered travel routes, and shifting scholarly or antiquarian interests.

Particular attention is given to ancient monuments, which frequently appear in early travel narratives as incidental curiosities. Although systematic archaeological research in the region developed only in the late 19th century, earlier accounts preserve descriptions of monuments that no longer survive. One example is the reconstruction of the history of the arch at Trajan’s Gate, destroyed in 1835. Through the combined analysis of textual and visual evidence, the project identified the creator of a long-misattributed engraving as the Augsburg artist Jeremiah Wachsmuth, whose work likely relied on an earlier traveler’s sketch. This case demonstrates how archival fragments shape the memory and interpretation of monuments across centuries.

DigitalSEE’s infrastructure supports both exploratory research and sustained engagement. The system offers filterable search, query functions, and an interactive geospatial interface. Required metadata fields ensure consistency, while the data model accommodates uncertainty in dating, provenance, and description. The public-facing website allows users to browse entries, inspect high-resolution images, view location maps, and connect to external authoritative resources.

The project follows standards such as TEI EpiDoc and CIDOC CRM. Computational methods, including topic modeling and spatial analysis adapted to small datasets, support interpretation without flattening complexity. DigitalSEE promotes collaborative scholarship and public engagement with the cultural heritage of Southeastern Europe by sharing its software, models, and resources via GitHub, Zenodo, and a Linktree portal.

This poster presents an ongoing project aimed at developing a bilingual (French–Spanish) lexical infrastructure for contemporary architecture, designed according to TEI and LMF standards and enhanced through AI-assisted modelling techniques. The resource is conceived not only as a digital lexicon but as an open infrastructure that supports public engagement, scholarly reuse, and cross-disciplinary interaction between architecture, linguistics, and digital humanities.

The project is grounded in two parallel web corpora of architectural discourse (2000–2025), collected from magazines, blogs, institutional publications, and professional platforms. Term extraction was performed using NLP-assisted workflows, after which key lexical units were manually curated and structured following a TEI–LMF hybrid model (Romary 2003; Francopoulo et al. 2006). The lexicon integrates hierarchical, synonymic and bilingual equivalence relations, enriched through contextual embeddings (CamemBERT and BETO) and guided paraphrasing techniques. AI models were employed to identify semantic proximities, propose candidate relations, and assist in drafting definitional paraphrases, while final decisions remain expert-guided.

The poster demonstrates three layers of innovation:

1. Standard-based modelling of a specialised lexicon
   The TEI–LMF implementation allows the resource to function as an interoperable lexical infrastructure, facilitating sustainability, export to linked open data formats (e.g., SKOS), and potential integration into platforms such as the PanLatin Lexicon (ILC-CNR). The encoding captures conceptual relations, contextual examples, morphological data, and bilingual mappings, offering a rich representation of architectural terminology for researchers, translators, and educators.

2. AI-supported enrichment workflows
   The project evaluates how AI can assist with corpus exploration, lexical clustering, semantic alignment, and paraphrase generation without replacing expert control. The workflow demonstrates how distributional embeddings help identify conceptual networks within architectural discourse, contributing to a dynamic understanding of emerging terms (e.g., ecological metaphors, resilient-city frameworks). This component will be illustrated through prototype visualisations and small demos derived from the current database.

3. Public engagement and participatory potential
   Beyond scholarly applications, the lexicon is designed as a public-facing infrastructure. Architectural terminology carries strong societal relevance—urban planning, sustainability, environmental metaphors—thus offering opportunities for interaction with students, architects, cultural institutions, and local communities. Future development includes participatory annotation modules, public contributions on conceptual interpretations, and integration into teaching activities in translation, architecture, and digital humanities. This aligns the resource with DARIAH’s vision of infrastructures that enable openness, shared creativity, and socially responsive scholarship.

The poster will present the current beta version of the lexicon interface, examples of TEI–LMF entries, AI-assisted enrichment results, and visualisations of the conceptual networks extracted from the corpus. By illustrating both methodology and public engagement potential, this contribution showcases how a specialised digital lexicon can evolve into a hybrid infrastructure—technically robust, socially meaningful, and adaptable to transnational collaborations in digital humanities.

This poster presents an exploratory digital tool for analyzing and visualizing the nineteenth-century correspondence of the Bulgarian merchant brothers Evlogi and Hristo Georgievi, whose economic, cultural, and philanthropic activities shaped Southeast European society and contributed to the founding of Sofia University. The project provides an integrated environment for exploring over 800 TEI-encoded archival entries, enabling researchers to engage with a dispersed historical corpus through spatial visualization, statistical analysis, and network modeling. In doing so, it demonstrates how digital humanities methods foster connections between communities, places, and archival memory, aligning with the conference theme of “Engagement.”

The Georgievi letters constitute a multilingual, transregional communication network linking Ottoman Bulgarian towns with the Danubian Principalities, Central Europe, and the Mediterranean. Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, and French circulated together, reflecting the linguistic diversity of nineteenth-century commerce. Rather than relying on automated translation, the project emphasizes human-encoded TEI metadata and philological attention to names, places, and commodities. Translation, across languages, scripts, and archival formats, is treated as a collaborative scholarly act. The tool enables users to navigate these multilingual traces and engage with historical communication practices shaped by adaptation and negotiation.

At its core, the project commits to annotation within a small-data framework. The dataset is modest due to the limits of surviving sources, but it offers interpretive depth rather than large-scale abstraction. Each letter was encoded in TEI XML to capture correspondents, dates, and geographic references, with standardized place names linked to a gazetteer. This approach foregrounds data as a historical artifact rather than a neutral substrate. By prioritizing curated, human-driven annotations, particularly for under-resourced languages, the project supports nuanced analysis while avoiding algorithmic opacity and encouraging reflection on data creation, interpretation, and archival bias.

The Streamlit-based interface integrates three analytical lenses. A map module built with Leaflet and Folium visualizes the network’s geographic reach, highlighting its Lower Danube core and connections to cities such as Istanbul, Odessa, Trieste, Manchester, and London. Filters allow users to trace changes by correspondent, commodity, or time. A statistical view reveals broader patterns, most notably Hristo Georgiev’s role as the correspondence hub, while linking each visualization back to the underlying TEI records and individual letters.

The network analysis module, developed with NetworkX, models correspondence as a directed, weighted graph. Node size reflects degree, and edge thickness indicates frequency. The resulting hub-and-spoke structure centers on Hristo Georgiev, with clusters and peripheral modules representing parallel ventures. This interactive model enables researchers to test hypotheses about commercial coordination, kinship, and political or economic organization in ways that complement traditional historiography.

The Georgievi correspondence forms part of a cultural memory spanning multiple states and languages. Encoding it in TEI XML and publishing it through transparent, FAIR workflows transforms archival documents into reusable, interpretable data. The tool amplifies rather than replaces archival memory, enabling letters once locked in copybooks to be explored by scholars, students, and the wider public. The project demonstrates how responsible digital methods can deepen engagement with historical archives and generate new perspectives on networks, language, and cultural memory.

The history of botany is fundamentally a history of its visual culture, shaped by a contested global encounter between diverse indigenous traditions and the classificatory systems of European empires. Historically, the botanical archive functioned as a “visualization machine” designed to facilitate imperial administration through remote observation (Bleichmar, 2012). Within this visual epistemology, illustrations often served as mobile proxies for physical specimens, effectively erasing the local environmental context and geographic origins of plants to fit them into the reductive, universalizing logic of Linnaean taxonomy. These imperial practices frequently marginalized or subsumed sophisticated epistemic traditions, such as those found in the Chinese Bencao systems, Mesoamerican codices, and Ayurvedic herbals, which prioritized different modes of relating to the natural world.

To address these historical erasures, we introduce Phyto-Vision, a scalable Digital Humanities workflow situated within the emerging field of Digital Plant Humanities (DPH). This discipline brings together environmental and digital frameworks to recover marginalized narratives of botanical life and human-flora relations (Arthur & Ryan, 2024). Phyto-Vision is designed to transform fragmented historical imagery into a quantifiable corpus by treating the digitized page not merely as a carrier of information, but as a visual territory for critical analysis.

To ensure technical interoperability and sustainability, Phyto-Vision implements a multi-stage pipeline focused on reproducible research practices. We first executed a metadata unification phase, adapted from the ZuantuSet method (Mei et al., 2025), normalizing data into machine-actionable schemas. To maintain archival integrity across disparate digital libraries, we performed archival deduplication, identifying and merging overlapping editions through image collation techniques (Kaoua et al., 2021). This infrastructure ensures that the resulting dataset follows FAIR principles, making the archive discoverable for longitudinal study and cross-cultural comparison.

The extraction core utilizes the YOLOv11 architecture (Jocher & Qiu, 2024). We curated a seed corpus of 781 manually annotated botanical illustrations representing various global traditions, sourced from the Library of Congress, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Royal Horticultural Society, Yale University Library, and the National Archives of Japan. To ensure model robustness against material degradation and varying visual grammars, we applied a rigorous data augmentation strategy involving horizontal flipping, random cropping, and noise injection, which expanded the training set to 1,875 examples. The fine-tuned model demonstrated exceptional efficacy for cultural heritage data, achieving a peak mean Average Precision (mAP@50) of 96.9%, with precision and recall reaching 95.5% and 90.3%, respectively.

Beyond detection, Phyto-Vision implements a domain-specific taxonomy to categorize iconography by form, specifically morphological diagrams, habit illustrations, and decorative borders. This allows for a visual–syntactic classification that measures the persistence of indigenous knowledge versus colonial classificatory systems. By automating the curation of these visual series, we provide a pathway for decolonizing visual epistemologies in the plant humanities. This poster showcases the end-to-end workflow of the project, and to support community reuse, the Phyto-Vision pipeline and normalized metadata will be made available as an Open Access resource.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Open Marketplace (SSHOMP) - marketplace.sshopencloud.eu/ -, one of the flagship services of the “Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cluster” (SSHOC), is a discovery platform for new and contextualised resources from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) [1, 2]. Its main aim is to support researchers in discovering, accessing and comparing digital tools and methods for their research. With its five content types - Tools & Services, Datasets, Training Materials, Publications, and Workflows - the SSHOMP covers a large range of research practices and methodological approaches.

The SSHOMP is built on three interrelated pillars: community, curation and contextualisation. This poster focuses on the community dimension, in line with the theme of the DARIAH Annual Event 2026. It presents the various roles and uses of the SSHOMP and illustrates what it means to be a contributor to this collaborative service (especially, based on some user stories), and how the content is moderated and the community is engaged by the Editorial Team running the portal [e.g., 3].

Participatory projects in the digital humanities have demonstrated their potential to empower academics and enable shared ownership of knowledge infrastructures. The SSH OMP builds on this insight by supporting the collaborative creation of tools and methods descriptions. While it is not directed at society at large, the SSHOMP nevertheless embodies a form of generous thinking that values openness and inclusivity in the way a collective truth about the tools and methods is built and promoted.

Community engagement is further supported through features such as curated collections - under development at the time of writing this abstract - which bring together resources around shared research questions, methods or disciplinary perspectives. The poster highlights recent work on collections developed in national or project-based communities - such as the Text+ in Germany or the ATRIUM project community for example. These activities demonstrate how local or disciplinary practices are integrated into a broader European research infrastructure landscape and how the SSHOMP functions as an infrastructure of engagement [3], which content is shaped by the communities.

From a more technical and conceptual perspective, the poster also highlights how the SSH Open Marketplace has been designed as a service based on community needs, and demonstrates how the team in charge of the service, always keen on collecting ideas for new features to be implemented, actively engages with its communities to ensure that the SSHOMP fits their needs. That is also why this poster is an interactive poster that asks a series of core questions to the participants in order to: 1/collect ideas for new and unforeseen uses of the Marketplace, 2/identify new tools or collections to be created and indexed in the Marketplace, 3/collect suggestions for new features to be implemented in future upgrade of the service. Thanks to sticky notes and pens available next to the poster, participants to the DARIAH Annual Event will be asked to contribute their views on what the SSHOMP should include and look like.

This poster presents the experiences, learning outcomes and teaching strategies gained from teaching and refining the university course “Computational Background Skills for Digital Humanities” (CBS4DH), which covers low-level computational background skills for digital humanities. The purpose of this proposal is twofold: first, to provide a more coherent pedagogical framework for similar DH-related courses by examining current university offerings; and second, to design a student-centered (Jones 2007) course that better addresses the learning needs of DH students. This integrated analysis enables the identification of concrete and potential gaps between institutional provision and student expectations, thereby offering an evidence-based contribution to the future development of DH curricula. Our poster aims to stimulate discussion about the requirements that institutions and research projects have for prospective DH scholars and should promote the exchange of best practices in related university courses.

This poster will present the state of KBR’s- the Royal Library of Belgium, multi service data-driven research infrastructure. This is centered on the concept of "Collections as Data," aiming to provide researchers and users with high-quality, machine-readable access to Belgium’s cultural and scientific heritage.

This is supported through three projects that span 2020- 2030, funded by BELSPO. The first step of this infrastructure was the DATA-KBR-BE project under the BRAIN-be 2.0 program. This initiative addressed the technical and legal barriers to data-level access, moving beyond simple online catalogs to provide access to pre-curated digitized collections. This established a sustainable data extraction workflow and the launching the Open Data Platform.

In the second step the data provision services are being further developed through the BELSPO ESFRI project of Virtual Lab, with contributions to DARIAH. In Virtual Lab accredited users of eduGAIN will be able to view available data and make selections for compiling their own datasets. This will be compressed and sent through a data service that further supports BELNETs file transfer services. In a third step the research data infrastructure will be enhanced by the BELSPO ESFRI CultuR-AI project, a contribution to CLARIN. In CultuR-AI KBR will work to evaluate the use of GenAI tools for enriching KBR’s collections. These two infrastructure projects are coordinated by the Digital Research Lab, a 10 year collaboration between KBR and Ghent University, to facilitate text and data mining on KBR’s digitized and born digital collections.

The combination of these projects will aid to facilitate interdisciplinary research, allowing scholars to treat digitized collections and documents as vast datasets for text and data mining (TDM). This also makes clear contributions to the European Research Infrastructures, specifically DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and CLARIN (Language Resources and Technology). Through these frameworks, and the FWO CLARIAH-VL initiative, KBR ensures that its data services are interoperable, standardized, and integrated into the broader FEDOSC and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This collaboration provides users with accredited systems for secure and persistent access to sensitive or rights-restricted data, fostering a trustworthy environment for large-scale analysis. In addition this works to both streamline internal operations and enhance user experience:

• Data on Demand & Automated Services: This service simplifies the process of compiling, packaging, and sending specific sub-sets of collections to users, reducing the manual burden on library staff while providing tailored datasets for specialized queries.

• Collection Enrichment: AI and machine learning models are utilized for semantic enrichment. This includes automated metadata extraction, Named Entity Recognition (NER), etc.

• User-Level Access: For the end-user, AI-driven interfaces facilitate more intuitive discovery, allowing for similarity searches, across (centuries) of material.

This multi-service infrastructure not only automates internal workflows for data delivery but also empowers the global research community to unlock new insights from Belgium’s rich heritage through sophisticated, data-level exploration.

The growing influence of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, challenges ancient principles of digital humanities (methodological transparency, evidence management, and research reproducibility) by introducing a powerful yet opaque digital infrastructure. While AI accelerates information processing and expands interpretive possibilities, it complicates the traceability of sources and undermines the reproducibility and verifiability of knowledge production (Vitali-Rosati, 2025). Confronted with this opacity, researchers must extend the classical “critique of sources” (Langlois, Seignobos, 1898) to encompass the tools that generate or select them, developing a critique of infrastructures themselves.

This requires critical literacy (Marin, Steinert, 2022): the capacity to assess not just the reliability of outputs produced by opaque models but also the epistemic values and intentions embedded within them. Key questions arise: Who built the model, with what data, and for what purpose? What blind spots or biases are concealed within its design? More broadly, what kinds of historical, social, or cultural questions can such tools meaningfully illuminate—and when might they instead weaken research by bypassing critical engagement with sources?

Library labs, located at the intersection between those who collect and preserve sources and those who interpret them, are particularly well suited for this kind of critical co-construction (Carlin, Laborderie, 2021). By bringing together expertise from curation, data science, and research methodology, these spaces make it possible to document data provenance, uncover corpus bias, negotiate modeling choices, and develop participatory practices that bridge scientific and civic perspectives.

From this interdisciplinary collaboration emerged the Mezanno/Corpusense ecosystem, part of the BnF’s four-year research plan. This open-source tool extracts both the text and structural features of documents and integrates AI modules for content categorization. While its use requires no technical proficiency, it keeps researchers central to the process through three principles: local control of data, modularity of processing chains (layout detection, OCR transcription, structuring via LLMs), and systematic documentation of methodological choices. The goal is not to adopt prepackaged AI services but to adapt them to the standards of the humanities and social sciences: transparency, reproducibility, and openness to collective critique.

Mezanno shows how library labs can become infrastructures of engagement, making visible the technical operations, epistemic decisions, and uncertainties that underlie research. This transparency invites shared critique among researchers, librarians, heritage institutions, and the broader public. Through the example of the BnF DataLab project, this contribution demonstrates how the power of generative AI can be reconciled with the values of critical, participatory, and sustainable research.

Bibliography
Caroline Muller & Frédéric Clavert, Écrire l’histoire. Gestes et expériences à l’ère numérique, Paris, Armand Colin, 2025.
Marcello Vitali-Rosati, “L’IA a-t-elle tué les humanités numériques?”, Humanités numériques et intelligence artificielle: interactions/altercations, Sorbonne Université, 2024. https://ihn.sorbonne-universite.fr/journee-detude-humanites-numeriques-et-intelligence-artificielle-interactions/altercations
Marie Carlin & Arnaud Laborderie, “Le BnF DataLab, un service aux chercheurs en humanités numériques”, Humanités numériques, 2021, 4. ⟨hal-03285816v2⟩
Joseph Chazalon et al., “Reprendre le contrôle des processus de traitement de données de recherche en histoire quantitative : présentation de l’écosystème Mezzano,” DHNord2025, Tourcoing, France. ⟨hal-05421670⟩

The Czech Republic has made substantial investments in the development and support of a national landscape of large research infrastructures (RIs). Under the governance of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS), a robust RIs ecosystem has evolved since 2010 and has been formally consolidated in the Roadmap of Large Research Infrastructures of the Czech Republic (Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, 2024). The Roadmap currently includes four infrastructures relevant to the humanities: the Czech Archaeological Information System, the Czech Literary Bibliography, the Czech National Corpus, and LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ. Despite the maturity of these individual infrastructures, their disciplinary specificities have posed persistent challenges for interoperability, sustainability, and community uptake.

All four infrastructures are currently engaged in the implementation of the national strategic project Open Science II (OS II), which aims to establish the Czech national node within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and to promote its integration into dedicated disciplinary clusters. In addition, the project supports the adoption of FAIR principles and Open Science policies within the Czech research environment. Previous research has demonstrated that FAIR principles must be operationalised in ways that reflect the epistemic and methodological specificities of the humanities rather than being applied as uniform technical standards (Tóth-Czifra, 2020; Harrower et al., 2020). This contribution argues that the coordinated design of a national humanities cluster within EOSC provides an effective governance and technical model for overcoming disciplinary fragmentation while preserving domain-specific requirements. The Humanities and Arts cluster within OS II is implemented by a dedicated mini-consortium composed of experts representing the humanities-oriented RIs listed on the national Roadmap.

The core activities of the Humanities and Arts cluster focus on both the creation of new disciplinary repositories (notably in bibliographic and archaeological domains) and the further development of existing ones, such as the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ repository. A key objective is their systematic interconnection with central national solutions, including the National Metadata Directory and the National Repository Platform, in line with nationally defined technical and organisational requirements (Matyska et al., 2025). The proposed poster presents the overall design of the Czech humanities node within EOSC together with the conceptual framework underpinning the planned technical solutions and organisational interventions. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the combination of (i) shared national core services, (ii) discipline-specific repository layers, and (iii) community-driven governance supported by centrally coordinated FAIR and EOSC compliance. This architecture is designed to accommodate the specific requirements of individual scholarly communities while enabling interoperability with international disciplinary networks and alignment with central national infrastructures.

While grounded in the Czech context, the model presented here is applicable to other countries with heterogeneous humanities infrastructures seeking to balance national coordination, disciplinary autonomy, and EOSC interoperability. The case further illustrates the critical role of a national funding and policy authority in enabling long-term coordination across research infrastructures and ensuring sustainability beyond individual project cycles. The poster provides practical insights into the design, governance, and implementation of collaborative humanities infrastructures aligned with EOSC and FAIR principles.

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.

This poster presents an ongoing citizen science campaign, The Family History Repository, launched in Latvia in spring 2026. The initiative is developed within the framework of the Latvian State Research Programme project Navigating the Latvian History of the 20th–21st Century: Social Morphogenesis, Legacy, and Challenges (2023–2026, No. VPP-IZM-Vēsture-2023/1-0003) and responds to historians’ growing interest in bottom-up perspectives on historical knowledge production.

The campaign aims to collect data on which events, individuals, and issues from 20th- and 21st-century Latvian history are considered meaningful within family experiences and narratives. Such bottom-up data are crucial for counterbalancing long-standing scholarly assumptions and biases regarding what constitutes “central” or “research-relevant” historical issues and knowledge. By foregrounding family narratives, the project seeks to illuminate how Latvian history functions within society and is embedded in family practices.

The digital survey platform developed for the campaign is designed to be openly accessible, with a primary target group consisting of primary and secondary school history teachers, their pupils, and the pupils’ family members. The Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia builds on extensive experience in public engagement and citizen science initiatives, including projects involving schoolchildren in manuscript transcription, poetry recording, and an educational game related to Latvian folk song stylistics (Eglāja-Kristsone and Raudive 2020; Pērle-Sīle and Reinsone 2022).

A key technical and ethical challenge of the campaign lies in integrating the Institute’s digital archival infrastructure with a campaign-specific survey tool so that submitted family narrative units can semi-automatically form a new, structured archival collection. This requires balancing established archival practices—such as the provision of rich metadata—with the protection of personal data in compliance with GDPR, particularly Recital 38 and Article 8 concerning children’s data. Ensuring anonymity and accounting for the potentially sensitive nature of family narratives are central concerns. In this way, the campaign foregrounds the methodological, ethical, and legal dimensions of collaborative research involving vulnerable groups and cultural data.

References

Eglāja-Kristsone, Eva, and Signe Raudive. 2020. “Sabiedrības iesaistes akcija ‘Lasi skaļi’: estētiskie un izglītojošie dzejas ieskaņošanas aspekti” [Public Engagement Action “Read Aloud”: The Aesthetic and Educational Aspects of Recording Poetry]. Letonica 42: 66–83. https://doi.org/10.35539/LTNC.2021.0042.E.E.K.S.R.0005.

Pērle-Sīle, Ginta, and Sanita Reinsone. 2022. “Transcription as a Tool for Deep Reading and Teaching of Folklore.” Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications 4 (1): 390–400. https://doi.org/10.5617/dhnbpub.11316.

Heterogeneous collections, multiple formats, and evolving annotation practices pose significant challenges for Digital Humanities infrastructures. To move beyond isolated project silos, research environments must provide open and flexible access to cultural heritage. The TextAPI (https://editions.sub.uni-goettingen.de/textapi) and its surrounding specifications SearchAPI (https://editions.sub.uni-goettingen.de/searchapi), AnnotationAPI (https://editions.sub.uni-goettingen.de/annotationapi) address this by defining stable, implementation-independent interfaces for accessing, searching, and presenting annotations for digital texts.

The infrastructure is built on a loosely coupled, API-driven philosophy. By separating normative API contracts from specific back end implementations, we ensure long-term resilience and maintain the system as easy to adopt by others as possible. This approach lowers the barriers for community-built tools, allowing researchers, memory institutions, and the public to interact with textual data independently of the underlying repository technology.

The poster visualizes this ecosystem using the C4 model (https://c4model.com/) to illustrate scope, responsibilities, and engagement boundaries. At the System Context level, TextAPI-based services are situated within the broader research environment, we highlight the interplay between end-users, client applications (TIDO), and external authority services. At the Container level, we present the deployable building blocks — including API endpoints, search back ends, and transformation modules.

The accompanying live demonstration showcases the ecosystem in action. Instead of a single reference stack, we demonstrate how various clients can retrieve texts, run searches, and consume annotations across different back end technologies. A key example of this modularity is the integration with TextLPG (https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/561741118?language=en), which provides complex graph-based text modeling, and TIDO (https://editions.sub.uni-goettingen.de/tido), an open-source viewer that translates these API streams into an intuitive interface for the public.

Together, the poster and demo highlight how a flexible, API-based architecture serves as a infrastructure for the public good. It demonstrates that standardization is not a constraint, but a catalyst for collaborative, sustainable, and participatory Digital Humanities research.

While the digitization of cultural heritage has long promised to democratize access to history, a significant "analog barrier" persists. Although millions of documents are available as digital images, they remain machine-unreadable – effectively locking their content away from search and analysis. Consequently, vast historical narratives remain hidden within unstructured data, to a large extent accessible only to experts with specialized paleographic skills.

This paper presents the ongoing transformation of the Swedish National Archive Database (NAD) into a dynamic e-infrastructure for research (2026–2030, funded by the Swedish Research Council). This infrastructure is designed to fulfill three primary objectives. First, it enhances interoperability and retrieval through streamlined API integration and standardized frameworks. By leveraging IIIF and OAI-PMH, the initiative expands access to research datasets, full-text, AI search and reference data, providing researchers with a more robust digital toolkit.

Second, the platform enables the development of domain-specific AI models fine-tuned on archival holdings. Through extensive collaboration with READ COOP and the Transkribus community, the National Archives has developed the Swedish Lion model, trained on 50,000 manually verified pages. Unlike general large language models (LLMs) – which often suffer from "hallucinations" and lack historical nuance – our model possesses the contextual vocabulary necessary to navigate the dialectal and orthographic complexities of historical Swedish language. Future iterations will extend these capabilities to non-linear formats, such as maps and tables.

Third, the infrastructure establishes a bidirectional data ecosystem, allowing researchers and the public to contribute transcriptions and metadata corrections. While NAD remains the authoritative system for core archival information, this platform creates a mechanism for harnessing external expertise. By integrating user-generated contributions with AI-driven processing, the National Archives can significantly enhance the quality and connectivity of its digital collections.

Finally, the presentation explores the project’s commitment to ethical AI and transparency. Moving away from opaque "black box" models, NAD prioritizes scientific explainability through validation and our own open-source pipeline for historical text, HTRflow (http://github.com/AI-Riksarkivet/htrflow). In doing so, the National Archives retains control, guaranteeing that the "ground truth" of historical inquiry remains rooted in authentic archival sources.

In sum, we argue that this new infrastructure represents a transformative shift: from digital archives as static repositories to a collaborative e-infrastructure that fosters co-creation and new research.

Research infrastructures in the Humanities and Cultural Heritage increasingly operate within complex digital ecosystems, where data, tools, services, and communities continuously evolve. In this context, access-oriented platforms alone are no longer sufficient: infrastructures also require analytical instruments capable of monitoring practices, identifying trends, and supporting evidence-based decision making. This paper presents the H2IOSC Observatory, a permanent monitoring environment developed within the Humanities and Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud (H2IOSC), and discusses its design as a joint effort of four European Research Infrastructures: CLARIN, DARIAH, E-RIHS, and OPERAS.

The H2IOSC Observatory is conceived as a dynamic monitoring layer that complements infrastructural service provision. It builds on an extensive landscape activity carried out through a mixed-methods approach combining large-scale surveys, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and systematic mapping of digital resources, tools, projects, and services. Rather than producing a static landscape report, these methods are operationalised within a continuously updated web-based Observatory designed to support long-term monitoring of research practices, FAIRness levels, infrastructural uptake, and community needs.

A central aspect of the design is the tight integration between the H2IOSC Observatory and the H2IOSC Marketplace. While the Marketplace provides access to datasets, tools, and services, the Observatory analyses their distribution, evolution, and use over time. This bidirectional relationship enables the Observatory to inform Marketplace curation strategies, onboarding priorities, and service design, while usage data and resource metadata feed back into the analytical layer. Together, the two platforms form a coupled system linking resource provision and evidence-based monitoring.

A defining feature of the Observatory is its cross-infrastructure and cross-domain architecture. Each participating Research Infrastructure contributes domain-specific perspectives and datasets: CLARIN brings expertise in linguistic resources and metadata aggregation; DARIAH contributes digital humanities methods, tools, and community-driven workflows; E-RIHS provides heritage science datasets and data spaces; OPERAS contributes knowledge on open scholarly communication and publishing practices. The Observatory integrates these heterogeneous inputs into a shared analytical framework, enabling comparative analysis while preserving disciplinary and methodological diversity. This coordinated approach demonstrates how multiple infrastructures can jointly construct a common monitoring environment without enforcing homogenisation.

The paper focuses in particular on the conceptual and functional characteristics of the Observatory. Structurally, it is organised as a modular web application providing interactive dashboards, qualitative summaries, and aggregated indicators derived from both quantitative and qualitative sources. Methodologically, it combines statistical analysis with interpretive layers that contextualise metrics within community practices. From a governance perspective, the Observatory supports evidence-based coordination across infrastructures by providing shared indicators, feedback mechanisms, and monitoring tools that inform strategic planning, service evolution, and the identification of gaps and FAIRification priorities.

The paper concludes by arguing that the H2IOSC Observatory contributes to the long-term sustainability of Humanities research infrastructures by embedding continuous, community-driven monitoring into their governance and evolution. By making its methodologies explicit and its results openly accessible, the Observatory aligns with Open Science principles and contributes to current debates not only within the DARIAH community, but also across the wider research infrastructure community and the broader EOSC landscape.

We are digital artists and humanists collaborating to design an interactive exhibit that illuminates and sonifies the processing of AI systems. We take inspiration from an exhibit in “AI: Mind the Gap” at MIT's Museum that educates viewers about how models work to classify and respond to their input.[1] At this exhibit, museum visitors are invited to draw a picture of a face on a touchscreen, and lights through a window display processing activities while the system classifies the images and chooses text to describe the sentiment they convey. The exhibit invites experimentation and further reading about how more complex AI responses work, and it helps visually orient viewers to the computational processes of emotion recognition.

We are building our own immersive exhibit to surprise, engage, and prolong people's encounters with supposedly "intelligent" machines, especially regarding a specific dimension of interactive encounter–the signals of uncertainty and multiple possibilities in the processing of a language model. We regularly encounter generative chatbots on our mobile devices that easily simulate coherent personalities but surprise us when suddenly they lose track of context or fail to cohere. Such ephemeral flickers hint at instability or uncertainty belied by the programmed confident tone of most AI responses. We want visitors to pause a moment over this specific problem, to see and hear it in flickers and noise (perhaps an unsubtle clank or blast of static) in an extended moment of constructive play. Like the MIT exhibit, ours will magnify and slow down the response to try to visualize the “thinking process” as it investigates multiple possibilities, makes false starts on the way to a resolution. Perhaps we will be able to experiment with tipping points–what contradictory dimensions in a prompt resolve differently based on a slight change in the text input? In exposing dissonances in the processing, we may invite an experience of the "uncanny" as discussed by Masahiro Mori.[2]

We enlarge the physical space for a memorable immersion experience, building with a computer, lighting, and sound equipment in a walk-in space designed for virtual augmented reality experiences in our campus library. But we minimize the processing and budget required for the simulation to maximize long-term sustainability of the project. We build with current lab computers and simple lighting/sound systems (Arduino kits, small projectors, or campus studio theater equipment) for translating computational processing signals into simple but dramatic lighting and sound effects.

We have begun experimenting with open-source small language models (SLMs), that is, models designed to be run on a local laptop or computer system (Ollama, Qwen, and others).[3] We give the models agency to access external systems via Model Context Protocol (MCP) to trigger lights and sounds in response to processing events.[4] We will adapt our processing together with our students this spring to turn this into a dynamic, educational art exhibit as we tweak the coding scripts “under the hood” to change the output. We hope to discuss our project in progress at DARIAH's annual event.

This paper examines how art festivals and educational programs in Varna, Bulgaria, function as infrastructures of engagement, connecting cultural institutions, non-profit organisations, schools, universities, community centres, and the public through co-creation, participatory humanities, and creative practice. Central to this ecosystem is the Public Library, which acts as a coordinator, facilitator, and anchor institution, ensuring collaboration across sectors, sustaining initiatives, and fostering long-term civic engagement.

The paper focuses on two complementary cases coordinated by the Public Library. The first, Literary Spotlight, is an interdisciplinary festival centred on literature, including visual arts (illustration), cinema, and stage arts, which actively engages local communities, artists, and institutions. The second case, STEAM Education for Gen Z Leaders of the Future, is an educational program for young audiences that combines cultural heritage, architecture, urban planning, and archaeology, adapted to the local context. Both initiatives rely on the Public Library to connect stakeholders, design participatory activities, and create inclusive and engaging experiences in both physical and digital spaces.

These cases illustrate three key dimensions of festivals and educational programs as infrastructural actors. First, they provide spaces for co-creation, enabling participants to contribute actively to cultural content and knowledge production. Second, they serve as laboratories for multi-stakeholder engagement, with the Public Library coordinating collaboration among schools, universities, cultural institutions, non-profits, and community centres, thereby fostering networks of participation and dialogue. Third, they contribute to urban revitalisation and social cohesion, transforming public spaces into vibrant hubs for creativity, learning, and civic interaction.

The paper also addresses challenges in sustaining such infrastructures, including temporary funding, stakeholder coordination, and the need for long-term institutional support. It argues that initiatives like Literary Spotlight and STEAM Education require participatory design principles, ethical governance frameworks, and resilient infrastructure to remain inclusive, socially responsive, and sustainable.

By framing art festivals and educational programs as critical infrastructures for engagement, the paper situates co-creation, participatory arts, and community involvement at the heart of engaged scholarship in the digital arts and humanities. The Public Library emerges as a key infrastructural actor, not merely a venue, but a coordinator, connector, and custodian of knowledge, culture, and civic participation.

This study demonstrates how hybrid cultural and educational infrastructures, coordinated by anchor institutions such as the Public Library, can foster collaboration, empower communities, engage youth, and enhance urban life. The examples from Varna illustrate a model for sustainable, socially embedded, and participatory infrastructures that produce cultural, educational, and civic value for society.

Cultural heritage is often encountered in dispersed or incomplete forms, yet these conditions can be turned into opportunities for engagement and reinterpretation. Rather than striving for unattainable unity, this paper explores how digital infrastructures and collaborative practices can reconnect heritage across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, fostering accessibility, participation, and shared meaning-making.

Through case studies spanning tangible heritage, such as archaeological and archival collections, and intangible heritage, including filmic and performative materials, the paper examines strategies of digital recomposition that illuminate traces of coherence and render intelligible histories of transformation. In different disciplinary contexts, this reflection translates into shared practices: digital exhibitions that reunite collections across institutions, collaborative archives and databases that combine dispersed data, and artificial intelligence tools that mediate and enhance access to diverse materials. These examples demonstrate how digital infrastructures can serve as spaces where heritage is not only preserved but actively reinterpreted, producing new narratives that acknowledge layered histories while opening them to broader publics.

Our discourse will discuss: how Italian silent cinema reinterprets archaeological imagery and contributes to cultural memory; data recovery and reinterpretation of legacy excavations; the use of archival sources for the enhancement of intangible heritage; and the development of Artificial Intelligence tools for restoring portraits, frescoes, and archaeological sites.

Digital restoration and AI technologies offer new ways of engaging with heritage, not by reconstructing an idealised integrity, but by generating accessibility, dialogue, and value. They enable new forms of hybridity, where tangible and intangible heritage intersect, and where infrastructures of engagement become spaces of co-creation. In this perspective, recomposition is not an end-state but an ongoing process that reflects evolving priorities and sensibilities. The discussion will consider the role of digital exhibitions and shared archives in reconnecting dispersed heritage, and the potential of AI to mediate access and enhance intelligibility. Particular attention will be given to the ethical and participatory dimensions of these practices, emphasising transparency, inclusivity, and sustainability.

The paper will also highlight specific case studies in which digital infrastructures have enabled new forms of visibility and accessibility, allowing both scholars and broader audiences to engage with heritage in ways that cultivate a nuanced understanding of continuity and change. Examples include archaeological finds dispersed across multiple institutions, film archives scattered by political or economic upheavals, and intangible practices preserved only in partial documentation. In each case, digital infrastructures have provided pathways to coherence without imposing artificial unity, enabling heritage to be experienced as a dynamic field of negotiation and reinterpretation.

By situating dispersion within the evolving narrative of heritage, these practices resist the temptation to impose closure and instead foster accessibility, coherence, and shared creativity. The goal is not to achieve complete unity, which is often unattainable, but to generate new ways of seeing and engaging with heritage that situate incompleteness as a vital chapter in its history. In doing so, digital infrastructures become spaces of connectivity across disciplines, institutions, and publics, cultivating generosity, participation, and shared creativity in the digital arts and humanities.

The “Towards a Loire Parliament” initiative is a situated research-action experiment and an operative institutional fiction aimed at reconfiguring relationships between human societies, the Loire River (France), and living environments. Initiated in 2019 by POLAU (Arts & Urbanism Hub), the initiative lies at the intersection of arts, humanities, environmental sciences, and territorial practices, exploring renewed forms of ecological governance and democratic engagement in the 21st century, particularly in riverine contexts marked by environmental uncertainty.

Based on the hypothesis of an assembly capable of representing not only human collectives but also more-than-human entities of the Loire basin—waters, sediments, species, and ecological dynamics—the project challenges anthropocentric frameworks of law, politics, and spatial planning. Rather than proposing a fixed institutional model, it unfolds as an open and evolving process that embraces uncertainty, plurality of knowledge, and situated inquiry as methodological principles. It mobilizes a heterogeneous coalition of actors—researchers, artists, jurists, naturalists, public institutions, citizen associations, and river users—engaged in the co-production of knowledge and narratives from within the milieu itself.

The Loire Parliament initiative is rooted in a long history of environmental mobilizations along the Loire (including Loire Vivante, etc.), while reformulating these struggles in light of contemporary ecological debates on the political recognition of non-human entities. The initiative was initially structured through a cycle of public hearings (2019–2021), conceived as an expanded parliamentary inquiry bringing together philosophers, anthropologists, ecologists, jurists, artists, and river practitioners, with contributions from scholars such as Bruno Latour and Philippe Descola. These hearings, extended through artistic and editorial outputs (“Le fleuve qui voulait écrire », De Toledo, 2021), highlighted both the heuristic potential of institutional fiction and its operational limits, including heterogeneous temporalities, coordination challenges, and ambiguities surrounding representation. This approach being at odds with the approach centered on the “voices” of the river.

The latter refers to a set of listening devices, sensitive mediations, embodied experiences, and narrative translations seeking to make perceptible the perspectives of the river and its ecosystems. In this sense, taking into account the voices of the Loire, what we perceive of them, must be able to guide the projects carried out by the collective. Since 2022, the collective has deliberately prioritized this dimension, emphasizing territorial anchoring and experimental protocols of attention to the living milieu.

Today, the Loire Parliament functions as a collective learning laboratory based on a distinctive protocol combining: (1) the initiation of inquiries into territorial issues (bathing, pollution, ecological solidarities); (2) systematic immersions in the river environment (walks, bivouacs, navigation); (3) arts–sciences experiments to cross perspectives and expand imaginaries; and (4) public assemblies and the production of material and immaterial traces (sensitive maps, narratives, films, podcasts, archives). Far from institutional closure, the initiative seeks to build a shared yet plural narrative capable of transforming how societies think, feel, and govern from watershed perspectives.

This paper assesses the epistemological, political, and methodological implications of this arts–sciences–territories dynamic, arguing that the Loire Parliament contributes to environmental humanities by experimenting with (in)frastructures of engagement, collective inquiry tools, and situated knowledge circulation in times of accelerated ecological change.

This panel is proposed by the “Visual Media and Interactivity” DARIAH Working Group (WG). This collective presentation of members of the WG will be an opportunity to share common perspectives, challenges and opportunities with researchers interested in its themes. The working group is dedicated to exploring visual and audiovisual content and its methods of digitisation, management, analysis, interpretation, and public engagement. These domains constitute a rapidly expanding field of scientific research (Burgess & Green, 2018). For example, film analysis has been prevalent and institutionalised within film studies and history for numerous decades (Ferro, 1974); they now engage a diverse array of academic disciplines, including sociology, media studies, educational sciences, political science, or theatre studies (Sebag & Durand, 2020 ; Leblanc, Ria & Veyrunes, 2013 ; Howard, 2021). Humanities and Social Sciences working in these areas often encounter significant challenges related to access to methods, tools, infrastructures, as well as skills to develop quality datasets which adhere to the FAIR principles and openness in ways which can underpin novel research. These challenges include devising methods for hosting and archiving these materials, mastering tools for qualitative and quantitative data mining and analysis (including AI technologies), and formulating strategies for the dissemination and valorization of visual data both within and beyond the academic sphere, all while addressing the particular format and copyright concerns associated with images and videos (Bourgatte & Tessier, 2018 ; Besson & Lavorel, 2023).

The “Visual Media and Interactivity” DARIAH Working Group (WG) brings together researchers interested in the use and development of methods, tools, infrastructures, and workflows for creating, storing, archiving, annotating, and sharing visual, audiovisual, 2-dimensional (2D) and 3-dimensional (3D) content. Building on its members' experiences, this WG address transdisciplinarily challenges:

1) Mapping existing efforts, DH competence centres, and available methods, tools, infrastructures, and workflows to ensure state-of-the-art knowledge on the topics.

2) Contributing to the development of innovations, including tools, infrastructures, workflows and skills. For instance, customising visual and annotating tools to better meet Digital Humanities requirements, offering training opportunities, and collecting examples of good practices or success stories. In a context where multiple initiatives have been launched, such an agenda is mandatory to ensure a common path toward interoperable practices.

With this panel, the WG is focusing on scoping opportunities for adopting common platforms, standards, and formats. All researchers exploring visual media corpora across the humanities and social sciences who wish to share their methods, challenges, and research outputs are welcome to join this effort.

References

Baumann, Sara E., Pema Lhaki, et Jessica G. Burke. (2020) Collaborative Filmmaking: A Participatory, Visual Research Method. Qualitative Health Research 30, nᵒ 14.

Besson, R. & Lavorel, M. (2023). L’annotation vidéo pour la recherche. Usages et outils numériques. Consortium Canevas, MkF.

Burgess, J., & Green, J. (2018). YouTube : Online Video and Participatory Culture. Polity.

Ferro, M. (1974). Analyse de film, analyse de sociétés : une source nouvelle pour l'Histoire. Hachette, 1974.

Howard, Craig D. (2021). Participatory Media Literacy in Collaborative Video Annotation. TechTrends 65, nᵒ 5

Leblanc, S., Ria, L. & Veyrunes, P. (2013). Vidéo et analyse in situ des situations d’enseignement et de formation dans le programme du cours d’action. in L. Veillard & A. Tiberghien. Instrumentation de la recherche en Education. Le cas du développement d’une base de vidéos de situation d’enseignement et d’apprentissage ViSA. Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Sebag, J. & Durand, J-P. (2020). La sociologie filmique, CNRS Editions.
Tessier, Laurent, et Michaël Bourgatte. (2018). Les outils d’annotation vidéo pour la recherche. In Expérimenter les humanités numériques : Des outils individuels aux projets collectifs, édité par Étienne Cavalié, Frédéric Clavert, Olivier Legendre, et Dana Martin. Parcours numérique. Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

This proposition reports on a series of pedagogical interventions conducted with approximately thirty students enrolled in a Master’s program in Humanities and Cultural Industries. Initially structured around two technical case studies — Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a writing companion and AI-based image annotation for visual humanities — the course addressed contemporary transformations of textuality, authorship, and editorial mediation in digital environments. These technical topics, however, rapidly became entry points for a broader reflection on research practices, pedagogical formats, and interdisciplinary knowledge production.

The pedagogical framework combined inquiry-based learning and critical AI literacy. Rather than maintaining a vertical model of expertise transmission, the sessions were shaped by continuous exchanges between students’ humanities training, their personal experimentation with generative systems, and the instructor’s background in computer science. This dialogical configuration progressively transformed the classroom into a shared methodological laboratory.

The research contribution consists in an empirically grounded analysis of how interdisciplinary teaching can support methodological innovation in digital humanities infrastructures. The course was organized as iterative cycles of experimentation, collective discussion, and methodological redesign. Two main conclusions emerged from these interactions.

First, students’ proposals — sometimes perceived as naive from a strictly technical perspective — proved to be methodologically fertile precisely because they were not yet constrained by disciplinary automatisms. In RAG-based writing experiments conducted in journalistic and mediation contexts, students used contrasting document corpora to explore how source selection and qualification shape narrative production. These experiments challenged the assumption that methodological innovation primarily originates from senior research communities, and highlighted student contributions as legitimate research inputs.

Second, the collective discussions fostered a reflexive posture regarding research objectives, methodological choices, and epistemic limits. In the case of RAG, students identified how corpus composition, document status, and prompt framing condition narrative outcomes, positioning RAG as an epistemic device rather than a mere generative accelerator. In the case of annotation, they critically examined how current pipelines impose reductive representations of visual objects, echoing critiques of classification as an epistemic construction. Students proposed differentiated annotation strategies depending on research objectives, combining automation with humanities-driven interpretative control.

RAG and annotation therefore function not as the core objects of this contribution, but as methodological catalysts for rethinking how digital humanities knowledge is produced, evaluated, and transmitted.

The paper proposes a reflexive circular framework: (1) appropriation of emerging methods; (2) critical examination of their assumptions and associated methodological conventions; (3) collective proposal of alternative methodological configurations; and (4) reintegration of these proposals into both research and teaching practices. Methodology is understood broadly, encompassing research questions, evaluation criteria, pedagogical design, and epistemological and ethical positioning.

From a DARIAH perspective, this experience advocates for more participatory, horizontal, and research-integrated pedagogies in digital humanities. It argues for stronger connections between teaching and research, and for the inclusion of Master’s students as active contributors within participatory research infrastructures. Such configurations challenge the traditional division between engineers as technical executors and humanities scholars as users, promoting instead a genuinely interdisciplinary co-construction of future digital humanities methods.