Conference Agenda

This panel proposal directly addresses the DARIAH 2026 theme of hybridity by confronting a central crisis in Digital Humanities (DH) research: the escalation of isolated projects and fragmented digital heritage. Our proposed solution, the CHRONICA project infrastructure, demonstrates a critical hybrid approach to knowledge co-construction. We propose to move past disciplinary digital silos by building an AI-enabled, ontology-based federated hub that will link and mobilize over million research records from major scholarly projects (including Baptisteria Sacra Index: An Iconographical Index of Baptismal Fonts (BSI, Canada), Documents of Early English Data Set (DEEDS, Canada), and Mapping Lived Religion (MLR, Sweden), Mapping Manuscript Migration (MMM, Finland), Corpus Burgundiae Medii Aevi (CBMA, France), and partners’ projects from Germany, Poland and Portugal ). The discussion will explore how this technical transformation—turning scholarly 'Big Data' into CARE, OPAC, and FAIR-compliant 'Smart Data' via Generative AI and Named Entity Recognition (NER)—is inextricably linked to a profound social and institutional transformation, ultimately directing deep historical evidence toward evidence-based policymaking, education, and community-driven Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) preservation.

The full CHRONICA consortium currently comprises twelve partners spanning seven countries—Canada, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, and Sweden—all united by this vision for an interoperable DH future. This panel session will feature three groups in this consortium. Rather than simply describing their individual projects, each participant will offer a unique and critical perspective on the challenges and necessary transformations required to link their particular scholarly domain (e.g., diachronic linguistics, prosopography, digital editing) to the CHRONICA federation. This configuration ensures a hybrid, multi-national discussion that bridges technical implementation, disciplinary methodology, and institutional strategy, directly addressing the complexities of large-scale European DH integration.

Moderator of the Panel: Miguel A. Torrens (University of Toronto, Canada)

Canada:

1. Semantic AI for Networked Saints (SANS) This paper introduces the pilot project SANS at the University of Toronto, demonstrating the foundational steps required to build a federated resource for complex historical data within the CHRONICA framework. SANS brings together three leading, multi-national DH projects—the Documents of Early English Data Sets (DEEDS) and the Baptisteria Sacra Index (BSI) (Canada), alongside Mapping Lived Religion/Mapping Saints (MLR/MS) (Sweden). The case study details the collaborative framework utilizing Generative AI and Semantic Web principles to identify, extract, and establish durable links between saint references across these diverse cultural heritage corpora. It critically addresses the technical and methodological issues encountered when aligning heterogeneous datasets and preparing a small corpus for large-scale, AI-enabled integration.

France:

2. Mapping Saints in the Corpus Burgundiae Medii Aevi: From Regional Medieval Data to Federated Cultural Heritage Knowledge. This paper presents an experimental collective project developed by the LaMOP research team, based on the Corpus Burgundiae Medii Aevi (CBMA), which brings together over 22,000 medieval documentary units of diverse typologies—diplomatic, hagiographic, historiographic, normative, epistolary, and literary—produced between the 5th and 15th centuries in the Burgundian area. The corpus is fully lemmatized, enriched with structured metadata, and geolocalized, enabling large-scale diachronic and spatial analysis. Focusing on the identification and distribution of saints across heterogeneous textual genres, the paper explores how named entities can be extracted and modeled through NER and ontology-based approaches to transform scholarly data into interoperable “smart data.” It addresses the epistemological challenges of automated analysis in medieval sources and discusses the integration of regional corpora into AI-enabled federated infrastructures such as CHRONICA, contributing to reusable and resilient cultural heritage knowledge beyond digital silos

Sweden:

3. Mapping Saints across borders: the possibilities and challenges with linked (open) data. This paper will introduce the completed project Mapping Lived Religion (MLR) and critically reflect on applying the principles of linked (open) data on transnational data collections. Moreover, it will present a pilot project applying new methods in machine learning to enrich the database and allow further linking to develop Mapping Saints and build a truly comprehensive research resource. During the project, there were limitations in terms of the technological possibilities of the digitized collections. Now automatically identifying and mapping all of the relevant charters held by the Swedish National Archives (RA) in Stockholm is possible. These sources are vital to a complete understanding of social systems in the medieval world, including donations, social contracts, cultural adaptations, and lived religion practices. The possibilities for medieval research via these charters are of course not limited to questions of lived religion and are applicable elsewhere.