Conference Agenda

Digital humanities projects that work with and for knowledge communities increasingly function as forms of engaged scholarship. Taking social justice as a practical and methodological framework, this paper asks what it means to claim DH scholarship as activism – where the boundary lies between engagement and extraction (e.g. exploitation, extractive practices) and how ethical and legal responsibilities shape DH work from design to dissemination.

These topics and others form the core of the #dariahTeach course ‘Social Justice in the Digital Humanities’’ published April 2024. Twenty-one case studies highlight how DH researchers conceive their scholarship as instruments for societal change and as vehicles for public good. The course was developed by two DARIAH Working Groups, #dariahTeach and Ethics and Legality in Digital Arts & Humanities (ELDAH) funded by a DARIAH WG grant. While Social Justice as a concept and practice takes various forms, many of the featured projects frame their research around restorative social justice: a value-based approach that foregrounds inclusion, democracy, responsibility, reparation, safety, healing, and reintegration.

The course itself was conceived to be collaborative and community-driven: highlighting existing work and encouraging future scholarship. Case study authors were asked to address two specific points: 1) why and how digital humanities methods and theories were key to carrying out the project’s goals and 2) what theories and concepts from social justice (e.g. postcolonial and decolonial theory, diversifying the curriculum initiatives, data feminism) underpin the project’s design. In adopting a community-driven ethos, the majority of case studies were written by project PIs. Each underwent a peer review process, followed by a design phase with one of the #dariahTeach course designers. All contributors to case studies received recognition for their work.

Many of the case studies address ethical issues, particularly those around working with communities that have historically been excluded from dominant discourses. For many projects, ethical issues infuse all aspects of project design: balancing technological possibilities with ethical challenges. Case studies address both contemporary and historical injustices. Many of the projects themselves were developed through participatory and situated research, where digital and computational approaches as well as archival practices are themselves challenged by social justice insights and practices. The case studies demonstrate that the activist potential of digital humanities can be realised, but only with a concomitant ethical duty of care embedded as a core principle in the design, implementation, and dissemination of research – especially when working with vulnerable narratives, sensitive heritage, and contested histories.

This paper will problematize some of the issues and challenges of working within a social justice framework, highlight best practice, as well as discussing issues of ethics, privacy, and copyright. The additional duty of care when developing and disseminating content created by or about marginalised, indigenous, or minority populations, and/or those whose ethics and traditions differ from dominant western values will also be highlighted. And lastly, how these considerations are taken into account by practitioners who do research in reparative ways when dealing with contested histories and/or material cultures will be discussed.

In July 1969, the army partnered with the São Paulo state government to create Operation Bandeirante: a semi-clandestine agency comprising security agents from various forces, formed with the aim of eliminating communism in Brazil (Huggins, 1998). With private funding, the agency was officially established in 1970 as DOI-Codi, when the National Security Doctrine outlined new security policies treating ideas and citizens as internal enemies. Between 1969 and 1982 – when the agency was dissolved –, at least 7,000 people were tortured at São Paulo facilities, and at least 70 of them were killed in 1982.

The site was recognised as a heritage site in 2014. Since then, survivors, researchers and members of civil society have mobilized, calling for the creation of a museum in the space, even with continued occupation by police. In 2018, these individuals organised the DOI-Codi Memorial Working Group, carrying out activities within the space with the aim of turning it into a museum through a collaborative model. However, the state government is rejecting the creation of a museum, citing a lack of public interest and insufficient resources. In response, and to sustain the ongoing campaign, researchers decided to create the DOI-Codi Virtual Memorial, an innovative digital solution developed to disseminate knowledge about the institution and address the trauma experienced. (Neves, Lima, 2025)

The platform challenges traditional museum practices by proposing the virtual environment as a tool for activating museum activities designed for physical spaces. This is significant in Brazil, where virtual museums are not recognised as museums and there is a lack of public policies addressing this issue.

The virtual museum breaks down physical and ideological barriers, enabling interactive virtual visits to Building 2-A, where interrogations and torture took place, and to the commander's house, possible by 3D scanning of the facilities, carried out in 2023. Despite the fact that police station was also used as a place of imprisonment and torture, it was not possible to apply this technique due to the ongoing use by the police. Therefore a 3D model was created. Visitors can view part of the collection of documents, testimonies and photographs inside the buildings at the site where the events took place. The complete collection is available in a database containing documents, fragments of testimonies and artefacts recovered during archaeological research conducted in 2023 and 2025. The collection is organised using brazilian open-source public tools: Tainacan and Educaplay RNP, aligned with the virtual memorial's goal of promoting open science and encouraging new research. Collaborative curatorship is encouraged, contributing to the strengthening science and reparation in Brazil.

The Virtual Memorial acts as a 'public backup' of the site's knowledge and materiality, ensuring the irrefutability of historical evidence and the potential for memory, even in the absence of a physical memorial. The aim is to increase awareness, reinforce democratic values and support the campaign for the construction of the physical memorial. The virtual memorial is supplementary but does not replace the physical experience of the 'spirit of the place'.

Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, public protest has become increasingly fragmented, short-lived, and vulnerable to erasure due to censorship, repression, and platform moderation. Much contemporary civic mobilisation risks disappearing from the historical record. This paper presents a public digital humanities project that addresses this challenge by developing an open, reproducible infrastructure for documenting and preserving protest activity in Russia through social media data.

The project is based on large-scale data collection from VKontakte and Telegram, the dominant social media platforms in Russia and key sites where information about protests circulates under authoritarian conditions. Using automated data extraction pipelines, the project has collected and processed posts referencing protest activity from 2022 onwards, resulting in a dataset documenting nearly 40,000 protest events across all Russian regions. The infrastructure (github.com/dariatalanova/russian-protests) was originally developed to support an investigative journalism project published by Novaya Gazeta Europe, but has since been redesigned as a reusable, open-source research framework.

Methodologically, the project combines computational text analysis with large language models (LLMs) to address challenges of scale, duplication, and semantic ambiguity in social media data. The pipeline includes automated scraping, text cleaning, vectorisation using embeddings, clustering and deduplication of semantically similar posts, and LLM-assisted entity extraction to identify locations, protest types, and organisational actors. Rather than treating LLMs as black-box analytical tools, the project frames them as infrastructural components that enable the transformation of unstructured, ephemeral social media content into a structured, archivable corpus.

The paper argues that such infrastructures function as critical knowledge systems in contexts where civic expression is actively suppressed. Protest events documented on social media are often rapidly deleted, obscured, or distorted; by systematically capturing and preserving these traces, the project creates a digital archive of civic mobilisation that would otherwise be lost. The infrastructure operates not only as a research tool but also as a mechanism for preserving collective memory, enabling future historical, sociological, and cultural analysis. By making both the methodology and the codebase openly available, the project supports multiple research futures: quantitative analysis of protest dynamics, qualitative case studies, comparative regional studies, and longitudinal investigations of civic activism under repression.

The project engages with ethical questions central to public digital humanities, including responsible handling of sensitive data, minimisation of harm to individuals, and the limits of transparency in authoritarian contexts. Decisions regarding data aggregation, anonymisation, and selective publication are embedded in the infrastructural design rather than treated as afterthoughts.

This paper contributes to ongoing discussions within digital humanities on research infrastructures as forms of public engagement, the preservation of fragile digital heritage, and the ethical use of computational methods in politically sensitive environments. It demonstrates how methods developed at the intersection of journalism, computational social science, and digital humanities can build sustainable, open infrastructures that document civic life under repression, supporting both scholarly inquiry and the public good.

This paper presents lessons learned in transforming the minutes of the Assembly of the League of Nations (1920–1946) into a Linked Open Data service and semantic portal for Digital Humanities, by re-using the ParliamentSampo framework for the speeches of Parliament of Finland (1907–).