Conference Agenda

Language and the Anglo-European hegemony that dominates academic knowledge infrastructures constitute in many regions of the world one of the primary obstacles to the transmission and exchange of knowledge across and beyond academia, undermining the principles of openness promoted by funders and universities. For as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o writes, research infrastructures continue to perpetuate the colonial tradition of gathering knowledge to be stored away “in a European language for consumption by those who have access to it” (2025: 70). Globalisation and the capitalist logics of academic publishing have intensified the dominance of English in particular, with even users of major European languages under increasing pressure to conform to the Anglophone hegemony of academia in the 21st century (Schnell 2024). In addition to creating structural barriers to academic publishing for those outside the Anglophone world, these tendencies further isolate the outputs of “locally relevant research” (Helsinki Initiative 2019) from their immediate publics and communities and reinforce the marginalisation of knowledges expressed in different languages.

Nevertheless, particularly in the field of Digital Humanities, recent years have seen the emergence across the world of more experimental forms of digital publishing that seek to disrupt the monolingual logics of academic knowledge infrastructures by exploring the potential of digital platforms for fostering more multilingual publishing workflows. This paper is based on a survey of these distinct initiatives, in addition to a selection of more in-depth case studies that combine qualitative analysis of the multilingual affordances and associated language ideologies of specific platforms with semi-structured interviews with their editors and publishers. In addition to reflecting on current publishing practices, these interviews further explore the new challenges associated with the rapid growth of language technologies and AI tools, and the risks and opportunities these bring for furthering multilingual knowledge production and dissemination.

Based on the findings of this research, the paper will summarise the ways authors, editors and publishers can learn from these initiatives in order to contribute to the development of multilingual knowledge infrastructures through their own publishing practices. Building on Digital Humanities’ emphasis on collaborative action to transform academic and digital infrastructures, the paper will highlight the DH community’s potential to lead in experimenting with new multilingual digital publishing models that have the potential to be adopted by wider research communities. The paper will further illustrate the importance of shifting academic priorities away from the (over)production of research outputs from the Anglophone Global North (Klein 2024) to prioritising instead collective efforts to support more equitable models of knowledge dissemination across languages and communities within and beyond academia.

Scholarly resources in the humanities face significant discoverability challenges as they are scattered across diverse catalogues, repositories and funding databases, which have varying standards and limited interoperability. This presentation examines the Text+ Registry as an example of how digital infrastructures can be designed to encourage open, inclusive and collaborative engagement across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Through its distinctive layering approach and community-driven curation model, the Registry shows how research infrastructures act as catalysts for sustainable scholarly collaboration and improved public access to humanities resources.

The Registry is a unified meta-cataloguing system developed within Text+, a consortium of Germany's National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), to address the aforementioned fragmentation. Thanks to its innovative design, the Registry aggregates metadata from multiple authoritative sources, enabling distributed enrichment by domain experts and researchers beyond the circle of the consortium. Using concrete examples from the field of scholarly editions, we will demonstrate how the Registry can bridge the gap between existing catalogues, such as AGATE (the current research information system (CRIS)) for the German Academies' Programme containing information on projects funded since 1979), and specialised inventories, such as Patrick Sahle’s catalogue (SDE).

The presentation will demonstrate how the Registry's metamodelling approach accommodates diverse resource types flexibly while maintaining semantic consistency through information layering and authority data integration (cf. Gradl et al. 2025). Furthermore, we will examine how low-barrier authentication mechanisms enable broad community participation in resource curation, transcending traditional boundaries. The Registry's approach to implementing the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) provides practical guidance for other infrastructure projects. Rather than viewing FAIR compliance as primarily a technical challenge, the Registry illustrates how community participation can facilitate metadata enrichment through authority data, vocabulary integration, and provenance preservation.

The Registry's bidirectional data exchange capabilities exemplify sustainable infrastructure design: it both harvests metadata from existing systems and provisions enriched data to domain-specific services such as the PhilFinder provided by the Specialized Information Service Philosophy (cf. Fruth et al. 2025). Integration with complementary infrastructures, including an instance of the Research Software Directory or the SSH Open Marketplace as well as further planned use cases in NFDI and beyond, positions the Registry within broader European research infrastructure initiatives. These interconnections demonstrate how national infrastructure components contribute to transnational collaborative frameworks.

Insights gained from workflows for data ingestion, quality assurance, and collaborative curation will be shared. Hence, the paper addresses the 2026 conference theme of ‘Infrastructures of Engagement’: The Text+ Registry prioritises openness through accessible authentication, fosters collaboration through distributed curation, ensures inclusivity by integrating resources regardless of institutional origin, and promotes sustainability through the reuse of existing standards and technologies. In doing so, it exemplifies how digital infrastructure can facilitate meaningful engagement between researchers, institutions and the wider public sphere. The presentation will also address critical questions regarding infrastructure sustainability and community engagement. How can research infrastructures balance centralised coordination with distributed curation? Which technical systems enable flexible evolution while maintaining data quality? How can systems be designed to serve both specialised research communities and other potential audiences?

Scholarly publishing infrastructure plays a crucial role as a record of scholarship and a building block in the production and dissemination of knowledge [1]. India holds the 4th rank globally [2] as a research hub (most articles published) and the 9th rank in the Springer Nature Index [3]. In the Indian context, the infrastructure has undergone rapid and uneven transformation from digitalization to the global commercial Open Access (OA) movement. Country research output expanded rapidly, but at the same speed, did the publishing infrastructure also develop? The study examines the contemporary journal infrastructure in India and understands the journals' Article Processing Charges (APCs)[4] and publishing platform, OJS (Open Journal System)

This paper presents research on the design and development of a digital approach and infrastructure for the digitisation of knowledge and information by textile-crafting communities. Specifically, the research is conducted in collaboration with the Jawaja artisan community in Rajasthan, India, to explore how skills, tacit knowledge, materiality, and digital approaches come together to underpin innovation within the creative industries.

Currently, there are a variety of approaches for communities to share their data, including information about themselves and their environments, through data infrastructure. These include citizen platforms such as Zooniverse and Data Collective, structured databases, such as Wikidata, and other initiatives led by open-data organisations. In addition, the digitisation of cultural heritage from indigenous communities has increasingly been seen by cultural institutions as a politically and culturally valid means of keeping objects active participants within their communities (Newell 2012). Many of these initiatives focus on users in Western communities with significant levels of digital infrastructure, access, and literacy. Hence, data is often collected, managed, and used by external researchers, and the ability and agency of communities to use this data in ways that are helpful to them remain limited. The paper offers insights into how communities can digitise information about their intangible practices in ways beneficial to them. By mobilising autoethnographic methodologies for documentation, our approach supports communities in eliciting the human, social, and historical context in which craft practices develop, using digital methods, visual media, and technologies accessible to the community. The translation of their lived experience and memories into digital formats is explored through key concepts such as connectedness, integrity, and the originality of their practice. The paper presents a prototype infrastructure based on an open set of containerised tools, including data storage infrastructure and accessible web user interfaces for interacting with the data. The infrastructure is designed to enable communities to have agency over their data, including using it through apps and linking it to their physical products. In doing so, the information is compliant with principles such as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR), as well as with the CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance, by adding a social responsibility dimension to data collection practices. In doing so, it boosts transparency and understanding of these communities, their territories, and their resources, while potentially influencing policies that affect them. The prototyped infrastructure deploys Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) to enable individuals/organisations to prove their identities online without relying on a central authority. The paper also discusses the challenges encountered when developing innovations with communities. This includes both human and infrastructural challenges, including the need for long-term maintenance to ensure that digital infrastructures remain sustainable.

In conclusion, the proposed digital approach and infrastructure aim to safeguard the intangible practices that sustain crafting communities and open markets. In doing so, digital technologies become a mechanism for preservation and innovation, enabling future resilience and safeguarding these communities.

References

Newell, J. (2012). Old objects, new media: Historical collections, digitization and affect. Journal of Material Culture, 17(3), 287-306. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183512453534