The PAESE (Provenance Research in Collections from Colonial Contexts in Lower Saxony) database aggregates object records from museum and university collections in Lower Germany. As the project transitions to a Linked Open Data architecture in PAESE 3.0, it faces a foundational question with both technical and ethical stakes: what would it mean to reorganize provenance data not around objects as stable, bounded entities, but around the historically situated acts—collection, transfer, sale, looting, donation—through which objects moved across time and space, and through which colonial power was exercised and documented?

This paper argues that the shift to an event-oriented structure is not a neutral technical upgrade but a reorientation of what provenance claims to represent, and that the engineering choices involved encode interpretive commitments that existing ontologies do not adequately address. We develop this argument across conceptual and technical registers and ground it in findings from the PAESE 3.0 international survey of community representatives, activists, researchers, and museum professionals from formerly colonized regions.

Digital Humanities (DH) positions itself as an inherently international endeavour, yet the extent to which its citation practices reflect this aspiration remains largely untested at scale. We present a bibliometric analysis of geographic citation insularity — the tendency of scholars to cite works produced in their own country — across the DH field from 2007 to 2025. Using OpenAlex, we constructed a corpus of approximately 17,600 DH works by combining publications from 19 exclusively DH journals (following Spinaci et al. 2022) with keyword-matched works. We extracted 58,655 citation-level records with country metadata for both citing and cited works, covering 63 countries. We find that 28% of DH citations are geographically insular, and that every country with sufficient data cites itself significantly more than a null model based on publication shares would predict. However, the pattern is not uniform: smaller national communities such as Finland, Austria, and Greece exhibit insularity ratios up to 31 times their expected baseline, while larger producers like the US and UK show lower ratios despite higher absolute self-citation. We also document a clear temporal decline, from roughly 40% insularity in 2007–2009 to 27% in 2022–2025, suggesting that DH citation networks are gradually internationalizing. These findings confirm longstanding qualitative critiques of geographic bias in DH while offering a more nuanced picture: insularity is universal but declining, and most pronounced in smaller, cohesive national communities rather than in the Anglophone centres that dominate overall output.

International frameworks have long addressed technological obsolescence, proposing solutions to mitigate its effects. However, a different challenge arises when a database reaches a “legal end”: it continues to exist, yet no entity is responsible for its maintenance, and its data, although still accessible, become increasingly difficult to reuse. This paper explores the possibility of introducing legal mechanisms that would allow a public authority or designated entity to assume responsibility for abandoned databases, thereby ensuring both their accessibility and their suitability for text and data mining. Such measures could not only prevent the emergence of data silos but also actively counteract their consolidation.

This paper examines the strategic transition of the OPERAS research infrastructure into a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), proposing a functional co-hosting model between Poland and France to foster a scholarly ecosystem. By establishing the Central Hub and a technical Innovation Lab in Poland alongside a Community Hub in France, this framework enables functional specialisation while mainstreaming Central and Eastern European perspectives within the global Open Science movement.

The integration of high-performance computing and AI resources from the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (PCSS) facilitates the processing of complex, multilingual SSH datasets, ensuring that digital innovation remains community-governed. Through services such as the GoTriple discovery platform, the PRISM transparency tool, and the promotion of "Diamond" Open Access models, the infrastructure empowers researchers by removing financial and linguistic barriers.

Furthermore, the OPERAS Innovation Lab pioneers new modes of scholarly writing and digital editions, providing a robust foundation for traditional philological inquiry. Ultimately, hosting the OPERAS ERIC in Poland signifies the maturity of the national research system and its commitment to a resilient, inclusive habitat for scholarly communication that preserves bibliodiversity and cultural heritage across national boundaries.

Today's societal challenges demand knowledge embedded in sources spanning diverse formats, languages, eras, and regions. Yet Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH) researchers still face significant infrastructural barriers: creating FAIR and ethically responsible data following the CARE principles, optimising tools across disciplines, and documenting workflows transparently and reproducibly, challenges compounded by insufficient digital literacy training.

CLARIAH-VL+ (2025–2028) responds to this challenge by providing locally tailored yet internationally grounded infrastructural support for Flemish Digital Humanities research. Bringing together over 25 research, heritage and expertise groups across four Flemish universities (UGent, UA, VUB, KU Leuven), core facilities, GLAM institutions, and Flemish and federal partners, the project works towards an Open Cloud for Flanders (SSHOC-VL) by 2030, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Since 2016, our consortium has been structurally embedded in two ESFRI Landmark Research Infrastructures: CLARIN-ERIC and DARIAH-ERIC, with Belgium holding active governance roles in both. Consortium members further represent Belgium in RESILIENCE, EHRI and CESSDA, ensuring direct contribution to their Open Science ecosystems within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). In this poster, we demonstrate how we have already contributed our workflows, tools and services to the SSH Open Marketplace, advancing the European transferability of Flemish DH research.