This half-day workshop aims to create a space where research stories intertwine with the narratives of cultural heritage organisations (CHOs) that hold cultural heritage data. Participants will have the opportunity to share experiences, solutions and identify needs related to infrastructural support to DH research. The workshop seeks to identify ways to improve the findability, interoperability and use of data scattered across borders, domains and media; or data separated from the materials needed to interpret them.

Data in the humanities is “a digital, selectively constructed, machine-actionable abstraction representing some aspects of a given object of humanistic inquiry” (Schöch, 2013). Researchers combine heterogeneous data, from various sources. This practice is essential to develop a comprehensive view that is relevant in terms of their research questions and topics. In turn, researchers often enhance CH data by refining, classifying, and adding context, but there are few mechanisms for returning this back in circulation. Even when shared, research data often remains disconnected from original collections.

Factors that hinder finding, reassembling collections, or reconnecting them to research data are varied:

• For historical and administrative reasons, data can remain scattered across various organisations and systems, within a national context or internationally.
• Local solutions and licences that allow access to data may adhere to different principles and standards impacting data management.
• Analog sources have not yet been made available in digital format (due to limited resources, or other reasons such as copyrights or GDPR).
• The quality of data (e.g. description, coverage bias) is varied and may not meet the needs of a particular research project before enrichment and harmonisation.
• Libraries, archives and museums adhere to long-standing but not shared practices and produce diverse metadata.
• Improving the interoperability between various data sources and underlying information infrastructures demands organisational collaboration but also dialogue regarding the needs of research.
• Advancements on LLMs and computer vision, while holding enormous promise to translate, find thematic affinity, or provide descriptive solutions, also raise new challenges regarding transparency or trust towards rightholders, or cannot fill the human gap required to verify or interpret results.
• Additional layers of information created by researchers often remain unusable and even unfindable in the context of cultural heritage. There is a need to establish the pathways and habits to prepare the data for re-use.

Call for proposals

This workshop is open to conference participants, researchers and CH practitioners who may present other aspects of research at the conference, but here are invited to:

• Present research making visible the infrastructures (or the lack thereof) to access and reassemble scattered data.
• Scattered collections/data may refer to research materials accessed in different countries, GLAM domains, or in heterogeneous media as well as research data that enrich but remain disconnected to original collections.
• We welcome presentations from small to large-scale initiatives, from local, national and international levels that could be seen as important pointers when building up joint solutions.
• Insights could highlight, search services, collaboration, (meta)data practices, workflows, data asset management, joint repositories, or methodological innovations, but this list is not exhaustive.
• We also welcome personal experiences, ideas and practical examples concerning how infrastructures (e.g., processes and workflows, supporting repositories, search services, digital asset management, and so on) could further benefit innovative research.

We look forward to your proposals contributing to the general aim of promoting discussion on services and infrastructures that make it easier for researchers to find, combine, and use data scattered across domains, borders or media to build a mutual vision and effective data life cycles in DH.

Submission Guidelines

Send an abstract (max. 400 words not including references) that lay out the research process, including types of data, infrastructures involved, developed or needed (from collaboration, technical or methodological development) to reassemble scattered collections.

All submissions should be sent in via the DHNB conference tool, https://www.conftool.org/dhnb2026/. If you have not created a user account for DHNB 2026, you will need to create one. After logging in, select the workshop “Infrastructures to reassemble data scattered across domains, borders and media”.

Accepted proposals will be curated in two to three thematically related sessions for this half-day workshop, to best foster collaborative dialogue and mutual learning. We seek to identify how research, CHOs, and joint digital infrastructure development support one another. Participants will gain a more thorough understanding of various perspectives, bottlenecks, invisible barriers, explaining factors affecting access to CH data and discuss emerging needs for the future.

Important dates

Submission Deadline: 11 January 2025

Notification of acceptance: 31 January 2025

 

Workshop organisers

Johanna Lilja¹, Liisa Näpärä¹, Inés Matres², Eiríkur Smári Sigurðarson³,  Mari Väina⁴

¹ National Library of Finland, ² University of Helsinki, ³ Icelandic Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts, ⁴Estonian Folklore Archives

The workshop is facilitated by researchers and organisations affiliated to DARIAH, the pan-European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. We seek to consolidate DHNB as a forum for encounters between Nordic and Baltic scholars and CHOs on issues of digitizing and using digital collections.

Contacts: Ines.Matres@helsinki.fi (researchers); Liisa.Napara@helsinki.fi (Cultural heritage organisations)