Publications

The case for Public AI: making it happen with cultural heritage [Europeana Report Published]

The case for Public AI: making it happen with cultural heritage

Developed through iteration and in collaboration with over 400 professionals of the data space and the Europeana Initiative community, the paper presents a shared vision for how the cultural heritage sector can contribute to a more democratic, pluralistic and publicly accountable AI ecosystem in Europe. 

As AI reshapes how knowledge, culture and history are produced, accessed and interpreted, this paper explores how the cultural heritage sector, supported by the data space, can help build Public AI in Europe — AI that serves the public good, not just commercial interests.

The paper sets out a clear and ambitious role for the data space in turning this vision into reality: from leading by example and applying AI in line with Public AI principles across our technology stack, to acting as a rights broker, trusted infrastructure, literacy engine, technical partner and collective voice for the cultural heritage sector.  

Read the paper if you are curious to know:

  • Why is cultural heritage data so valuable for AI training?
  • Beyond data, how can cultural heritage institutions and professionals help shape an alternative AI approach in Europe?
  • What opportunities is the data space exploring to make this happen, and what challenges must we overcome?
  • What is Public AI, why is it gaining traction in policy debates, and how can it address structural imbalances in today’s AI ecosystem? 
  • What is the state of Europe’s AI landscape, and what role can our sector play in it? What partnerships are needed —and under what conditions— for us to play that role effectively?
  • What are the risks of inaction — for Europe, for the future of AI systems, for the open knowledge ecosystem and for our sector?

Read the paper in full

Key Insights

Journal for Artistic Research [Issue 38 now online]

Issue 38 of the Journal for Artistic Research is now Online

JAR is open-access, free to read, and to contribute. 

The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, open-access and peer-reviewed journal that disseminates artistic research from all disciplines. JAR invites the ever-increasing number of artistic researchers to develop what, for the sciences and humanities, are standard academic publication procedures. It serves as a meeting point of diverse practices and methodologies in a field that has become a worldwide movement with many local activities.

Issue 38 contains 5 peer-reviewed contributions:

ECOLOGIES IN ACTION: an emergent framework for thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices, presents research by Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker and Nicole Wendel (and Sabine Zahn during the first phase). They came together in a series of intensive online encounters between 2020 and 2022, to explore how aesthetic research practices might enable and realize a specific form of thinking, which they term ‘aesthetic thinking’. This shared enquiry into practice poses questions about how they can be developed, tested, shared and brought into relations with other practices, while reflecting on under what conditions aesthetic thinking flourishes. [en] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.3935614]

Artist-researchers Fiona Crisp, Alis Oldfield, Laura Harrington, Luis Guzman, Grace Denton, Jacqueline Donachie, Christine Borland and Louise Mackenzie come together to present Institutional Fieldworking. The exposition proposes the institution as an active site of fieldwork to perform and reveal compelling relationships between interdisciplinary research and the agency of publics. The exposition allows the reader to navigate their own route through and between three ‘scales’ of approach: Scales of Negotiation, Scales of Institution and Scales of Time, Space and Velocity. The group seek to re-vision the relationships between scientific and artistic research, exploring artistic outcomes that can support publics and generate socio-political impact. [en] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.3566870]

In the exposition Graphic Animism: The Visual Complexity of the Physical World from Emergence to Decay, Johanna Drucker, tracks insights about fundamental principles of the animate world, explored through her own artistic practice over decades. Beginning in the 1970s with studies of minute specimens of organic matter, her approach to drawing and painting images of these objects led to a realisation that animism operates at every scale of the physical world as part of larger systems of relations and forces. The concept of ‘animism’ refers here to active systems in the physical world capable of producing transformation and being agents of change while ‘graphic’ refers to marks made on a surface, an act of bringing something into being, not necessarily as a picture or representation. [en] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.3420489]

The Aesthetics of Photographic Production, by Andrea Jaeger investigates photographic production as a multisensory, material, and more-than-human field of making. The project’s dissemination strategy is threefold: this exposition, a published monograph and a performance and exhibition of artworks, each calibrated to communicate the research through distinct epistemic affordances. Grounded in sensory field encounters within commercial laboratories and manufacturing facilities — Bayeux London, Make it Easy Lab Nottingham, Fujifilm Tilburg, and Polaroid Enschede — the exposition foregrounds production ecologies where photographic work emerges through distributed relations among technicians, machines, paper, chemistry, protocols, speed, and darkness. [en] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.603276]

In his Spanish language exposition Hacia el intérprete extendido. Más allá del saxofón: el gesto y la tecnología en P.O.V., Pedro Pablo Cámara Toldos explores the creative possibilities arising from the convergence of music, technology and performance. He presents P.O.V. (‘Point of View’) a project that redefines the concept of the ‘extended performer’ from an interdisciplinary perspective. This approach combines electronic music, virtual reality headsets, video and social media as integral elements of the performance. Through this multimedia interaction, the aim is not only to amplify the sensory impact of the work, but also to encourage critical reflection on how technology and social media shape perception and identity, challenging the traditional conventions of the classical concert and proposing a novel experience for both the performer and the audience. [es] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.2914544]

All expositions in this issue can also be viewed in an accessible version. Go to https://jar-online.net/en/issues/38 or switch between versions from within each exposition.

Survey on Artistic Research: Performance, Teaching and Publication Practices [Now open]

Survey on Artistic Research: Performance, Teaching and Publication Practices

How are artistic performance, artistic research, teaching and academic publications recognised and evaluated in higher music education today?

Researchers from Széchenyi István University and Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary) are conducting an international survey examining careers, working conditions and evaluation systems in Higher Music Education Institutions worldwide.

The study explores:

• the balance between artistic activity, artistic research, teaching and scholarly publication;

• promotion and career pathways in conservatoires and university music departments;

• institutional expectations regarding research output;

• the recognition of artistic research within evaluation and promotion systems;

• challenges faced by academic and artistic staff in different national contexts.

We are particularly interested in understanding how institutions evaluate publications in relation to artistic practice and artistic research, and how these expectations influence professional development.

We warmly invite academic staff, artistic researchers, performers, teachers, administrators and doctoral candidates working in higher music education to participate.

The questionnaire is anonymous and takes approximately 15 minutes to complete.

Survey link:
https://elteppk.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_37pAuHb2hKyVDFQ

Your contribution will help provide an international overview of current practices and support evidence-based discussions on the future of evaluation systems in higher music education.

Demystifying Data Journals [Mar 10 @ 13:00, online]

Demystifying Data Journals: Experiences of data journal editors

Data journals are a format of publication that publish datasets or ‘data papers’ rather than conventional research articles. They offer a route to increase the visibility of research data outputs whilst also rewarding creators with a peer-reviewed publication, credit, and increased opportunity for citation (Walters, 2020). This event will feature presentations from researchers from a range of disciplines, in both STEM and the humanities, involved in editing data journals, who will share their experiences and advice with attendees. The event will introduce the concept of data journals and how they operate and explore best practices when submitting papers to these journals or developing data journal publications. There will be opportunities for questions and discussions throughout the event. This event is delivered by the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR) and attendance is open to anyone with an interest in learning more about data journals.

Walters, W.H. (2020) ‘Data journals: incentivizing data access and documentation within the scholarly communication system’, Insights: the UKSG journal, 33(1), p. 18.

Agenda

13:00 – 13:05: Introduction and welcome

13:05 – 14:25: Talks and Q&A session

  • Prof. Vanessa Higgins, University of Manchester. Editorial Board Member for the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
  • Judith Winters, University of York. Editor of Internet Archaeology.
  • Dr Derek Gatherer, Lancaster University. Editorial Board, Scientific Data.
  • Dr Laura Sbaffi, University of Sheffield. Section Editor for PLOS Digital Health and Associate Editor for JASIST

14:25 – 14:30: Final comments

The Third Thursday – April 2025

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A monthly round-up of DH-related events, webinars, conferences, opportunities & jobs from the DARIAH-IE inbox…

Generative AI and Historical Research: Opportunities, Challenges and Risks – an interdisciplinary workshop convened by Dr Bronagh Ann McShane

Event: May 7, 2025, 9:30 – 14:00 (in person)

This in-person, interdisciplinary workshop brings together historians, social scientists and computer scientists to explore the methodological, ethical, and practical implications of Generative AI in historical research. Through presentations, case studies, and discussions, participants will examine:

  • How to harness AI’s potential while maintaining historical rigour.
  • The role of AI in research workflows (scalability, replicability, and ethical considerations).
  • How AI tools can be trained to recognise historical nuance and context.

Registration: Generative AI and Historical Research

Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century

Event: May 14th, 2025 11am (online)

On 29 April 2025 Scottish Universities Press (SUP) will publish its second open access book, Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century edited by James O’Sullivan, Michael Pidd, Sophie Whittle, Bridgette Wessels,  Michael Kurzmeier and Órla Murphy. To celebrate the release of the book SUP are hosting a fireside chat with co-editor Bridgette Wessels and chapter authors Andrew Prescott and Michelle Doran. 

The collection brings together twenty chapters that cover practical design processes of digital editions as well as conceptual approaches to editing born-digital material. It also engages with timely and important topics that are often neglected, including queer approaches to editing, accessibility, editing and publishing in the age of artificial intelligence, and the data edition.  

Registration: SUP fireside chat: Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century.

Large Language Models for Digital Humanities Research Summer School

Deadline: 1st June

Event: 8th – 11th September 2025 (in person)

This year’s Summer School on “Large Language Models for Digital Humanities Research“, organized by the University of Cologne’s Competence Area III, in conjunction with the Center for Data and Simulation Science, the Department for Digital Humanities, the Cologne Center for eHumanities, and the Data Center for the Humanities, takes place from 8th – 11th September 2025, at Cologne University (on site).

This summer school addresses MA students and doctoral candidates from Linguistics and Digital Humanities, as well as other fields that focus on the application of LLMs for DH Research. Please Note: Participation in the summer school is free of charge! However, minor costs might occur if specific hardware (e.g. Google Colab) is required during workshops.

Further information and application instructions: http://ml-school.uni-koeln.de/

DHBenelux 2025

Event: 3–6 June 2025

We are excited to announce that registration for DHBenelux 2025 is now open! Join us in Amsterdam from 3–6 June 2025 for our traditional annual conference that brings together the vibrant Digital Humanities community across the Benelux region and beyond.

🎟️ Early bird tickets are available until 7 May 2025 (or until sold out), so make sure to register in time to secure your spot! Authors are required to register. 

🔗 Register here: https://2025.dhbenelux.org/registration/

Announcing the new Heritage, Artificial Intelligence & Law (HAIL) Network

We invite you to join a supportive space for knowledge exchange and collaboration on all things related to heritage, AI and law.   

As recently seen in the UK Copyright & AI Consultation, the heritage sector faces complex issues and lacks meaningful representation in government policy on AI. We have an opportunity to fill that gap. HAIL will be an interdisciplinary space for practitioners, researchers and other advocates in heritage, technology and legal sectors to voice concerns and excitement around the use and development of AI. 

Our goal is to share information, best practice, publications, calls for evidence, consultations, news and other related events. For example, we’ve already started a collaborative list of relevant consultation responses (by the way, let us know if your response is publicly available). By combining forces, we will be better able to organise and enable the diverse voices of the heritage sector to more meaningfully contribute to policy debates  — and at a crucial moment not only for AI regulation, but also for ensuring the sector’s visibility, representation and resilience. 

HAIL is led by Paula Westenberger, as part of her BRAID Fellowship on Responsible AI for Heritage, and supported by a steering group with Harriet Deacon, Bartolomeo Meletti, Anna-Maria Sichani and Andrea Wallace.

To join the HAIL network, subscribe to the listserv at: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/HAIL. 

International GLAM Labs Community Annual Report

The first official annual report of the International GLAM Labs Community is now available. We would like to thank all the contributions and suggestions. In addition, we have created a new community in Zenodo in which you will find additional presentations from the International GLAM Labs Community.

Report: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15096604

Zenodo community: https://zenodo.org/communities/glam-labs/) 

AI-Powered Metadata, Hackathons, APIs & Notebooks

Event: 3–6 June 2025 (online)

Registration for the webinar*: https://clirdlf.zoom.us/meeting/register/KN5e8r48Q1G-i8BRUrKGWQ#/registration

*The webinar is kindly hosted by CLIR – Council on Library and Information Resources (https://www.clir.org/) and organised by Olga Holownia. Once you have registered you should receive an email from Olga confirming your registration, a zoom link and how to add the meeting to your calendar.

The agenda for the webinar will include 3 presentations and an opportunity for questions.

ADHO GeoHumanities SIG – community-building and networking event

Event: 1 May 2025 (online)

Recently, we revived the GeoHumanities SIG with a new international group of co-convenors and we write to you today to announce a first community-building and networking event taking place online May 1st.

The GeoHumanities SIG has mainly been known for its mailing list (the GeoHumSIG mailing list), which also runs on ADHO servers. If you are not yet a subscriber to that mailing list it is likely that you’ll have missed a previous announcement of this event. Please consider subscribing here, which is the closest approximation of a ‘membership’ we have for an interest community connected to Spatial and Geo-Humanities within ADHO and beyond, comprising well over 400 current subscribers.

For the community-building event in May we welcome short 3-minute introductions about you and your GeoHumanities work. Whether you are a longtime contributor to this forum or a newcomer, we would like you to let us know about yourself. We suggest that participants prepare 3 slides: 

1- Who you are and what your background is 

2- What your contribution to the field has been in the past 

3- What you are working on at the moment (this could be a submission to ADHO or other current work) + future plans and projects.

We hope you will join us in this small online event to gather as many voices from the community as possible: postgraduate students, early-career researchers, but also experienced scholars and practitioners.

We will take it as an opportunity to reconnect and discuss the future of GeoHumSIG and gather ideas for the in-person pre-conference workshop at this year’s ADHO Annual Conference at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

Please sign up for the online community-building and networking event using this short form.

This event will be held on Teams on Thursday May 1, 2025 from 17:00-19:00 GMT.

Report on the Survey “Digitization and Artificial Intelligence for Archives and Documentary Heritage Materials

We are pleased to share the results of a survey exploring how AI is impacting digitization of archives and documentary heritage collections across different institutions. We thank all those who responded to the survey.

Link to the Survey Report

We are a team of researchers from archival, information, and librarianship backgrounds investigating the intersection of digitization and artificial intelligence (AI). 

For comments or questions, please contact the team at e.sengsavang@unesco.org. 

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Cultural Analytics

https://jamesosullivan.github.io/culturalanalytics.html

Proposals are invited for chapters to be included in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Cultural Analytics, a major new reference work that aims to consolidate and extend the field of cultural analytics at a time of considerable methodological innovation and critical reflection.

Cultural analytics—defined broadly as the computational and data-driven analysis of cultural materials—has matured from a set of experimental practices into a dynamic and increasingly central approach across the humanities and interpretive social sciences. This handbook seeks to capture the richness of this moment: to provide scholars, students, and practitioners with a comprehensive, critical, and forward-looking account of the field.

Contributions are welcome from across disciplines, institutions, and methodological traditions, including, but not limited to digital humanities, literary and cultural studies, art history, film and media studies, sociology, linguistics, and computational social science.

Chapters that focus on detailing specific methods are particularly welcome, but contributions are expected to adopt critical perspectives, rather than offering ‘how-to’ guides or focusing exclusively on case studies and accounts of project-based applications. Chapters should interrogate the epistemological, methodological, disciplinary, or infrastructural dimensions of cultural analytics. Prospective authors should consider The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities as an example of what is being sought. The aim is to offer durable, field-defining insights that speak beyond individual projects or tools. Essays will serve as entry points into individual topics and, with this in mind, should be framed broadly. The essay title should speak to the essay’s breadth of coverage.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words, along with a short biographical statement to james.osullivan@ucc.ie by May 9th, 2025. Informal enquiries prior to submission are welcome.

Finals chapters will range from approximately 4,000–6,000 words, with manuscripts due in late 2025.

Oral History as Data? Critically approaching the digital turn in method, meaning and recollection

Event: 22 May 2025, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm, UCL (in person)

The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) is delighted to welcome Julianne Nyhan, former UCLDH Director and Professor Emeritus of Digital Humanities at UCL, to give the 2025 Susan Hockey Lecture, as the centre celebrates its 15th anniversary.

Oral History is undergoing somewhat of a digital turn. Digital technologies and digital methods are now expanding the range of forms that oral history can take and, potentially, the kinds of questions that we can ask about oral history interview collections.  From an earlier oral history landscape that was constituted of the oral history interview, its analogue or digital recording, its transcript and, potentially, its publication, we are now asking whether oral history can be understood as “data”? What happens when we try to organize or represent the rich and complex experiences shared in an oral history interview using a structured format, like a knowledge graph? And do such changes matter? Or, to put it another way, if we understand oral history as ‘data’, can digital methods be used to analyze it without epistemological loss or consequence?

All welcome but registration is required: https://ucldh-hockey-lecture-2025.eventbrite.co.uk

Computational Humanities Research Conference

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 2025 edition of the Computational Humanities Research Conference (CHR 2025), which will take place on December 9–12, 2025, at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg.

In recent years, the arts and humanities have seen a significant increase in the use of computational, statistical, and mathematical approaches. This kind of research is distinguished by its reliance on formal methods and the development of explicit, computational models—ranging from quantitative and statistical techniques to broader computational methods for processing and analyzing data, as well as theoretical reflections on these approaches.

Despite the growing prominence of this field, many scholars still struggle to find suitable venues where they can present and publish computational work while maintaining a strong connection to traditional humanities inquiry. This is precisely the gap that the CHR conference seeks to address.

The deadline for full paper submissions is July 18, 2025. For further details, please consult the full Call for Papers here.

Text Affects Conference

Text Affects conference, University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, 16-18 December.

The topic of this edition is the future of intelligence, a call to reflect on how Text Affects contribute to the development and expression of human and artificial intelligence. 

[CFP] Text Affects 2025 – DEADLINE 15 SEPTEMBER 2025

Submission link: https://openreview.net/group?id=AFFECTS/2025

Call for Papers https://digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/text-affects/text-affects-2025-2/calls/call-for-papers/

European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture and Technology” 2025

Deadline: May 18 2025

Event: July 21 – August 2, 2025

Applications to the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture and Technology” 2025 to be held at the university Marie and Louis Pasteur in Besançon (France) from July 21 to August 2 will open tomorrow 24 of March up to May 18 via Conftool

The Summer University will last for 11 full days with an intensive programme consisting of workshops, teaser sessions, public lectures, regular project presentations, a poster session, and a panel discussion. Each workshop consists of a total of 18 sessions or 36 teaching hours. Building on the spirit of previous editions in Leipzig and Cluj, the ESU in Besançon aims at being a space for interdisciplinary collaboration and opportunities for scholars and students in Humanities and therefore strengthening the community of practice already established in past years.

The ESU is sponsored by DARIAH with 12 scholarships of 450 Euros each to partially cover the costs of registration and staying in Besançon as well as by CLARIN for the organization of a workshop and of a conference. 

For all relevant information please consult our website which will be continually updated and integrated with more information as soon as it becomes available. To get some insight into what you can expect from the European Summer University please consult the archive section on our website.

Celtic and Latin glossing traditions: uncovering early medieval language contact and knowledge transfer (GlossIT)

Deadline: 12 May 2025

The “Celtic and Latin glossing traditions: uncovering early medieval language contact and knowledge transfer (GlossIT)” ERC-CoG-project at the University of Graz is hiring a Digital Humanities postdoctoral researchers for four years. Candidates should have experience with digital editions and philological/linguistical projects. Furthermore, they should be familiar with Natural Language Processing and Text Reuse tools. 

https://jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/9a9b957f-510d-f070-8eef-67f92298cad3

The position will be available from 1 June 2025 (starting date negotiable). Deadline for applications is 12 May 2025.

For more information on the GlossIT project, see: https://glossit.uni-graz.at/en/

Lecturer in Digital Humanities

Deadline: 9 May 2025

The Institute for Digital Humanities in Göttingen (Germany) is seeking to fill a permanent position as Lecturer in Digital Humanities (E13 (wage grade according to the public sector pay agreement TVöD)/50%) starting on 1 July 2025. Further information can be found here: https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/644546.html

Complementary to this, a second position (E13 (wage grade according to the public sector pay agreement TVöD)/50%) is available in the ForContext project (https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/644546.html). It is of course possible to apply for both positions.

Particular research focuses on digital image and artefact studies, computer linguistics, computational literary studies and digital palaeography. At the IfDH, historical data from antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times are currently being researched in text, 2D, 3D and 4D formats. We would be delighted if you would enrich our team with your expertise.

ECHOES Project (European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science)

The development in ECHOES contributes to the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) – a shared platform, designed to provide heritage professionals and researchers with access to data, scientific resources, training, and advanced digital tools.  ECHOES is currently conducting a “Consultation” in the form of a questionnaire to gather insights from cultural heritage stakeholders. As partner of the ECHOES Project, the Austrian National Library strongly encourages representatives of the Humanities to participate in this initiative and share the consultation within their networks. 

  • How to participate? The questionnaire incl. a short explaining video can be accessed here: ECHOES Consultation 
  • Who can participate?  All cultural heritage stakeholders, including professionals, researchers, computer scientists, developers, institutions, and umbrella organisations. 
  • When is the deadline? The questionnaire will remain open until 30 April 2025. 
  • With your contribution, we will be able to set up the Cultural Heritage Cloud with and for the GLAM-Community. We would be grateful for your support in spreading this with your professional networks. If this topic has already reached you through one of our many project partners, we apologize for any duplication.