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DARIAH Working Groups Funding Call 2026-2027: Meet the winning projects
In September 2025, DARIAH launched the fifth Working Groups (WG) Funding Scheme Call for the years 2026-2027. This scheme is dedicated to – and open only for – the DARIAH Working Groups, and is intended to support their activities, small-scale projects and innovative ideas to be put forward, implemented, or sustained.
In this call, which was launched in September and was closed in mid November 2025, we received 8 applications overall. The evaluation of these applications was carried out by two reviewers for each proposal, concluding to a reviewers’ meeting in which the winning proposals were agreed among the whole evaluation committee as well as the Board of Directors.
This year, DARIAH awarded 7 WGs with funding to explore innovative ideas, build up their expertise or sustain existing tools and services, dedicating an overall budget of €40.000 to the call.
The winning projects:
- Performing Arts: Structuring Semantic Knowledge for the Digital Age – Theatralia WG
This project builds on the previous two project phases which advanced the digital structuring of research in
the Performing Arts. The first (2021–2023) established a state-of-the-art overview and identified the need for a shared, computerized descriptive language to support digital knowledge exchange and enhance scholarly value in the field. The second phase (2024–2025) began developing such a model, resulting in two open-access tools: a Dublin Core-based descriptive model for Performing-Arts archives and a multilingual prototype thesaurus (Version 1) created with OpenTheso (an open-source vocabulary management tool).
This third phase aims to deepen this work by expanding the thesaurus and improving its accessibility. Although Version 1 comprises about one hundred curated English terms, the underlying corpus contains roughly 1,400 multilingual concepts. Phase 3 will involve reviewing, refining, and translating these concepts, with the goal of producing a configured Version 2 containing approximately 250 terms across multiple languages. In parallel, the WG will explore integrating the thesaurus into a user-friendly digital interface, potentially through collaboration with the Croatian DARIAH-HR platform tezaurus.hr, while examining how it may interoperate with the Dublin Core for Performing Arts (a metadata standard for describing cultural-heritage resources).
- Research Data Management Tools and Strategies for Language Diversity – Research Data Management + Multilingual DH WGs
This joint project aims to organise a two full-day workshop on “Research Data Management Tools and Strategies for Language Diversity”. The workshop will bring together researchers in multilingualism, data stewards and educational designers, who will create one to three textual Open Educational Resources (OERs), either as guidelines or case-studies, to be published on DARIAH-Campus. This project aims to explore how linguistically diverse, crosslingual data can be combined with datasheets, data papers, data management plan wizards and semantic artefacts, and how the latter facilitate multilingual data sharing and reuse in digital humanities communities. These OERs will also address CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics), as well as inclusiveness and minority representation.
- Connecting the Collections: A Roadmap for Interoperable Music Linked Data – Artificial Intelligence and Music WG
“Connecting the Collections” is an intensive, Dagstuhl-style seminar designed to strategically relaunch the Artificial
Intelligence and Music (AIM) Working Group. It addresses the critical fragmentation of digital music resources where, despite AI advancements, the field remains hampered by isolated data silos and poor reuse of semantic models. To overcome these barriers, this project convenes a multidisciplinary group of leading experts from the UK, Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Italy, and France for a 3-day participatory workshop dedicated to creating interoperable data ecosystems and promoting the ethical reuse of standards.
The seminar will adopt a co-creation methodology, dissecting four diverse use cases ranging from managing music
archives to large-scale audio analysis. Through structured requirement engineering sessions and roundtable discussions, participants will critically evaluate existing music ontologies and identify specific gaps in implementing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. We will move beyond speculative discussion to draft practical solutions for connecting disparate musical assets via Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web technologies.
- Workflows for feminist data-linking – Women Writers in History WG
A major issue hampering scholarship on historical women authors, publishers and readers, has been the lack of
standardized identifiers allowing researchers to manipulate and link data, thereby overcoming current digital data silos. This project will theorize and redress this data imbalance by carrying out a pilot to create standardized identifiers for 100-200 historical women who lack them, currently rendering them digitally near-invisible and unfindable.
Starting with a reflection on the current state of the datascape, the WG will identify gaps and patterns in coverage, critically testing different kinds of identifiers for usability and adaptability, and formulating a series of best practices. Collaboration with the DHwiki and BiblioData WGs will be crucial at this stage of the project. The pilot’s starting-point will be data in four databases built or managed by WG project members, RECIRC (Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700), SHEWROTE (Studying Historical Early Women’s Reception: Oeuvres, Texts, Engagements), Texts on the Move and Electronic Enlightenment, which we will comprehensively survey as a first step towards our long-term goal of linking data across datasets, creating a data ecosystem of interoperable databases focusing fully or partly on historical women authors, publishers and readers. In doing so, we will adopt a mixed approach, creating identifiers using a variety of resources, including Wikidata, the CERL (Consortium of European Research Libraries) Thesaurus, and VIAF. These experiences will form the basis for a white paper to be submitted to Transformations and a workflow for feminist data linking for the SSH Open Marketplace.
- BIBTRAIN, Bibliographical Data Training Materials – BiblioData WG
The Bibliodata WG aims to create a set of training materials to help students and practitioners understand how to retrieve, process, and analyse bibliographical data for curatorial and scientific purposes, as well as how to work with specific bibliodata-related tools (such as the AVOBMAT tool for bibliodata analysis, QA Catalogue for metadata quality assessment, OpenCitations toolings, etc). With respect to the individual capacities and expertise of WG members, the materials will cover both general issues related to work with bibliographical data (such as data cleaning, data harmonisation, etc.) and more specific tasks introducing the use of particular software tools, datasets, and workflows. All materials will be made publicly available via DARIAH-Campus.
The BIBTRAIN materials will build on the previous activities of the BDWG, particularly on the findings of the Bibliodata Landscape Analysis Report and the Open Bibliodata project (DARIAH Theme 2022–2024), within which a set of six bibliodata-related workflows was developed and made publicly available via the SSH Open Marketplace. The ambition of the project is to foster and broaden the community of bibliodata curators and researchers by delivering innovative and practical training materials to the interested audience, reflecting the latest development and methodological approaches in the field.
- Bringing together initiatives on new standards and metadata for visual data – Visual Media & Interactivity WG
The Visual Media and Interactivity DARIAH WG brings together researchers interested in the use and development of methods, tools, infrastructures, and workflows for creating, storing, archiving, annotating, and sharing visual, audiovisual, and 3D content. For the period 2026-2027, the WG is focusing on enhancing the community within DARIAH and scoping opportunities towards the adoption of common platforms, standards and formats through the organisation of a series of online meetings and four face to face workshops to map existing efforts and develop a roadmap for the community.
All researchers exploring visual media corpora in the various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, and wishing to share their methods, challenges and research outputs, are welcome to join this effort!
- Standardizing and diversifying OER workflows: Templates and best practices – #dariahTeach WG
Open Educational Resources (OER) are vital for accessible, high-quality education and central to the #dariahTeach WG. However, diverse formats and embedded external content often create barriers to reuse and interoperability. This project will organise a hands-on workshop with OER creators from across Europe to co-develop a reusable Markdown (MD) template for DARIAH-Campus. This template will enable smoother offline content creation and include best practices for migrating content from other formats.
Participants will bring case studies from their own work, ensuring the workflow meets actual needs and aligns with the EU’s new skills agenda. We will address aspects of accessibility, including multilinguality, decolonization of concepts and wording, and inclusivity for both contributors and users. We will test the integration of typical DH OER functionalities into the MD template and explore options for collaborative case studies. The template will incorporate insights from other OER formats using Markdown, such as TeachBooks, and will be informed by the #dariahTeach Social Justice Course as a model for a new design framework.
By standardizing DARIAH OER creation and conversion, we aim to:
* reduce technical hurdles for educators and researchers,
* foster collaboration across European institutions,
* and ensure that future DARIAH-Campus resources are consistent, accessible, and reusable.
This funding scheme will run from January 2026 until end of March 2027. The funded projects will be invited to present their project results during the DARIAH Annual Event 2027. Keep an eye on our news section as we will be posting more information on their development.
