Written by Cécile Chantraine Braillon, La Rochelle Université (France) and Anamarija Žugić Borić, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (Croatia), this article presents the work conducted within the Theatralia Working Group to address the growing digital transformation of the performing arts. Bringing together around 30 scholars, GLAM professionals, and artists, the group fosters interdisciplinary research on digitization, digital performance, digital methodologies, and archiving in the performing arts.
After an initial phase dedicated to identifying the new challenges and emerging needs raised by the performing arts’ adaptation to the digital turn, the group underscored a key epistemological issue: the need for a shared computational language to describe and represent the field, enabling meaningful data exchange and generating real scholarly value. In its second phase, Theatralia therefore refocused its efforts on refining such digital description models and supporting their integration into broader archival infrastructures. This Spotlight delves into the issues identified and the task of building and further developing a thesaurus for performing arts.
This article is part of DARIAH’s latest outreach campaign, DARIAH Spotlight, which makes research within the DARIAH network more visible. This monthly series will showcase digital scholarship in the humanities, from both DARIAH Working Groups and DH projects within the DARIAH network. Follow this campaign for more Spotlight articles.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Open Marketplace is a discovery portal which pools and contextualises resources for Social Sciences and Humanities research communities: tools, services, training materials, datasets, publications and workflows.
The Marketplace highlights and showcases solutions and research practices for every step of the SSH research data life cycle.
Training Series Learning objectives
Understand Open Science, FAIR and CARE principles in practice Participants will be able to explain the Open Science paradigm and the FAIR and CARE principles, and assess their implications for responsible research data management across the full data lifecycle in the arts and humanities, social sciences, language sciences, and GLAM-related research.
Navigate and critically use the SSH Open Marketplace Participants will be able to confidently navigate the SSH Open Marketplace to discover, evaluate, and select relevant tools, services, datasets, workflows, and training materials for their research needs.
Integrate digital resources into research workflows Participants will be able to incorporate SSH Open Marketplace resources into discipline-specific research workflows, enhancing transparency, reproducibility, and efficiency in arts and humanities, social sciences, language sciences, and GLAM-related research.
Contribute to and curate resources Participants will be able to contribute their own communities’ high-quality resources to the SSH Open Marketplace by applying editorial guidelines, metadata standards, and best practices for documentation, interoperability, and reuse, as well as reuse Marketplace resources to support reproducible and transparent research practices.
Apply domain-specific standards, resources and research practices Participants will be able to document, share, and reuse domain-specific research workflows, data, and tools within arts and humanities (DARIAH), social sciences (CESSDA), language sciences (CLARIN), cultural heritage contexts, thereby fostering interoperability, FAIR compliance, and sustainable knowledge exchange within national and European research infrastructures
Leverage the SSH Open Marketplace for community-specific applications Participants will be able to design and implement customized application scenarios by utilizing the SSH Open Marketplace to create, curate, and disseminate tailored resource lists or complex catalogs that meet the specific needs and standards of their respective research communities.
Overview of sessions and learning objectives per session
Training session
Learning objectives
20 February: FAIR, CARE & Open Science Principles
1. Explain the core principles of Open Research and their relevance for SSH research practices. 2. Distinguish between FAIR and CARE principles and understand their complementary roles in data governance. 3. Identify key FAIR-compliant research infrastructures relevant to SSH research. 4. Assess the implications of Open Science requirements for data management planning and project design. 5. Apply FAIR and CARE principles to a concrete research use case or project scenario.
20 March: Introduction to SSH Open Marketplace
1. Describe the purpose, scope, and added value of the SSH Open Marketplace for SSH research. 2. Navigate the SSH Open Marketplace interface to locate resources (tools, services, datasets, training materials, and workflows). 3. Use search and filtering functions to identify relevant resources for a specific research question. 4. Understand how the Marketplace connects community use-cases to European SSH research infrastructures. 5. Select appropriate resources from the Marketplace for early-stage or exploratory research tasks.
17 April: Making the most of the SSH Open Marketplace
1. Explore and differentiate advanced resource types such as workflows. 2. Integrate Marketplace resources into existing research workflows. 3. Evaluate the quality, relevance, and reuse potential of Marketplace entries using metadata and relations. 4. Enrich existing Marketplace records by adding metadata, links, and contextual information. 5. (Re)use Marketplace resources to support reproducible and transparent research practices.
15 May: Contributing to the SSH Open Marketplace
1. Understand the role of community contributions in sustaining the SSH Open Marketplace. 2. Add new tools, datasets, workflows, or training materials to the Marketplace. 3. Apply editorial guidelines and quality standards for resource curation. 4. Use metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies to improve interoperability and discoverability. 5. Critically review and improve existing Marketplace entries to enhance reuse and FAIRness. 6. Understand programmatic access and re-use of marketplace material via API and WordPress plug-ins.
19 June: Thematic Art and Humanities
1. Identify DARIAH services and workflows relevant to arts and humanities research. 2. Understand how arts and humanities research workflows are represented in the SSH Open Marketplace. 3. Apply DARIAH tools and workflows (e.g. ATRIUM) to concrete research scenarios. 4. Integrate heterogeneous data types typical of arts and humanities research into FAIR-aligned workflows. 5. Share and document arts and humanities workflows for reuse within the SSH community.
18 September: Thematic GLAM institutions
1. Understand the specific characteristics and challenges of cultural heritage and GLAM data. 2. Identify relevant tools, standards, and services for GLAM data in the SSH Open Marketplace. 3. Apply FAIR principles to digitised and born-digital cultural heritage data. 4. Integrate GLAM datasets into interdisciplinary SSH research workflows. 5. Promote reuse and sustainability of cultural heritage data through documentation and sharing practices.
16 October: Thematic language data
1. Identify CLARIN services and standards for managing and analysing language data. 2. Understand FAIR and legal/ethical challenges specific to language data (e.g. sensitive or personal data). 3. Use the SSH Open Marketplace to discover language resources, tools, and workflows. 4. Integrate CLARIN tools into linguistic research workflows. 5. Prepare and document language datasets for reuse within national and European infrastructures.
20 November: Thematic Social sciences
1. Identify CESSDA services, standards, and tools relevant to social science research. 2. Understand best practices for managing, documenting, and sharing social science data. 3. Use the SSH Open Marketplace to locate CESSDA-related datasets and services. 4. Apply FAIR and ethical principles to quantitative and qualitative social science data. 5. Connect social science research workflows to European data services and infrastructures.
The training series are conceptualised following the FAIR-by-design methodology developed in skills4EOSC (Filiposka et al. 2024), which consists in taking a systematic approach for conceptualizing each training session, e.g. defining the target audience, the learning objectives and the means to achieve them in each training session, publishing the materials and guides about how to use them, among others. FAIR learning materials enable the reuse of the materials both by learners and by trainers.
Target audience
The workshop series is aimed at a broad audience with links to the social sciences and humanities – from beginners to experienced researchers and practitioners who want to contribute their perspectives or benefit from the experiences of others.
a discovery portal, to foster serendipity in digital methods
an aggregator of useful and well curated resources
a catalogue, contextualising resources
an entry point in the EOSC for the Social Sciences and Humanities researchers
The SSH Open Marketplace is not:
a repository. Nothing is hosted in the SSH Open Marketplace. Workflow content type can be hosted, but this is an exception.
a data catalogue. The goal is not to collect all the SSH datasets, but selected datasets are indexed to support the contextualisation (dataset mentioned in a publication or used in a training material for example).
a commercial Marketplace. There is nothing to sell in the SSH Open Marketplace. Commercial software/services can be referenced
Written by Maria Ilvanidou, Scientific Associate at ATHENA RC and Athens University of Economics and Business, this article presents the findings of the ATRIUM Skillset Assessment Survey, conducted within the ATRIUM project, to understand the skills researchers already have, the ones they’re missing, and the training support they need to work confidently with digital tools and services in the ATRIUM Catalogue. The findings were analyzed and presented in the ATRIUM Skillset Assessment and Gap Analysis Report published in August 2025.
Strengthening digital skills ensures more equitable access to research infrastructures and better data and research practices across languages, media and disciplines. For ATRIUM, training is not just an optional extra but a central strategy to enable researchers to use the services available to them. The Skillset Assessment and Gap Analysis report offers a detailed, evidence-based picture of the skills researchers already have and the areas they need more support. Its insights are relevant beyond ATRIUM, contributing to ongoing discussions and efforts in digital capacity building across the wider AHSS community.
This article is part of DARIAH’s latest outreach campaign, DARIAH Spotlight, which makes research within the DARIAH network more visible. This monthly series will showcase digital scholarship in the humanities, from both DARIAH Working Groups and DH projects within the DARIAH network. Follow this campaign for more Spotlight articles.
We are pleased to announce that SSHOC’s activities in 2026 will be led by newly elected Sally Chambers (from DARIAH ERIC – Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) as Chair, and Vania Virgili (from E-RIHS ERIC – European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science) as Vice-Chair. This decision was taken by the SSHOC Governing Board during their meeting on 27 November 2025.
As the newly elected coordinators of the SSH Open Cluster Governing Board, Sally Chambers and Vania Virgili will serve voluntarily in 2026, coordinating the SSHOC Cluster. The Cluster brings together 20 members from research organisations, data archives, funding agencies, and the national nodes of the cluster’s infrastructures. They will also represent SSHOC in communications with external bodies such as the European Commission (EC), ERIC Forum, and the EOSC Association, as well as act as liaisons with the EU-wide science clusters initiative OSCARS.
SSHOC’s governance bridges the full breadth of the research infrastructure landscape in the humanities and social sciences, including the complementary contributions of heritage science. The involvement of E-RIHS at the leadership level is especially significant, as E-RIHS recently became an ERIC (on 28 March 2025), and the cluster is proactively giving space for newly established ERICs to take leadership roles. This signals a stronger commitment to fully integrating cultural heritage expertise into the overall SSH data ecosystem.
Sally Chambers will be taking on the Chair role after a year of acting as Vice-Chair of SSHOC: “I am grateful to follow on from Darja Fišer (from CLARIN-ERIC) as the next Chair of the SSHOC Governing Board in 2026, in what will be a crucial year for Research Infrastructures. In the coming months, SSHOC will need to navigate the emerging landscape of Research and Technology Infrastructures, advocate for the strategic importance of the SSH RIs in the next Framework Programme, as well as understand our role in the recently launched EOSC Federation. I am delighted to join forces with Vania Virgili in her new role as Vice-Chair, to address these challenges through our shared commitment to strengthening collaboration across social sciences, humanities and now heritage science infrastructures.”
“As a newly established ERIC, taking on the Vice-Chair role in SSHOC is, for me, a meaningful recognition that heritage science has a place at the European core of research infrastructures. I am grateful that SSHOC has, over the years, served as a vital forum for exchanging experiences and tackling shared challenges. As Vice‑Chair, I am committed to ensuring balanced representation across disciplines, supporting the Chair, and encouraging other SSH research infrastructures to step forward as leaders in future cycles. With E‑RIHS now a full ERIC, I look forward to contributing heritage science expertise to SSHOC’s mature cluster, building on past achievements and strengthening collaboration to support and represent the broader SSHOC community across the social sciences and humanities,” said Vania Virgili in her speech.
The new Chair and Vice-Chair take on their roles as of 1st January 2026, where one of their first tasks will be to present the SSHOC Annual Plan for 2026.
Susan Schreibman, DARIAH Director and Professor of Digital Art and Culture in Maastricht University, was awarded the Ángel David Nieves Book Award (Edited Collection) by the American Studies Association. The prize is awarded yearly for the best digital or public humanities project on city and regional planning history. Susan received the prize for her book Feminist Digital Humanities: Intersections in Practice, co-edited with Lisa Marie Rhody.
About the Book
Feminist digital humanities offers opportunities for exploring, exposing, and revaluing marginalized forms of knowledge and enacting new processes for creating meaning. Lisa Marie Rhody and Susan Schreibman present essays that explore digital humanities practice as rich terrain for feminist creativity and critique.
The editors divide the works into three categories. In the first section, contributors offer readings that demonstrate how feminist thought can be put into operation through digital practice or via analytical approaches, methodologies, and interpretations. A second section structured around infrastructure considers how technologies of knowledge creation, publication, access, and sharing can be formed or reformed through feminist values. The final section focuses on pedagogies and proposes feminist strategies for preparing students to become critical and confident readers with and against technologies.
Aimed at readers in and out of the classroom, Feminist Digital Humanities reveals the many ways scholars have pushed beyond critique to practice digital humanities in new ways. The book is available open access (generously supported by the UM Open Access Book Fund) from this link: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p088506
It’s December which means it’s time for our 2025 advent calendar!
2025 has been a very busy and productive year for DARIAH. Over the year, we welcomed a new member country, launched new outreach campaigns to showcase the excellent research happening within DARIAH and beyond in DH, enriched our trainings resources by adding many new courses on DARIAH-Campus, published the first volume of Transformations: A DARIAH Journal and issued its second call for articles, organised events, webinars, workshops and conferences for our community, launched a new Working Groups Funding Scheme and contributed to the many European projects DARIAH is currently participating in.
We have gathered the year’s highlights into our latest advent calendar. Join us in reviewing this past year by opening a new door every day for a new DARIAH highlight.
Written by Inés Matres and Mengdi Zhang (University of Helsinki), this article is acelebration of the 10th anniversary of the Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon through the lenses of a participant and a team leader shining a spotlight on two projects from the latest DHH25 that delved into two historical areas, colonialism and the Holocaust, following traces in newspapers (for the former) and oral histories (for the latter) via machine learning, LLMs, and digital methods.
The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon (DHH) is an award-winning event welcoming every year approximately 40 students in humanities and social sciences to collaborate with computer scientists and develop a project from start to finish in ten days. The true objective of this hackathon is to show students the value added in collaboration while encouraging them to address real humanities questions and problems through the application of innovative methods and data approaches.
This year the Hackathon offered four thematic areas but as both authors of this Spotlight article have a shared interest in historical data, they chose to delve into two projects that focused on European events that had a global impact which continues to the present day: Colonialism and the Holocaust.
Group picture of DHH25 participants Photo credits: Jukka Suomela
This article is part of DARIAH’s latest outreach campaign, DARIAH Spotlight, which makes research within the DARIAH network more visible. This monthly series will showcase digital scholarship in the humanities, from both DARIAH Working Groups and DH projects within the DARIAH network. Follow this campaign for more Spotlight articles.
This post highlights activities and results of the project Enabling city dwellers to better understand and valorise intangible and built heritage together: Digital tools and practices ran by the ARCHETIPO Working Group (WG) between 2023 to 2025. The project leaders were Elena Gigliarelli and Georgios Artopoulos, chairs of the ARCHETIPO WG. This project was funded by the Working Groups Funding Scheme 2023-2025.
Description of the project
The project sought to establish an interdisciplinary community in architecture and Digital Humanities through the organisation of a 5-day international workshop. By uniting diverse disciplines, stakeholders, and authorities, the project aimed to integrate local expertise on traditional building methods into a digital platform. Recognising the need to document and preserve traditional techniques, the project employed digital technologies for research. These tools not only process images and geometrically represent construction but also acquire architectural information historically transmitted through computational methods.
The 5-day international workshop on Digital integrated strategies to safeguard heritage construction technologies was held from 30 September to 5 October 2024 in Poggioreale (Trapani), at the Town Hall council chamber. Organised by CNR-ISPC in collaboration with The Cyprus Institute and the University of Catania, and supported by the Municipality of Poggioreale, it brought together lecturers, students, PhD candidates and professionals from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Cyprus.
Image from the workshop held in the municipal hall of Poggioreale Nuova
The goal of this workshop was to explore how integrated digital tools can support threatened historic settlements, construction provenance knowledge, safeguarding and a potential rehabilitation as well as the study of safe access to a historic settlement at risk, with a focus on the digital curation of knowledge about traditional construction technologies.
Blending theory and practical sessions, the workshop focused on the scientific and operational aspects of heritage digitization, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue among academics, professionals, and local communities while utilizing advanced digital technologies. The methods and processes explored in this workshop were classes on BIM/HBIM and data management alternated with fieldwork: 2D/3D surveys using drone photogrammetry and mobile SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), typological–construction analysis, and data-processing pipelines. The choice of Old Poggioreale—abandoned after the 1968 Belice earthquake—offered an open-air laboratory to trial workflows that can be replicated in other European contexts.
Processing and contributions from the University of Catania.
Project outcomes
The workshop had a significant impact not only on the scientific level but also on raising awareness within the local community. Poggioreale has become an international case study for the application of digital technologies to heritage conservation, demonstrating how the dialogue between past and future can lead to innovative and sustainable solutions. The team produced a georeferenced 3D baseline (point clouds and orthophotos), pilot HBIM models with libraries of techniques (vaults, masonry, floors), and initial safety recommendations to enable controlled public access.
Teaching materials (slides, workflows, checklists) will make the experience reusable in other courses. Content will be soon published open access on DARIAH-Campus, with persistent identifiers issued via an open repository, and will feed HERIGITAL, ARCHETIPO’s forthcoming semantic database. The event, supported by E-RIHS.it (for non-invasive investigations and FAIR data practices) and co-funded by BHiLab (ISPC) with an additional €5,000, strengthened new collaborations among partners and with the local community.
Find out more about the ARCHETIPO WG and how to get involved here.
The ECCCH is a new EU-funded digital platform connecting Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) across Europe, including museums, archives, libraries, researchers, and conservators. It offers shared infrastructure, advanced tools (AI, 3D, annotation), and a collaborative space to digitise, preserve, and showcase cultural heritage.
Why join?
Collaborate across disciplines and borders
Manage, and share collections cost-effectively in a collaborative environment
Establishing a cost-effective policy for the storage, management, and sharing of collections
Boost visibility and international reach
Access cutting-edge digital tools that would otherwise be unaffordable
Develop innovative services (virtual exhibitions, 3D reconstructions, educational apps)
What will be funded?
The call will support 20 projects, with up to €29,800 available per project. Projects should:
Involve CHIs working with tangible and/or intangible heritage
Raise awareness of the ECCCH and expand its community
Support skills development and capacity building, especially for small and medium-sized CHIs
Projects are expected to have a wide geographical reach and engage a significant number of CHIs. Alongside communication activities, they may also include:
Digital or in-person workshops, webinars, and online courses
Training materials (guidelines, toolkits, manuals)
Informational events on ECCCH benefits
Surveys to identify sector challenges and opportunities
Helpdesks providing tailored support and feedback
Creative engagement formats such as hackathons, co-design, or co-creation sessions
Who can apply?
Consortia of CHIs, led by umbrella organisations, networks, or professional associations with European, national, or regional reach.
To support prospective applicants, the ECHOES Team hosted an Info Day on Thursday, November 6 as a Zoom webinar. This session shared details about the application process and answered many questions on the call and submission. The slides presented are now available for download and you can see the recording of the webinar on our Youtube channel.
Key Dates
Deadline for submissions: 30 January 2026, 11:59 pm CET
The DARIAH Annual Event 2026 will take place on May 26th to May 29th in Rome, Italy. Our host for this year’s event is CNR: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. May 26th will be a day for DARIAH internal meetings, followed by the main conference on May 27th to May 29th.
This year’s event will explore the topic of Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement.
The theme of DARIAH’s 2026 Annual Event is to explore digitally-enabled research through a public and participatory lens, focusing on who our research is for, what are its social and public benefits, and how research can serve to create new dialogues within the public sphere. We seek to foster exchanges on how digital infrastructures, networks and collaborative methods can enable and sustain forms of scholarship that are open, flexible and socially responsive. A way to frame this is through the concept of hybridity: an intermingling of ‘disciplines, technological and cultural practices’ which embed within them the goal of connectivity. This may be connectivity of the university or memory institutions with society through collaborative and joint engagements, or it might be providing alternative spaces for/where people can connect and interact through a hybrid network of physical and technology-mediated encounters to co-construct knowledge.’
Whether through scholarly reflections, concrete case studies, theoretical contributions, or policy considerations, this year we seek to explore how digital, social and institutional infrastructures can support engaged research, and nurture generosity, participation and shared creativity in the digital arts and humanities.
We welcome contributions on a variety of topics, including but not limited to:
Infrastructures of engagement: designing open, inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable platforms
New models of collaboration across academia, memory institutions, and society
Pedagogies of engagement and public-facing (digital) humanities education
Mapping engagement: Evaluating and evidencing public value and impact in digital research
Preservation, stewardship, and resilience in digital knowledge infrastructures
Co-creation, citizen science, public and participatory humanities, and community-driven, engaged scholarship
Policy and governance frameworks for sustaining participatory infrastructures
Creative and artistic practices as forms of public engagement and dialogue
The role of digital archives and participatory practices in shaping collective memory and identity
Ethical and sustainable approaches to participatory digital-enabled research
Implementing CARE: Designing digital infrastructures that foster trust, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility
Intercultural and transnational perspectives on public digital humanities
Research infrastructure as critical Infrastructure – strategies to build resilient infrastructure for engagement and public good
Policy and governance frameworks for sustaining participatory infrastructures
Keynote speaker
We are happy to announce that Andreas Fickers, director of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), 3rd Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Luxembourg and head of its Digital History Lab, will give a keynote speech on “Multimodality as a means for multivocality? Transmedia storytelling and the challenges of shared authority in digital public humanities” at the DARIAH Annual Event 2026.
Important dates
(Extended)Deadline for Call for Papers:December 22, 2025January 8, 2026 Registration opens: February 15, 2026 Notification of acceptance: Late February, 2026
On October 22nd, 2025 the DARIAH South-East European (SEE) Regional Hub officially launched, during an event at the Vučedol Culture Museum in Osijek, Croatia. The launch was organised on the side of the Digital Humanities and Heritage conference, an annual international conference run by DARIAH-HR. The SEE Hub is the first DARIAH Regional Hub launched.
“I really have to congratulate the chairs, Koraljka Kuzman Šlogar & Dimitar Illiev, for their tireless work in bringing the SEE Regional Hub into existence and building connections across the region,” said Edward J. Gray, DARIAH’s Officer for National Coordination. “It was a privilege to give an official welcome as a DARIAH-EU representative for this important initiative that will serve to structure cross-regional cooperation in southeastern Europe, and, I hope, bring new communities and Members to DARIAH-EU.”
Pre-launch workshop and strategy meeting with interested parties from across southeastern Europe.
Edward Gray, Dimitar Illiev & Anamarija Žugić Borić welcome participants and officially launch the SEE DARIAH Regional Hub from Vučedol Culture Museum.
A DARIAH Regional Hub (DRH) is a representative consortium of institutions from geographically close countries that serves the aims of DΑRΙΑΗ at a regional level and is officially recognised by DARIAH-EU. The main criterion for establishing a DRH is geographic proximity because cultural, social, historical and/or linguistic similarities that can be found in geographically close countries constitute an excellent basis for fruitful collaboration on joint projects. DARIAH Regional Hubs have existed in the past alongside projects such as Humanities at Scale and DESIR. In 2023, DARIAH-EU formalised the mechanism as a permanent part of community building in DARIAH.
The SEE DARIAH Regional Hub includes nine institutions across six countries. It is co-led by the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” in Bulgaria and the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb, Croatia, with participating institutions in Greece, the Academy of Athens & the Athens University of Economics and Business; in Cyprus, the Cyprus Institute and the University of Cyprus; in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the University of Sarajevo; and in Slovenia, the National Library of Slovenia and Institute of Contemporary History.
The goals of this Hub are to develop a regional digital humanities network, to promote mutual understanding between researchers across borders, share knowledge and expertise while raising awareness about digital humanities methods and tools in the region. The SEE Hub should also expand DARIAH’s presence in non-Member countries, and help promote collaboration on projects and initiatives that address common interests and challenges in the Balkan peninsula. These goals will be accomplished via hosting events to build community, developing education resources on DH tools, methods and workflows, exploring funding opportunities, and encouraging information exchange between the partners.
“We’re excited to see that the announcement of the Hub has already generated strong interest, with institutions from North Macedonia and Montenegro eager to join right after its launch at the conference,” said Koraljka Kuzman Šlogar co-coordinator of the SEE Hub from the Institute of Ethnology and and Folklore Research in Zagreb.
“The establishment of this Hub is the fruit of the common efforts of many people and institutions across the region. Using our common heritage and shared research interests and methods as a basis, I believe we can further promote the causes of both (Digital) Arts and Humanities and of DARIAH’s network of scholars”, Dimitar Iliev, co-coordinator of the SEE Hub from the University of Sofia, stated.
Members of a DRΗ can be institutions from DARIAH Member Countries, DARIAH Observer Countries and non-member countries. Both DARIAH Cooperating Partners and non-affiliated institutions from non-member countries are allowed to join as long as the overall goals of the regional association are in line with DARIAH’s mission to “empower research communities with digital methods to create, connect and share knowledge about culture and society.”
The 29th DARIAH General Assembly will be held at the Cyprus Institute (and online) on Wednesday, November 19 2025. This will be followed by a joint strategic workshop between National Representatives and National Coordinators on November 20 aiming to clarifying DARIAH’s strategic position over the next five years and define concrete actions to strengthen its role in supporting digital arts and humanities researchers across Europe. The outcomes of the workshop will directly inform the next phase of the DARIAH Strategy, ensuring alignment with future funding frameworks, and the needs of national research communities.
Since becoming a founding member of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) in November 2022, DARIAH has been an active voice in Europe’s research assessment reform movement. The Coalition champions a shift from narrow, journal-based metrics towards qualitative, contextual, and transparent evaluation.
Over the past three years, and building on its 2023 position paper on The Role of Research Infrastructures in the Research Assessment Reform, DARIAH has translated the CoARA principles into tangible outcomes: from pioneering open peer review practices in Transformations, our own diamond, open-access, peer-reviewed journal, to developing assessment criteria for non-traditional research outputs in the context of the ATRIUM project.
“Research infrastructures play a unique role in shaping a culture of responsible assessment,” says Toma Tasovac, DARIAH’s Director Emeritus and Strategic Advisor to the Board of Directors. “We support evaluation models that value openness, interdisciplinarity, and the real, diverse ways in which arts and humanities researchers create knowledge and contribute to research infrastructures.”
The newly published Progress Report and Action Plan brings together DARIAH’s achievements from 2022–2024 and sets out a strategic roadmap for 2025–2027. It outlines clear priorities for implementing DARIAH’s CoARA commitments and for sustaining momentum towards a more equitable and transparent research assessment ecosystem.
“Sharing DARIAH’s CoARA Action Plan means a lot to us,” said DARIAH Open Science Officer Françoise Gouzi. “It shows how we’re putting research assessment principles into action, embedding openness, transparency and reusability in our day-to-day editorial and institutional practices.”
Through these efforts, DARIAH continues to connect policy, infrastructure, and community, helping to ensure that research assessment reform in Europe reflects the diversity, creativity, and collaborative ethos of the arts and humanities.
We are excited to share the dates of the DARIAH Annual Event 2026, planned to take place on May 26th to May 29th in Rome, Italy. Our host for this year’s event is CNR: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche.
Topic of this year’s event is Digital Arts and Humanities with and for Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement. Please save the date and stay tuned, we will be publishing more information on the conference and the call for papers in the coming weeks!
The DARIAH Annual Events is the annual gathering point of the DARIAH community to meet, discuss and present research on the year’s set topic. Have a look at past DARIAH Annual Events here.
OpenMethods is a metablog highlighting curated content about Digital Humanities Methods and Tools, an important area currently underrepresented in the DH peer-reviewed literature especially, but not exclusively, from a European perspective.
With over 250 posts contributed by committed Volunteer Editors, OpenMethods metablog gives accessibility and visibility of scholarly conversations on digital methods. OpenMethods was originally launched through the Humanities at Scale project and was then sustained as a DARIAH Core Service.
Transition to a DARIAH-IT Community Service
In 2024, OpenMethods transitioned to a Community Service operated by DARIAH-IT. Recognising its value in showcasing digital methods and tools, DARIAH supported DARIAH-IT in taking over its daily operations, ensuring the platform’s continued growth and relevance in the evolving DH landscape.
Spadi, A., SPINELLI, F., Degl’Innocenti, E., Gouzi, F., Testori, M., Karachristos, I., & Horvath, A. (2025). OpenMethods v2.0: shaping the future of a Community service. DARIAH Annual Event 2025 | The Past (DAE 2025), Göttingen, Germany. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15755629
“With over 250 posts contributed by committed Volunteer Editors since 2018, OpenMethods is an original publishing hub and crossroads easing conversation on digital methods” said Françoise Gouzi, DARIAH’s Open Science Officer. “From 2024, we’ve moved step by step towards a transition of the metablog to a Community Service operated by DARIAH-IT. I think this transition demonstrates the capacity of DARIAH as a resilient network able to provide stable services to the community. We are confident and delighted to support DARIAH-IT in taking over its daily operations, ensuring the platform’s continued growth and relevance in the evolving DH landscape.”
“Since February 2025, when the DICO (DARIAH-IT Coordination Office) took over the service, we’ve been working closely with the Open Methods Editorial team to shape a new strategy for the metablog and to encourage broader community participation” commented Alessia Spadi, DARIAH-IT Deputy National Coordinator & Sustainability HUB Manager. “We presented the transition with a poster at the DARIAH Annual Event 2025, then launched a call for volunteer editors and welcomed 22 new members from across Europe and beyond. Now, we’re preparing a full rebranding of the website, building on the excellent work done so far and giving the platform a fresh look for its next phase of development.”
Spadi, A., SPINELLI, F., Degl’Innocenti, E., Gouzi, F., Testori, M., Karachristos, I., & Horvath, A. (2025). OpenMethods v2.0: shaping the future of a Community service. DARIAH Annual Event 2025 | The Past (DAE 2025), Göttingen, Germany. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15755629
Open Call for contributions
Currently, the OpenMethods Editorial Team has launched a new call for content contributions and is inviting you to be part of it! If you’ve already published insightful work on Digital Humanities methods or tools, OpenMethods offers the perfect platform to give it greater visibility. By contributing to this metablog, you help amplify open access research and connect with a broader community of practitioners and scholars.
OpenMethods highlights Digital Humanities methods and tools already published on various sites. All selected content has to be:
already published elsewhere.
Open Access content/data.
Content can consist of blog posts, reports, presentations, working papers, data papers, articles, book chapters, video or podcasts. It is not a problem if it is already highlighted on another platform. Content with persistent identifiers (uri, handle, doi) are of course more than welcome.
DARIAH-EU is proud to announce a new initiative titled “DARIAH Beyond Europe”, a curated series of online presentations aimed at highlighting the work of our valued extra-European Cooperating Partners and fostering new synergies within the DARIAH community. The series will take place throughout the academic year 2025-2026, with each session dedicated to a current extra-European Cooperating Partner.
DARIAH Beyond Europe: Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University Thursday, October 30 at 14:00-15:30 CET
Our first session, highlighting our longstanding partnership with the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, will be held on October 30th from 14:00 Central European Time (9:00 Eastern Daylight Savings Time). It will be presented by the Center’s Executive Director, Dr. Natalia Ermolaev and Dr. Bryan Winston, Digital Scholarship expert at the Princeton University Library. The CDH has been a DARIAH Cooperating Partner since January 2021, and since 2023 has been co-organising a series of summer workshops with DARIAH-EU and Athens University of Economics and Business.
Sessions will last 90 minutes, with time for an introduction from DARIAH, a presentation from our Cooperating Partner, followed by discussion and questions. The Cooperating Partner will have the opportunity to introduce their institution and research activities, particularly its work in the field of digital arts and humanities, and lay out how they are already collaborating, or hope to collaborate more deeply, with DARIAH members and stakeholders. Future sessions are in the process of being scheduled and will be announced in the coming weeks.
The goal of the “DARIAH Beyond Europe” series is to provide a platform for mutual exchange and to enhance the visibility and integration of our non-European collaborators within the broader DARIAH family.
Please register to join our meeting and learn more about our extra-European Partners, and how DARIAH can help build meaningful scientific collaboration across borders!
We are currently looking for 15 evaluators to support the peer review of the top 25 applications of the ECHOES Cascading Grants Programme Call 1 on Data.
The ECHOES Cascading Grants Programme provides funding for consortia led by Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) to engage with the Cultural Heritage Cloud. The Cascading Grants programme supports up to 50 projects across three calls to enhance digital engagement, data sharing, and collaboration.
In particular, Call 1 on data seeks to encourage stakeholders in the Cultural Heritage Community to contribute datasets for use in the Cultural Heritage Cloud. Proposals define the dataset’s intended user community, its purpose (e.g., research, education, virtual exhibitions, etc.), expected outcomes, and benefits for the broader cultural heritage community. Additionally, applicants are asked to provide a scenario of how the project would like to make use of the Cultural Heritage Cloud, including possible steps needed to analyse and process the Cultural Heritage datasets provided. Finally, a detailed dataset description is required, covering content, technical specifications, ethical considerations, availability, and licensing.
For the final evaluation of Call 1, we require 3 external and 1 internal reviewers per application and as such we are drawing on our wide network of practitioners in the field to support this work as external reviewers. External reviewers in this context includes anyone who is not employed by a direct financial beneficiary or associated partners of the ECHOES project or connected with any of the projects selected for the final stage of Call 1.
In particular, we are looking for:
15 people as external reviewers to each review approximately 5 +/- applications (approx 5000 words each)
We expect it to take about 2-3 hours per application, with a total of 10-15 hours of work for 5 applications.
The review work will take place during the month of November, giving you 4 weeks to complete the work.
We are unable to remunerate this work, and as such, the review work will need to be undertaken on a voluntary basis.
In the lead-up to the proposal review period, we will hold an evaluators’ information meeting at the beginning of November to collectively align on the approach and criteria.
Please let us know by Friday 24 October if you are interested in supporting the evaluations of our top 25 applications from Call 1. You can let us know by sending a brief email to: grants@echoes-eccch.eu with the subject line: ECHOES: Call 1: Stage 2 Evaluation, stating your interest, your home institution, and main area of expertise.
As we confirm the list of evaluators, we will organise the evaluator’s information meeting for the beginning of November and send you instructions in advance of the review period.
This post highlights activities and results of the project Navigating through Digital Knowledge Models ran by the THEATRALIA Working Group (WG) between 2023 to 2025. The project leaders were Pr. Cécile Chantraine Braillon (WG Chair, La Rochelle Université) and Dr. Anamarija Žugić Borić (WG Chair, DARIAH-HR). This project was funded by the Working Groups Funding Scheme 2023-2025.
Project objectives
Launched within the DARIAH-EU infrastructure, the THEATRALIA WG brings together a network of approximately 50 researchers from across Europe and beyond. The initiative was born out of a growing need to adapt research and archival practices in the performing arts to the digital age.
To address this challenge, THEATRALIA adopted a phased, methodical approach. Phase 1 (2021–2023) focused on conducting a comprehensive landscape study, which revealed a significant gap: the absence of descriptive standards tailored to the specific needs of the performing arts. Phase 2 (2023–2025), which was the focus of the WG’s latest project funded by the DARIAH-EU WG Funding Scheme, aimed to develop practical digital solutions to address this shortfall—both in terms of describing performing arts archives and the field itself.
The project’s objectives were twofold: first, to design a digital descriptive model that reflects the unique characteristics of performing arts archives; second, to develop a controlled vocabulary that enhances semantic precision and interoperability across platforms and disciplines. To meet the first objective, the team conducted a thorough review of existing metadata practices and selected Dublin Core as a flexible foundational model. Thirty-eight metadata fields were retained and redefined with domain-specific guidance, ensuring alignment with established standards and ontologies.
In parallel, the team developed a prototype thesaurus. Rather than constructing a comprehensive ontology, THEATRALIA chose a pragmatic approach, building a structured, multilingual thesaurus using OpenTheso—an RDF-compatible platform. Terms were carefully extracted and standardized from authoritative glossaries and dictionaries. To date, around 1,400 terms have been compiled, with nearly 100 already accompanied by definitions and bibliographical informations.
The Spectator’s School: Digitizing Research in Performing Arts (November 21-22, 2024 | Lille, FR CNRS SCV, France)
Project results and outcomes
Several tangible results have been achieved. THEATRALIA successfully followed its roadmap to develop digital description languages for the performing arts, including a Dublin Core-based metadata model and a domain-specific thesaurus, both designed in accordance with FAIR principles and set to be released by mid-2025. These resources aim to support archivists, researchers, and cultural institutions in organizing, describing, and analyzing performing arts materials in a sustainable and interoperable digital environment.
Those resources/deliverables of the project are already available in open access in HAL SHS here:
Cécile Chantraine-Braillon, Fatiha Idmhand, Emeline Jeanne Jouve, Jorge Dubatti, Marie Lavorel, et al.. Multilingual Thesaurus of Performing Arts (Version 1). 2025. ⟨halshs-05156229⟩
In addition to the creation of those resources, the project also catalyzed new international collaborations, extending its network to include scholars from Israel, Indonesia, and Latin America, and led to integration within large-scale research infrastructures. Notably, THEATRALIA is involved in OSCARS (Open Science Cluster’s Action for Research and Society) through the OASIS project (2025–2026), which promotes innovation in open audiovisual science. It also secured additional funding from the Institut des Amériques for the PERFORMA project (2025–2026), focused on developing a multilingual thesaurus (French–Spanish–English) dedicated to the performing arts.
From March to November 2024, THEATRALIA organised six training workshops—online, hybrid, and in-person—on digital description standards (such as Dublin Core), thesauri management tools (e.g. OpenTheso, Protégé), and domain-specific vocabularies. Over 75 participants attended. One of these sessions, focused on the e-spect@tor video annotation tool, was held during the international conference The Spectator’s School: Digitizing Research in Performing Arts (Lille, Fédération CNRS Sciences et Cultures du Visuel, 21–22 November 2024), co-organised by THEATRALIA. The work will result in multiple scholarly outputs, including a peer-reviewed article in the ASPA Journal (open access) and a collective volume to be published by Éditions des Archives Contemporaines (EAC/open access). Together, these outcomes significantly contribute to the development of robust digital infrastructures for the performing arts and the broader humanities community.
Ultimately, THEATRALIA has provided the performing arts research community with robust, interoperable tools to address both the conceptual and technical challenges of digital archiving and analysis—marking a significant step forward in the digital transformation of the field.
Find out more about the THEATRALIA WG and how to get involved here.
We are thrilled to share with you the successful culmination of our recent internal and international Composability and Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) workshop at CERN focusing on two key areas: reviewing the progress of composability development and deployment in the OSCARS project and exploring potential collaboration with the AARC TREE project with respect to Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure. This workshop was particularly significant as it allowed us to delve into the shared challenges faced by research infrastructures and brainstorm potential solutions. In OSCARS, we believe in the power of collective intelligence and the transformative potential of hands-on learning.
Workshop Objectives and Outcomes
The workshop was held as a satellite event of the Open Science Fair and in conjunction with the project meetings of OSCARS WP2 (Composable Research Infrastructure Services in EOSC) and the AARC-TREE project. This combination resulted in more than 60 registered participants, half of which could attend in person. The synergy with the AARC-TREE project provided valuable insights for the OSCARS project, particularly in the realm of Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure. Conversely, it also offered the AARC-TREE project a clearer understanding of community needs.
The workshop began with a comprehensive review of our progress in composability development and deployment. Within OSCARS, composability refers to the ability to combine and integrate smaller, modular components or services into more complex systems. In a composable system, each component is designed to function independently but can be easily assembled or reconfigured with others to create new workflows or applications. The workshop focused on evaluating the improvements made to the services and ensuring they align with the Cluster’s vision of composability.
We then took a deep dive into the EOSC nodes, focusing on the Federation’s build-up and the distinct roles of the EU and CERN nodes. We reviewed key timelines, including the October 2024 node launch, the governance roadmap until 2027, and the publication of the EOSC federation handbook. A central point of discussion was the challenge of integrating services like AAI and catalogues, highlighting the contrast between the EU node’s strict Service Level Agreements and the more flexible nature of Research Infrastructures. The presentation of the candidate CERN EOSC node highlighted the sharing of experience and lessons learned, including the importance of AAI and the potential for federated data management and storage solutions. The discussion also touched on the role of credits and the need for a more flexible access policy vocabulary.
We continued the workshop with the discussion of “Resource discovery: Challenges and Solutions”. We realized that maturity differs significantly within and across the clusters. While climate research data remains highly fragmented, LifeWatch showcased an advanced federated search with API and LLMs integration. We also examined CLARIN’s infrastructure for promoting interoperability in computational linguistics. The discussion consistently returned to the need for standardized metadata and harmonized policies, with a clear consensus on the potential of semantic web technologies and knowledge graphs.
Further, we discussed the architecture and capabilities of various workflow management systems, including Galaxy, REANA, EWOKS, and DIRAC, focusing on their core design philosophies, user experience, execution environments, data management and integration, reproducibility, and sharing mechanisms. Key points included the use of tools like snakemake for interoperability, the need for data provenance and versioning, and the challenges of integrating different storage systems and tools. The discussion also touched on the importance of reproducibility and FAIR principles, as well as the ongoing development and implementation of open standards like CWL.
The highlight of the workshop were the tours to various experimental sites at CERN, including the Synchro-Cyclotron, the Antimatter Factory, and the ATLAS experiment. We appreciated the insightful and detailed explanations of cutting-edge research. Thank you for the enriching experience!
As a conclusion of the workshop, each cluster defined some upcoming steps and takeaway messages. In general, all clusters aim to improve compatibility across different Research Infrastructures (RIs) by sharing workflows and tools. This collaborative approach helps in addressing data fragmentation and semantic harmonisation, ensuring that data is accessible and meaningful across disciplines. The use of common platforms such as Galaxy, Zenodo, and Virtual Research Environments (VREs) is promoted to streamline data management and analysis.
To achieve these common goals, several steps were outlined:
Semantic Harmonisation: Implementing ontologies and FAIR vocabularies is crucial to reduce data fragmentation and enhance interoperability.
Workflow Development: Collaborating on the development of reusable and platform-independent workflow components creates bridges between communities and fosters cooperation.
Tool Integration: Promoting the integration of tools across different clusters and communities ensuring that methods and services are widely accessible and usable.
Competence Centres: Proposing and developing inter-cluster Competence Centres is necessary to address shared challenges and enhance collaborative capabilities.
Training and Documentation: Providing extensive documentation and training for VRE workflows and analyses is necessary to ensure that researchers can effectively use these platforms.
Platform Integration: Enabling VREs integration with heterogeneous computing resources (e.g. clouds, HPCs), and the development of common VRE Helm Charts, are crucial objectives to optimize and standardize deployments.
By focusing on these commonalities, the clusters can advance their goals and enhance the overall research environment, leading to more efficient and effective data management and analysis across disciplines.
Looking Ahead
The workshop culminated with an in-depth discussion on the upcoming tasks, particularly focusing on the initial concepts for our community engagement activities. This segment was instrumental in fostering creativity and soliciting diverse perspectives on how to effectively engage with the community, promote our work, and ensure practical application of our tools. We unanimously agreed to continue and enhance our community outreach efforts by participating in cluster-specific conferences and workshops, ensuring alignment with the visions of the Competence Centres and Work Packages 1 and 3.
On 25 September 2025, the SSH Open Cluster held its 5th Assembly, led by Darja Fišer (CLARIN ERIC), and Vice Chair Sally Chambers (DARIAH ERIC). The meeting reviewed governance updates, strategic initiatives, and adopted a forward-looking work plan.
The meeting began with a review of the year’s developments, with two new ERICs joining the team, namely EHRI and E-RIHS who formally transitioned to ERIC status. Also, a new Cluster member, MEDem, joined the roster of participants. The Cluster’s Rules of Procedure (RoP) underwent a revision with changes that allow greater flexibility, and follow the more mature status of the Cluster after the first three years of work.
The meeting also reviewed ongoing strategic engagement at European and national levels. At the European level, SSHOC continues to work closely with the ERIC Forum, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and the OSCARS project.
National updates illustrated the Cluster’s influence on local levels he Swiss nationwide initiative SSHOC-CH, presented by Georg Lutz from FORS, was founded as a legal entity in 2024, and is building broad membership with ambitions to deepen policy engagement, stakeholder outreach, and service coordination. In the Netherlands, SSHOC-NL is consolidating a network of SSH institutions, libraries, and archives, positioning itself for stronger alignment with cluster objectives. The initiative was presented by Richard Zijdeman from the International Institute of Social History. From Italy, Emiliano Degl’Innocenti from The National Research Council (Cnr) presented the H2IOSC project and reported progress in federating resources across infrastructures, building registries of tools, establishing secure analysis environments, and advancing collaboration around language and media datasets.
The meeting also presented the 2026 Work Plan, anchored around three strategic pillars: sharing data, tools & workflows; training & education; and advocacy & outreach. On the first pillar, led by Sally Chambers (DARIAH ERIC) Cluster members pledged to operate, maintain, and further develop the SSH Open Marketplace, exploring further connections to EOSC.
Under training and education, led by Susan Schreibman (DARIAH ERIC) the Cluster aims to refine its vision for a Competence Centre, work on SSHOC web presence, and consolidate educational resources across infrastructures.
On advocacy and outreach, led by Bonnie Wolff-Boenisch (CESSDA ERIC) the Cluster affirmed its intent to maintain a strong presence in relevant stakeholder bodies. The Cluster also plans to boost its visibility through participation in major conferences, coordination with national initiatives, and support for emerging efforts, especially for Ukrainian SSH researchers.
As SSHOC moves forward from this 5th Assembly, its focus is set on actionable steps, deeper cross-infrastructure collaboration, and stronger presence in Europe’s research infrastructure ecosystem.
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