• Hong Liu University of Toronto,
• Ray Siemens University of Victoria,
• Alan Colin-Arce University of Victoria

University of Toronto

This talk introduces the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, which is an in-development community-governed digital research infrastructure designed to support open scholarship for academics, research partners and stakeholders, students, and interested members of the public (https://hsscommons.ca). As an initiative of the INKE Partnership (https://inke.ca/) developed with project partners in Canada, Australia, and the United States, the HSS Commons arose from the recognition that existing commercial academic networking platforms and proprietary repositories are insufficient in supporting the ethical collaborative and multilingual practices that characterize much humanities research. In response, the HSS Commons combines elements of social networking sites, tools for collaboration, and institutional repositories, allowing researchers to freely share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools.

 

Taking the HSS Commons as a case study in value-driven infrastructure, this talk demonstrates how digital research environments are not neutral containers for scholarship but active agents that shape research practices, participation, and visibility. The talk will use the Commons’ engagement of a few Canadian early modern studies associations in Canada as examples to describe ways in which the HSS Commons facilitate open scholarship with emerging digital research infrastructure and research data management best practices. Meanwhile, the talk will also highlight two design commitments guiding the project—community governance and multilingualism—as it is reflected in the ongoing translation initiatives and community-building efforts with national and international partnerships. 

 

First, following the Principles of Open Infrastructure, HSS Commons is structured around the core value of care (Winter 2020, Nowviskie 2015) in the organization of sustainable, non-commercial knowledge commons. Community governance is incorporated as a design principle that informs platform architecture and policy decisions to facilitate non-discriminatory participation in an open yet secure digital environment. Second, and relatedly, HSS Commons takes multilingualism seriously as an infrastructural concern rather than an optional enhancement. While humanities research frequently engages with local languages and culturally specific archives, digital infrastructures often default to English, limiting the circulation and visibility of non-Anglophone scholarship. HSS Commons addresses this imbalance by embedding multilingual considerations into its development. This talk will briefly discuss the Common’s community-led translation workflows in building multilingual interfaces that support the creation, dissemination, and discovery of scholarship in four other languages including French, Spanish, Bangla, Portuguese. The Commons is also currently working on translating its interface into Mandarin Chinese. 

 

The talk concludes by reflecting on the implications of the work of HSS Commons for future DH research environments, suggesting that attention to governance and language is essential to assessing the long-term value and impact of digital infrastructure in the humanities.

 

Keywords: Digital Infrastructure, governance, multilingualism

• Jane Gallagher University of Leeds,
• Claire Knowles University of Leeds,
• Simon Popple University of Leeds,
• Maeve Murphy Quinlan (Dr) University of Leeds

University of Leeds

The current anxieties around the appearance and embedding of AI and LLMs in the University sector and GLAMA (Galleries, Libraries, Archive, and Academia) sector triggered a strand of research in University Cultural Collections at the University of Leeds. This included two AI focused short fellowships in conjunction with the Library and Digital Creativity and Cultures Hub (DCCH) in 2025 entitled. University Cultural Collections and Generative AI: Critical Approaches in a Library Context . Their report called ‘for the informed use of Generative AI by cultural practitioners going forward, which could be fostered through institutional support, standardised training, and open-source tools’. Building on this recommendation, we began to model the role library and archival collections could play as the basis of future knowledge and discovery, through the potential use and origination of AI tools. This approach is grounded in a series of critical questions around how AI technologies are used to inform researchers of archival collections’ content and value, how and where technologies are valuable, and underlying concerns around sustainability, professional values, ethics and inclusivity. 

To further explore and iterate on our previous work we launched our current DAIMs project which concludes in July 2026. The project was designed to develop an ethically informed framework for the use of Generative AI and LLMs in relation to our Cultural Collections. The project aligns with the UoL Digital Libraries Infrastructure Project (DLIP), AI governance, Open Knowledge and our commitment to equity of opportunity for researchers. It responds to growing sectoral anxieties around the deployment of AI tools and LLM approaches in relation to collections and the current lack of strategic guidance for researchers and students necessary to underpin a healthy research environment. It specifically focusses on the potential use of tools (those currently approved by the University), the prototyping of new open-source tools such as the metadata agents, and methods for the creation and tracking of metadata to operationalise library processes for cultural collections and to enhance discoverability and linkage. It is informed by a series of collections-based experiments and built around a diverse and interdisciplinary team including collections staff, digital humanities scholars, researchers and our RSE community. 

This paper will unpack the findings of this very recent project and consider what is next in terms of developing common, shareable resources and approaches. It will also evaluate the collaborative nature of the working processes, considering the value of building interdisciplinary teams to consider foundational questions and the role DH methods and approaches play in this context. We will present the results of our experimentation and share our emergent framework.

• Daniela Schulz Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel,
• Kilian Hensen University of Cologne,
• Tobias Gradl University of Bamberg,
• Leon Fruth University of Bamberg,
• Nils Geißler University of Cologne

Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel

Scholarly resources are typically developed within project-specific contexts, creating a fragmented ecosystem where results remain isolated in institutional silos. This not only impedes the visibility of resources, but also limits the potential for collaborative enhancement, cross-referencing, and the sustainable stewardship of digital scholarly outputs. The Text+ Registry [1], developed within Germany's National Research Data Infrastructure [2], shifts the paradigm from centralized control to distributed curation, transforming the way scholarly communities engage with resource metadata across institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

Traditional cataloguing approaches face a critical dilemma: either enforce rigid standardization that fails to capture domain-specific nuances or accept incompatible local solutions that hinder interoperability. The Registry's architectural response to this dilemma is a metamodeling framework combined with provenance-aware information layering. Rather than flattening diverse metadata into a lowest common denominator, the system maintains multiple autonomous layers that preserve the integrity and context of each data source while enabling their synthetic combination. 

The layering system supports automated aggregation and expert curation. Manual enrichments become additional layers that enhance collective knowledge without overwriting original contributions. This reframes interoperability as post-hoc composition that respects heterogeneity, rather than prior agreement on a unified schema. The technical implementation uses a model-driven design approach, in which formal data models tailored to each data domain generate application components that are independent of specific technologies. YAML-based model definitions enable schemas to evolve without requiring a redesign of the system. Shared DataCite mappings facilitate interoperability and cross-domain queries, while preserving the richness of domain-specific metadata. Furthermore, the integration of authority files such as the Integrated Authority File [3] facilitates semantic links between resources, actors, and institutions.

This distributed curation model addresses sustainability challenges inherent in community-maintained infrastructure. Rather than requiring resources to abandon existing cataloguing practices or migrate to centralized platforms, the Registry enables participation through low-barrier mechanisms: automated harvesting from existing APIs, form-based manual submissions, and Edit-a-thon events for collaborative enhancement. Version control and transparent attribution ensure all contributions remain traceable and reversible.

Beyond its role within Text+, the metamodeling and layering capabilities have proven transferable. They have facilitated the integration of Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) into the Text+ resource landscape and now underpin cataloguing systems in two further initiatives: Research data management infrastructures in Germany and the long-term project Modern India in German Archives (MIDA). These reuse cases demonstrate that the Registry’s technical framework is not bound to a single infrastructural context.

Having presented the architectural blueprint of the registry at the 2024 DHC, we now report on developments and insights gained over the past two years. The paper examines how this framework combines technological components, distributed curation and community engagement to operationalize FAIR principles in practice, moving toward concrete workflows that incentivize data sharing and collaborative stewardship. By analysing specific integration cases—from the technical challenges of MGH-to-registry transformation to the organizational dynamics of cross-institutional curation—we demonstrate how infrastructure design choices shape possibilities for scholarly collaboration.

 

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1. https://registry.text-plus.org 

2. Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI), https://www.nfdi.de/?lang=en 

3. Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND), https://www.dnb.de/EN/Professionell/Standardisierung/GND/gnd_node.html