On the 6th and the 7th of September the Sloane Lab hosted in collaboration with Humanities Data Science and Methodology (HDSM), TU Darmstadt a 2-day symposium titled “Connecting, co-designing and engaging with digital collections and infrastructures: challenges and case studies”. The symposium took place at the Hessisches Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv in Darmstadt, Germany, and it was funded by the Towards a National Collection Programme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Welcoming an international audience of researchers, museum professionals, archivists, librarians, technologists and students interested in the intersections of Digital Humanities, Digital History, and Digital Heritage the event explored the state of the art of how digital collections and infrastructures can be connected, co-designed, and engaged with, including the ethical, creative and human-centred challenges that can arise in digital contexts.
The themes of papers covered diverse topics including semantic web and data-driven methods for connecting and researching digital collections; human-centred, ethical and interdisciplinary approaches to linking past and present collections; creative and knowledge-led engagements with digital collections; and future directions. The symposium finished with a discussion that explored the interests and needs of cultural heritage institutions in collections as data infrastructure projects.