From Artefacts to Algorithms: Federated Infrastructures, Knowledge Representation and AI in the Humanities
Abstract
The digital transformation blurs the boundaries between research activity and infrastructure in the humanities. Data‑driven methods and AI are gaining importance, yet their outputs hinge on the quality of underlying data and metadata. Initiatives such as the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) foster federated data spaces that enable large‑scale, cross‑modal data retrieval and analysis. Potential gains include accelerated discovery of cultural artefacts, reproducible workflows and new insights through federated data corpora. Risks appear in data fragmentation, algorithmic bias, dependence on evolving platforms, and the need for sustainable digital publication and development of new skills. Core competences of the humanities — close reading, archival work and hermeneutics — still remain essential. The Digital Humanities extend this repertoire with computational text processing and annotation, historical network analysis, computer vision, interactive visualisation and digital knowledge representation. This impulse talk examines how these new methods integrate into everyday scholarship and teaching in the humanities, supported through federated infrastructures such as NFDI4Culture. It closes by asking how digital methods can strengthen, rather than replace, humanities research while safeguarding data quality, data sovereignty and long‑term availability of data and results.