With data quantity and variety becoming increasingly sought-after, the more distant past offers a wealth of potential research objects of interest to actors both inside and outside academia (e.g., the 2024 Vesuvius Challenge). Data quality, as well as specialized knowledge of the subjects at hand, therefore has to rise to the occasion to match this growing demand, setting clear boundaries and reinforcing ethics – traditional and modern – challenged by new motivations and interests. Disciplines dealing with ancient civilizations and medieval cultures are intensely transdisciplinary, spanning wide timeframes and locations across the world. Still, disciplinary boundaries remain in place and inform both formative years of scholarship and available research avenues, including spaces to communicate findings and opportunities to seek out collaborators.

Digital History, Digital Classics, Digital Palaeography, Digital Manuscript Studies, and similar definitions have all been attempts at attaching more specific descriptors to the work of archaeologists, historians, linguists and more scholars applying digital approaches to history or using digital tools to glean new insights from historical items. Many scholars in this sphere share similar hurdles and challenges, such as convincing colleagues that historical research results can and should be considered as data, a reluctance to self-identify as digital humanities scholars, and the need to connect with like-minded specialists in fields outside one’s own. There have however been just as many advances facilitating both the work itself (e.g., tools, approaches and shared experience related to historical research) and the dissemination of research, such as through dedicated, peer-reviewed, open-access publication venues (e.g., Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Journal of Digital History, Studies in Digital Heritage).

Another welcome development has been the active involvement in research of museum professionals, librarians and curators, documenting and sharing findings and best practices in custodianship and caretaking (e.g., British Library, Bodleian regarding their digitized manuscript collections); navigating tensions between open access and cultural sensitivities (e.g., the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme of the British Museum, African Digital Heritage projects); the importance of metadata standards for long-term reusability; and helpful guidelines such as the FAIR principles. Initiatives such as the DARIAH-EU working group on “Ethics and Legality in the Digital Arts and Humanities” (ELDAH) further highlight these challenges by developing tools like the Consent Form Wizard to ensure responsible data handling and ethical compliance in humanities projects. Pedagogical uses of ancient and medieval collections further remain underexplored; DH-informed material may be offered on-site in museums, and online in downloadable form, but these first steps are rarely further developed into actual learning goals, complete courses or reusable modules (e.g., IIIF-based platform for learning Abnormal Hieratic, Leiden). Lastly, engagement in the form of gamification either pedagogically or commercially (e.g., Assassin’s Creed) is an avenue that has grown exponentially in the past decade.

This event offers a platform of exchange for scholars of ancient civilizations and medieval studies venturing into DH practices, methodologies and tools, those with experience bridging evidence of the past and technical approaches, and technical experts contributing to projects centering ancient and medieval topics, objects and materials.

The mini-conference welcomes submissions on the topics of ethics, accessibility (open vs. closed), reuse of data, modelling, mapping, object and data ownership, imaging (incl. IIIF), methods of increasing engagement, curation, sustainability and more. Contributions from interdisciplinary areas such as game and media studies, (meta)data science and (open access) publishing are also appreciated.

In the DH community ethos of methodological pluralism and equity, the conference committee strongly encourages participation by scholars of the past and practitioners concentrating on areas not always included in the traditional “Classics” descriptor, such as archaeology of the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania, historical ethnology and anthropology, digital historical linguistics and more. Early Career Researchers (ECRs) are especially invited to submit an abstract and participate in the conference.

Mini-Conference Program