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HDSM Contributes to the DH2025

On July 14-18, the Digital Humanities Conference 2025 took place at NOVA-FCSH in Lisbon.
HDSM member, Prof. Julianne Nyhan, gave a talk at Panel 3: “The global state of digital history: Establishing data culture(s) in uncertain times“. Other speakers were: Till Grallert, Torsten Hiltmann, Andrew Flinn, Min-Woo Lee, Ian Marino, and Ian Milligan.

Our colleague Dr. Nadezhda Povroznik co-organised Panel 10 “Openness in GLAM: Analysing, Reflecting, and Discussing Global Case Studies” and also gave a talk on “A Dual Lens on Openness of the Rijksmuseum: Tracing Historical Processes via Web Archives”. Other panellists: Paul L. ArthurMia RidgeT. Leo CaoSamantha Callaghan, and Luis Ramos Pinto.

The description of the panel on Openness in GLAM:

Openness is now considered a key concept in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector, shaping current discussions about accessibility, inclusivity, participation, and the democratization of knowledge. In implementing open knowledge principles, cultural heritage institutions are both motivated and sometimes pressured to provide access “to all citizens”. On the one hand, this highlights the potential to bridge gaps between collections, knowledge, policy, technology, and community engagement. On the other hand, this vision is complicated by challenges such as intellectual property restrictions, the ethical limitations of unrestrained openness, legal barriers, costly technological infrastructures, insufficient IT skills, conflicting institutional priorities, and, most recently, questions about the ethics of the commercial exploitation of open data by AI companies.

This panel explores the diverse dimensions of openness within the GLAM sector in a global context, focusing on case studies from museums, libraries, and web archives. It also provides reflections from scholars and practitioners on their practical implementation via sociocultural, historical, and technological lenses. By critically examining selected case studies, the panel seeks to unpack how openness is conceptualized, implemented, and experienced in different institutional contexts. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, critical reflection, and interdisciplinary approaches, panellists will explore copyright barriers for Australian museums and analyse international examples that suggest potential pathways forward; observe the historical process of implementing openness on the Rijksmuseum (Netherlands) seeing them via the openness of web archives; reveal the paradoxes of open GLAM data that have hindered its promise in the UK; discuss platformization in the cultural sector and biases in historical representation; examine open GLAM addressing colonial approaches building on historical collecting practices; and assess implications of open access challenges and advocates for adopting best practices in the public domain in Portugal. These exemplars of openness in the GLAM sector reveal both the benefits and the challenges of fostering expanded access in the field.

The panel contributes to ongoing debates on digital transformation, accessibility, and sustainability, providing insights into the theoretical and practical implications of the concept of openness for cultural heritage. In line with the DH2025 theme, Building access and accessibility: Open science to all citizens, this panel highlights the critical intersections of openness, accessibility, and digital heritage.

The abstract of the presentation by Dr. Povroznik is as follows:

The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, is recognised as a pioneer in opening up cultural heritage to researchers and to the public (Terras 2015). It has published its digital collections as Linked Open Data (Dijkshoorn et al. 2018), placed these in the public domain, fostered reuse through initiatives like Rijksstudio and Rijksawards, developed data exploration tools (Mensink / van Gemert 2014), and other initiatives. While there is an extensive range of publications on the topic of the Rijksmuseum as an exemplary open institution, the dynamics of this openness remain underexplored. This research aims to reconstruct the process of implementing openness through historical analysis of snapshots of the museum’s website preserved in web archives.
The museum’s website is a valuable historical resource and a significant instance of born- digital heritage, which requires thorough preservation to provide access to these resources in the future (Schroeder / Brügger 2017). Two interconnected aspects will be addressed during this presentation: the historical process of implementing openness on the Rijksmuseum’s website and the openness of web archives, particularly the Internet Archive and the Dutch
Web Archive, to explore the websites’ history.
The historical process will be traced using qualitative methods to create a timeline and identify milestones, and quantitative methods will be employed to track progress and assess web archives. Comparative analysis will be applied to selected datasets taken yearly: from 2010 and 2011 (before and after the introduction OpenGLAM), 2014 (forwarding dynamics), 2019 and 2022 (before and after the pandemic). Datasets will be assessed regarding URL overlaps, formats, and volumes to evaluate the Internet Archive and the Dutch Web Archive and address a question of openness of the past for historical analysis.

Image courtesy: Prof. Nirmala Menon

The book of abstracts will be published soon on Zenodo. We will announce its release as soon as possible.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
valentinaprishchepova (September 1, 2025). HDSM Contributes to the DH2025. HDSM. Retrieved March 15, 2026 from https://hdsm.hypotheses.org/5653


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