CLARIAH Summer School 2025 Recap
From June 30 to July 2, 2025, the CLARIAH Digital Heritage and Humanities Summer School was held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.
This intensive three-day programme brought together community members from across the humanities, social sciences, and libraries to explore the use of digital tools and datasets in cultural heritage and humanities research.
Why a summer school format?
The summer school format was deliberately chosen to encourage focused learning and peer exchange in an immersive setting. While CLARIAH develops online resources and tutorials, a summer school allows for better in-person interaction with our community and for connecting our tools, data, and collections with the people who want to use them. It allows researchers, ranging from early-career to senior, to engage hands-on with digital tools and reflect on broader questions in digital (heritage) research.
Plenary sessions and three specialised strands
Through plenary lectures and discussions, participants became familiar with shared interdisciplinary concerns in Digital Heritage and Humanities research. In conjunction with this, participants deepened their knowledge of how to use digital collections, datasets, and tools in their research by participating in one of three thematic strands of their choice under guidance by experts. Participants followed a combination of plenary lectures and one of three in-depth thematic strands:
- Linked Data Applications: by Richard Zijdeman (IISG), this track introduced participants to working with Linked Open Data in historical and heritage datasets.
- Audiovisual Collections and Media Analysis: by Christian Olesen (UvA), this strand provided training in the Media Suite and tools for searching, annotating, and analysing audiovisual heritage.
- (Cultural Heritage) Research Data and ELSI: by Sabrina Sauer (RUG) and colleagues explored the ethical, legal, and social dimensions of data management, touching on FAIR and CARE principles and practical applications like data-envelopes.
Across the three days, plenary lectures and workshops by scholars such as Emily Hansell Clark, Liliana Melgar Estrada, Marjan Grootveld, Norah Karrouche, Mateusz Kielan, Chiara Latronico, Rick Mourits, Jetze Touber, and Mari Wigham provided critical insights into topics like sound, coloniality, vocabularies, and FAIR data. The programme concluded with a collaborative session on developing interdisciplinary digital research workflows and practices that can be applied in participants' own projects and institutions. Once again, we would like to extend our gratitude to not only our speakers but also to our participants for their valuable insights, input, and enthusiasm.
What have we accomplished?
The summer school not only offered concrete technical and methodological skills but also facilitated critical conversations around access, bias, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Many participants left with project ideas, new research contacts, and a clearer path for integrating digital heritage tools, datasets, and collections into their own work.
What’s next?
Given the enthusiastic response, CLARIAH will offer future editions of the summer school. For next year we aim to add a fourth strand regarding text analysis from a literary, historical and/or language perspective. Also, we aim to provide ECTS for each strand with the 2026 summer school. In the long run, we hope to align with some of the other excellent endeavours, perhaps even working towards a programme for spring, summer, fall and winter schools across the national heritage and humanities landscape!