HDSM Contributes to the DH2025
2025/09/12
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“. 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”.
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….
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…