From Artefacts to Algorithms: Federated Infrastructures, Knowledge Representation and AI in the Humanities

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.