On 3 December 2025, researchers, data specialists, heritage professionals, infrastructure providers, and policymakers gathered in Utrecht for CLARIAH-NL’s Community Connect 2025. This year’s programme combined strategic consultation, expert discussion, and practical knowledge exchange, all centred on a single overarching question: How should CLARIAH-NL evolve to meet the needs of researchers and cultural institutions in the next decade?

A Morning Dedicated to Strategy: Building the CLARIAH Roadmap 2026–2030

The invitation-only morning session launched with an update on CLARIAH’s current organisational phase: the consortium agreement is being finalised, membership fees are being implemented, and the infrastructure, which is by nature always “under construction”, is entering a new phase of long-term sustainability.

Roeland Ordelman outlined the perspectives shaping the forthcoming CLARIAH Roadmap 2026–2030, touching on methodological requirements (scholarly primitives), organisational realities (distributed infrastructure components and partners such as SURF), and strategic themes across the SSH sector, including AI, new data types, public values, and societal challenges such as climate and health.

Participants then joined one of three structured roundtables: Research, Landscape, and Resources, each tasked with identifying pressing gaps and articulating short-, medium-, and long-term priorities.

Research Roundtable: Emerging Fields, Interdisciplinarity, and AI

The Research Roundtable highlighted several domains insufficiently supported by current infrastructure: art and visual culture, archaeology, digital-born materials, and multimodal or experiential data such as games and social media. Participants emphasised that methodological boundaries, not just disciplinary ones, continue to limit cross-domain research.

Several insights emerged:

Interdisciplinary collaboration benefits from co-location and hands-on exchange between researchers and engineers, as demonstrated by past Media Suite collaborations.
AI is becoming both a tool and an object of study, raising questions about safe environments, methodological transparency, and the risks of expanding “black box” processes without adequate training.
Fragmentation across tools, datasets, and institutions remains a fundamental obstacle for researchers who need integrated workflows rather than isolated resources.

Short-term recommendations ranged from community workshops and AI literacy efforts to voucher systems providing hands-on engineering support. Medium-term priorities called for expanded compute access, while long-term ambitions emphasised disciplinary widening, critical digital humanities, and stronger integration in the European landscape.

Landscape Roundtable: Bridging National and European Ecosystems

The Landscape Roundtable addressed the structural connections between CLARIAH-NL, national partners, and European infrastructures. Representatives from NDE, NWO, SURF, EHRI, E-RIHS, ODISSEI, and TDCC-SSH discussed the persistent challenge of silos—institutional, disciplinary, technical, and organisational.

Key themes included:

The need for clearer role definition for CLARIAH-NL within the broader ecosystem.
A shift toward two-way communication, where user needs actively shape infrastructure development.
The challenge of data afterlife, particularly in heritage and scientific contexts.
The importance of shared standards and vocabularies, without resorting to one-size-fits-all approaches that may not suit sensitive or specialised data.
Recognising that infrastructure must be more than a project lifecycle; it must become a durable public good.

There needs to be more focus on understanding user needs, defining CLARIAH’s role, building bridges across infrastructures, and ensuring sustainable collaboration.

Resources Roundtable: Interoperability, New Data Types, and AI Readiness

The Resources Roundtable focused on the infrastructure’s building blocks: data, tools, workflows, standards, and their usability across the humanities.

Several core gaps emerged:

Interoperability and Metadata Quality
Participants agreed that true interoperability—particularly the “I” of FAIR—is still the most challenging dimension. Metadata must cover semantics, usage, provenance, and quality. Without this, even excellent resources remain isolated.
A Humanities Knowledge Graph
A medium-term ambition is the development of a national Humanities Knowledge Graph, supported by a lifecycle management system and anchored in authoritative institutions. This would provide a foundation for cross-collection analysis, discovery, and responsible integration of LLMs and RAG-based tools.
New Data Types and Data Lifecycle Management
Humanities research increasingly relies on born-digital materials, synthetic datasets, trained models, 3D objects, digital twins, HTR output, streaming data, and user-generated annotations. CLARIAH must plan for long-term stewardship, storage, and accessibility of these materials.
AI Literacy and Provenance
The group highlighted the need for training and documentation that foreground data provenance and “data genealogy,” especially when AI is applied. Given the long history of entity recognition and other automated methods in the humanities, participants emphasised continuity rather than novelty.

Short-term work will focus on interoperability at metadata level; longer-term ambitions include trust networks that ensure robustness and transparency across the whole ecosystem.

Afternoon Keynote: Rethinking Digital Infrastructure

In the open afternoon programme, Melvin Wevers (UvA) delivered a keynote titled Rethinking Digital Infrastructure: What Computational Humanities Truly Need. Wevers spoke candidly about the practical challenges computational historians encounter when attempting to apply large-scale analytical methods to heritage collections.

He identified persistent gaps in:

Discovery: metadata overviews without data-level access
Access: lack of bulk availability, unclear documentation, copyright barriers
Compute: insufficient integration between heritage collections and computational environments

Wevers recommended a shift toward API-first design, shared models as infrastructure, providing compute resources, documenting with working code and integration over invention.

Parallel Sessions: Learn & Teach, AI & Humanities Research, and Data Flows & Data Stories

Learn & Teach

Discussions focused on integrating CLARIAH tools and datasets into humanities curricula. Examples from the University of Groningen’s DH programmes highlighted the importance of small, modular teaching assets, scaffolding, and the challenge of “de-Googling” and now “de-AI-ing” students. Participants stressed the need for sustainable platforms, greater discoverability across learning resources, and interfaces that meet students where they already work.

AI & Humanities Research

This session addressed methodological assumptions embedded in data creation and AI usage. Presenters underscored that data are never “raw” and always shaped by human perspectives. Work on linked open data and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) demonstrated how LLMs might enhance cultural heritage accessibility, provided that provenance and conceptual modelling remain central.

Data Flows & Data Stories

Participants examined how data stories can make research methods transparent and support reproducibility. A case study on propaganda in the Netherlands during World War II illustrated how combining newspapers and radio collections in the Media Suite can reveal historical dynamics otherwise invisible in traditional narratives. The session emphasised interactive visualisation, metadata transparency, and future publication possibilities within CLARIAH.

Looking Ahead: Toward a Shared National Narrative

The closing plenary reinforced a core insight from the entire day: CLARIAH-NL must articulate a compelling narrative about the role of humanities infrastructure in addressing societal challenges, AI developments, and long-term stewardship of cultural data.

Several overarching themes resonated across all discussions:

Fragmentation must be actively addressed technically, institutionally, and socially.
AI literacy and responsible practice will become central to all future infrastructure.
Sustainability beyond projects requires structural partnerships and coherent national positioning.
Community is both the driver and beneficiary of infrastructure, and continuous dialogue is essential.
The humanities bring indispensable critical perspectives to AI, datafication, and societal change, and must claim a central position in national and European discourse.

As CLARIAH-NL moves into the next phase of roadmap development, the insights from Community Connect 2025 will feed directly into strategic planning, ensuring that the infrastructure continues to evolve in step with the needs of scholars, cultural institutions, and society at large.

Thank-you for joining us

To those who where part of the CLARIAH Community Connect 2025,

We want to express our gratitude for joining us at this year’s event. Your participation is what makes our events vibrant and inspiring gatherings.

We hope you found the discussions and networking opportunities both valuable and impactful.

Your feedback is incredibly important to us. If you have any thoughts or suggestions about the event, we’d love to hear from you here. Together, we can make future events even better.

If you would like to stay up-to-date with CLARIAH developments, please consider subscribing to our newsletter, if you haven’t already done so.

Once again, thank you for being a part of the CLARIAH Community Connect 2025. We hope to see you again at future events.

Warm regards,

CLARIAH-NL Management Board

Reflections from CLARIAH-NL Community Connect 2025