The AI4LAM community are invited to a professional meetup (places in person and online) hosted at the National Museum of Australia in the Peninsula room. The aim is to peer network and share work developing or experimenting with AI/ML and applying that to cultural heritage or humanities and arts digital collections and data.

• Welcome and introductions (10 min) - co-convenors and/or hosts
• Francis Crimmins & Terence Ingram, NLA (15 min + 5 min Q&A)
• Kent Fitch, ADFA, UNSW (15 min + 5 min Q&A)
• TBC (15 min + 5 min Q&A)
• Break (25 min)
• Sae Ra Germaine, CAVAL (15 min + 5 min Q&A)
• Lucie Paterson & Jeff Williams, ACMI (15 min + 5 min Q&A)
• TBC, NAA (15 min + 5 min Q&A)
• TBC, NFSA (15 min + 5 min Q&A)
• Discussion with audience (30 min)

The meetup is timed to occur in the same week with two great conferences. One in Canberra, Australia, hosted by the Australasian Association of Digital Humanities (Digital Humanities Australasia) and one in London, England, hosted by the British Library (Fantastic Futures). Options to host attendees onsite and virtually is facilitated. Ticketing is in place for "In person" or online attendance.

This conference aims to mobilize knowledge, research, and professional experience around the benefits and challenges of developing and maintaining open scholarship in the current age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital platforms, as well as how best to coordinate open scholarship policies in ways that connect with related activities across Canada, Australia, and global partners. It also continues our tradition of celebrating and reflecting on the important, ongoing work of the open scholarship community. Open scholarship emphasizes the social nature of knowledge, along with community-driven initiatives, outreach, and partnerships that aim to close gaps between academic theory, research, and communities beyond academic specialists. Even though many researchers now have unprecedented opportunities to share and collaborate with each other and the public, much scholarship still remains inaccessible to wider audiences. In contrast to this reality, open scholarship asserts that research publications, datasets, educational resources, and other output should be accessible to all. Rapid advancements in AI, coupled with the expansion of open access research and digital infrastructures, are transforming open social research, public discourse, and creative practice. These shifts—spanning environmental, communal, social, creative, epistemic, and economic structures—demand urgent critical inquiry into the future of knowledge itself. Along with other disciplines, creative practice—itself a form of knowledge production in the academy and the wider world—is experiencing these shifts acutely. Moreover, the ‘data deluge’ in all disciplines presents both new possibilities and pressing challenges for digital researchers and engaged publics alike. Yet, while these issues are widely acknowledged across various fields, too often discussions remain siloed.

Cultural data comprises the machine-readable traces left by and generated to describe the cultural productions emerging from the deliberate pursuit of art, as well as the people, organisations, and places that surround them. This panel aims to examine the affordances of intimate, experimental, even anomalous, interactions with cultural data, in order to highlight the plurality of narratives and modes of interpretation that it can generate. With presenters from within collecting institutions, in the academy, and acting as artist-investigators, it will consider the role of cultural data in digital collections and web interfaces beyond their immediate utility as documentary records. Cognisant of the mechanisms that determine the biases and exclusions of data structures, it will consider what opportunities there are for rethinking how data performs as a social and cultural lens, and how it might illuminate connections to the non-human world.

Dr Keir Winesmith is responsible for the delivery of the National Film and Sound Archives (NFSA)’s strategic digital roadmap, which develops the information and communication technology (products and services) to enhance discoverability and shareability of the national audiovisual collection. He joined the NFSA from the National Gallery of Australia, where he was the Tim Fairfax Head of Digital. Prior roles include Chief Technology Officer at Old Ways, New, an Indigenous-owned and managed social enterprise, and Director of Digital Experiences at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of the 2020 book The Digital Future of Museums, and he co-founded the Sydney Cultural Data Salon and is an inaugural mentor in the Australia Council’s CEO Digital Mentoring program.

https://keir.winesmith.co/about/

Rachel Fensham FAHA FRSA was a Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne and the University of Surrey, and her research fields are performance, cultural history, and digital humanities. She was the lead CI for the Australian Cultural Data Engine (2021-2023) and is co-author with Tyne Sumner and Nat Cutter of Cultural Data: an Intimate Analytics of Cultural Collections (Routledge 2026). Other publications include the forthcoming Fabrications: Costume, Dance and Material Culture (OUP 2026), Movement: Theory for Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2021), and chapters on digital laboratories (Routledge 2023); on archives (Routledge 2016); and on costumes as data in Small Data is Beautiful (GSP 2023).

https://www.acd-engine.org/

Elvis Richardson is an artist, Lecturer in Visual Art and Design at Australian Catholic University, and founding editor of the Countess Report; a landmark, artist-led research project benchmarking gender representation and equity across Australian visual arts institutions. The Countess Report advocates for transparency, accountability, and diversity in the art sector. Recent writing includes "Artist to the Power of Mother," featured in the December Motherhood issue of Artlink.

www.elvisrichardson.com

www.countess.report

Mitchell Whitelaw is Professor of Design in the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University with interests in digital design and culture, data practices, more-than-human worlds and digital collections. His publications include Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (MIT Press 2004), and articles in journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Senses and Society. He has worked with institutions including the State Library of NSW, the State Library of Queensland, the National Archives and the National Gallery of Australia, developing "generous" interfaces to their digital collections. His current research investigates environmental and biodiversity visualisation, and digital design for a more-than-human world.

https://mtchl.net/bio/

This panel examines how emerging technological systems and corporate data extraction practices are fundamentally challenging the rhetoric of openness that has organised digital humanities and GLAM ethics, along with many other internet communities, since the early days of the world wide web. While openness and data availability once promised democratic access to cultural materials and research findings, this framework was implicitly reliant on existing regulatory frameworks, institutional protocols, and infrastructural conditions that had managed availability, remuneration and protection of cultural materials prior to the digital age. The current, large-scale appropriation of datasets (public, semi-public, and proprietary) by technology corporations – for the purposes of training large language, image and multimodal models – has revealed how digital openness depended on these existing systems of governance and control, which are no longer functioning as designed. As legal frameworks struggle to address corporate data mining or protect cultural producers (or prosumers) and government regulatory responses lag technological developments, data creators, including digital humanists, and cultural institutions face increased risks to their intellectual labour and community materials. Is this the “end of open data,” and if so, how should data holders, cultural institutions, and digital humanists respond? To what extent have past assumptions about openness systematically disadvantaged marginalised groups, especially First Nations communities and Global South institutions whose materials were made available for extraction? How do we move beyond binary framings of open versus closed to develop more nuanced, care-based approaches to digital cultural materials? In what ways can our communities learn from other disciplines (such as social science models of data donation) and to what extent are different approaches necessary?

Parliamentary bodies around the world have been publishing transcriptions of their proceedings for decades or even centuries. These transcriptions enable public scrutiny and transparency of the actions and speech of legislative bodies and elected representatives.

Because of their documentation of legislative action and speech, their relatively consistent format, and their coverages of long periods of time they are potentially useful for policy researchers, media and communication scholars, political scientists, linguists, sociologists, historians, and many others.

This workshop aims to provide a starting point for working with these transcribed proceedings, including evaluating how they might (and might not!) be useful for your research, how to get started for different kinds of projects, and cautionary notes on potential limitations.

We will be using a suite of computational text analysis approaches, with no prior coding experience necessary.

Learn how to:

• Access (Federal) Hansard in different ways
• Make sense of different models which can be applied to the data
• Make the most of the tools provided by the Parliament

You will also:

• See examples of research using Hansard as data source
• Get hands-on experience exploring Hansard as text data

homo-calculans.blog: including slides for this presentation.

Archipelagos or Empires? Narrative Colonialism in Generative AI

Jill Walker Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture & Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen

What are the dominant narratives of generative AI, and what is at stake in their circulation? In this keynote, Jill Walker Rettberg discusses her ongoing research on AI-generated narratives in the AI STORIES project, which starts from the hypothesis that LLMs replicate and perhaps increase certain narrative patterns, which could mean that we lose diversity in storytelling. Research so far suggests this is true – the thousands of AI-generated stories we have analysed in the AI STORIES project emphasise stability and nostalgia, telling remarkably similar stories of threatened communities saved by reconnecting with heritage.

The theme of DHA2025, Digital Archipelagos, reminds us both of our diversity and our interconnectedness – but can we retain these when using large language models (LLMs)? Is it possible to use large language models (LLMs) without succumbing to the digital colonialism of the large tech companies that sell them to us? How should we, as researchers and educators, respond to political and institutional pushes to use genAI? What does it mean for our digital archipelagos that Trump has issued an executive order banning “woke AI” and an AI Action Plan to ensure US allies use the “full AI technology stack” that aligns with American values? Generative AI is normalising, erasing the outliers and exceptions and replacing them with statistical probability. So would it help to use local models, or is the technology itself a problem? By understanding how LLMs really work we can gain the tools to decide when not to use it, and when it might add value. Rettberg will close by highlighting examples of how researchers might use LLMs with care, in ways that resist homogenisation and keep the archipelago alive.

Followed by

Digital Humanities for Australia: An overview of the HASS and Indigenous RDC

Nichola Burton, Programs Architect, HASS and Indigenous RDC

The HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons (RDC) works in collaboration with Indigenous Australians, researchers, industry and government to harness data that strengthens Australia’s social and cultural wellbeing and supports understanding and preservation of our culture, history and heritage. New digital platforms and data directories are expanding how researchers discover and access rich HASS and Indigenous data, while training programs build capability in data-driven research and Indigenous data governance. As an engine for research translation, the RDC enables national, cross-sector data collaboration, integrating ARDC compute, storage, identifiers and discovery services with analysis tools, standards and expert support.

Unfortunately, Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker has had to withdraw. We are very pleased that Rose Barrowcliffe is able to present her work on Indigenous Data in Kathryn's stead.

Herbaria hold millions of specimens collected from Indigenous lands around the world. The specimens may represent a piece of the puzzle that allows Indigenous peoples to care for their Traditional Country ('Country' for short), build sustainable incomes, and continue cultural practices. Indigenous data sovereignty (IDSov) means people have the right to manage and control these specimens as part of their environment and resources (Carroll et al. 2021, Maiam nayri Wingara and Australian Governance Institute 2018), but Indigenous peoples' ability to exercise these rights is limited due to the poor findability of the specimens.

This project, led by a Butchulla and Bundjalung-Gumgganggbir Macquarie University research team and partnering with New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), Local Contexts, the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), and Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet), pilots processes for improving the findability of, and reconnecting botanical specimens to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. NYBG staff assisted with understanding the priorities and processes that have resulted in some Australian records being findable but not others. The Local Contexts staff shared learnings from metadata enrichment to similar items in other collections. LDaCA provided initial programming support to map the specimens' collection points and suggested language datasets to indicate who the relevant Traditional Owners might be. AARNet provided the geospatial analysis necessary for the process of inferring connections between large datasets of botanical specimens and Aboriginal groups.