The central topics of the interdisciplinary conference were the potential, perspectives and challenges that come along with digital approaches to cultural heritage. The conference started from two ongoing digital heritage projects, INVENTARIA – The Making of Inventories as Social Practice (FWF P 35988 Stand Alone Project)1, and Hohensalzburg Digital (funded by Land Salzburg)2, both dedicated to castle inventories (14th–18th centuries). A central concern was discussing the preliminary results of these projects. Beyond that, international speakers presented their experience with digital cultural heritage projects, addressing in particular the added value these approaches open for academic research and the interested public.
DANIEL SMAIL (Harvard) opened with his keynote on spatial dimensions of inventories from the corpus of the DALME project.3 Using the example of selected household inventories – the earliest of which date from the 12th/13th centuries –, he pointed out that these are more than just windows onto past materialities; rather, they have the potential to reveal how compilers conceived things and their attributes. Smail emphasised that this type of document also provides information on how the space was perceived in connection with the objects: This can be read off the way the descriptions in the inventories were arranged and structured and, at least in the later examples, off the room labels. Thus Smail's lecture explored an innovative approach to inventories that attempts to enter the thought-worlds of people living in late medieval cities and to reconstruct aspects of their phenomenological experience.
In the panel on researching inventories, CHRISTINA ANTENHOFER, BARBARA DENICOLÒ and ELISABETH TANGERNER (Salzburg) provided insights into the corpus of Tyrolean castle inventories of the 14th to the 16th century analysed in the INVENTARIA project. Their focus was on the complex practices associated with the inventorying process. Based on analyses of materiality, structure and content, they outlined the course of the creation of the inventories, including the writing of the texts, their further use and the roles of the people involved. They also showed how such data can be represented and used for further analyses by modelling them in an event-centric manner with the CIDOC-CRM ontology and visualising them in the form of knowledge graphs.
BAS SPLIET (Antwerp) addressed the question of why the demand for Dutch paintings declined so sharply in the late 17th century. He critically examined conventional explanations, such as reduced purchasing power, overproduction and limitations of space or budget. Based on a unique database of Amsterdam probate inventories, which record the monetary valuation of artworks and household objects, Spliet concluded that these factors are not sufficient to explain the decline. Instead, he situated it in the context of a consumer revolution. As Dutch burghers adopted new tastes, traditional paintings lost both social distinction and appeal, reflecting the emergence of Holland's modern consumer society. This change marked a significant shift in cultural values, with evolving fashions beginning to displace long-established art forms.
In the panel about the reconstruction of interieurs, CHRISTOPH BRESER (Krems) and INGRID MATSCHINEGG (Krems) examined the challenges of reconstructing medieval and early modern architectural heritage when archival and structural sources are limited. As part of the INVENTARIA project, they analysed various reconstruction scenarios using 3D models of Tyrolean castles from the 15th and 16th centuries. Both confirmed and hypothetical elements are visualised, with difficulties arising when later modifications obscure the original structures. Using selected Tyrolean examples, the research explores digital tools that facilitate the visualisation of these layered entities, to advance building documentation through standardised methods that account for historical changes and shifting perceptions over time. Based on three states of castles, 1) that of the original, built castle, 2) the castle as narrated in the inventories, and 3) the current appearance of the castle, Matschinegg and Breser were able to address both the limits and the potential of historical castle inventories.
The contribution of CHIARA PICCOLI (Amsterdam) focused on a 3D reconstruction of the private library of Pieter de Graeff, an Amsterdam patrician and director of the Dutch East India Company, from the Virtual Interiors project.4 Her aim was to reconstruct not only De Graeff's extensive book collection but also the spatial organisation of his residence along the Herengracht. Using archival sources, such as De Graeff's probate inventory, personal documents, his book auction catalogue, and architectural studies, she placed the library in its historical context in a house that remains, albeit modified. This lecture highlighted the potential of 3D technology to bring historical interiors to life, improving accessibility to these spaces and the narratives they convey for modern scholars. At the same time, Piccoli located the main challenge in developing stable and long-term solutions for storing, accessing and publishing annotated data.
In the subsequent panel, KATHERINE WILSON (Chester) introduced an object-centred approach within the _Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000-1700 (MOB)_project.5 Wilson discussed how everyday objects gained new meanings through haptic and sensory interactions, making these interpretations accessible to academics, students and the public. In the current phase, supported by a "public engagement and impact" grant, the project has been prioritising accessibility through digital tools, such as VR models of medieval Chester landmarks and a new prototype for a museum database. Wilson emphasised that effective dissemination of research requires collaborative, co-creative efforts with public and heritage stakeholders to maximise both cultural and academic impact, enriching local economies while advancing research accessibility.
THOMAS PICKLES (Chester) talked about the Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES) project6 which aims to create a comprehensive digital resource on churches in Britain and Ireland from before 1100 CE including a database, an online exhibition space, and educational materials tailored for schools. Through close collaboration with primary and secondary teachers, ECCLES has developed curriculum frameworks, lesson plans and digital tools for effective use in the classroom to make medieval history accessible to pupils. Pickles highlighted the impact of interactive digital tools on deepening pupils' understanding of early medieval history through a co-creative, educational approach.
The final session on Day 1 featured an open panel discussing the perspectives and challenges of digital approaches to cultural heritage. Participants, including heritage institution representatives, digital tool developers and digital humanities academics, shared insights in brief opening remarks. DANIEL SMAIL (Cambridge Mass.) highlighted the need for infrastructure to make research data accessible. CHIARA ZUANNI (Graz) noted that substantial coordination between institutions, often with different policies, is essential for data sharing. BERNHARD HEIL (Salzburg) discussed the role of digital solutions in exhibitions, such as media stations in museums. ULRIKE TANZER (Innsbruck) focused on the political and infrastructural requirements, emphasising that digitalisation aims to preserve cultural heritage. GÜNTER MÜHLBERGER (Innsbruck) pointed out that digital methods unfortunately remain uncommon in the humanities, with limited inter-institutional collaboration, despite promising advances in AI and related fields. These statements spurred a forward-looking debate, concluding that digital work in cultural heritage is essential to society, necessitating more funding opportunities, interdisciplinary collaboration and stronger institutional support for digital humanities in academia, especially in teaching.
The second day was opened with a keynote speech by CHRISTINA ANTENHOFER, BARBARA DENICOLÒ, and ELISABETH TANGERNER (Salzburg) on the narrative and fictional potential of inventories, demonstrating that these documents are more than just objective lists – they have a narrative character and reveal stories, both through their macro-structure and their micro-level details. Using examples from late medieval and early modern Tyrolean castle inventories, the speakers explored how textual structures create narratives that reveal different perspectives on rooms and objects. Moreover, they highlighted micro-stories embedded in these documents, e.g. castle inspections, object biographies, and resident details. Narrative potential is also rooted in the stories the mentioned objects tell on the castles, including architecture, daily life, religious practices, and weaponry. This was illustrated from the culinary domain by the mentioned kitchen tools, specialised food-processing rooms and food stocks as windows into historical practices.
In the next panel on the processing of data, ELISABETH GRUBER-TOKIĆ, KAROLINE IRSCHARA and GERHARD RAMPL (Innsbruck) gave an insight into the creation of a hierarchically structured and specifically or thematically searchable thesaurus based on the historical vocabularies extracted from the Tyrolean castle inventories. As part of the knowledge representation pipeline within the workflow of the INVENTARIA project, the thesaurus aims to make information about historical objects and lost terms visible and explorable. The speakers demonstrated the individual steps of the workflow: from word collection via semi-automatic annotation with manual control, through standardisation of word forms and identifier assignment, to the determination of basic categories and classification and visualisation.
ELISABETH GRUBER and PETER FÄRBERBÖCK (Krems) introduced ITEM7, a developing online tool by IMAREAL designed to catalogue historical objects found in inventories, account books and related sources. ITEM, which emerged from the Raumordnungen8 project, structures relationships between objects, spaces and actions, and switches from a relational to a graph database format to enable better integration with linked open data and compatibility with external databases. Based on RDF interfaces and REALonline9 software, ITEM utilises advanced AI technologies that enable agent-driven searches, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for contextual information and SPARQL queries from natural language. The project also explores AI-driven pattern recognition for classifying medieval room types and demonstrates the potential of AI to enrich historical analysis through detailed studies of medieval inventories.
ANDREA MUSSMANN (Innsbruck) presented a custom import/export tool developed to enhance the annotation capabilities of Transkribus for historical handwritten castle inventories within the INVENTARIA project. While Transkribus can be used to efficiently digitise and transcribe these inventories, it remains limited in handling fine-grained annotations and lacks automation for detailed attribute tagging. The new tool, interfacing with Transkribus via its API, converts documents into a CSV format optimised for large-scale annotation tasks, enabling users to export and re-import annotations as required. The benefit for historical research is, therefore, an acceleration of the annotation workflow and an optimisation in the processing of historical documents.
In the next panel, WALTER BRANDSTÄTTER (Salzburg) and STEFAN ZEDLACHER (Krems) took up the issue of 3D modelling, referring to the project Hohensalzburg digital (2022–2024) that aims to reconstruct the social and cultural history of the fortress through digital modelling, moving beyond traditional architectural research. Using historical inventories, the project develops a 3D space-time model of the fortress, visualising rooms, furnishings and the movement of people within the historical complex. With the help of access diagrams, organisational principles of historical spatial structures, such as those shown in the inventories, became visible. In this way they demonstrated how the interplay between modern inventory research and building research can lead to new results in spatial exploration.
CHIARA ZUANNI's (Graz) paper addressed the challenges and opportunities in using digital methods to document museum exhibition histories, which are typically ephemeral and involve multiple actors. She highlighted that, while exhibition histories provide valuable insights into museum practices and public reception, digital tools remain limited. Current solutions include databases and websites with digitised catalogues or 3D models of museum spaces, but these often lack integration with archival data. Zuanni proposed a new approach to link archival and visitor data with 3D models, creating "digital twins" of exhibitions. Examples from Austria and the UK illustrated the initial findings, underscoring the potential for enriched historical understanding through digitally connected exhibition records.
The final panel on modelling information was opened by the presentation of MILENA PERALTA FRIEDBURG and GERALD HIEBEL (Innsbruck) on another crucial methodological aspect of the INVENTARIA project's knowledge representation pipeline. They introduced the workflow, beginning with the extraction of data and metadata from the corpus of Tyrolean castle inventories, through the ontological mapping to CIDOC CRM, to the methodological approach to modelling and RDF creation, and finally to the visualisation as navigable and intuitively explorable knowledge graphs. It could be shown that event-centric modelling allows us to examine the process of the creation of inventories as events. They demonstrated that the visual representation via knowledge graphs not only reveals the complexity of historical inventories, but also enables exploration of and comparison within the large corpus of documents and highlights the significance of understanding the making of inventories as a historical practice.
LEON VAN WISSEN (Amsterdam) emphasised the new opportunities for data-centric approaches and research perspectives associated with the rapid growth of digitisation and the publication of open data by GLAM institutions. At the same time, he pointed out the associated challenges, such as the long-term hosting of research data. Van Wissen illustrated this with two case studies about the usage of linked open data: The Golden Agents10 project – completed in 2022 – investigated the interactions between producers and consumers in the Dutch Golden Age using inventories and created navigable knowledge graphs that are still accessible online. The current project GLOBALISE11 uses material about the Dutch East India Company published by the Dutch National Archives and processes this large number of textual documents using various digital methods, and with the support of citizen scientists, to make them usable for the public.
The extensive thematic and methodological range in the programme of this conference demonstrated the considerable potential of utilising digital methods in the analysis of historical sources. It also became evident that this field of research is not only confronted with a constantly growing wealth of innovative possibilities but also with several institutional and infrastructural challenges that need to be addressed soon.
Conference overview:
INTRODUCTION/OPENING
Christina Antenhofer / Claudia Posch
KEYNOTE 1
Moderation: Christina Antenhofer
Daniel Smail (Harvard): The Imagined Space of the Late Medieval Household
PANEL 1: WORKING ON INVENTORIES
Chair: Gerhard Rampl
Christina Antenhofer (Salzburg) / Barbara Denicolò (Salzburg) / Elisabeth Tangerner (Salzburg): How to Record Spaces and Objects: Tracing the Social Practice of Inventorying Using the Example of Tyrolean Castle Inventories
Bas Spliet (Brussels/Antwerp): ‘Slecht En Oud’: Why Did Paintings Go Out Of Fashion After The Dutch Golden Age?
PANEL 2: RECONSTRUCTING INTERIEURS
Chair: Barbara Denicolò
Christoph Breser (Krems) / Ingrid Matschinegg (Krems): Interpreting Building Information Between Historical Reconstruction and Simulation
Chiara Piccoli (Amsterdam): Virtual Interiors: Creating a CD Scholarly Edition of the Private Library of the Amsterdam Patrician Pieter de Graeff (1638–1707)
PANEL 3: RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST
Chair: Walter Brandstätter
Katherine Wilson (Chester): Challenges and Opportunities of Reconstructing the Past for the Present: Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000–1700
Thomas Pickles (Chester): Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES): Reconstructing Early Medieval Churches in Schools
OPEN PANEL DISCUSSION
Moderation: Christina Antenhofer
Bernhard Heil (Salzburg) / Günter Mühlberger (Innsbruck) / Daniel Smail (Harvard) / Ulrike Tanzer (Innsbruck) / Chiara Zuanni (Graz): Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges
KEYNOTE 2
Moderation: Claudia Posch
Christina Antenhofer (Salzburg) / Barbara Denicolò (Salzburg) / Elisabeth Tangerner (Salzburg): Scurrilities, Gossip and Storytelling: The Narrative and Fictional Potential of Late Medieval Castle Inventories
PANEL 4: PROCESSING DATA
Chair: Elisabeth Tangerner
Elisabeth Gruber-Tokić (Innsbruck) / Karoline Irschara (Innsbruck) / Gerhard Rampl (Innsbruck): Organising the Past: Creating a Hierarchical Thesaurus for Enhanced Analysis and Preservation of Medieval Castle Inventories
Elisabeth Gruber (Krems) / Peter Färberböck (Krems): Walking on the Path of Inventories. Using RDF, LOD, LLM Technologies for Object-related Sources
Andrea Mussmann (Innsbruck): Bridging the Gap: Introduction to a Custom Transkribus Import/Export Tool
PANEL 5: 3D MODELLING
Chair: Ingrid Matschinegg
Walter Brandstätter (Salzburg) / Stefan Zedlacher (Krems): Hohensalzburg Digital – From Historical Inventories to Three-dimensional Space-time Models
Chiara Zuanni (Graz): Exhibition Histories in 3D: Connecting Archives, Objects, and Narratives
PANEL 6: MODELLING INFORMATION
Chair: Claudia Posch
Milena Peralta Friedburg (Innsbruck) / Gerald Hiebel (Innsbruck): The Secrets of Tyrolean Castle Inventories: Mapping Hidden Events and Metadata to CIDOC CRM
Leon van Wissen (Amsterdam): From Archives to Insights: Leveraging Linked Open Data in DH Research Projects
CONFERENCE CLOSING
Christina Antenhofer / Ingrid Matschinegg / Gerald Hiebel / Claudia Posch / Gerhard Rampl
Notes:
1 INVENTARIA – The Making of Inventories as Social Practice (2022–2025). Project leader: Christina Antenhofer. University of Salzburg, University of Innsbruck, and IMAREAL Krems. This project is funded entirely by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [FWF P 35988 Stand Alone Project]. Website: https://www.inventaria.at/ [16.10.2024].
2 Hohensalzburg Digital. Historische Daten zur materiellen Raumausstattung und -nutzung erschließen und verlinken (2022-2024). Project leaders: Christina Antenhofer and Ingrid Matschinegg. University of Salzburg and IMAREAL Krems. This project is funded by the state government of Salzburg (DH-Call 2022). Website: https://hohensalzburg.digital/ [16.10.2024].
3 DALME – The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe. Project leader: Daniel Smail. Harvard University. Website: https://dalme.org/ [16.10.2024].
4 Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data (2019–2021). Project leader: Charles van den Heuvel. University of Amsterdam. This project was funded by NWO Smart Culture – Big Data/Digital Humanities. Website: https://www.virtualinteriorsproject.nl/ [30.10.2024].
5 MOB - Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries (2018–2020 & 2021–2022). Project leader: Katherine Wilson. University of Chester. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Website: https://mobilityofobjectsacrossboundaries.wordpress.com/ [16.10.2024].
6 ECCLES – Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (2016–2018, 2021 & 2023–2024). Project leader: Thomas Pickles. University of Chester. This project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Website: https://earlychristianchurchesandlandscapes.wordpress.com/ [16.10.2024].
7 ITEM. IMAREAL Krems, University of Salzburg. Website: https://item.imareal.sbg.ac.at/ [30.10.2024].
8 Raumordnungen. Objekte des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (2008–2010). Project leaders: Ingrid Matschinegg and Thomas Kühtreiber. IMAREAL Krems. Website: https://www.imareal.sbg.ac.at/imareal-projekte/raumordnungen/ [30.10.2024].
9 REALonline (since 2001). Project leaders: Isabella Nicka and Peter Färberböck. IMAREAL Krems, University of Salzburg. Website: https://www.imareal.sbg.ac.at/imareal-projekte/realonline/ [30.10.2024].
10 Golden Agents (2017–2021). Project leader: Charles van den Heuvel. University of Amsterdam. This project was funded by the Large Investments program of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO). Website: https://www.goldenagents.org/ [28.10.2024].
11 GLOBALISE (2022–2026). Project leader: Matthias van Rossum. Huygens Institute, International Institute of Social History, Digital Infrastructure Department of the KNAW Humanities Cluster, VU University, University of Amsterdam, and the Dutch National Archives. This project is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) [175.2019.003]. Website: https://globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/ [28.10.204].