Two days rethinking the hackathon for Arts & Humanities research: ontologies, metadata, linked data and cultural heritage knowledge

ScholarTHON: Organising Knowledge

Ontologies and Knowledge Representations in Arts and Humanities and Cultural Heritage Data

How we organise knowledge shapes what can be found, connected, and reused – and by whom. Join us at Cardiff University on 2–3 December 2026 for the second ScholarTHON: two days bringing together Arts and Humanities researchers, GLAM professionals, digital humanists, and Research Software Engineers (RSEs) to explore how cultural heritage knowledge is structured, represented, and sustained.

ScholarTHON rethinks the hackathon for Arts and Humanities research. Rather than starting with a technology or asking participants to build a finished product, we start with research questions. You will work in a small interdisciplinary group, with an RSE at the table from the outset, to develop a question and explore the data, methods, and tools that might help address it.

Across the two days, you can expect:

conversations and hands-on sessions on knowledge organisation, ontologies and knowledge representation, metadata and structured data, Python, Linked Open Data, data reconciliation, and sustainable digital infrastructures;

collaborative work turning a research question into a knowledge model, ontology sketch, metadata strategy, and sustainable research workflow;

opportunities to meet researchers, project teams, and PIs through our Common Interests Lunch, with themed tables organised around participants’ interests;

a final collaborative challenge, with groups presenting their proposals on Day Two and ten hours of dedicated RSE collaboration available to the winning teams to take their work further.

Our guiding question throughout will be:

How do we organise knowledge in ways that remain useful, accessible, sustainable, interoperable, and accountable to the communities who use it?

The event is free to attend, and no prior coding experience or established digital project is required. Researchers at every career stage are welcome, alongside librarians, archivists, curators, Wikimedians, RSEs, and other GLAM professionals. Five £200 bursaries are available to help with the costs of attending.

Come with a research question – or simply the beginnings of one – and spend two days developing it with people who approach knowledge, data, and cultural heritage from different perspectives.

Organisers

ScholarTHON is organised by Data/Culture (University of Oxford), the Mapping the Arts and Humanities Project (School of Advanced Study, University of London), and the Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultures Research (Cardiff University), with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The first ScholarTHON took place in June 2026 at the Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library, Oxford. Read about what happened in Inside the ScholarTHON (https://blog.humanities.org.uk/2026/06/23/insidethescholarthon/).

Description supplied by the event organiser.