Keynote von Prof. Dr. Christof Schöch

Over the last two decades, the Digital Humanities have flourished and spread across Europe. In the process, Digital Humanities researchers have embraced Open Science principles as a driving force and profoundly transformed their scholarly practices. National and European research infrastructures are being developed to support accessibility, reproducibility and sustainability for research data, methods and training. Now, Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the landscape, offering both profound challenges and transformative opportunities. Closed datasets and AI models, inequalities in access to resources, and linguistic biases threaten to undermine Open Science's core principles. Copyright issues, privacy risks, and environmental costs demand urgent attention. At the same time, Artificial Intelligence enhances research in the Digital Humanities in multiple ways, whether by automating rich annotations on large datasets, enabling insights into multilingual resources or democratizing reseachers' ability to design algorithmic pipelines. This keynote will explore how Europe’s Digital Humanities are navigating this complex intersection, leveraging the opportunities of Artificial Intelligence to advance research while safeguarding its ethical and inclusive foundations. The future of open knowledge production in the Humanities depends on our ability to bridge these worlds by fostering collaborative infrastructures, developing creative solutions, and maintaining scholarly best practices.