By Caitlin Wilson, Paola Marongiu, and Barbara McGillivray
Celebrating Ten Years of Open Humanities Data and Collaboration
This year we marked an important milestone here at JOHD: a decade of the journal. It therefore felt right that we should celebrate the past ten years of advancing openness, collaboration, and data sharing in the humanities. In honour of the occasion, we organised a special online conference called A Decade of Open Humanities Data: Celebrating the JOHD Community, which brought together academics, editors, and data practitioners from all over the world to consider the past ten years of accomplishments and to look ahead to the future of open research in the Humanities.
The event was designed to be inclusive and globally accessible, running in two sessions to accommodate participants across multiple time zones. Over 50 attendees and 40 speakers joined from institutions spanning Europe, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific region, including University College London, CLARIN ERIC, the British Library, University of Bologna, University of Oxford, and Hong Kong Baptist University, among others.
Looking Back and Looking Forward
On 26 September 2025, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD). The journal’s journey began on 29 September 2015, when JOHD published its first article. Since then, we’ve grown steadily: launching the Open Humanities Data Forum in 2019, our first special collection in 2021, and publishing our first team article in 2022. Today, JOHD is a thriving venue for scholars committed to making humanities data more accessible and reusable.
Over the past ten years, JOHD has published over 200 papers, spanning all major disciplines across the humanities. Our editorial team includes editors, copyeditors, and social media editors and is supported by an advisory board of experts from diverse fields. We’re also active on our social media channels, including X, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, WeChat, and we have a mailing list publishing regular newsletters.
Over the years, JOHD has contributed to the community by publishing papers on data publishing, organising events, and launching special collections that showcase data creation in sub-disciplines or on specific themes. With this anniversary event, we hoped to bring our community together to celebrate the data papers we have published (and their authors), share experiences, and inspire future initiatives to strengthen the culture of openness and reuse in humanities research for the years to come.
Highlights from the Sessions
The first session featured a series of Lightning Talks that showcased the breadth of research within the JOHD community. These were an opportunity for published JOHD authors to share their experiences on creating and curating datasets and tools for humanities data. The session was opened by our own Dr Jin Gao, JOHD’s publishing editor in 2015 who shared her reflections on launching JOHD to support open humanities data.
We then saw two Thematic Dialogues, where contributors from a variety of disciplines came together for more long form discussions. For the first discussion, The Practicalities, Value, and Limits of Sharing Data in Humanities Research, panelists explored the meaning of effective and responsible data sharing. I found this dialogue to be a great exploration into how open data practices in the humanities can bolster research across the discipline. In this section, we heard from representatives of CLARIN ERIC, DARIAH-EU, and Open Data Charter, and the CNR-Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, in conversation with Dr Jenny Kwok. These institutions share the common aim of promoting openness, interoperability, and sharing of humanities research data.
The second Thematic Dialogue, What Reuse Looks Like in Practice, offered insights from nine researchers on the circumstances that facilitate or occasionally impede data reuse in humanities contexts. Speakers came together from a variety of institutions to discuss the possibilities of data reuse from their own projects. Andrea Farina, chair of the session, reflected that “celebrating the journal’s birthday while witnessing such diverse and inspiring approaches to data reuse across disciplines was truly energising.”
Collective Reflections on Open Humanities Data
A particularly interesting part of the event invited participants to take part in an interactive reflection session led by members of the JOHD team. This session, chaired by Dr Mathilde Bru encouraged attendees to consider what open humanities data means in their own research practice and how it might evolve in the years ahead. Using a collaborative Miro board, participants shared their thoughts on openness, reuse, and sustainability, contributing ideas for future datasets and topics for publication.
The activity created an open space for dialogue, creativity, and community building, allowing participants to see the diversity of perspectives that shape the field. From early-career researchers to experienced editors, contributions highlighted the collective ambition to make data sharing in the humanities more inclusive, transparent, and impactful. The output was a series of excellent visualisations created by Michele Ciletti from participants’ responses on the Miro Board.
A Shared Future for Open Humanities
The JOHD Anniversary Event open forum, “What should Open Humanities Data look like in 10 years?”, brought together 3 experts for a 45-minute collaborative discussion on the future of open humanities data. Moderated as an open conversation rather than a traditional panel, the session featured reflections from Dr Lisa Griffith (Digital Repository of Ireland), Professor Simon Mahony (University College London/Peking University), and Dr Victoria Van Hyning (University of Maryland). These three scholars touched upon different challenges that need to be overcome in order to improve how open humanities data will look like in 10 years.
Lisa Griffith opened the discussion by addressing pressing concerns arising from recent advances in Artificial Intelligence. She highlighted how AI companies are increasingly scraping open repositories, often violating licences, to train commercial models, profiting from publicly shared data without consent. Moreover, automated scraping bots generate such high volumes of requests that they can cause service outages, jeopardising global access to open data. Griffith called for collective action from the open data community to protect repositories while maintaining a commitment to openness. She suggested that updated licences, such as those currently under discussion within the Creative Commons framework, could help address these issues. Looking to the next decade, Griffith envisioned stronger infrastructural support for researchers through the widespread adoption of IDs on the model of the Irish persistent identifiers (PIDs), which could interlink research papers, datasets, algorithms, and funding information. She also emphasised the need to promote multilingualism, ensuring that minority languages—such as Irish—are better represented in the open data ecosystem.
Simon Mahony focused on the importance of making FAIR data truly FAIR—that is, ensuring data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable from creation to long-term preservation. Without access to the underlying data, he argued, reproducibility and verification, which are fundamental principles of scholarly research, become impossible. Transparency and accountability must therefore remain at the core of open scholarship. Mahony praised the JOHD model, which allows researchers to publish data papers with DOIs that point directly to datasets, making research outputs traceable and citable. Looking to the future, he envisioned a scholarly community fully committed to sharing the complete data lifecycle openly.
Victoria Van Hyning expanded on the notion of accessibility, stressing the need to make open data usable by people with disabilities. She noted that data and metadata should be designed to support individuals who rely on screen readers or other assistive technologies, ensuring equitable access to research information. She further expressed hope that within the next ten years, repositories and journals like JOHD will develop robust guidelines and standardised practices to support accessible data creation and curation.
Together, the three panelists offered a new perspective on the future of open humanities data, which will need to be ethically grounded, inclusive, multilingual, and technically up to date. Their insights underscored the shared responsibility of the research community to build infrastructure and policies that ensure open humanities data remain a cornerstone of transparent scholarship in the years to come.
Videos from the event are available in this playlist on JOHD’s Youtube channel.
Thank you!
This only leaves us to thank our panel chairs: Simone Mahony, Andrea Farina, Victoria Van Hyning, Paola Marongiu, Michele Ciletti, and Mathilde Bru, as well as the team at Ubiquity Press, including Jaqueline Barlow and Patrick Higgins, for their invaluable technical support.
Our hope was that this anniversary would act as a call to action as well as a time for reflection as the JOHD community looks to the next ten years. The conversations emphasised the value of ongoing cooperation, open editorial procedures, and the ongoing incorporation of open data concepts into humanities research. Thank you so much to all who attended and contributed to our celebrations and thank you to all the incredible authors who have trusted JOHD to share their data over the last ten years.
The recordings of the sessions will soon be available on JOHD’s YouTube channel, and the interactive Miro board will remain open as a space for ongoing reflection. We warmly invite all members of the community to continue this conversation and help shape the future of open humanities data.
If you would like to contribute a dataset, article, or reflection to JOHD, visit our submission portal.
