What is a ScholarTHON?

For anyone new to the format, ScholarTHON rethinks the hackathon for arts and humanities research. It keeps what makes hackathons so valuable (protected time, intensive collaboration and access to technical expertise) and drops the pressure to produce a finished product. Participants work in small interdisciplinary groups with a Research Software Engineer (RSE) at the table from the very start, and together they shape and challenge a research question, find the data, methods and tools that could help answer it, and sketch a realistic workflow to get there.

That leaves time for the questions that usually come before building anything: What are we trying to represent? What assumptions are we aiming to encode? What becomes visible (or invisible) when knowledge is turned into structured data? And what would a responsible and sustainable research workflow look like?

Our first edition, at the Centre for Digital Scholarship in Oxford’s Weston Library in June 2026, was oversubscribed, and participants rated it 4.6 out of 5 for helping them reframe their research questions. As one of them put it: “You can finally challenge and confront all the questions that you never have time to think about during work.” (The full story is in Inside the ScholarTHON.)

Why organising knowledge?

More and more arts and humanities research lives in digital collections and databases. We define “collections” here as Katrina Fenlon (2020) does: as a shorthand for “a variety of digital projects and their outcomes, ranging from scholarly editions to linked data hubs.” Whether we build them or inherit them, each reflects decisions about how knowledge is organised. This includes which categories we use to sort information, who defines them, how one record connects to another, and what a schema might leave out. These choices shape what can be found, and by whom, long after a project’s funding has ended.

Greg Bak, Danielle Allard and Shawna Ferris (2019) treat knowledge organisation as “a form of knowledge creation.” Their argument comes from archives. They write that “documents become archival records when they get linked to other documents and contextualized through recordkeeping practices.” So whoever does the organising helps make the knowledge. The same work of grouping, describing and linking goes into every digital edition, research database and online catalogue that arts and humanities research increasingly relies on.

Computer science has its own version of this idea, in the ontologies ScholarTHON will explore. For example, Thomas Gruber (1993) defined an ontology as “an explicit specification of a conceptualization,” and a conceptualization as “an abstract, simplified view of the world that we wish to represent for some purpose.” Every category we add makes some things easier to find and others harder, and whoever creates these structures decides whose categories they encode. This is why it is important to make them with the people who will use them.

We chose this theme partly because the ScholarTHON 1 participants asked for it. When we asked what they would like to explore at future ScholarTHONs, their answers included linked open data and Wikidata, Python, and “more museum object records and metadata as the metadata can be more sparse than other types of data.”

The same need shows up in research on the sector as a whole. In a 2022 audit of 264 leading UK heritage institutions (230 of them responded), AHRC’s Towards a National Collection programme found “huge variations in the structure and semantics” of their collections metadata, and only 6% of respondents used external identifiers to keep records linked. Meanwhile, the 2024 foreword to “Unlocking the potential of digital collections: A call to action” reads thusly: “through a historic lack of investment in skills, digitisation and common infrastructure, the remarkable collections held in the UK remain fragmented and, in many cases, hard to access, even for the most dedicated researchers.”

Our own research through Data/Culture points to the same problem. Across all 5,181 AHRC research grants and fellowships beginning between 2006 and 2022, 1,016 reported producing a database or software output, accounting for £338 million, or 36% of their funding. Yet among the 766 awards that explicitly set out to create a digital output, only 40.5% gave a web link through which it could be followed in the funder’s records. And of the 127 resources documented in the Data/Culture collection, 98% still load, but only 43% make their data downloadable, and just 10% meet all five of our tests for reachability, searchability, licensing, downloadability and recent maintenance.

It goes back to how we organise, document, connect and maintain digital collections, so that they stay meaningful and usable beyond the projects that produced them.

The guiding question for the two days then is: how do we organise knowledge in ways that remain useful, accessible, sustainable, interoperable and accountable to the communities who use it?

What will the two days look like?

Day One: Frame · Model · Organise

Day One will lay the conceptual foundations for turning a research question into a model of the knowledge behind it. It will open with conversations on knowledge organisation, ontologies and knowledge representation, then turn to metadata and structured data, with an introduction to Python as a way of getting from the data you have to the questions you can ask. There will also be a walkthrough of OpenRefine, a free tool for cleaning, reconciling and enriching metadata so that collections can be linked and reused, with support on hand for any group that wants to use it. Groups will then form around a research question and begin building a knowledge model of their own, starting with a map of the people, places, objects, events or concepts involved and how they connect, then sketching an ontology and working out the metadata it will need.

Common Interests Lunch

ScholarTHON is also about meeting the people and projects you might not otherwise come across. Over lunch, we will host Common Interests Tables, bringing together participants, project teams and PIs working on related questions. Each table will gather a few projects around a shared theme, with plenty of time for everyone to introduce what they are working on, swap questions and find possible connections.

Confirmed so far are Mapping the Humanities and AI, Data/Culture and the Digital Infrastructures for Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage Community Interest Group (DIAHCH-CIG), with more to be announced.

When you register, we will ask which projects, topics or research communities you would most like to meet, and we will build the tables from your answers, so the lunch reflects the interests of the people actually coming.

Day Two: Connect · Apply · Share

Day Two will apply these models to research problems from across the arts, humanities and heritage, through case studies, group work and a conversation on digital research infrastructure. After a roundtable on digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities, groups will turn their first sketches into knowledge models that others could reuse, testing them against questions such as whether the model answers the research question, what it leaves out, which standards would make it interoperable, and how it could stay usable after the project ends. Each group will then present its proposal to a jury, and the winning team will receive ten hours of dedicated collaboration with a Research Software Engineer to take its ideas further.

Stay tuned: we will share the full programme very soon!

Come along!

ScholarTHON is open to researchers at every career stage, from PhD candidates to established scholars, and to librarians, archivists, curators, Wikimedians and other GLAM professionals, as well as Research Software Engineers. If you work with collections, archives, research data or cultural data in any way, we would love you to join us. No prior coding experience is required.

Registration is free and places are limited, so please plan to join us in person for both days. We are also offering up to five bursaries of £200 towards travel, accommodation, subsistence, childcare and caring responsibilities, other accessibility costs, or anything else that helps you attend. Priority will go to participants with caring responsibilities, postgraduate students, early-career researchers and those without a permanent post. To apply, answer “Yes” to the bursary question when you register. And if you know colleagues or students who might benefit, please do share the call widely.

Register: Eventbrite | Questions: giovanna.dimartino@anthro.ox.ac.uk | 🗺️ Explore the map | 🔎 Explore the Data/Culture portal