Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ATRIUM (Advancing FronTier Research In the Arts and hUManities)
Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-12-31
We live and work in the age of digital abundance. However, the massive quantities of available digitized and born-digital content do not automatically translate into easy-to-use research workflows. Humanities researchers face a number of challenges finding, accessing, and reusing digital resources: filtering out the noise, processing metadata of different quality and granularity, clarifying reuse rights for digital objects, and identifying the best tools to process a myriad of data formats, to name just a few.
ATRIUM (Advancing FronTier Research In the Arts and hUManities) aims to address this by providing vastly improved access to a rich portfolio of state-of-the-art services available to researchers across countries, languages, domains and media, building on a shared understanding and interoperability principles established in the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) cluster. ATRIUM will achieve this by bridging leading research infrastructures in arts and humanities (DARIAH), archaeology (ARIADNE), languages (CLARIN), and open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (OPERAS).
The Arts and Humanities is a very diverse field, covering a range of disciplines and communities of practice that have different epistemological and methodological foundations: an archaeologist and an art historian studying a Mycenaean fresco will have distinct goals and approaches to describing their objects of research. A literary scholar and a linguist will come to a textual corpus with radically different senses of what a corpus is and what questions can be asked of it. Yet research infrastructures in the Arts and Humanities domain must cater to a very wide range of stakeholders and offer services that cut across discipline-specific boundaries. Through the four-year project with 30 partner institutions, ATRIUM tackles this heterogeneity within the Arts and Humanities by going deep and wide at the same time: on the one hand, ATRIUM will make a groundbreaking contribution to the consolidation and expansion of services, including data services, specifically in the field of archaeology, while, on the other hand, facilitating access to a wide array of essential text, image and sound-based services that benefit a number of other disciplines within the Arts and Humanities, and cover all phases of the research data lifecycle (creating, processing, analyzing, preserving, providing access to and reusing).
ATRIUM (Advancing FronTier Research In the Arts and hUManities) aims to address this by providing vastly improved access to a rich portfolio of state-of-the-art services available to researchers across countries, languages, domains and media, building on a shared understanding and interoperability principles established in the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) cluster. ATRIUM will achieve this by bridging leading research infrastructures in arts and humanities (DARIAH), archaeology (ARIADNE), languages (CLARIN), and open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (OPERAS).
The Arts and Humanities is a very diverse field, covering a range of disciplines and communities of practice that have different epistemological and methodological foundations: an archaeologist and an art historian studying a Mycenaean fresco will have distinct goals and approaches to describing their objects of research. A literary scholar and a linguist will come to a textual corpus with radically different senses of what a corpus is and what questions can be asked of it. Yet research infrastructures in the Arts and Humanities domain must cater to a very wide range of stakeholders and offer services that cut across discipline-specific boundaries. Through the four-year project with 30 partner institutions, ATRIUM tackles this heterogeneity within the Arts and Humanities by going deep and wide at the same time: on the one hand, ATRIUM will make a groundbreaking contribution to the consolidation and expansion of services, including data services, specifically in the field of archaeology, while, on the other hand, facilitating access to a wide array of essential text, image and sound-based services that benefit a number of other disciplines within the Arts and Humanities, and cover all phases of the research data lifecycle (creating, processing, analyzing, preserving, providing access to and reusing).
As ATRIUM concludes its second year, significant progress has been made across its eight Work Packages:
WP1 established robust project management foundations including governance structures, financial procedures, and a Data Management Plan, and published the ATRIUM Policy Brief with seven recommendations.
WP2 developed a strong visual identity and Communication and Dissemination Plan in 2024, updated in 2025. Most KPIs were exceeded, including over 50 ATRIUM-related events, and the Horizon Booster exercise produced exploitation roadmaps for two Key Exploitable Results.
WP3 delivered D3.1 inventorying 134 data formats and semantic artefacts, and analysed metadata practices across four major catalogues. In 2025, T3.3 analysed workflow data formats in collaboration with WP4/5, T3.4 ran a multilingual hackathon localising the TRIPLE ontology, and the MetaCat knowledge graph suite was designed and presented at the CLARIN Annual Conference.
WP4 published 17 workflows on the SSH Open Marketplace with 5 more in draft, and presented at Cultural Heritage, Archaeology and DH conferences to advance scholarly recognition of workflows as legitimate research outputs.
WP5 selected datasets for demonstrators and advanced implementation in 2024. By M24, the first demonstrator embedding the IIIF Mirador viewer in the ARIADNE portal was released with 38,000+ medieval stained glass images, the EpHEMERA platform was expanded with PoTree and 3DHOP visualisation, and a speech-based context sheet application was developed for field archaeology.
WP6 updated the Digital Object Gateway, launched an ATRIUM tools portfolio on the SSH Open Marketplace, and released the Oral History Transcription Portal in 2024. In 2025, the DOG was re-engineered with FAIR signposting support, GoTriple integration was implemented, and the production Transcription Portal was launched and user-tested at the second Researcher Forum.
WP7 published curriculum guidelines (D7.2) and hosted a Researcher Forum in Poland in 2024. In 2025, the Skillset Assessment Report (D7.1) was published and downloaded 650+ times, a second Researcher Forum (Munich) and Mutual Learning Exercise (Madrid) were delivered, and the first ATRIUM Peer Review Framework covering data papers, workflows and training materials was published.
WP8 ran four calls receiving 296 applications, of which 132 were successful, delivering approximately 160 weeks of access across 2024–2025. Six summer schools were held across France, Czech Republic and the UK, a TNA Blog published 17 posts, and two TNA Showcase webinars were organised to promote the programme.
WP1 established robust project management foundations including governance structures, financial procedures, and a Data Management Plan, and published the ATRIUM Policy Brief with seven recommendations.
WP2 developed a strong visual identity and Communication and Dissemination Plan in 2024, updated in 2025. Most KPIs were exceeded, including over 50 ATRIUM-related events, and the Horizon Booster exercise produced exploitation roadmaps for two Key Exploitable Results.
WP3 delivered D3.1 inventorying 134 data formats and semantic artefacts, and analysed metadata practices across four major catalogues. In 2025, T3.3 analysed workflow data formats in collaboration with WP4/5, T3.4 ran a multilingual hackathon localising the TRIPLE ontology, and the MetaCat knowledge graph suite was designed and presented at the CLARIN Annual Conference.
WP4 published 17 workflows on the SSH Open Marketplace with 5 more in draft, and presented at Cultural Heritage, Archaeology and DH conferences to advance scholarly recognition of workflows as legitimate research outputs.
WP5 selected datasets for demonstrators and advanced implementation in 2024. By M24, the first demonstrator embedding the IIIF Mirador viewer in the ARIADNE portal was released with 38,000+ medieval stained glass images, the EpHEMERA platform was expanded with PoTree and 3DHOP visualisation, and a speech-based context sheet application was developed for field archaeology.
WP6 updated the Digital Object Gateway, launched an ATRIUM tools portfolio on the SSH Open Marketplace, and released the Oral History Transcription Portal in 2024. In 2025, the DOG was re-engineered with FAIR signposting support, GoTriple integration was implemented, and the production Transcription Portal was launched and user-tested at the second Researcher Forum.
WP7 published curriculum guidelines (D7.2) and hosted a Researcher Forum in Poland in 2024. In 2025, the Skillset Assessment Report (D7.1) was published and downloaded 650+ times, a second Researcher Forum (Munich) and Mutual Learning Exercise (Madrid) were delivered, and the first ATRIUM Peer Review Framework covering data papers, workflows and training materials was published.
WP8 ran four calls receiving 296 applications, of which 132 were successful, delivering approximately 160 weeks of access across 2024–2025. Six summer schools were held across France, Czech Republic and the UK, a TNA Blog published 17 posts, and two TNA Showcase webinars were organised to promote the programme.
ATRIUM's open-source approach bridges critical gaps in digitization pipelines and research workflows, enabling seamless access and implementation for researchers, cultural heritage institutions, and other stakeholders. Key outcomes include reusable workflows, open-access training, and interoperability with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). ATRIUM's documented workflows support diverse data types (text, image, 3D, sound, and geospatial) while innovations in object recognition for archaeology enhance large repository management.