Tapestries in Cultural Heritage Research and Collections

This deposit will be updated with final presentation materials following the conclusion of the conference. We exist in an environment of ever-increasing outputs. Digital humanities research is endlessly generating new artefacts: articles, code, media, websites, documentation, training, metadata, paradata, documentation of data practices, policy documents. These all serve a variety of purposes but often lack explicit connection (or a visual logic of connection) to one another. A well designed website can profile these outputs attractively and the objects themselves can be sustainably archived on a research repository with a persistent identifier, carefully documented and designed to require minimal system resources using interoperable file formats. A problem remains: how do we tell their story? There are many creative answers to this question. It is important to develop a mode for combining stories into a larger patchwork of meaning - to synthesize information into understanding or knowledge, to facilitate reading at scale. Telling the story of digital humanities and heritage content, whether it be qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods, benefits from an ordering principle, a frame for apprehension. In 2025, Bob Stein and colleagues launched an Internet Archive platform entitled Tapestries. Stein is founder of the Criterion Collection, the Voyager Company and the Institute for the Future of the Book. The platform is a self-described ‘portable compound illustration’ of digital artifacts. Initially designed to expose the vast wealth of the archived web in a novel format, the platform now aspires to broader ambitions. Like their textile counterparts, these digital tapestries can represent a woven image of carefully chosen materials rather than a fragmented dive from link to link that obscures the wider context of digital content. A Tapestry begins as a blank infinite canvas of simultaneously visualized and readable frames stitched in from websites and other online content. The platform is a series of iframe windows, and the views that they reveal are endlessly flexible. It moves beyond certain unfulfilled promises of hyperlinking and connected information by taking up the challenge of Lawless et al. (2003: 928) to continually assess “how innovation alters the definition of literacy”. Several illustrative use case samples created by Stein and others demonstrate the flexibility and variety offered by the tapestry medium: a cross-section of AI outputs, films from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, an introduction to Tom Lehrer and a corpus of MIT publications on Generative AI. Each conveys a multimodal story told through visual queues and supplementary text designed to guide the reader. It offers the opportunity to move beyond text as the primary mode of communication as well as rejecting a singular or linear mode of reading. The sample projects hint at genres of tapestry authoring that this workshop will tease out: corpus-level engagement with publications, connections between curated textual works, video introductions to a corpus of work, visual juxtaposition for the purpose of easy comparison and the joining of a diverse corpus of media. The facilitators of this workshop - collection and data specialists, scholars, and data curators - share an interest in creative solutions to exposing GLAM collections while combining them with born digital media that complement and expand their story. As a team working at the KB National Library of the Netherlands and at its Future Libraries lab collaboration with TU Delft, we are interested in bringing collections, DH projects and methodological artefacts to life via tapestries of meaning woven in aggregate. Questions include: Is this a new form of science communication for humanities work? Is it a form of research dissemination? Can it be research itself? What can the medium open up as a form of ongoing work for others to build on? Answers to these questions can directly feed back into the future development of the tool. This workshop has three goals: First, the workshop will profile a range of approaches to using the tool from authors, researchers, data managers and cultural heritage professionals. Because the tool can juxtapose and weave together any web-based content and natively support audio and video objects, it sits on top of discrete outputs from a wide range of DH and heritage activities and ties them together in a manner that is simple to author, simple to read, sustainability friendly and open to a wide range of creative approaches. It is a metatextual storytelling layer. Secondly, the workshop invites participants to weave their own tapestry. They will be prompted to bring examples of their own work which they find challenging to explain due to its complexity. Attendees will then have an opportunity to work together on a shared challenge of knowledge visualization and/or storytelling and explore a creative solution. The organizers will provide a sample collection from Dutch heritage institutions - with a focus on the KB National Library - including a range of material such as digitized books, photographs, magazines and secondary sources. Attendees are welcome to combine their own material with this sample, or to find their own material. Thirdly, the workshop will conclude with a chance to discuss imagined future use cases for Tapestries based on the collaborations of the participants. It is the belief of the organizers that something this ambitious and open-ended will not only support our collected DH and heritage activities right now, but also has the potential to grow and evolve with best practice in the field.