Hlavní stránka Info portálu ZČU

Thirty researchers and students from seven European institutions spent four days immersed in data analysis at the University Library of the University of West Bohemia. They formed four teams, each working with unique datasets related to European cultural heritage – ranging from early modern Latin scientific texts and digital art collections to underground literature and inscriptions from the Roman Empire. Using methods like formal network analysis, geographic information systems, and natural language processing, they searched for connections between culture, power, and memory across the centuries.

“We wanted to show that making digitized cultural heritage collections accessible opens up a wide range of new possibilities – both for studying history and for advancing computational methods. Advanced quantitative analysis of large historical datasets often reveals patterns that traditional historical research might overlook. But that requires combining expertise from many different fields,” explained one of the organizers, Vojtěch Kaše, a researcher from the Faculty of Arts at the University of West Bohemia.

One team, for example, focused on the Czech database SCRIPTUM, which contains over ten thousand digitized texts of underground and exile literature. They looked into which topics appeared in these works despite censorship, and what insights they could gain about the role of women in this literature. A completely different perspective came from analyzing Latin inscriptions from the Roman provinces – participants used spatial data analysis to explore how cultural influences spread across the Roman Empire or how metallurgy helped fuel urban development.

The organizers from the CCS Lab at the University of West Bohemia and their partners from Germany’s Philipps University Marburg and Justus Liebig University Giessen aimed to use the hackathon to foster collaboration across disciplines and countries – and, above all, to show that cultural heritage isn’t just about museums, but also about data, algorithms, and open thinking. Strong emphasis was also placed on data ethics, open science, and support for early-career researchers.

One participant, İlke Şanlıer from Çukurova University in Turkey, summed up the atmosphere simply: “This wasn’t just a research meeting – I felt like part of a temporary new academic community. I’m not just going home with new ideas and tools, but also with renewed optimism about the future of international, multilingual academic exchange.”

Open science is an umbrella term for various approaches and practices aimed at making scientific knowledge more accessible. It’s not just about publishing research results in open-access journals, but also about making the data and methods behind those results openly available (open data, open methodology, open research software), so they can be reused by other researchers. “One of the key goals of the hackathon was to inspire participants to use transparent analytical practices when working with data – by relying on open file formats, open-source software, and public repositories for sharing data and code. It’s becoming clear that good practices in this area play a crucial role in any interdisciplinary research,” Kaše concluded.