Summary

From 4 to 7 May 2026 in Brussels, Belgium, this EDDI-SODHA Summer School brings together experts from physical and digital archives, galleries, museums, and libraries to discuss vital questions around digital archiving, ontologies, the cost of archiving, and more.

Description

The week opens with a pre–Summer School discussion on the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), offering a shared foundation in high-quality data documentation through group exercises and discussion. Over the following days, sessions address the practical, methodological and legal dimensions of digital archiving, ontologies, vocabularies, and shared meanings, and the broader impact of archiving on collective memory and open science.

Combining presentations and group activities, the programme provides both conceptual insight and practical guidance on archival best practices, with explicit highlighting on data documentation, in contemporary research and heritage contexts.

Preliminary programme

• 4 May 2026: Pre Summer School Training

  • An introduction to DDI by Alina Danciu (CDSP, SciencesPo) and Becky Oldroyd (CLOSER, UCL) 

  • An organised tour at a museum of a partner institute in Brussels
    To Be Announced

• 5 May 2026: Memory, method and meaning
   
  • Digital archiving, the how’s the what’s and the why’s by István László Gyimes (State Archives of Belgium, Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
     
  • Law and order (of things) by Louise de Béthune (State Archives of Belgium, KU Leuven)
     
  • Sharing meaning, vocabularies in a European Context by Róza Vajda (ONTOLISST team at ELTE Centre for Social Sciences)
     
• 6 May 2026: The impact of archiving
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  • Curating the collective memory by Filip Strubbe & Johan van der Eycken (State Archives of Belgium)
     
  • Open science: connecting archives to make them by Stephanie Buyle (KIK/IRPA)
    
     
• 7 May 2026: Archival best practices
   
  • Putting the re- in research by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
    To Be Announced

Registration is open!