EADH Small Grants: Meet the 2025 Awardees

10 Feb 2026 - 00:00

The European Association for Digital Humanities is pleased to announce the recipients of the EADH Small Grants. The selected projects reflect the breadth and vitality of current digital humanities research and practice, spanning areas such as digital philology, archives and preservation, community-based documentation, sustainability, and the critical study of machine translation. We are happy to present them here.

Giuseppe Arena – The Capuana Linked Lexicon

Giuseppe Arena holds a Master's degree in Digital Humanities. He is currently a research fellow for the Hyperedition of Luigi Pirandello's works at the University of Catania, collaborating with CINUM and CNR-ISTC. He is a member of AIUCD and Wikimedia Italia. His research interests focus on digital philology, ontologies and electronic literature. 

The Capuana Linked Lexicon project presents the first semantic edition of Luigi Capuana's Spoglio Linguistico, integrating unpublished archival materials. The importance of these private notes lies in their linguistic nature, useful for reconstructing the Verismo debate surrounding the issue of naturalistic writing and in their historical relevance for understanding Capuana's creative laboratory. The main outcome is a scholarly digital edition that integrates lexical entries encoded in TEI-Lex0 with IIIF facsimiles of the original manuscript pages, within the TEI Publisher environment. A central aim of the project is the creation of a dedicated Wikibase instance compliant with OntoLex-LEMON, designed to store lexical entries, forms, meanings, textual attestations, and manuscript references. This knowledge graph will be fully queryable via SPARQL and interoperable with Wikidata, enabling advanced linguistic and philological research on linked datasets, according to FAIR principles. In addition to the edition itself, the project will produce a reusable and documented workflow from TEI-Lex0 to OntoLex-LEMON and Wikibase, in order to create a replicable model for future semantic editions of manuscript-based lexical materials. The results of the project will be disseminated through at least one peer-reviewed article and a seminar on the interoperability of Wikimedia resources in digital philology.

 

Jennifer Bajorek, Raphaël Grisey, Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye & Soso Soumaré – Digitization Workshop: Creating Culturally Relevant Documentation for a Visual Archive of an African Immigrant Community in France

The project team is a collective engaged in collaborative research and archival practice around the archive of Bouba Touré. It brings together Dr. Jennifer Bajorek, a scholar of African and militant photographic histories; Dr. Raphaël Grisey, a Berlin-based artist and researcher and long-time collaborator of Touré; Dr. Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, an anthropologist working on migration and popular culture in West Africa; and Soso Soumaré, director of a social services organisation supporting migrants in the Paris region and a member of Bouba Touré’s family.  

The Digitization Workshop: Creating Culturally Relevant Documentation for a Visual Archive of an African Immigrant Community in France will design and run a two-day workshop bringing diverse stakeholders (community members, archivists, and scholars) into conversation about the creation of accurate, culturally appropriate and informed, and accessible documentation for the digitized archive of Bouba Touré. Touré was a Franco-Malian photographer, filmmaker, writer, and militant labor and immigrants’ rights activist (ca. 1948-2021) who bequeathed to us a singular and extensive archive of photographs, film, and video work that bears witness to the lives of African immigrant workers in the Paris region as well as to rural life in villages along the Senegal River. The project will develop culturally relevant approaches to documentation for Touré’s archive in tandem with its digitization, which is now being undertaken by the Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis, in Bobigny, France, where Touré’s archive is now housed. Questions of language (linguistic variation, orthography, placenames), translation, approaches to identifying photographic subjects, modes of access, and the treatment of potentially sensitive themes will all be considered, as will culturally informed approaches to IP management and various approaches (practical and methodological) to collecting oral histories and testimonies and incorporating them into documentation. Workshop findings will be disseminated in the form of a bilingual (in English and French) digital publication. 

 

David Mahoney – Wasteback Machine  

David Mahoney is a PhD candidate at The University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Design Informatics. His principal research interest is reducing the environmental impact of the internet and improving accessibility, aligning technological potential with environmental stewardship. He is the founder of Overbrowsing, an applied research group focused on advancing sustainable web practices. 

Wasteback Machine is a JavaScript library for analysing the size, composition, and environmental impact of archived websites, known as mementos. Developed as part of doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Design Informatics, the project addresses a key limitation in existing web assessment tools, which rely almost exclusively on synchronous, live measurement. Owing to the ephemeral nature of the web, such approaches capture only a website’s current state and fail to account for patterns of growth over time, obscuring the cumulative environmental impact of websites. Wasteback Machine introduces a novel methodological framework that enables robust quantitative analysis of web archives. The system reconstructs mementos with high fidelity by removing archival artefacts, correcting replay-induced modifications, and preserving temporal coherence across embedded resources. This approach allows for accurate retrospective measurement while remaining sensitive to the distinctive ontological status of mementos as reborn digital objects, shaped both by the original web and by the technical and curatorial practices of archiving institutions. Funding from the EADH will support the extension of the library to additional web archives, enhancing temporal coverage and analytical accuracy, and the development of a web application to make Wasteback Machine accessible to researchers, practitioners, and the wider public.

 

Tiziana Pasciuto & Francesco Dragone – ArchiSTART! Hands-on Workshop for Beginners on the Archives’ Preservation

Tiziana Pasciuto is a postdoctoral research fellow in the ERC CoG REDMIX project at the University of Turin. With a background as an archivist and conservation scientist, she earned a PhD in Digital Humanities at the University of Genoa in 2025, focusing on digital archives, semantic ontologies, and cultural heritage preservation. Francesco Dragone is a research fellow in the ERC CoG REDMIX project at the University of Turin, with a background in visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking. He works on public engagement, citizen science initiatives, and multimedia storytelling, including podcast production.  

ArchiSTART! is a pilot project aimed at addressing the vulnerability of small, non institutional archives through a standardised, hands-on training model. Building on research conducted within the ERC-funded REDMIX project, the initiative will deliver a 30-hour modular workshop in Italy for cultural associations, volunteers, and private custodians of archives. The workshop combines progressive teaching with practical activities on real archival cases, equipping participants with immediately applicable skills in preservation, basic cataloguing, and digitisation. Key outcomes include the validation of the training model, pilot conservation actions carried out by participants, and the production of open-access teaching materials and multimedia documentation shared via Zenodo. Designed for scalability, ArchiSTART! aims to foster local networks of “memory keepers” and lay the groundwork for future international editions.

 

Aleksandra Rykowska – Stylometric Analysis of Literary Machine Translation  

Aleksandra Rykowska holds an MA in Linguistics and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her doctoral research focuses on the stylometry of literary machine translation, with additional interests in corpus linguistics and verse studies. 

The Stylometric Analysis of Literary Machine Translation project aims to develop a new method for analysing literary machine-translated texts from a stylometric and linguistic perspective. The study will be based on a multilingual corpus of 300 works of modern literature (from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present), translated by both professional human translators and machine translation systems into English, French, Polish, and Lithuanian. The project includes the creation of a parallel corpus of human and machine translations, respecting copyright constraints, and the development of scripts for linguistic analysis. A research visit to Dublin City University and a library visit in Dublin will support access to materials and engagement with state-of-the-art machine translation research. The outcomes will include a shared corpus resource and a scholarly article presenting the results of the study.