Horizon Europe Programme Committee
- Date
- July 9, 2026
- Location
- Brussels, Belgium
We are delighted to share that ATRIUM was invited by the European Commission to present at the 26th meeting of the Horizon Europe Programme Committee, which took place on 9th July 2026 in Brussels.
Who Needs the Humanities in the Age of AI? Integrating the Humanities into Europe’s Research and Innovation Landscape
ATRIUM’s Project Manager, Megan Black, addressed the committee of EU policymakers and national delegates with a presentation titled Who Needs the Humanities in the Age of AI? Integrating the Humanities into Europe’s Research and Innovation Landscape. The presentation was prepared by ATRIUM’s Principal Investigator, Toma Tasovac, who could not attend due to medical reasons.
Digital humanities as a bridge
ATRIUM made the case for why humanities research infrastructure deserves a central place in Europe’s research and innovation agenda. A central argument of the presentation was a reframing of how we think about the humanities and integration. Rather than asking how the humanities might be brought into interdisciplinary research, ATRIUM argued that the humanities are already interdisciplinary by design – working across texts, images, archives, sound, objects and computational methods as a matter of course. The real question is whether our funding systems, infrastructures and assessment models recognise and support this at the scale Europe needs.
ATRIUM: integration at European scale
ATRIUM serves as a concrete model for what integration at infrastructure level looks like. Bringing together 30 partners from 12 countries and four major European research infrastructures – DARIAH, ARIADNE, CLARIN and OPERAS – ATRIUM works to make humanities research more findable, reusable, reproducible, equitable and visible. Through interoperable metadata, linked archives and reusable workflows, it addresses a fundamental challenge: that a historian studying twentieth-century migration, for instance, may need to draw on digitised newspapers, passenger lists, oral histories and census data – each held in different repositories, using different vocabularies, languages and access rules.
Why AI makes this urgent
AI makes this work more urgent, not less. Building responsible, human-centric AI requires curated cultural data, rights clarity, multilingual resources and interpretive judgement – areas where humanities research infrastructures have deep expertise. The humanities are not a decorative afterthought to the AI agenda; they provide the knowledge needed to ask what data means, whose voices are represented, and what has been excluded.
Three policy asks for funders
The presentation closed with three concrete policy asks for European funders: to continue supporting curiosity-driven humanities research as foundational research; to recognise reusable workflows, data and training as legitimate research outputs, in line with CoARA and DORA; and to invest in the human capacity – data stewards, curators, trainers, rights experts – without which open science remains an aspiration rather than a daily reality. Being invited to present at the Programme Committee is a meaningful recognition of the work our community has been doing, and a welcome opportunity to bring the voice of humanities research infrastructure into a policy-level conversation about the future of European science.