A workshop on workflows: ATRIUM at DHd 2026

By Massimiliano Carloni

Is a workflow truly a workflow if it is not reusable? This and many other questions were explored during a workshop organized by the ATRIUM project in Vienna on 24 February 2026, “Reusable workflows in practice – a hands-on workshop” ( abstract on Zenodo ). The workshop was held during the conference of the Digital Humanities association of the German-speaking countries (DHd), which this year focused on less conventional scholarly outputs: ‘not only text, not only data’ .

The workshop was divided into three sections. After a brief introduction to ATRIUM, participants were involved in a ‘world cafe’, where they rotated tables and shared their thoughts on three key questions: what defines a workflow? Why are workflows so important in research? And what makes a workflow reusable? Among the participants’ observations, collected on several flip charts, it was interesting to find a common thread and some recurring keywords: tools and services, efficiency, openness, modularity, and good documentation, just to name a few. This activity also showed that ATRIUM’s approach to promoting and supporting workflows aligns with a broader community’s understanding and need for this type of scholarly output.\

In the second part, after a presentation of the SSH Open Marketplace , everyone got to dive deeper into three specific workflows, on automatic text recognition , publishing collections as data , and collaborative map annotation . The participants were asked to analyze these workflows based on a set of assessment criteria prepared by the organizers, covering everything from the purpose of the workflows to methodology and sustainability. The organizers themselves benefited greatly from this analysis, as the participants were also invited to share their thoughts on the criteria themselves and offered constructive feedback on all three workflows.

In the workshop’s final part, participants had the opportunity to put their knowledge into practice – by creating their own workflows! The topics proposed by the participants covered a wide range of disciplines, from library science to psychology and ethics, including some not yet represented in the SSH Open Marketplace. The workflow form was not seen as a limitation. For many participants, redacting a workflow was the chance to finally formalize an idea or explore how a specific approach could become reproducible and reusable in other contexts. These initial outlines and drafts, which the organizing team helped redact also with the support of a dedicated workflow , might just be the start of some fresh new contributions to the SSH Open Marketplace.