Call for Participants: Linked Pasts 2025
We are pleased to invite participants to join the online Linked Pasts symposium 2025, taking place from December 1–12, 2025. In particular, we invite you to register for the activity ‘Enriching digital heritage with LLMs and Linked Open Data’, co-organised by the Pelagios Network, an ATRIUM partner.
The annual Linked Pasts brings together scholars, heritage professionals and other practitioners with an interest in Linked Open Data as applied to the study of historical disciplines. Panels and working groups at Linked Pasts are more goal-oriented than a conventional academic conference, and activities and agendas are often proposed, developed and revised by all participants at the event itself.
Activity: Enriching digital heritage with LLMs and Linked Open Data
Combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with Linked Open Data (LOD) offers great potential to make cultural heritage metadata FAIR. The proposed activity will bring together specialists from cultural heritage, data science and digital humanities to provide feedback on a practical application of this approach over two sessions. Cultural heritage practitioners hear a lot about the transformative potential of AI, but opportunities to get hands on with cultural heritage collections are rare. They might also be aware of the problems of AI, especially LLMs, but would like to understand more about limitations and their relevance to heritage.
The Cultural Heritage AI Cookbook , offers a practical method of enriching metadata. Funded by the Netherlands eScience Center and the Lorentz Center@lambda, the convenors and twenty others created a set of Google Colab Notebooks for the recognition, disambiguation and relations of named entities using LLMs. The next step is to integrate LOD more deeply within the cookbook to address issues with the accuracy, validity and biases of outputs.
This activity will be divided into two sessions to be held on MS Teams. The first examines the cookbook as it currently stands, providing an introduction, practical examples of its use and an opportunity to provide feedback. The output will be a feedback document used to update the cookbook. The second session will focus on future directions. Discussion will encompass the challenges of embedding the cookbook, the approach, and AI more generally in cultural heritage practice. The activity will offer an opportunity for cultural heritage professionals to express their interest and concerns.
This second session aims to draw up a plan in the form of a pathway towards impact encompassing how this might be used in cultural heritage organisations and possibilities for enriched FAIR data to develop new forms of engagement with collections.
Practical Info
The activity is most likely to take place on the 9, 10 December TBC. Participants who have signed up using the Google Form will receive an email and details of the activity will appear on the Linked Pasts symposium website/material.
Details of the cookbook can be found here: https://pelagios.org/llm-lod-enriching-heritage/intro.html
The notebooks are available on this Github repo https://github.com/pelagios/llm-lod-enriching-heritage
Both of these objects are currently being updated. The notebooks will be updated based on feedback and made available openly. Other outputs such as updates to explanatory text, descriptions of the notebooks and plans for future work will be added at the above links.
Organising Committee
Gethin Rees, Lecturer in Digital Products and Industries, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK
Elton Barker, Professor of Ancient Greek Literature and Culture, The Open University
Sarah Middle, Researcher, Archaeological Data Service, York
Anna-Maria Sichani, BRAID Fellow – Research Associate in Digital Humanities, School of Advanced Study, London
Mia Ridge, Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections, British Library