The DARIAH Theme Call 2024-2026 on the topic of Mistakes was open from late Summer to end of September, inviting proposals and project applications that would explore the concept of mistakes, critically considering their role, impact, and potential within Digital Arts and Humanities scholarship and practice. The DARIAH Theme is an annual area of focus chosen for investment by the DARIAH Board of Directors.
This year’s call attracted an exceptionally high number of well-articulated, diverse and competitive applications. After an extensive peer-review process, we are excited to announce that the Programme Committee has selected five winning projects. These projects will receive an overall budget of 45.000 euros.
“It was comforting and encouraging to see that the DARIAH Theme Call on “Mistakes” received the largest number of applications since the launch of the scheme: mistakes do resonate with us all and are deeply embedded in the core of our research”, said Agiatis Benardou, President of the Board of Directors. “Reviewing the submissions was a toiling, exciting and rewarding process. Across successful applications, mistakes become opportunities for transformation, whether in art, digital humanities, or numismatics. From turning AI glitches into beautiful music, to uncovering historical forgery insights, to challenging algorithmic norms, these endeavors celebrate the profound lessons found in imperfection. They serve as a reminder that mistakes are “portals of discovery”, as James Joyce put it in Ulysses over a hundred years ago.”
Winning projects
1. Erring on the Side of Beauty: Making Music from Mistakes in Art Education
Coordinator: Brecht De Man (PXL MUSIC-Research, PXL University of Applied Sciences and Arts)
This project will seek to push our understanding of mistakes in digital art education, specifically focusing on AI-assisted music production. It is founded on the premise that imperfections, glitches, and unexpected outcomes in AI processes can be powerful catalysts for creativity and learning.
The project’s approach is rooted in self-determination theory, positing that by empowering students to collaboratively explore, manipulate, and recontextualize AI “mistakes,” we can foster greater autonomy, competence, and relatedness in their artistic journey. This project aims to create a flexible curriculum that encourages students to engage critically and creatively with AI-generated musical artifacts. This curriculum will be introduced in selected part-time art education programs, fostering an environment where experimentation is encouraged and “failures” are reframed as stepping stones to innovation.
2. Tracking collaborative mistake correction in media Wiki-based graph databases
Coordinator: David Lindemann (UPV/EHU Dept. of Linguistics and Basque Studies)
This project aims to build bridges between the DH/GLAM community and the developer and user communities around public data management software solutions. The project also aims at strengthening existing collaborations with Open Data initiatives and the emerging landscape around the European Open Science Cloud, including the advent of new European Cultural Heritage Cloud infrastructures.
To do this, the project will organise a face-to-face meeting with the Wikibase and Wikibase Cloud teams at WMDE, Berlin, and a booksprint event. One of the outcomes from this event will be a White Paper, addressing the state of the art in the topics the group is bound to work on. Main function of that paper will be to familiarize the DARIAH community, on one side, and people active in Wikimedia chapters and on Wikimedia platforms, with each other, and with features and use cases of the Wikibase software; this also includes to point at requirements for LOD exhibiting and editing software in general from a GLAM and DH perspective.
3. Breaking the Code: Algorithmic Non-Normativity in Creative Digital Humanities
Coordinator: Diogo Marques (Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto)
This project will examine the relationship between gender, identity, and algorithmic systems in the realm of creative digital humanities. It seeks to uncover how algorithms—often seen as neutral—actually encode and perpetuate societal norms, particularly regarding gender. Through cyberliterary-cyberartistic interventions, such as hacking, glitching, and livecoding performances, the project disrupts these algorithmic structures to expose their inherent biases.
Drawing on frameworks, the project will focus on how errors, glitches, and deviations can reveal the normative constraints embedded in digital systems. By combining artistic practices with scholarly research, it aims to challenge conventional algorithmic norms and offer new insights into gendered and intersectional identities in the digital age.
Additionally, through the lens of Critical Code Studies, the project will engage with the underlying code itself, critically analyzing the biases coded into digital platforms and how these can be creatively disrupted. In sum, Breaking the Code aims not only to interrogate the biases embedded in digital systems but also to reimagine how these systems can be used creatively to foster non-normativity and inclusivity, revealing possibilities beyond the algorithmic norm.
4. Mistakes as a source of knowledge: ACCSN 2.0
Coordinator: Lily Grozdanova (Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”)
Identifying forgeries of ancient numismatic material requires practical work and precise analysis of the counterfeits themselves. Currently, there is no digitised collection of such objects to assist specialists in further developing their expertise in production techniques and forgery markers. Hence, the scientific community’s ability to study mistakes and create proactive prevention strategies is severely limited.
The project’s central goal will be to digitise the most significant collection of numismatic objects identified as counterfeits which belongs to the Coin cabinet of the Royal Library of Belgium. This will include on- site processing of the objects. A further goal of the project will be to develop a “standardised identification expertise card” that can be internationally applied. A severe issue is the absence of an internationally standardised expertise procedure for counterfeit identification. Activities are being conducted to define the terminology, including creating the Nomisma Counterfeits Workgroup to deal with the difficulties of the terminology and ontology in the area. The simultaneous development of the “expertise card” within the frames of the current proposal will be a sound basis for collaboration and coordination of the two processes directly influencing the Digital Numismatics environment.
5. The Serendipity Engine: Harvesting Digital Art from AI Hallucinations
Coordinator: Mark Amerika (CU Boulder/TECHNE Lab)
AI hallucinations encompass a range of outputs that may appear plausible but are factually incorrect, entirely fictional, or strikingly incongruous. These can manifest as textual fabrications, visual anomalies in image generation, or auditory discordances in speech synthesis—each of which challenges human perceptions of AI-generated content across different sensory domains.
By embracing these AI-generated hallucinations as sources of creative potential, all three artists will draw on the avant-garde tradition of chance operations in art, music, literature, and performance. In applying this approach, this research team aims to create an interdependent form of co-authorship between human and machine, challenging conventional notions of creativity. In doing so, the project questions the very nature of creativity and explores how AI reshapes the way humans understand artistic expression and authenticity in the digital age.
The projects will run for a year and a half (December 2024 – June 2026) while the project coordinators will be invited to present their results at the DARIAH Annual Event 2026.
Stay tuned for more information as we will be showcasing the projects, their goals and research outcomes throughout their funding period.
For more information on past DARIAH Theme Calls read here.
