On March 5, 2026, the CLARIN&DARIAH Spring Conference took place at the University of Latvia, bringing together more than sixty researchers and practitioners from the digital humanities, language technology, memory institutions and research data infrastructures.   

A central theme running through the programme was what researchers, institutions, and society expect from research infrastructures — and how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping humanities research and work with language resources. In the morning session, associate professor Andrius Utka from the Vytautas Magnus University introduced the CLARIN-LT research infrastructure and recent Lithuanian language resources developed for the AI ​​era, emphasising that high-quality language data and reliable access to it are becoming critical for both the development of language technologies and research. Ahmad Kamal from Linnaeus University in Sweden then provided an insight into the activities of DARIAH-SE, offering the perspectives of the Swedish national node of DARIAH. 

The conference participants particularly valued the demonstration session, which showcased newly developed tools and resources and illustrated their practical use in research. Demonstrations covered various digital tools and language resources, including the Latvian language morpheme and word formation database, the Norma corpus and technical formatting tool, the DataverseLV research data repository, resources for digitization and analysis of folk song texts and melodies, an image search tool from the Latvian State Archives of Audiovisual Documents, LATE speech transcription tool, AI tools for book cataloguing, the Historical Dictionary of Latvian Given Names and Livonian language digital resources.  

The conferences concluded with a panel discussion, “Humanities in the Age of AI: What Do We Expect from Infrastructures?” Speakers and participants highlighted practical needs, such as sustainable data storage and access to data, a shared ecosystem of tools, and closer cooperation between researchers, memory institutions and technology developers. The panel discussion clearly showed that in the AI ​​era, the importance of research infrastructures is only increasing- enabling language resources, cultural heritage and research data to be usable, comparable and sustainable for both academia and society. Conference presentations are available here.