CfP: Revisiting Metadata. Standardisation, Trust and Power

Revisiting Metadata. Standardisation, Trust and Power

This conference presents the way we design, govern, and disclose metadata as directly entangled with questions of public trust, pluralism, authority and the possibility of informed democratic deliberation. We debate how rich and transparent metadata about provenance, verification status, editorial interventions, and funding can support more diversified databases as well as democratic resilience by enabling the accountability and traceability of information flows. The Call for Papers invites contributions that examine, contest, or re‑imagine metadata practices in light of tensions between standardization, trust and power.

Metadata: Metadata is the structured information that turns raw files and data into manageable, searchable, and sharable resources within digital workflows. It drives automation and decision‑making at the stages of creation, ingestion, processing, discovery, access control, and long‑term preservation. By encoding context, relationships, and rights, metadata enables interoperability between systems and ensures that digital materials can be reliably found, interpreted, and reused over time. Metadata is a human, interpretive activity imposing standards on data that inevitably encode particular worldviews, power relations, and assumptions about what counts.

Metadata standards emerged as libraries, archives, and information scientists sought shared schemas (such as MARC in the 1960s and Dublin Core in the mid‑1990s) to describe resources consistently across institutions and, later, across the web. Over time, these core schemas were joined by a proliferation of domain‑specific standards and application profiles (for audiovisual media, research data, cultural heritage, etc.), reflecting both technological change and the growing need for interoperability between heterogeneous digital systems.

Feminist, Decolonial and Indigenous Perspectives: Established metadata standards have been critiqued from feminist, decolonial and Indigenous perspectives for their embedded assumptions about people, place, and authority. It has been argued that standard vocabularies and structures often cannot express local epistemologies, relational concepts of land, kinship, trauma, or testimony. The tension is that FAIR principles prioritise making data maximally open and reusable for technical and scientific efficiency, while CARE foregrounds community rights, control, and ethical use, which sometimes requires limits on access and reuse that directly constrain FAIR-style openness. Many (oral) history and community archive projects have developed project‑ or community‑specific extensions and application profiles—adding new fields, vocabularies, and ethical metadata to articulate e.g., the harms of war and displacement more adequately. Other initiatives offer alternative cataloguing traditions in their own right, e.g., stressing Indigenous data sovereignty.

“Soft Censorship” and Agenda-Setting: Most recently, metadata has become a key battleground in contemporary wars as well as political threats to democracy because metadata can be deliberately manipulated, for example through mislabeling. As a result, it can help disinformation appear more credible than verified information. Platform‑controlled relevance signals and opaque taxonomies can effectively turn metadata into an instrument of “soft censorship” and agenda‑setting, where some voices and narratives are amplified while others are quietly buried. The way metadata is defined, governed, and exposed is also a central element of concern as Artificial Intelligence is increasingly integrated in professional practices. Machine-automated metadata standardization risks misclassifying content and the reproduction of inequalities included in classification languages of the past. This is increasingly important to highlight, given that the training data on which models are built can further entrench metadata biases and soft power through labels and classifications that are applied automatically and, at times, uncritically. This also raises pressing legal and regulatory questions, from GDPR and the EU AI Act’s data-governance requirements to the copyright and IP status of the training data and metadata themselves.

Thematic Scope and Invited Submissions

Papers may address empirical case-studies or critical evaluations of the underlying visions, practices and contemporary use, adaptation or refusal of metadata standards from the perspective of:

• gender studies
• postcolonial scholarship
• war studies
• digital hermeneutics
• living and community archiving
• AI and history
• cultural heritage

Potential questions may include:

• What are differences between machine and human categorization, or within a mixed computational/human approach, with regards to reproducing or changing biased cultural codes of reference?
• Who has or takes the authority to categorise, for what purpose and with what result?
• What is the role of metadata enrichment in integrated digital workflows: e.g. with regards to OCR, digitization, copyright, ownership, data analysis and data disclosure?
• What can we learn from a critical evaluation of pre-AI tools for automatic metadata generation?
• What ethic reflections does the private commercialization of access to standardized public data provoke?

Submission details

The conference will take place at the University of Luxembourg in Belval from 27 until 29 January 2027.

The presented papers will be reworked for publication as an edited volume in De Gruyter Series: ‘Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics’. As such, successful authors will be asked to submit a full paper of 8000 words following the conference.

Please send your abstract of up to 500 words, together with a short biographical note of up to 200 words compiled and submitted into a single file (.doc, .docx or .pdf) to machteld.venken@uni.lu and ellen.charlesworth@uni.lu before 11 October 2026. Multiple attachments will not be considered.

Mandatory abstract criteria: The abstract must clearly explain how the proposed paper intends to address the central topics of the conference standardization, trust and power. Proposals that fail to explicitly address this conceptual intersection will not be considered.

You will be notified of the outcome on the 26 October 2026.

The deadline for the submission of full papers of 8000 words is 30 April 2027.

There is financial aid available for scholars without institutional support or for scholars from outside of Europe. Please email the organisers before the abstract submission deadline for further details.

Key dates

Abstract submission deadline – 11 October 2026

Notification of acceptance – 26 October 2026

Conference – 27-29 January 2027

Full paper submission deadline – 30 April 2027

Anticipated publication – Spring 2028