Webinar on gender in the digitisation of cultural heritage: what volunteers and communities can do

On 9 October 2026 at 10:00 Vilnius time, the online training webinar "Gender in the digitisation of cultural heritage" took place. It was organised by VILNIUS TECH for the DIGICHer project, together with the Lithuanian Citizen Science Association. It was held in English and led by Dr. Monika Mačiulienė.

Six places where gaps arise

The webinar showed that gender gaps in digital collections are not accidental: they can be reproduced or corrected at each of six stages of digitisation.

1. Selection: what gets digitised at all, and in which order.
2. Names and descriptions: how people are recorded in the metadata, for example when a woman is recorded only under her husband's name.
3. Standards: the fields and vocabularies used to describe people.
4. Machines: text classifiers and image recognition that repeat stereotypes.
5. Labour: who does the work, and who is credited.
6. Content: whose work ends up in the collection.

Participation as the answer

The main point of the webinar: many of the initiatives that have really changed the numbers are run by volunteers, at low cost. The volunteer project Women in Red, for example, helped raise women's share of English Wikipedia biographies from 15% in 2015 to 20% in 2024.

Three formats were presented that a citizen science association can run together with a heritage institution:

• An edit-a-thon. One day, one room, a tutorial for beginners and a list of missing women. Participants write or expand Wikipedia and Wikidata entries on women connected to a collection.
• A transcription run. Volunteers transcribe letters, diaries and documents written by women, so that the texts become searchable and the names become findable.
• A name audit. Volunteers go through catalogue entries and list every woman recorded under a husband's name, as "wife of", or not at all. The archive decides what to add.

In all three formats volunteers are credited by name. The webinar also covered cases where communities themselves decide who may see their heritage, and where makers take part in digitising their own archives.

A checklist for institutions

The webinar ended with a six-question checklist, one per stage, that a heritage team can go through before publishing a digitised collection, and with a question to participants: what could a citizen science project in Lithuania take on first?

There is no recording, but the full slides with the list of sources are available to download.

Download the webinar slides (PDF)

DIGICHer is funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe programme, grant agreement No. 101132481.