CAREing for Data in Dialogue (2026)
Perspectives on social, cultural data and beyond — the seventh edition of the “… in Dialogue” series
Research data in the humanities and social sciences is rarely simply “open” or “closed”. Much of it describes people — their words, their images, their suffering — and asking what it means to care for such data is a question of ethics as much as of infrastructure. The CARE principles put collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics beside the FAIR ones, and this workshop asks what that looks like in practice.
For the seventh edition of “… in Dialogue”, researchers bring concrete datasets to the table and discuss how they handle the ethical questions each one raises. Short pitches are combined with hands-on work and with perspectives from law and information security.
9 December 2026 · Dome Room (Kuppelraum), Main Building (H4), University of Bern · the event is held in English.
This programme is provisional. Several contributions are confirmed but still without a title, and some slots are open; these are marked “to be announced” below.
Programme
| Time | Session | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00–09:15 | Welcome | |
| 09:15–10:05 | Keynote — title to be announced | to be announced |
| 10:05–11:05 | Dataset pitches | |
| The Case of Digital Scholarly Editing: How to Mediate Discrimination in Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Texts and Photographs | Elias Zimmermann | |
| Title to be announced | Markus Schiegg | |
| Who CAREs about Witches? | Christa Schneider | |
| Title to be announced | Stefan Leins | |
| Data Steward’s perspective | Data Stewards, University of Bern | |
| 11:05–11:35 | Coffee break | |
| 11:35–12:30 | Title to be announced | Cristina Grisot |
| 12:30–14:00 | Lunch break | |
| 14:00–15:00 | Dataset pitches | |
| Securing Data Vulnerabilities | Elisa Fornalé | |
| A Safe Space for Testimony: CARE and the Research Infrastructure for Studying Sexual Abuse in the Environment of the Catholic Church in Switzerland | Moritz Mähr & Magda Kaspar | |
| “There was a time when demons just did the trick.” — CAREing for cultural property in the Information Age | Sebastian Borkowsky | |
| When Every Minute Identifies: Emergency Medicine Data at the Boundary of Openness | Martin Müller | |
| 15:00–16:10 | Hands-on (parallel, coffee served) | |
| Learning to See the Problem: Discrimination-Sensitive Metadata in Practice | Moritz Mähr | |
| Bring your own data | Christa Schneider | |
| 16:10–17:00 | Two contributions — titles to be announced | to be announced |
| 17:00 | Closing & apéro |
Speakers
Sebastian Borkowsky — University of Bern.
Elisa Fornalé — Associate Professor at the World Trade Institute, University of Bern, working on international law, human rights, migration and the environment.
Cristina Grisot — Linguistic Research Infrastructure (LiRI), University of Zurich, and national coordinator of CLARIN-CH.
Magda Kaspar — historian at the Department of History, University of Zurich, researching sexual abuse in the context of the Catholic Church in Switzerland.
Stefan Leins — Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, working on the cultural practices of financial markets and commodity trading.
Moritz Mähr — Digital Humanities, University of Bern and University of Basel; works on research infrastructures for sensitive historical data.
Martin Müller — Department of Emergency Medicine, Inselspital, University Hospital Bern, where he leads the Resource & Risk Management group.
Markus Schiegg — Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Fribourg; his research on patient letters from psychiatric institutions works closely with highly sensitive personal records.
Christa Schneider — Digital Humanities, University of Bern; her research includes the Basel witch trials.
Elias Zimmermann — editor of the digital edition of Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s short forms and letters, University of Geneva and University of Zurich, where the project has developed its own discrimination-sensitive editorial guidelines.
Registration
Registration is free and runs through the University Library Bern:
Contact & Organisers
If you have questions, please contact imdialog@ub.unibe.ch. Further details are announced here as the programme is settled.
Organisers:
- Dr. des. Christa Schneider (Digital Humanities)
- M.A. Ursula Loosli; Dr. Gero Schreier (Open Science, University Library Bern)
- Prof. Dr. Tobias Hodel (Digital Humanities)
Header image by Simon Lee on Unsplash, used under the Unsplash licence. Cropped to a banner format.