1The Research Infrastructure of Slovenian Historiography (RI INZ) was established in September 2006. While the foundations were laid at that time, its primary aim – the digitisation and online publication of frequently used Slovenian historical content – was only defined and developed in the following years. An important aspect of the infrastructure’s early development was the popularisation and promotion of historical–scientific research among the general public and the research community, which was to be achieved through a digital portal or a similar application. The online research and educational portal History of Slovenia – SIstory was launched in September 2008. A test version of the portal was presented to the Institute’s researchers at the beginning of 2008, allowing them to test the portal’s functionality, logical sequence of functions, content hierarchy, links, and the various search methods.¹

2The main content of the portal at the time consisted of a combination of historical literature, historical sources and technical infrastructure services. Its main goal was to provide digitised and freely accessible research results and sources. Emphasis was placed on preserving older, less easily accessible sources, thereby safeguarding cultural and scientific heritage.² One of the first significant projects to populate the portal was the comprehensive digitisation of the entire edition of the scientific journal Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino (Contributions to Contemporary History), which includes issues from 1957 to the present day. In the following years, efforts expanded beyond internal production to include numerous Slovenian and international editorial offices, institutions, and individual collectors, in order to obtain verified historiographical works and materials. Alongside content acquisition, the necessary copyright permissions for publication were systematically obtained and recorded.³

3The operation and design of the SIstory portal originally focused on supporting the research processes of the Institute’s research community members. Following a highly successful initial response from the public and related institutions, SIstory gradually expanded beyond the boundaries of “written history,” incorporating interactive presentations of historical content supported by emerging technologies.⁴ With data preservation and research community integration at the core of its development, SIstory became the primary output of the newly established Slovenian national node of the DARIAH ERIC research infrastructure (DARIAH-SI),⁵ with the Institute (specifically RI INZ) serving as the national coordinating institution.⁶

4The redesign presented in this paper focuses on technological advances to improve the accessibility of the data. Furthermore, the data available on the portal has not yet been fully explored; therefore, part of our work consists of a content analysis. Finally, we are focusing our efforts on the transparency, reuse, and accessibility of data, as well as user-friendly interaction with the portal. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: the opening Section outlines the history and placement of the portal within the field of digital humanities, along with a brief overview of the portal’s technical development. The next Section presents the redesign process, providing an overview of the upgrade components (technical foundations and metadata), as well as basic content statistics. The following Section discusses the content analysis, highlighting notable trends and their significance for the portal. Finally, the last Section provides an overview of the paper and presents some options for future work.

1The landscape of digital humanities in Slovenia during SIstory’s early development differed significantly from its current state. At the time, the field was still in its early stages, with limited infrastructure and awareness, and only beginning to establish itself within academic and research institutions. Hadalin⁷ details the state of digital humanities in Slovenia at that period, highlighting key institutions (such as ARNES and the Jožef Stefan Institute), and researchers who, despite general scepticism, advocated for the integration of this emerging field into mainstream science and curricula. Additionally, the author outlines essential services and research infrastructures such as DARIAH-SI and CLARIN.SI, which remain fundamental for open research data preservation and are vital to the field’s growth. He also emphasises the SIstory portal as the “central hub for digital history” and outlines its importance as a collection of materials relevant not only to the research community of Slovenian history but also to wider research communities.⁸

2It is important to note that while the core features of SIstory, particularly its primary purpose of digitising historical sources,⁹ align with both traditional research data repositories and digital libraries, SIstory was never intended to be either. As evidenced by various sources from the time of its initial launch,¹⁰ the portal was always meant to be co-created with users and the research community. Its modular design was specifically developed to facilitate direct engagement with users. This is further supported by the diversity and volume of materials, databases, and interactive technologies that have been, and in many cases remain, integral to the portal’s ongoing development:

• ZgoLj (Zgodovina Ljubljane – History of Ljubljana): ZgoLj was a mobile application developed as part of SIstory, which supported augmented reality and enabled a virtual tour of Ljubljana’s historical centre, based on old photographs, provided by the Historical Archives of Ljubljana.¹¹
• Interactive exhibitions: Utilising similar technologies, SIstory hosted interactive exhibitions, such as “Slovenians and the First World War 1914–1918”.¹² Due to the obsolescence of the technologies used to create these exhibitions, such examples only contain their metadata records.
• History Citation Index (HIS): Almost simultaneously with the development of SIstory, another important database – History Citation Index (Zgodovinarski indeks citiranja or ZIC) – was in development. The primary purpose of ZIC was to create a database of citations of Slovenian humanities production, filling the gap between the citation databases¹³ recognised by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARIS, then ARRS) and humanities publishing practices.¹⁴ The database was later also recognised by ARIS and remains regularly updated to this day.¹⁵
• Database of WWI victims: A national, freely accessible database of deceased individuals from the area within the borders of the Republic of Slovenia, resulting from the long-standing project Zbiranje podatkov o vojaških žrtvah 1. svetovne vojne na Slovenskem (2015–2018). The time period encompasses data from the war period, but also includes deaths resulting from the war’s effects after 1918.¹⁶
• Database of WWII victims: The database results from research conducted between 1997 and 2012 as part of four major research projects. It is a systematic record of military and civilian persons who had the right of residence in the present-day Republic of Slovenia during the Second World War and the immediate post-war period (May 1940 – January 1946) and lost their lives due to wartime and (revolutionary) post-war violence or the consequences of war. In 2025, both the WWI and WWII databases were redesigned to provide not only unrestricted access to previously limited data but also to enable public participation. The updated version now allows users to contribute additional information, comments and personal narratives within designated layers, promoting a more comprehensive and collaborative approach to historical documentation.¹⁷
• Population censuses – A database of digitised population census questionnaires for Ljubljana. A population census was carried out for the first time in 1830, based on an imperial patent from 1804 and new instructions issued in 1829. The statistical questionnaires for the town of Ljubljana (Conscriptions Aufnahms Bogen) have been fully preserved and are now organised into eleven census units, according to Ljubljana’s cadastral municipalities and house numbers.¹⁸

3While the development and release of the abovementioned databases (ZIC, Popisi, WWI & WWII) were all carried out under the SIstory banner, they remained standalone until recently,¹⁹ complementing the core of the SIstory portal – the publications. In this paper, we focus on the development history, update, and subsequent analysis of this central component.

1As the portal was updated multiple times, the code became too extensive to manage efficiently. Moreover, the concepts and various solutions developed over the years were very ambitious and deemed necessary at the time. However, they did not prove to be as useful in daily practical operations as initially thought. Additionally, the outdated appearance of the user interface was a decisive factor in our choice to rebuild from scratch. When planning the redesign, we considered the legacy issues and solutions from previous versions of the portal to enhance system functionality and create a familiar user experience.

2The redesign consisted of several sections, from purely technical aspects (such as the code base and integration of the OAI-PMH protocol) to simplifying the metadata schema, refining the user interface, and restructuring the content classification.

Source: Own work

1In the effort to present the redesign of the SIstory portal, it became clear that focusing mainly on technical and aesthetic improvements would not fully capture the essence of the portal – its content, or rather, its historical sources. Therefore, we expanded the scope of the work to include a comprehensive content analysis, aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the content available on the portal.

Source: Own work

2The analysis focused on various aspects of the portal’s content, ranging from basic statistics of the main metadata groups (excluding individual metadata elements) to a more in-depth analysis of:

• publication date – when a work was first published;
• publication keywords – e.g., Jugoslavija, učbeniki;
• language of the publication – classified according to the ISO 639-2 standard;
• author networks – mapping connections between contributors.

3This, in turn, allows us to demonstrate not only the scope of available content but also to highlight the different types and variations of this content.

4.3. Language trends

1In addition to keyword analysis, we also examined the languages of the publications within the SIstory portal, as shown in Figure 3.

2It is not surprising that the most frequent language of publications on the portal is Slovenian, with a total of 46312 occurrences, mainly in the period from 1970 to 2025, especially between 1990 and 2025. The second most common language is Serbian (8201 occurrences), although an explicit distinction must be made here, as Serbian also falls into two other language categories: Serbian (Cyrillic) for publications in Cyrillic script (3947 in total) and the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian category for publications where the language could not be explicitly identified (mostly publications referring to the Yugoslav Official Gazettes), which are the most frequent among the publications.

Source: Own work

3Publications in Serbian across all mentioned categories were most frequently issued between 1930 and 1990, mainly in connection with official gazettes.
Another commonly used language is German, particularly during the 19^th century – especially between 1850 and 1870 – when many publications related to Slovenian history were produced in the Austrian Empire (1804–1867) and Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), often written in both German and Slovenian. While German was less prominent in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries (1710–1830), it became more notable in conjunction with Slovenian in later decades. Less frequently used languages – each appearing fewer than five times – include Spanish (Castilian), Latin, Polish, Arabic, Albanian, Ukrainian, and Esperanto.⁴⁰ Additionally, 42 publications are multilingual, and some items have no associated language. This is especially true of the digitised collection “The Casting of Death”, a series of death masks detailed in Meden and Pančur.⁴¹

4.4. Authorship

1As the final part of our comprehensive analysis of the content and characteristics of the SIstory portal, we examined authorship trends, focusing on frequent author pairs (Figure 4) and co-authorship networks (Figure 5).

Source: Own work

2Figure 4 shows the co-occurrence of author pairs based on the “Author” metadata field, which includes only individual publication authors. Organisational, editorial, and translation authorship were excluded from the analysis.

3Of the original 6317 author pair combinations, 5511 occurred only once, representing 87.3% of all author pairings. The remaining 12.7% consist of combinations with multiple occurrences. This may suggest limited recurring collaborations and a diverse research network, as well as the fact that the production on SIstory includes a high number of unique collaborators. Supporting this idea is the very high percentage of publications with single authorship across SIstory’s entire production (94.5%)⁴², indicating a trend of authors favouring individual work over joint efforts.

4Several authors have frequently collaborated on publications available through the portal, with specific pairs standing out for their joint work. The most frequent collaborators are Bojan Balkovec and Božo Repe, who co-authored 49 publications. They are followed by Božidar Flajšman and Božo Repe with 29 joint works, and Bojan Balkovec and Božidar Flajšman with 28. Although these author pairs exhibit high co-occurrence, manual checks reveal that most of their collaborations are concentrated in the Events section (Dogodki), specifically video recordings on historical themes produced by the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana – an institution to which all three authors are affiliated.

5In contrast, author pairs with fewer than ten co-occurrences tend to be more varied and are more likely to produce traditional academic outputs such as scientific papers or monographs. For example, Gašper Šmid and Žarko Štrumbl co-authored eight scientific papers, mainly in the journal Arhivi, while Mitja Ferenc and Božo Repe collaborated on six chapters in a scientific monograph. However, this pattern is not universal; manual checks of author pairs within the 5–10 co-occurrence range revealed exceptions. One such case is that of Marta Rendla and Vida Deželak Barič, who co-authored eight works – all of which are periodic interim reports for a research project.⁴³

6Within the scope of the authorship analysis, we also examined the author network. Figure 5 shows the ten most connected authors, based on the number of direct co-authorship links for each author.

Source: Own work

7The co-authorship network, shown in Figure 5, highlights the ten most interconnected authors and their relationships, outlining key figures within the SIstory production. With a density metric of 0.0046, the network is relatively sparse, indicating that most authors are not directly connected. However, the average path length of 3.89 suggests that most authors can be linked within about four steps, implying that although direct connections are limited, authors are frequently linked through short co-authorship chains.

8Many of the most connected authors, such as Božo Repe, Bojan Balkovec, and Božidar Flajšman, are already identified in Figure 4 as frequent collaborators from the same institution. However, additional authors, like Mojca Šorn and Vasilij Melik, although not part of recurring co-authorship pairs, are notable for their high connectivity within the network. Their position on the periphery of the top ten suggests they may not co-author often but remain important figures within the portal’s production.

1This paper presents the History of Slovenia – SIstory.si portal, detailing its background and the technical, visual, and content-related updates in the latest version (5.0). The development of the portal illustrates its evolving role in supporting historical research and its contribution to the expanding field of digital humanities. Over time, its reach has grown beyond the original academic focus, serving a broader audience interested in Slovenian history.

2The decision to redesign the portal from the ground up appears to have been a step in the right direction, as initial user feedback indicates improved responsiveness and a generally smoother user experience.

3To better understand the scope and structure of the portal’s content, we conducted an exploratory content analysis. While the portal’s content was recently the focus of a study,⁴⁴ the emphasis was on the chronological additions to the SIstory portal throughout its history. Still, no detailed (metadata) analysis has been performed to help us understand the content coverage and themes of the portal. Therefore, the redesign offered us the ideal opportunity to familiarise ourselves more thoroughly with the content we have collected and worked on so far, thus creating a valuable foundation for the future.

4The initial content study, based on trends in publication over time, provided an overview of content distribution and outlined the likely reasons for this. These were then further examined through keyword analysis, which showed, to some degree, that the type of publications within the peaks of the graph aligns well with the hypothesised reasons for such a distribution (i.e., large volumes of publications of the same type, such as textbooks and censuses). This also applies to the language analysis, which primarily aimed to provide an overview of the variety of publication languages available on the portal. Given the historical context, it is not surprising that in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, publications were mainly in German, with some exceptions published in Slovenian, while in the 20^th century, language coverage began to expand to other South Slavic languages (again with Slovenian as the dominant language).

5Lastly, the authorship analysis allowed us to familiarise ourselves with the diversity of (co-)authorship and connections/relations amongst them. The initial overview revealed a notably high number of single-authored publications. Additionally, examining author pairs revealed that co-authorship within SIstory is quite limited and primarily linked to the specific institution and type of content produced, such as extensive video production by a particular institution to which the authors belong. The subsequent analysis of the author network suggests a relatively sparse overall network, with most authors not directly connected. It also highlights the rather unsurprising fact that the authors within the most frequent author pairs exhibit the centrality of the author network.

6Our future work will focus on further analysing the technical processes behind data collection and expanding the scope of metadata. The current state of the redesigned portal will serve as a foundation for more direct community involvement in the development process. We aim to incorporate user feedback from the beginning and explore the integration of visualisations that will facilitate easier interaction with the data. We will also continue to improve existing collections, ensuring the portal remains a comprehensive, dynamic, and accessible platform for historical research.

1The research was conducted within the framework of the DARIAH-SI research infrastructure, the infrastructure programme I0-0013 The Research Infrastructure of Slovenian Historiography infrastructure programme [Raziskovalna infrastruktura slovenskega zgodovinopisja], and research programme P6-0436 Digital humanities: resources, tools and methods [Digitalna humanistika: viri, orodja in metode], which are co-financed by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) from the state budget and the RSF.