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Abstract. Digital literacy and technology education has gained much relevance in humanities and heritage related disciplines during the recent decades. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to examine the current state of educational programs in digital cultural heritage and related disciplines primarily in Europe with supplemental information from the US. A further aim is to highlight core topics, challenges, and demands, and to show innovative formats and prospects.

Maya hieroglyphic script (300 BCE–1500 CE) is a semi-deciphered logographic and syllabic autochthonous writing system from the Americas and is one of the most significant writing traditions of the ancient world. Because of its incomplete state of decipherment, complexity and variation in graphematics, and partially lost lexicon, transliterations cannot be used within the encoding. The project Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan approaches this challenge with an encoding strategy relying on stand-off markup, which is enriched with additional information sources. Using different formats (RDF, XML) and standards (CIDOC CRM, TEI P5), the inscriptions are encoded in a multilevel corpus: (1) a tei_all-compliant schema defining values and rules for the encoding of the text’s topological and structural features, (2) a “Sign Catalogue” for the classification of Maya hieroglyphs, and (3) the tool ALMAH (Annotator for the Linguistic analysis of MAya Hieroglyphs) for linguistic analyses. In this paper, we focus on the TEI schema and highlight our strategy for encoding hieroglyphs without using linguistic transliterations and transcriptions.

Digital data on tangible and intangible cultural assets is an essential part of daily life, communication and experience. It has a lasting influence on the perception of cultural identity as well as on the interactions between research, the cultural economy and society. Throughout the last three decades, many cultural heritage institutions have contributed a wealth of digital representations of cultural assets (2D digital reproductions of paintings, sheet music, 3D digital models of sculptures, monuments, rooms, buildings), audio-visual data (music, film, stage performances), and procedural research data such as encoding and annotation formats. The long-term preservation and FAIR availability of research data from the cultural heritage domain is fundamentally important, not only for future academic success in the humanities but also for the cultural identity of individuals and society as a whole. Up to now, no coordinated effort for professional research data management on a national level exists in Germany. NFDI4Culture aims to fill this gap and create a user-centered, research-driven infrastructure that will cover a broad range of research domains from musicology, art history and architecture to performance, theatre, film, and media studies. The research landscape addressed by the consortium is characterized by strong institutional differentiation. Research units in the consortium's community of interest comprise university institutes, art colleges, academies, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This diverse landscape is also characterized by an abundance of research objects, methodologies and a great potential for data-driven research. In a unique effort carried out by the applicant and co-applicants of this proposal and ten academic societies, this community is interconnected for the first time through a federated approach that is ideally suited to the needs of the participating researchers. To promote collaboration within the NFDI, to share knowledge and technology and to provide extensive support for its users have been the guiding principles of the consortium from the beginning and will be at the heart of all workflows and decision-making processes. Thanks to these principles, NFDI4Culture has gathered strong support ranging from individual researchers to high-level cultural heritage organizations such as the UNESCO, the International Council of Museums, the Open Knowledge Foundation and Wikimedia. On this basis, NFDI4Culture will take innovative measures that promote a cultural change towards a more reflective and sustainable handling of research data and at the same time boost qualification and professionalization in data-driven research in the domain of cultural heritage. This will create a long-lasting impact on science, cultural economy and society as a whole.

We investigated the evolution and transformation of scientific knowledge in the early modern period, analyzing more than 350 different editions of textbooks used for teaching astronomy in European universities from the late fifteenth century to mid-seventeenth century. These historical sources constitute the Sphaera Corpus. By examining different semantic relations among individual parts of each edition on record, we built a multiplex network consisting of six layers, as well as the aggregated network built from the superposition of all the layers. The network analysis reveals the emergence of five different communities. The contribution of each layer in shaping the communities and the properties of each community are studied. The most influential books in the corpus are found by calculating the average age of all the out-going and in-coming links for each book. A small group of editions is identified as a transmitter of knowledge as they bridge past knowledge to the future through a long temporal interval. Our analysis, moreover, identifies the most disruptive books. These books introduce new knowledge that is then adopted by almost all the books published afterwards until the end of the whole period of study. The historical research on the content of the identified books, as an empirical test, finally corroborates the results of all our analyses. 19 pages, 9 figures

The digital transformation has initiated a paradigm shift in research and scholarly communication practices towards a more open scholarly culture. Although this transformation is slowly happening in the Digital Humanities field, open is not yet default. The article introduces the OpenMethods metablog, a community platform that highlights open research methods, tools, and practices within the context of the Digital Humanities by republishing open access content around methods and tools in various formats and languages. It also describes the platform’s technical infrastructure based on its requirements and main functionalities, and especially the collaborative content sourcing and editorial workflows. The article concludes with a discussion of the potentials of the OpenMethods metablog to overcome barriers towards open practices by focusing on inclusive, community sourced information based around opening up research processes and the challenges that need to be overcome to achieve its goals.

The Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging (ASIRF) 2019 took place at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany from September 22nd to 27th. The event featured eight lectures and tutorials from information retrieval experts and stood out due to the diversity of the participants, both regarding their cultural background and research. A varied social program complemented the scientific exchange.

To foster responsible research and innovation, research communities, institutions, and funders are shifting their practices and requirements towards Open Science. Open Science skills are becoming increasingly essential for researchers. Indeed general awareness of Open Science has grown among EU researchers, but the practical adoption can be further improved. Recognizing a gap between the needed and the provided training offer, the FOSTER project offers practical guidance and training to help researchers learn how to open up their research within a particular domain or research environment. Aiming for a sustainable approach, FOSTER focused on strengthening the Open Science training capacity by establishing and supporting a community of trainers. The creation of an Open Science training handbook was a first step towards bringing together trainers to share their experiences and to create an open and living knowledge resource. A subsequent series of train-the-trainer bootcamps helped trainers to find inspiration, improve their skills and to intensify exchange within a peer group. Four trainers, who attended one of the bootcamps, contributed a case study on their experiences and how they rolled out Open Science training within their own institutions. On its platform the project provides a range of online courses and resources to learn about key Open Science topics. FOSTER awards users gamification badges when completing courses in order to provide incentives and rewards, and to spur them on to even greater achievements in learning. The paper at hand describes FOSTER Plus’ training strategies, shares the lessons learnt and provides guidance on how to re-use the project’s materials and training approaches. Peer reviewed