• DARIAH EU
• 2017-2021close
• English close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage close

This report provides information about activities and progress towards establishing DARIAH membership in six countries: the Czech Republic, Finland, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK, which took place between July and December 2019. Previous activities were described in detail in the D3.2 - Regularly Monitor Country-Specific Progress in Enabling New DARIAH Membership. During the project lifetime, the Czech Republic joined DARIAH ERIC; in other countries, collaboration with DARIAH has been greatly strengthened and significant progress regarding DARIAH membership has been achieved. The report also outlines the next steps in the accession processes, building on the results of the DESIR project.

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) started in October 2010 to build on a network that connects both people (Holocaust researchers, archivists, curators, librarians and digital humanists) and dispersed Holocaust source material and collections. EHRI’s aim is making sources visible in a systematic way in order to counteract the fragmentation of the sources and to reveal interconnections. EHRI focuses on Archive and collection descriptions, which are available through the EHRI Portal. EHRI is currently in its second phase and is on the ESFRI Roadmap2 for a more sustainable future. EHRI has developed a set of controlled vocabularies that serves both as a retrieval and cataloguing tool for the multilingual and highly heterogeneous data of the EHRI portal. These vocabularies were partly implemented in the first phase of the project. In the current phase of EHRI the vocabularies are in the process of quality improvement improve and enrich the existing terms, add new terms, disambiguate and remove the mistakes (deduplication, merging, adding multilingual labels, consistency checks, multiple parent relations, etc.) and increase their coverage. In the EHRI portal the subject terms are currently not available for the public, as they are used only for retrieval purposes.

AbstractThe paper presents Intergraph, a graph-based visual analytics technical demonstrator for the exploration and study of content in historical document collections. The designed prototype is motivated by a practical use case on a corpus of circa 15.000 digitized resources about European integration since 1945. The corpus allowed generating a dynamic multilayer network which represents different kinds of named entities appearing and co-appearing in the collections. To our knowledge, Intergraph is one of the first interactive tools to visualize dynamic multilayer graphs for collections of digitized historical sources. Graph visualization and interaction methods have been designed based on user requirements for content exploration by non-technical users without a strong background in network science, and to compensate for common flaws with the annotation of named entities. Users work with self-selected subsets of the overall data by interacting with a scene of small graphs which can be added, altered and compared. This allows an interest-driven navigation in the corpus and the discovery of the interconnections of its entities across time.

The project will deliver training materials for the digital arts and humanities in different languages and make them available via an online e-learning platform. This report elaborates on the implementation of such a platform. It describes the main user scenarios, it collects user and technical requirements, defines the data model and functional specification and explores technical solutions. The report has been created within WP 4 Infrastructure Development with input from all partners, especially WP 2 (user requirements). As a first step, we performed desktop research on what kind of solutions and projects on portals for training materials exist and what kind of systems they are using. The second step was an evaluation of different tools. There are different evaluation methods and criteria for e-learning systems (e.g. Kurilovas & Dagiene 2009). We chose to start from user requirements and a mapping of the user requirements from WP2 to functionalities available in existing systems. Finally, we determined which solution would suit the requirements and other circumstances within the project best.

The DESIR project sets out to strengthen the sustainability of DARIAH and firmly establish it as a long-term leader and partner within arts and humanities communities. The project was designed to address six core infrastructural sustainability dimensions and one of these was dedicated to training and education, which is also one of the four pillars identified in the DARIAH Strategic Plan 2019-2026. In the framework of Work Package 7: Teaching, DESIR organised dedicated workshops in the six DARIAH accession countries (Czech Republic, Finland, Israel, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) to introduce them to the DARIAH infrastructure and related services, and to develop methodological research skills. The topic of each workshop was decided by accession countries representatives according to the training needs of the national communities of researchers in the (Digital) Humanities. Training topics varied greatly: on the one hand, some workshops had the objective to introduce participants to specific methodological research skills; on the other hand, a different approach was used, and some events focused on the infrastructural role of training and education. The workshops organised in the context of Work Package 7: Teaching are listed below:• CZECH REPUBLIC: “A series of fall tutorials 2019 organized by LINDAT/CLARIAHCZ, tutorial #3 on TEI Training”, November 28, 2019, Prague;• FINLAND: “Reuse & sustainability: Open Science and social sciences and humanities research infrastructures”, 23 October 2019, Helsinki;• ISRAEL: “Introduction to Text Encoding and Digital Editions”, 24 October 2019, Haifa;• SPAIN: “DESIR Workshop: Digital Tools, Shared Data, and Research Dissemination”, 3 July 2019, Madrid;• SWITZERLAND: “Sharing the Experience: Workflows for the Digital Humanities”, 5-6 December 2019, Neuchâtel;• UNITED KINGDOM: “Research Software Engineering for Digital Humanities: Role of Training in Sustaining Expertise”, 9 December, London.

3rd cycle; This webinar is dedicated to the phase of the research life cycle “Develop Research Questions”. It will dive into details of the topic of developing research questions with RIs, especially on finding, working with and contributing data to RI collections, using Virtual Research Environments, and tools. It will show successful examples of how Digital Humanities and eHeritage approaches, in cooperation with relevant Research Infrastructures, lead to innovative research methods and questions. It will also exemplify how to successfully involve the broader public in Digital Humanities and eHeritage research (citizen science). This webinar will cross-link to materials developed within PARTHENOS and by the PARTHENOS Cluster Partners and features “teasers” from several research infrastructures as well as an introduction of the Cultural Heritage Data Reuse Charter.

This document is the first version of the Data Management Plan (DMP) for data collected and created by DESIR. It describes the datasets generated during the course of the project, how the data will be produced and analysed. It details also how the data generated will be shared, disseminated and preserved.

To support the digital evolution within Social Sciences and Humanities research, it is necessary to stabilize knowledge on standards and research good practices. The goal of the Standardization Survival Kit (SSK), developed within the PARTHENOS project, is to accompany researchers along this route, giving access to standards and best practices in a meaningful way, by the mediation of research scenarios. A research scenario is a (digital) workflow practiced by researchers, that can be repeatedly applied to a task that will help to gain material or insights in view of a research question. These scenarios are at the core of the SSK, as they embed resources with contextual information and relevant examples on standardized processes and methods in a research context. The SSK is an open tool where users are able to publish new scenarios or adapt existing ones. These scenarios can be seen as a living memory of what should be the best research practices in a given community, made accessible and reusable for other researchers.

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal website aims to aggregate digitally available archival descriptions concerning the Holocaust. This portal is actually a meta-catalogue, or an information aggregator, whose biggest goal is to have up-to-date information by means of building sustainable data pipelines between EHRI and its content providers. Just like in similar archival information aggregators (e.g. Archives Portal Europe or Monasterium), the XML-based metadata standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) plays a key role. The article presents how EADs are imported into the portal, mainly thanks to the Open Archive Initiative protocols.