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The National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe (NI4OS Europe) project supports the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) by contributing to its portfolio of services, by involving national and regional research communities in the EOSC governance, by strengthening open science (OS) practices, and by promoting the FAIR principles (Macan et al., 2020; Garavelli et al., 2021) to help build the infrastructure and create a favourable environment for open and intensive scholarly communication.The main instrument in achieving this is the network of 15 national Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs) established in the partner countries as national-level coalitions of Open Science stakeholders that have a prominent role and interest in the EOSC. The concept of NOSCI has been developed in response to the specific traits and challenges in the targeted region, based on complex and multilayered analyses of stakeholders, policies, and local contexts (Toli et al., 2020). Inclusive by nature, NOSCIs connect stakeholders from across the research lifecycle at the national level and provide not only a testbed for the formulation of OS policies but also a forum for knowledge dissemination and sharing.Drawing on a secondary analysis of the abundant data collected and materials produced during the project, this presentation focuses on the challenges identified as the NOSCIs were built – from data collection in the context of landscaping (Kosanović & Ševkušić, 2019) and policy analysis, through concept development, to implementation, testing, and verification (use cases). It highlights the relationship between individual challenges and NOSCI elements that address these challenges.The challenges are largely owed to diversities within the region, most notably the varying levels of integration into European structures (of the 15 partner countries, eight are not EU members), linguistic diversity, different research governance systems, policy traditions, and available funding. The framework for NOSCI development, the so-called blueprint (Toli et al., 2020), was designed in full recognition of these diversities. It relies on three modular workflows (Toli et al., 2021) and gives maximum flexibility to countries or national initiatives while making sure that all locally specific aspects are addressed.We believe that the approach adopted by the NI4OS-Europe team could be applied in other highlydiversified environments, as has been demonstrated by the NI4OS-Europe use cases, thanks to the flexible mechanism of interaction between challenges and responses underlying the very concept of NOSCI. The results presented in this poster were subsequently published in: Ševkušić M, Toli E, Lenaki K, Kanavou K, Sifakaki E, Kosanović B, Papastamatiou I, Papadopoulou E. Building National Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs) in Southeast Europe: Supporting Research and Scholarly Communication. Publications. 2022; 10(4):42. [https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10040042] Interactive version: [https://open.ac.rs/index.php/ni4os-europe-pubmet2022-poster] Conference abstract: [https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_dais_13397] Conference abstract: [https://doi.org/10.15291/pubmet.3952]

A mainstream tendency for multimediality of information and exponential growth of data have promoted major changes in the academic paradigm, supporting the transition towards interdisciplinary research-based studies, which has affected the development of the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH). The paper aims at providing insights into the different activities implemented by the DH community in Latvia, which have contributed to the advancement of the field and stimulated the inclusion of digital research-related courses in the Latvian higher education curricula, reflecting on the establishment and implementation of the Master study programme in Digital Humanities at RTU considering it in its wider Latvian, pan-European, and global context.

Academic research about digital non-Latin script (hereafter: NLS) research data can pose a number of challenges just because the material is from a region where the Latin alphabet was not used. Not all of them are easy to spot. In this paper, I introduce two use cases to demonstrate different aspects of the complex tasks that may be related to NLS material. The first use case focuses on metadata standards used to describe NLS material. Taking the VRA Core 4 XML as example, I will show where we found limitations for NLS material and how we were able to overcome them by expanding the standard. In the second use case, I look at the research data itself. Although the full-text digitization of western newspapers from the 20th century usually is not problematic anymore, this is not the case for Chinese newspapers from the Republican era (1912–1949). A major obstacle here is the dense and complex layout of the pages, which prevents OCR solutions from getting to the character recognition part. In our approach, we are combining different manual and computational methods like crowdsourcing, pattern recognition, and neural networks to be able to process the material in a more efficient way. The two use cases illustrate that data standards or processing methods that are established and stable for Latin script material may not always be easily adopted to non-Latin script research data.Des recherches académiques sur les recherches de textes numériques qui ne sont pas en alphabet latin (désormais NLS) peuvent poser plusieurs défis, car le matériel vient d’une région où l’alphabet latin n’était pas utilisé. Ils ne sont pas tous faciles à trouver. Dans cet article, je vais présenter deux cas d’utilisation pour démontrer les différents aspects des tâches complexes qui pourraient être reliées au matériel NLS. Le premier cas d’utilisation focus sur les standards de métadonnées utilisés pour décrire le matériel NLS. En prenant comme exemple le VRA Core 4 XML, je montre où se trouvent les limitations pour le matériel NLS et comment nous sommes capables de les surmonter en augmentant les standards. Pour le deuxième cas d’utilisation, je regarde les données de recherches elles-mêmes. Même si la numérisation de textes complets de journaux occidentaux du 20e siècle n’est plus problématique, ce n’est pas le cas pour les journaux chinois de l’ère républicaine (1912-1949). Un obstacle majeur est la densité et la complexité de la mise en page, ce qui empêche les solutions OCR (reconnaissance optique de caractères) de se rendre à la partie de reconnaissance des caractères. Dans notre approche, nous avons combiné des méthodes manuelles et computationnelles différentes comme l’externalisation ouverte (crowdsourcing), la reconnaissance de motifs, et le réseau neuronal pour procéder au matériel de manière plus efficace. Les deux cas d’utilisations démontrent que les données standards ou les méthodes de traitement qui sont établies et stables pour le matériel en alphabet latin ne peuvent être utilisées facilement pour des données qui ne sont pas en alphabet latin. 

This talk outlines a vision for Common European Data Spaces, proposed by the European Commission, where FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) and FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) (De Smedt et al. 2020, Schwardmann 2020) can play a role in bringing together research infrastructures, data aggregators and other stakeholders working with curated objects in museums, herbaria, libraries and archives. The organisations and stakeholders involved represent a wide range of disciplines and data types including biodiversity, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, cultural history, digital storytelling, art conservation, and history of science among others (ICEDIG 2020, Ortolja-Baird and Nyhan 2021). The context and the history of the curated objects also span the natural sciences and cultural heritage domains (Nadim 2021, Weber 2021). Despite this heterogeneity, various common themes in the area of digital curation, open access, and data usage (Tasovac et al. 2020) appear where FDOs and Common European Data Spaces can be a useful venue for supporting the European Strategy for Data. In particular, FDOs, as an abstraction mechanism to structure and describe digital artefacts from a specific domain yet at the same time provide interoperability (De Smedt et al. 2020), can help realise the vision behind a common data space to “bring together relevant data infrastructures and governance frameworks in order to facilitate data pooling and sharing” (European Commission 2022:2). A May 2022 report on the challenges and opportunities of European Common Data Spaces highlights the following points: Open data holders have extensive experience in data publishing, metadata management, data quality, dataset discovery, data federation, as well as tried-and-tested standards (e.g. DCAT) and technologies. There seems to be very little knowledge/technology transfer from the open data community to the data spaces community, which is a missed opportunity. Data space implementations should not reinvent wheels that the open data community has already developed, tested, and used extensively. Whether the data is private, shared, or open, using data from multiple sources requires interoperability at several levels, from identifiers to vocabularies. The question of which data intermediaries will act as neutral agents to ensure interoperability is underexplored in the data space context. Public administrations, building on their experience of publishing open data, are best placed to take on such roles Open data holders have extensive experience in data publishing, metadata management, data quality, dataset discovery, data federation, as well as tried-and-tested standards (e.g. DCAT) and technologies. There seems to be very little knowledge/technology transfer from the open data community to the data spaces community, which is a missed opportunity. Data space implementations should not reinvent wheels that the open data community has already developed, tested, and used extensively. Whether the data is private, shared, or open, using data from multiple sources requires interoperability at several levels, from identifiers to vocabularies. The question of which data intermediaries will act as neutral agents to ensure interoperability is underexplored in the data space context. Public administrations, building on their experience of publishing open data, are best placed to take on such roles Building on previous conversations facilitated by DiSSCo, DARIAH, Europeana, and Archives Portal Europe Foundation, (Europeana Conference 2021, DARIAH Annual Event 2022), this talk will address the above points from the perspective of bringing together the domains of natural history museums, cultural heritage, and digital humanities. Within our collaboration, we have identified several common areas such as data discoverability, linking, and providing contextual information, which align with the goal of FDO implementation. DiSSCo and DARIAH as European infrastructures, on the one hand, and Europeana and Archives Portal as data aggregators, on the other hand, are involved in improving access to data and the researchers' capacity to work with heterogeneous data sources. One of the biggest shared challenges across the diverse workflows in the arts and humanities and natural history domains is that the data curation processes form a natural continuum between a range of different actors working either in cultural heritage institutions or in academia. In reality, these different layers of curation, enrichment and analysis are separated by legal, institutional, infrastructural and even funding silos (as in many countries, these institutions belong to different ministries, and fall under different legislative frameworks). How can this continuum, from a scholarly point of view, be supported within common data space and FDO framework? At the same time, implementing a common data space requires not just interoperability but stewardship and strategy for sharing resources (Keller 2021). The data infrastructure and FAIR related activities explored in our collaboration are of strategic importance to help Europe and the rest of the world deal with important societal issues. Therefore, bringing this collaboration within the context of FDO provides an ideal avenue to explore potential data, policy, and implementation matters, in order to address the two gaps outlined above for Common Data Spaces. Furthermore, the ideas expressed in Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage (with Europeana as the core stakeholder) and Green Deal Data Spaces need further clarification concerning implementation planning and most importantly, how multiple commons would work together. With DARIAH coming from the humanities and DiSSCo from the natural sciences side, such collaborations and synergy should align with the Common Data Spaces vision. The philosophy and ideas behind data and digital commons are not new (Fuchs 2020, Kashwan et al. 2021). However, it is crucial to contextualise the implementation strategy and benefits within data intensive, multidisciplinary research and FAIR principles. Given that curated objects are informational resources for the researchers, but can also provide contexts, and make visible the relationships between artefacts, people, publications, organisations, provenance, and events, it is important to think of them as much more than just records in a database. Additionally, FDOs as the digital representations of the curated objects have the potential of fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations (such as between biology, history, art or anthropology) and of providing a wider lens for understanding materiality and the role of data (Ribes 2019). As interdisciplinarity and data-driven foci are gaining traction via applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is vital to understand what FDO adoption and implementation can contribute to common data spaces. We believe FDOs can be a successful foundation for Common European Data Spaces because they can can connect multiple commons -- from Green Deal to Cultural Heritage -- in order to drive forward the vision for interdisciplinary collaboration.

In the last years, several scientific digital libraries (DLs) in digital humanities (DH) field have been developed following the Open Science principles. These DLs aim at sharing the research outcomes, in several cases as FAIR data, and at creating linked information spaces. In several cases, to reach these aims the Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data have been used. This paper presents how the current scientific DLs in the DH field can provide the creation of linked information spaces and navigational services that allow users to navigate them, using Semantic Web technologies to formally represent, search and browsing knowledge. To support the argument, we present our experience in developing a scientific DL supporting scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a knowledge base related to Medieval and Renaissance geographical works within the three years (2020-2023) Italian National research project IMAGO--Index Medii Aevi Geographiae Operum. In the presented case study, a linked information space was created to allow users to discover and navigate knowledge across multiple repositories, thanks to the extensive use of ontologies. In particular, the linked information spaces created within the IMAGO project make use of five different datasets, i.e. Wikidata, the MIRABILE digital archive, the Nuovo Soggettario thesaurus, Mapping Manuscript Migration knowledge base and the Pleiades gazetteer. The linking among different datasets allows to considerably enrich the knowledge collected in the IMAGO KB.

AbstractIn recent times, Digital Humanities (DH), together with the discoveries of Information and Communications Technology, have enabled the rediscovery and usability of cultural content with the support of various technologies. However, it was found that not everyone is able to access web platforms or visit cultural sites easily. In particular, the epidemiological Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the retrograde state of culture in terms of accessibility and usability, conditioned by the physical and web browsing limitations that for years weighed on people with disabilities. Therefore, it was decided to investigate how DH might support the cultural accessibility of people with disabilities. In particular, it was decided to carry out a systematic review of the cultural innovations of DH together with a survey on disability and supporting technologies in order to present how to improve the quality of the cultural experience of such a target. This study proceeded with the research and selection of literature on the subject of DH and disability, with the selection, analysis, and correlation of the scientific works included. The reference time frame includes the works produced between 2018 and 2022 consulted on main databases such as Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), screened using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses Statement.