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This article describes how virtual research environments (VREs) offer new opportunities for researchers to analyse open data and to obtain new insights for policy making. Although various VRE-related initiatives are under development, there is a lack of insight into how VREs support collaborative open data analysis by researchers and how this might be improved, ultimately leading to input for policy making to solve societal issues. This article clarifies in which ways VREs support researchers in open data analysis. Seven cases presenting different modes of researcher support for open data analysis were investigated and compared. Four types of support were identified: 1) ‘Figure it out yourself', 2) ‘Leading users by the hand', 3) ‘Training to provide the basics' and 4) ‘Learning from peers'. The author provides recommendations to improve the support of researchers' open data analysis and to subsequently obtain new insights for policy making to solve societal challenges.

International audience

Public and private organizations increasingly release their data to gain benefits such as transparency and economic growth. The use of these open data can be supported and stimulated by providing considerable metadata (data about the data), including discovery, contextual and detailed metadata. In this paper we argue that metadata are key enablers for the effective use of Linked Open Data (LOD). We illustrate the potential of metadata by 1) presenting an overview of advantages and disadvantages of metadata derived from literature, 2) presenting metadata requirements for LOD architectures derived from literature, workshops and a questionnaire, 3) describing a LOD metadata architecture that meets the requirements and 4) showing examples of the application of this architecture in the ENGAGE project. The paper shows that using metadata with the appropriate metadata architecture can yield considerable benefits for LOD publication and use, including improving find ability, accessibility, storing, preservation, analysing, comparing, reproducing, finding inconsistencies, correct interpretation, visualizing, linking data, assessing and ranking the quality of data and avoiding unnecessary duplication of data. The Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) can be used to build the metadata architecture and achieve the advantages.

The report “Selection of Research Data” contains general guidelines on how to determine what research data should be preserved for the long term and what data should not. These guidelines can be used by individual researchers or research groups, researchers who co-operate within a collaboratory, research institutes, university faculties and national or international organisations focusing on a specific scientific/scholarly discipline and bodies funding research. The checklist is also suitable for use by managers of archives, research repositories, and heritage institutions. This study shows the situation in the area of selecting research data, based on a survey of the literature, interviews with key players and the experience gained by DANS and the 3TU Data Centre. The main issues are considered. The most important reasons for preserving research data for the long term have been formulated. The checklist based on these can be used as a guide for creating guidelines for specific scientific/scholarly disciplines. The report also describes the various roles of people involved in selection. Attention is paid to the best moment in the digital life cycle of research data for selecting them.

In this chapter I will describe what the CLARIN infrastructure is and how it can be used, with a focus on the Low Countries (and especially the Netherlands) part of the CLARIN infrastructure. I aim to explain how a Humanities researcher can use the CLARIN infrastructure. I describe the basic functionality that CLARIN aims to offer, including searching for data and software, applying software to data, and storing data and software resulting from research.

This article explores the affordances and functionalities of the Dutch CLARIAH research infrastructure – and the integrated video annotation tool – for doing media historical research with digitised audiovisual sources from television archives. The growing importance of digital research infrastructures, archives and tools, has enticed media historians to rethink their research practices more and more in terms of methodological transparency, tool criticism and reflection. Moreover, also questions related to the heuristics and hermeneutics of our scholarly work need to be reconsidered. The article hence sketches the role of digital research infrastructures for the humanities (in the Netherlands), and the use of video annotation in media studies and other research domains. By doing so, the authors reflect on their own specific engagements with the CLARIAH infrastructure and its tools, both as media historians and co-developers. This dual position greatly determines the possibilities and constraints for the various modes of digital scholarship relevant to media history. To exemplify this, two short case studies – based on a pilot project ‘Me and Myself. Tracing First Person in Documentary History in AV-Collections’ (M&M) – show how the authors deployed video annotation to segment interpretative units of interest, rather than opting for units of analysis common in statistical analysis. The deliberate choice to abandon formal modes of moving image annotation and analysis ensued from a delicate interplay between the desired interpretative research goals, and the integration of tool criticism and reflection in the research design. The authors found that due to the formal and stylistic complexity of documentaries, also alternative, hermeneutic research strategies ought to be supported by digital infrastructures and its tools.

This report was produced in the context of the project Data Service Infrastructure for the Social Sciences and Humanities (DASISH) work package 4.3 Convergence of Data Services. The goal has been to allow the selection and promotion of high-quality deposit services for researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) and to make suggestions for service improvements.