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International audience; Published in OA on RESSI (http://www.ressi.ch/) at the end of Octobre 2021. We present here highlights from an enquiry on the innovations in scholarly writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the H2020 project OPERAS-P. This article explores the theme of Open Research Data and its role in the emergence of new models of scholarly writing. We examine more closely the obstacles and fostering conditions to the publication of research data, both from a social and a technical perspective.

AbstractIn research and policies, the identification of trends as well as emerging topics and topics in decline is an important source of information for both academic and innovation management. Since at present policy analysis mostly employs qualitative research methods, the following article presents and assesses different approaches – trend analysis based on questionnaires, quantitative bibliometric surveys, the use of computer-linguistic approaches and machine learning and qualitative investigations. Against this backdrop, this article examines digital applications in cultural heritage and, in particular, built heritage via various investigative frameworks to identify topics of relevance and trendlines, mainly for European Union (EU)-based research and policies. Furthermore, this article exemplifies and assesses the specific opportunities and limitations of the different methodical approaches against the backdrop of data-driven vs. data-guided analytical frameworks. As its major findings, our study shows that both research and policies related to digital applications for cultural heritage are mainly driven by the availability of new technologies. Since policies focus on meta-topics such as digitisation, openness or automation, the research descriptors are more granular. In general, data-driven approaches are promising for identifying topics and trendlines and even predicting the development of near future trends. Conversely, qualitative approaches are able to answer “why” questions with regard to whether topics are emerging due to disruptive innovations or due to new terminologies or whether topics are becoming obsolete because they are common knowledge, as is the case for the term “internet”.

This article has been accepted for publication by EUP in the IJHAC: International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/ijhac); International audience; Since the first ESFRI roadmap in 2006, multiple humanities Research Infrastructures (RIs) have been set up all over the European continent, supporting archaeologists (ARIADNE), linguists (CLARIN-ERIC), Holocaust researchers (EHRI), cultural heritage specialists (IPERION-CH) and others. These examples only scratch the surface of the breadth of research communities that have benefited from close cooperation in the European Research Area.While each field developed discipline-specific services over the years, common themes can also be distinguished. All humanities RIs address, in varying degrees, questions around research data management, the use of standards and the desired interoperability of data across disciplinary boundaries.This article sheds light on how cluster project PARTHENOS developed pooled services and shared solutions for its audience of humanities researchers, RI managers and policymakers. In a time where the convergence of existing infrastructure is becoming ever more important – with the construction of a European Open Science Cloud as an audacious, ultimate goal – we hope that our experiences inform future work and provide inspiration on how to exploit synergies in interdisciplinary, transnational, scientific cooperation.

This article presents a study of the French-speaking digital humanities. It is based on the experience of two research engineers from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) who have been studying these issues for the last ten years. They conducted a survey at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS-Paris) which enabled them to draw up an overview of the transformation of the profession of humanities and social sciences research engineers in the context of the digital humanities. The Digit_Hum initiative, which they run in parallel with their respective activities at the ENS, also provided information for this overview thanks to its role as a space for discussion about the digital humanities along with training and structuring of this field at the ENS and the Université Paris Sciences & Lettres (PSL). Cet article est une réflexion sur les humanités numériques en contexte francophone. Elle s’appuie sur l'expérience de deux ingénieures du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique travaillant sur ces questions depuis une dizaine d'années. À travers l'enquête qu'elles ont menée à l'École normale supérieure (ENS-Paris), elles dressent un panorama de la transformation du métier d'ingénieur(e) en sciences humaines et sociales dans le contexte des humanités numériques. L'initiative Digit_Hum, qu'elles animent en parallèle de leurs activités respectives à l'École, nourrit également ce témoignage en constituant un espace de discussions, de formations et de structuration des humanités numériques au sein de l'ENS et de l’Université Paris Sciences & Lettres.

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.

AbstractHow can researchers identify suitable research data repositories for the deposit of their research data? Which repository matches best the technical and legal requirements of a specific research project? For this end and with a humanities perspective the Data Deposit Recommendation Service (DDRS) has been developed as a prototype. It not only serves as a functional service for selecting humanities research data repositories but it is particularly a technical demonstrator illustrating the potential of re-using an already existing infrastructure - in this case re3data - and the feasibility to set up this kind of service for other research disciplines. The documentation and the code of this project can be found in the DARIAH GitHub repository: https://dariah-eric.github.io/ddrs/.

Abstract Contemporary discourse points to the central role that heritage plays in the process of enabling groups of various cultural or ethnic background to strengthen their feeling of belonging and sharing in society. Safeguarding heritage is also valued highly in the priorities of the European Commission. As a result, there have been several long-term initiatives involving the digitisation, annotation and cataloguing of tangible cultural heritage in museums and collections. Specifically, for built heritage, a pressing challenge is that historical monuments such as buildings, temples, churches or city fortification infrastructures are hard to document due to their historic palimpsest; spatial transformations, actions of destruction, reuse of material, or continuous urban development that covers traces and changes the formal integrity and identity of a cultural heritage site. The ability to reason about a monument’s form is crucial for efficient documentation and cataloguing. This paper presents a 3D digitisation workflow through the involvement of reality capture technologies for the annotation and structure analysis of built heritage with the use of 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNNs) for classification purposes. The presented workflow contributes a new approach to the identification of a building’s architectural components (e.g., arch, dome) and to the study of the stylistic influences (e.g., Gothic, Byzantine) of building parts. In doing so this workflow can assist in tracking a building’s history, identifying its construction period and comparing it to other buildings of the same period. This process can contribute to educational and research activities, as well as facilitate the automated classification of datasets in digital repositories for scholarly research in digital humanities.

Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Recently, new forms of citizen participation in cultural heritage have emerged, producing a wealth of material spanning from visitors' experiential feedback on exhibitions and cultural artefacts, to digitally mediated interactions like the ones happening on social media platforms. Citizen curation is proposed in the context of the European project SPICE - Social Participation, Cohesion, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement - as a methodology for producing, collecting, interpreting, and archiving people's responses to cultural objects, with the aim of favouring the emergence of multiple, sometimes conflicting viewpoints, and motivating users and memory institutions to reflect upon them. We argue that citizen curation urges to rethink the nature of computational infrastructures supporting data management of memory institutions, bringing novel challenges that include issues of distribution, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, and rights management. To approach these issues, we survey relevant literature towards a distributed, Linked Data infrastructure, with a focus on identifying the roles and requirements involved in such an infrastructure. We show how existing research can contribute significantly in facing the challenges raised by citizen curation, and discuss challenges and opportunities from the socio-technical standpoint.

Ancient Manuscripts and Virtual Research Environments Lausanne, 10–11 September 2020 - Conference report

International audience; This paper presents an attempt to provide a generic named-entity recognition and disambiguation module (NERD) called entity-fishing as a stable online service that demonstrates the possible delivery of sustainable technical services within DARIAH, the European digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities. Deployed as part of the national infrastructure Huma-Num in France, this service provides an efficient state-of-the-art implementation coupled with standardised interfaces allowing an easy deployment on a variety of potential digital humanities contexts. The topics of accessibility and sustainability have been long discussed in the attempt of providing some best practices in the widely fragmented ecosystem of the DARIAH research infrastructure. The history of entity-fishing has been mentioned as an example of good practice: initially developed in the context of the FP9 CENDARI, the project was well received by the user community and continued to be further developed within the H2020 HIRMEOS project where several open access publishers have integrated the service to their collections of published monographs as a means to enhance retrieval and access.entity-fishing implements entity extraction as well as disambiguation against Wikipedia and Wikidata entries. The service is accessible through a REST API which allows easier and seamless integration, language independent and stable convention and a widely used service oriented architecture (SOA) design. Input and output data are carried out over a query data model with a defined structure providing flexibility to support the processing of partially annotated text or the repartition of text over several queries. The interface implements a variety of functionalities, like language recognition, sentence segmentation and modules for accessing and looking up concepts in the knowledge base. The API itself integrates more advanced contextual parametrisation or ranked outputs, allowing for the resilient integration in various possible use cases. The entity-fishing API has been used as a concrete use case3 to draft the experimental stand-off proposal, which has been submitted for integration into the TEI guidelines. The representation is also compliant with the Web Annotation Data Model (WADM).In this paper we aim at describing the functionalities of the service as a reference contribution to the subject of web-based NERD services. In order to cover all aspects, the architecture is structured to provide two complementary viewpoints. First, we discuss the system from the data angle, detailing the workflow from input to output and unpacking each building box in the processing flow. Secondly, with a more academic approach, we provide a transversal schema of the different components taking into account non-functional requirements in order to facilitate the discovery of bottlenecks, hotspots and weaknesses. The attempt here is to give a description of the tool and, at the same time, a technical software engineering analysis which will help the reader to understand our choice for the resources allocated in the infrastructure.Thanks to the work of million of volunteers, Wikipedia has reached today stability and completeness that leave no usable alternatives on the market (considering also the licence aspect). The launch of Wikidata in 2010 have completed the picture with a complementary language independent meta-model which is becoming the scientific reference for many disciplines. After providing an introduction to Wikipedia and Wikidata, we describe the knowledge base: the data organisation, the entity-fishing process to exploit it and the way it is built from nightly dumps using an offline process.We conclude the paper by presenting our solution for the service deployment: how and which the resources where allocated. The service has been in production since Q3 of 2017, and extensively used by the H2020 HIRMEOS partners during the integration with the publishing platforms. We believe we have strived to provide the best performances with the minimum amount of resources. Thanks to the Huma-num infrastructure we still have the possibility to scale up the infrastructure as needed, for example to support an increase of demand or temporary needs to process huge backlog of documents. On the long term, thanks to this sustainable environment, we are planning to keep delivering the service far beyond the end of the H2020 HIRMEOS project.