• DARIAH EU
• 2018-2022close
• Other literature type close
• Hyper Article en Ligne - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société close
• DARIAH EU close

International audience; Navigating through the rich and dynamically evolving (Wouters et al., 2013) Digital Humanities (henceforth DH) landscape can be a time-consuming task and difficult to integrate into researchers' everyday routines. Yet primary goals of the DH paradigm such as 1. broadening and deepening the adoption of digital methods amongst humanities scholars and 2. facilitating the culture of reuse of already existing resources requires sufficient tools that make DH resources, methods and best practices visible, easily discoverable and freely accessible for researchers in all levels of expertise. The OpenMethods metablog aims to fulfil this need and provides a platform to bring together all formats of Open Access publications in different languages about methods in DH to spread the knowledge and raise peer recognition for them.

This article shows that metadata plays a central role in our society and concludes that through collaborative work, it is possible to pool solutions and to establish relationships of cooperation, both at the level of practical tool development and with regard to sharing and creating knowledge and know-how. ispartof: ABB: Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique - Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België vol:106 pages:135-144 status: published

International audience

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.

International audience

This article tackles the issue of integrating heterogeneous archival sources in one single data repository, namely the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal, whose aim is to support Holocaust research by providing online access to information about dispersed sources relating to the Holocaust (http://portal.ehri-project.eu). In this case, the problem at hand is to combine data coming from a network of archives in order to create an interoperable data space which can be used to search for, retrieve and disseminate content in the context of archival-based research. The scholarly purpose has specific consequences on our task. It assumes that the information made available to the researcher is as close as possible to the originating source in order to guarantee that the ensuing analysis can be deemed reliable. In the EHRI network of archives, as already observed in the case of the EU Cendari project, one cannot but face heterogeneity. The EHRI portal brings together descriptions from more than 1900 institutions. Each archive comes with a whole range of idiosyncrasies corresponding to the way it has been set up and evolved over time. Cataloging practices may also differ. Even the degree of digitization may range from the absence of a digital catalogue to the provision of a full-fledged online catalogue with all the necessary APIs for anyone to query and extract content. There is indeed a contrast here with the global endeavour at the international level to develop and promote standards for the description of archival content as a whole. Nonetheless, in a project like EHRI, standards should play a central role. They are necessary for many tasks related to the integration and exploitation of the aggregated content, namely: ● Being able to compare the content of the various sources, thus being able to develop quality-checking processes; ● Defining of an integrated repository infrastructure where the content of the various archival sources can be reliably hosted; ● Querying and re-using content in a seamless way; ● Deploying tools that have been developed independently of the specificities of the information sources, for instance in order to visualise or mine the resulting pool of information. The central aspect of the work described in this paper is the assessment of the role of the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) standard as the basis for achieving the tasks described above. We have worked out how we could develop a real strategy of defining specific customization of EAD that could be used at various stages of the process of integrating heterogeneous sources. While doing so, we have developed a methodology based on a specification and customization method inspired from the extensive experience of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) community. In the TEI framework, as we show in section 1, one has the possibility to model specific subsets or extensions of the TEI guidelines while maintaining both the technical (XML schemas) and editorial (documentation) content within a single framework. This work has led us quite far in anticipating that the method we have developed may be of a wider interest within similar environments, but also, as we believe, for the future maintenance of the EAD standard. Finally this work, successfully tested and implemented in the framework of EHRI [Riondet 2017], can be seen as part of the wider endeavour of European research infrastructures in the humanities such as CLARIN and DARIAH to provide support for researchers to integrate the use of standards in their scholarly practices. This is the reason why the general workflow studied here has been introduced as a use case in the umbrella infrastructure project PARTHENOS which aims, among other things, at disseminating information and resources about methodological and technical standards in the humanities.

International audience

Contemporary researchers are beginning to explore the possibilities and opportunities of digital humanities, but encounter major obstacles regarding (meta)data1. Many archival institutions lack the technology or the skills to process (meta)data, let alone share it. Different types of standards coexist and sometimes conflict with each other, while implementing the same standards often leads to slight differences which decrease interoperability. Storing, securing and making born-digital or digitized information available in a sustainable manner is a major challenge. Concepts such as metadata, Meta Information, Linked Open Data (LOD), Big Data… are on the rise, but their meaning and content — let alone their implications in terms of social impact — are seldom questioned. Archival institutions thus face a myriad of challenges when sharing (meta)data with the scientific community and when planning to preserve information for future generations while maintaining data authenticity2 . ispartof: Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België vol:106 pages:5-13 status: published