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In this paper we describe the development and evaluation of a visual analytics tool to support historical research. Historians continuously gather data related to their scholarly research from archival visits and background search. Organising and making sense of all this data can be challenging as many historians continue to rely on analog or basic digital tools. We built an integrated note-taking environment for historians which unifies a set of func-tionalities we identified as important for historical research including editing, tagging, searching, sharing and visualization. Our approach was to involve users from the initial stage of brainstorming and requirement analysis through to design, implementation and evaluation. We report on the process and results of our work, and conclude by reflecting on our own experience in conducting user-centered visual analytics design for digital humanities. International audience

CENDARI Archival Research Guide; This Archival Research Guide (ARG) aims to provide the user with a broad overview of the Archival Directory, a key component of the CENDARI Virtual Research Environment. The CENDARI Archival Directory consists of all available data in the AtoM application (“Access to Memory”) and data in the main repository, which is derived from international or national aggregators as well as national archives or other data providers. All data, whether manually inputted via the AtoM application or collected from institutions, form together the Archival Directory. In this guide the term “Archival Directory” refers only to the application AtoM and it hence will be used in this narrow sense. The term “Archival Directory AtoM” reinforces this definition. Unlike most of the other ARGs in CENDARI, this is not a thematic overview of a historical subject but instead a practical guide to the Archival Directory AtoM’s aims and how it was created and organised.This guide will present the methodology used by researchers associated with the CENDARI project when creating archival description and archival institution entries in CENDARI. It explains how material was selected to be entered into the Archival Directory AtoM, which institutions were considered as ‘hidden archives’ by the CENDARI team, what material was not included, the limitations of the project and the future of the Archival Directory AtoM. The CENDARI Archival Directory AtoM can be accessed both directly from the website and indirectly via the link provided in the Note-Taking Environment (NTE).

CENDARI Archival Research Guide; The subject “Science and Technology in the First World War” has so far been treated from the perspective on inventions and the development of new weapons, and often the focus has been on the topic of chemical warfare at the expense of other important dimensions. The approach of this Archival Research Guide, by contrast, comes from the social sciences and focuses on the establishment of relevant scientific, military and governmental bodies and on the personal networks established during the war. By examining these institutions and networks country by country, comparisons between them can be drawn, enabling further research with regard to the sociology of institutions. By pointing to the connections and channels of exchange between the nations and institutions under consideration, this approach opens up a transnational perspective and supports the paradoxal insight that transnational ties can dissolve national obstacles while simultaneously strengthening the nation-states themselves. On the individual level, the ARG takes the role of intellectuals into account, for whom scientific objectivity / neutrality and patriotic commitment seemed to have been no contradiction. It is remarkable that the First World War led to the establishment of several institutions aiming at funding science through the state, most notably in the case of France (CNRS), the U.S. (NACA/NASA) and Russia (KEPS).

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades has become ever more collaborative, distributed and data-intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organisation, analysis and presentation of research results of individual projects. However, the provision of e-infrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access and re-use has lagged behind. This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE: the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This EU-funded network has developed an e-infrastructure that enables data providers to register and provide access to their resources (datasets, collections) through the ARIADNE data portal, facilitating discovery, access and other services across the integrated resources. This article describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realise. The results of the ARIADNE surveys on users' expectations and requirements are also presented. The main section of the article describes the architecture of the e-infrastructure, core services (data registration, discovery and access) and various other extant or experimental services. The on-going evaluation of the data integration and services is also discussed. Finally, the article summarises lessons learned, and outlines the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in sharing data through ARIADNE. International audience

Over the course of its four year project timeline, the CENDARI project has collected archival descriptions and metadata in various formats from a broad range of cultural heritage institutions. These data were drawn together in a single repository and are being stored there. The repository contains curated data which has been manually established by the CENDARI team as well as data acquired from small, ‘hidden’ archives in spreadsheet format or from big aggregators with advanced data exchange tools in place. While the acquisition and curation of heterogeneous data in a single repository presents a technical challenge in itself, the ingestion of data into the CENDARI repository also opens up the possibility to process and index them through data extraction, entity recognition, semantic enhancement and other transformations. In this way the CENDARI project was able to act as a bridge between cultural heritage institutions and historical researchers, insofar as it drew together holdings from a broad range of institutions and enabled the browsing of this heterogeneous content within a single search space. This paper describes a broad range of ways in which the CENDARI project acquired data from cultural heritage institutions as well as the necessary technical background. In exemplifying diverse data creation or acquisition strategies, multiple formats and technical solutions, assets and drawbacks of a repository, this “White Book” aims at providing guidance and advice as well as best practices for archivists and cultural heritage institutions collaborating or planning to collaborate with infrastructure projects.

CENDARI (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure) is a research infrastructure project aimed at integrating digital archives and resources for research on medieval and modern European history.The project brings together information and computer scientists with historians and existing historical research infrastructures (archives, libraries, other digital projects) to improve conditions for digital historical scholarship. CENDARIhas engaged in extensive networking with the archives and libraries of Europe, especially those in Eastern Europe.CENDARI is a 4-year, European-Commission-funded project led by Trinity College Dublin, in partnership with 14 institutions across 8 countries. International audience

This paper presents the work carried out within the EU Cendari project to provide an appropriate customisation of the EAG format that would fulfil the expectations of researchers in contemporary and medieval history describing where they could find collections and documents of specific interests. After describing the general data landscape that we have to deal with in the Cendari project, we specifically address the data entry and acquisition scenario to identify how this impacts on the actual data structures to be handled. We then present how we implemented such constraints by means of a full TEI/ODD specification of EAG and point out the main changes we made, which we think could also contribute to the further evolution of the EAG setting at large. We end up providing a wider picture of what we think could be the future of archival formats (EAG, EAD, EAC) if we want them to be more coherent and more sustainable at the service of both archives and researchers. International audience

The CENDARI infrastructure is a research-supporting platform designed to provide tools for transnational historical research, focusing on two topics: medieval culture and World War I. It exposes to the end users modern Web-based tools relying on a sophisticated infrastructure to collect, enrich, annotate, and search through large document corpora. Supporting researchers in their daily work is a novel concern for infrastructures. We describe how we gathered requirements through multiple methods to understand historians' needs and derive an abstract workflow to support them. We then outline the tools that we have built, tying their technical descriptions to the user requirements. The main tools are the note-taking environment and its faceted search capabilities; the data integration platform including the Data API, supporting semantic enrichment through entity recognition; and the environment supporting the software development processes throughout the project to keep both technical partners and researchers in the loop. The outcomes are technical together with new resources developed and gathered, and the research workflow that has been described and documented. International audience

One of the funded project proposals under DARIAH’s Open Humanities call 2015 was “Open History: Sustainable digital publishing of archival catalogues of twentieth-century history archives”. Based on the experiences of the Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), the main goal of the “Open History” project was to enhance the dialogue between (meta-)data providers and research infrastructures. Integrating archival descriptions – when they were already available – held at a wide variety of twentieth-century history archives (from classic archives to memorial sites, libraries and private archives) into research infrastructures has proven to be a major challenge, which could not be done without some degree of limited to extensive pre-processing or other preparatory work. The “Open History” project organized two workshops and developed two tools: an easily accessible and general article on why the practice of standardization and sharing is important and how this can be achieved; and a model which provides checklists for self-analyses of archival institutions. The text that follows is the article we have developed. It intentionally remains at a general level, without much jargon, so that it can be easily read by those who are non-archivists or non-IT. Hence, we hope it will be easy to understand for both those who are describing the sources at various archives (with or without IT or archival sciences degrees), as well as decision-makers (directors and advisory boards) who wish to understand the benefits of investing in standardization and sharing of data. It is important to note is that this text is a first step, not a static, final result. Not all aspects about standardization and publication of (meta-)data are discussed, nor are updates or feedback mechanisms for annotations and comments discussed. The idea is that this text can be used in full or in part and that it will include further chapters and section updates as time goes by and as other communities begin using it. Some archives will read through much of these and see confirmation of what they have already been implementing; others – especially the smaller institutions, such as private memory institutions – will find this a low-key and hands-on introduction to help them in their efforts. International audience