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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.

This paper is about data in the humanities. Most of my colleagues in literary and cultural studies would not necessarily speak of their objects of study as “data.” If you ask them what it is they are studying, they would rather speak of books, paintings and movies; of drama and crime fiction, of still lives and action painting; of German expressionist movies and romantic comedy. They would mention Denis Diderot or Toni Morrison, Chardin or Jackson Pollock, Fritz Lang or Diane Keaton. Maybe they would talk about what they are studying as texts, images, and sounds. But rarely would they consider their objects of study to be “data.” However, in the humanities just as in other areas of research, we are increasingly dealing with “data.” With digitization efforts in the private and public sectors going on around the world, more and more data relevant to our fields of study exists, and, if the data has been licensed appropriately, it is available for research. The digital humanities aim to raise to the challenge and realize the potential of this data for humanistic inquiry. As Christine Borgman has shown in her book on Scholarship in the Digital Age, this is as much a theoretical, methodological and social issue as it is a technical issue. Indeed, the existence of all this data raises a host of questions, some of which I would like to address here. For example: What is the relation between the data we have and our objects of study? – Does data replace books, paintings and movies? In what way can data be said to be representations of them? What difference does it make to analyze the digital representation or version of a novel or a painting instead of the printed book, the manuscript, or the original painting? What types of data are there in the humanities, and what difference does it make? – I will argue that one can distinguish two types of data, “big” data and “smart” data. What, then, does it mean to deal with big data, or smart data, in the humanities? What new ways of dealing with data do we need to adopt in the humanities? – How is big data and smart data being dealt with in the process of scholarly knowledge generation, that is when data is being created, enriched, analyzed and interpreted?

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.

In the light of new digital production and dissemination practices, the scholarly publishing system has seen significant and also disruptive changes, especially in STM (science, technology and medicine) and with regard to the predominant format “journal article.” The digital transformation also holds true for those disciplines that continue to rely on the scholarly monograph as a publication format and means for reputation building, namely the Humanities and the Social Sciences with a qualitative approach (HSS). In our paper we analyse the reasons why the monograph has not yet reached its full potential in the digital paradigm, especially in the uptake of Open Access and innovative publishing options. We highlight some of the principal underlying factors for this, and suggest how especially practices, now more widespread in HSS but arising from the Digital Humanities, could play a role in moving forward the rich digitality of the scholarly monograph. peerReviewed

The international meeting, Berlin 7: Open Access Reaching Diverse Communities, took place from December 2nd to 4th, 2009, in Paris. This seventh follow up of the 2003 Berlin conference highlighted the different pathways to Open Access that research communities are taking. The conference was conducted primarily in a round-table style and addressed all of the most debated issues in the Open Access area. The aim of this report is to offer a synthesis of the different topics and perspectives.

Open research data is one of the key areas in the expanding open scholarship movement. Scholarly journals and publishers find themselves at the heart of the shift towards openness, with recent years seeing an increase in the number of scholarly journals with data-sharing policies aiming to increase transparency and reproducibility of research. In this article we present two case studies which examine the experiences that two leading academic publishers, Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature, have had in rolling out data-sharing policies. We illustrate some of the considerations involved in providing consistent policies across journals of many disciplines, reflecting on successes and challenges.

AbstractThis article introduces the notion of cultural innovation, which requires adapting our approach to co-creation. The argument opens with a first conceptualization of cultural innovation as an additional and autonomous category of the complex processes of co-creation. The dimensions of cultural innovation are contrasted against other forms of innovation. In a second step, the article makes an unprecedented attempt in describing processes and outcomes of cultural innovation, while showing their operationalization in some empirical case studies. In the conclusion, the article considers policy implications resulting from the novel definition of cultural innovation as the outcome of complex processes that involve the reflection of knowledge flows across the social environment within communities of practices while fostering the inclusion of diversity in society. First and foremost, cultural innovation takes a critical stance against inequalities in the distribution of knowledge and builds innovation for improving the welfare of individuals and communities.

International audience; Pour alimenter le débat au sein de la communauté des sciences de l’information de la communication et accompagner l’émergence de la science ouverte, l’article présente les résultats d’une étude empirique sur les dispositifs numériques mis en place par et pour les chercheurs en SIC dans le domaine de la gestion des données de recherche. Quels sont les entrepôts thématiques et disciplinaires des SIC, et quels sont les services génériques d’accueil et de diffusion des données de recherche à disposition des SIC ? Après une analyse conceptuelle des données de recherche et des entrepôts, l’article présente les résultats d’une étude empirique à partir des répertoires Cat-OPIDoR et re3data, en particulier leurs contenus, métadonnées, dimensions disciplinaires et localisation géographique. La discussion porte sur trois aspects : la certification et la normalisation ; la question de la gestion, de l’archivage et/ou la diffusion des données ; et l’impact de la gestion des données sur la communauté des SIC. En guise de conclusion, l’article propose quelques recommandations pour le positionnement des SIC et quelques pistes pour des recherches futures.

International audience; This paper provides both an update concerning the setting up of the European DARIAH infrastructure and a series of strong action lines related to the development of a data centred strategy for the humanities in the coming years. In particular we tackle various aspect of data management: data hosting, the setting up of a DARIAH seal of approval, the establishment of a charter between cultural heritage institutions and scholars and finally a specific view on certification mechanisms for data.