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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). CENDARI Archival Research Guide

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

This Archival Research Guide is dedicated to different forms of women’s participation in the war effort and associationism during the First World War: these two strands include active participation of women in battles; war relief associations, peace movements and women’s employment in the war industry. Contemporary historiography has recognized the crucial role that women played in sustaining the war effort by replacing the labour ofmen who were engaged on the front. On the other hand, the role of women was crucial in those years for a variety of reasons and occupations: in fact, their commitment to organize in soldier’s relief and peace associations represents an important part of the historiography of the WW1. Moreover, the First World War was the first major belligerent event in which women could wear a military uniform: while this didn’t happen in every country, it was probably a first step toward the inclusion of women in sectors which once were exclusively occupied by men. CENDARI Archival Research Guide

PurposeThis paper proposes a new perspective on the enormous and unresolved challenge to existing practices of publication and documentation posed by the outputs of digital research projects in the humanities, where much good work is being lost due to resource or technical challenges.Design/methodology/approachThe paper documents and analyses both the existing literature on promoting sustainability for the outputs of digital humanities projects and the innovative approach of a single large-scale project.FindingsThe findings of the research presented show that sustainability planning for large-scale research projects needs to consider data and technology but also community, communications and process knowledge simultaneously. In addition, it should focus not only on a project as a collection of tangible and intangible assets, but also on the potential user base for these assets and what these users consider valuable about them.Research limitations/implicationsThe conclusions of the paper have been formulated in the context of one specific project. As such, it may amplify the specificities of this project in its results.Practical implicationsAn approach to project sustainability following the recommendations outlined in this paper would include a number of uncommon features, such as a longer development horizon, wider perspective on project results, and an audit of tacit and explicit knowledge.Social ImplicationsThese results can ultimately preserve public investment in projects.Originality/valueThis paper supplements more reductive models for project sustainability with a more holistic approach that others may learn from in mapping and sustaining user value for their projects for the medium to long terms.

The Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) project has developed a new virtual environment for humanities research, reimagining the analogue landscape of research sources for medieval and modern history and humanities research infrastructure models for the digital age. To achieve this, the project has needed to be sensitive to the ways in which historical research practices in the 21st Century are distinct from those of earlier eras, harnessing the affordances of technology to reveal connections and support or refute hypotheses, enabling transnational approaches, and federating sources beyond the well-known and across the largely national organization paradigms that dominate within traditional knowledge infrastructures (libraries, archives and museums). This paper describes both the user-centered development methodology deployed by the project and the resulting technical architecture adopted to meet these challenging requirements. The resulting system is a robust ‘enquiry environment’ able to integrate a variety of data types and standards with bespoke tools for the curation, annotation, communication and validation of historical insight.

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

The CENDARI project committed in its original description of work to the production of a Business Plan (Deliverable 2.4), outlining a method statement for ensuring that the outputs of the CENDARI project would be available to future users. The project team decided to rename this deliverable the CENDARI “Sustainability Plan” and this document sets out the plan which is based upon a multidimensional conceptualisation of what CENDARI is and the value of its assets, as well as on the fundamental understanding of a digital project as useless if it does not ‘evolve and involve.’ This document presents not only the actions that have been and will continue to be taken by the CENDARI team, but also interrogates the topic of sustainability of research infrastructures