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TRAME is a research infrastructure for medieval manuscripts. The TRAME engine scans a set of sources for searched terms and retrieves links to a wide range of possible information, from simple reference, to detailed manuscript record, to full text transcriptions. Currently, it is possible to perform queries by: free-text, shelfmark, author, title, date, copyst or incipit, on more than 80 selected scholarly digital resources across EU and USA. Since 2014 September 1st, TRAME has entered a new phase and the current work is focused on: extending the meta-search approach to other web resources, leveraging the users interaction to define an ontology for medieval manuscripts, re-designing the front-end towards a new UX approach.

Abstract‘Social and Cultural Innovation’ is a syntagma that is receiving increased usage among researchers since it was the title chosen by the European Strategy Forum Research Infrastructures for the working group that deals with research infrastructures primarily connected with Social Sciences and the Humanities. Innovation refers to the creation of new products and services by bringing a new idea to the market. Economic growth turns on infrastructures, which provide access to services and knowledge, e.g. by overcoming the digital divide. The current migrant and refugee crisis has made it clear with extraordinary effectiveness that a most urgent objective is to work out policies of social and cultural innovation to the advantage of new citizens – policies that will make them feel welcome in full dignity.

This paper analyses the results of the technical and scientific work in the DARIAH preparatory phase, a European infrastructure for digital arts and humanities. We were looking for an infrastructure model that would allow for the integration of services built around communities. To this end, DARIAH will be developed as a social marketplace for services. The paper presents the design decision we made and our proof-of-concept demonstrators and experiments.

Narrative is emerging as a notion that may enable overcoming the limitations of the discovery functionality (only ranked lists of objects) offered by information systems to their users. We present preliminary results on modelling narratives by means of formal ontology, by introducing a conceptualization of narratives and a mathematical expression of it. Our conceptualization tries to capture fundamental notions of narratives as defined in narratology, such as fabula, narration and plot. A validation of the conceptualization and of its mathematical specification is ongoing, based on the Semantic Web standards and on the CIDOC CRM ISO standard ontology.

Thanks to the impressive research results produced in the last decade, digital technologies are now mature for producing high-quality digital replicas of Cultural Heritage (CH) artifacts. At the same time, CH practitioners and scholars have also access to a number of technologies that allow distributing and presenting those models to everybody and everywhere by means of a number of communication platforms. The goal of this chapter is to present some recent technologies for supporting the visualization of complex models, by focusing on the requirements of interactive manipulation and visualization of 3D models on the web and on mobile platforms. The section will present some recent experiences where high-quality 3D models have been used in CH research, restoration and conservation. Some open issues in this domain will also be presented and discussed.

Research assessment reform is crucial for the social sustainability of research infrastructures (RIs): RIs can only thrive in the long term if the researchers who contribute to their development and growth receive academic credit for the kind of work they do in and around research infrastructures. To put it bluntly, research infrastructures have a vested interest in supporting the reform of research assessment. But, conversely, ongoing attempts to reform research assessment can also benefit from the work of research infrastructures because RIs have a great deal of experience creating and maintaining public services for producing, curating and harvesting both traditional and non-traditional academic outputs. The goal of this paper is to outline DARIAH’s position on the importance of research assessment reform for thematic RIs and the importance of thematic RIs for research assessment reform at the European level.

Online publishing of almost every type of 3D data has become a quasi-standard routine. Nevertheless, the integration in a web page of a single 3D model, or of a predefined restricted set of models, raises different issues compared to an efficient and effective integration of thousands of them in an online repository. In this case it is mandatory to have an automatized pipeline to prepare and homogenize the dataset. The pipeline should be able to automatically wrap 3D data in all conditions, and display every single model with the best scene setup without any (or with a minimal) interaction by the database maintainers. This paper, retracing the steps of a recent real application case, aims at showing all the faced issues (and the adopted solutions) to publish a large and heterogeneous three-dimensional dataset in a web specialized repository. We want to introduce a valid and reusable strategy, starting from the description of the pipeline adopted for data pre-processing and moving to the choices made in the 3D viewer implementation. The paper concludes with a discussion on the actual state of the integration of 3D data with the other multimedia informative layers.

Within the DARIAH research infrastructure the need to collect, disseminate and monitor the contributions offered to the infrastructure has always been present. Work package 5 of the DARIAH Humanities at Scale (HaS) project has explored and described the activities and structure required to sustain these needs, resulting in the DARIAH contributions concept and procedure including a supporting online tool.ContributionsThe contributions to the DARIAH infrastructure consist either of services, being repeatable actions, or activities, which have a more unique/ oneBtime character. They are collected for several reasons. First of all, dissemination to the Arts & Humanities (A&H) community; contributions offered to the infrastructure need to be visible to the users within the community, so they can be found and used. Secondly the compatibility of the contributions to the infrastructure; how compatible are the contributions to the infrastructure, how easily can they be (re)used and/or combined with other services and last but not least monitoring of the variety and maturity of contributions as it is essential for the strategic planning and future development of the infrastructure.SpecificationsThe Contrib tool implements a registry of contributions with supports a workflow of (self)-assessing and reviewing contributions.The specifications of the contribution data and the workflow steps can be found in this report.

Greek and Roman marble artworks have been deeply studied from a typological and stylistic point of view, while there is still a limited knowledge on the pigments, dyes, binders and technical expedients used by Roman artists. In a renewed scientific interest towards the ancient polychromy (colour and gilding), a digital methodological and multidisciplinary approach can provide valuable information to better investigate and understand this fundamental aspect and to get a complete sense on Greek and Roman marble artworks. Following this research direction, the paper proposes a systematic methodological process defined to detect, document and visualize the preserved (and in some cases the digital reconstructed) original colour and gilding on Roman marble sarcophagi (II-IV century AD). The process defines a working pipeline that, starting from the selection of the artefact to study, proposes a set of investigation steps to improve our knowledge of its original painting. These steps include the direct virtual inspection, the archaeological and historical research, the on-site scientific investigation by multispectral imaging, spectroscopic and elemental analysis (eventually supported by micro-invasive techniques performed in laboratory), the accurate polychrome surface acquisition by colour calibrated 2D images. All the data produced are integrated with a high-resolution 3D model to support enhanced analysis and comparison and to create a digital 3D polychrome reconstruction by virtual painting. Finally, all those data are also made accessible on the web by using a cutting edge platform for visual media publication and interactive 3D visualization. This systematic and multidisciplinary process was tested on the so-called 'Annona sarcophagus' (Museo Nazionale Romano - Palazzo Massimo, inv. no. 40799).