DARIAH - Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities

Projects Magazine, a leading publication on European science, technology and innovation, has recently published an article about DARIAH. The article features an interview with DARIAH project coordinator Peter Doorn in which he discusses the goals of DARIAH and its importance for the future of arts and humanities research. From the article:

"We are building an infrastructure to provide the basic facilities on which researchers can work. Physical institutions like libraries, archives and museums are, in a sense, arts laboratories. In the digital age we need a parallel to that, a virtual laboratory for humanities research. That is what we are creating."

Download the complete article here

DARIAH Newsletter Issue 6 - Summer 2010

In this issue:

• DARIAH Workshop in Paris: The Governance of Digital Research Infrastructures
• Experts Forum on Scholarly Activity Process Modelling: Athens, June 10-11 2010
• A Glimpse of the MIRFOL Project
• ESF-COST Conference on Networked Hu-manities: Art History in the Web – Italy, 9-14 October 2010
• CARARE and Europeana: Making archae-ology and architectural heritage content available through Europeana
• Focus on DARIAH associate partners:
  • Swedish National Data Service
  • The Humanities Informatics Depart-ment in IMI-BAS (Bulgaria)

Download Newsletter in PDF Format

A new report from the European E-infrastructure Forum (EFF) discusses ESFRI project requirements for E-infrastructures. EEF members welcome feedback on this report  from all the stakeholders and specifically the ESFRI projects.

This extract explains the purpose and content of the report:

“The EEF is a forum for the Pan-European e-infrastructures providers in the areas of High Performance Computing, Networking, secure data-storage and services and the European Grid-infrastructure. The interest of the EEF in this work is to tailor our services to the ESFRI projects’ needs, to avoid parallel e-infrastructures being set up without connection to existing or planned investments and to have links established from the EEF to the ESFRI-projects to help the e-infrastructure providers and policy makers to provide the best services at the best conditions to the European flagship research facilities. The EEF has, through a series of meetings and a questionnaire, gathered a set of e-infrastructure requirements from the ESFRI projects. Some 28 ESFRI projects were consulted as part of the requirements gathering process. Based on the information received the EEF has made an initial analysis which is recorded in this report. The implications and opportunities for the European e-infrastructures have also been analysed and included in this report. The EFF sees this activity as a first iteration in an on-going dialog that is required between e-infrastructure and ESFRI representatives and foresees a number of steps that will continue this process.”

Expert Forum Website

As an essential step to develop a fuller understanding of conceptual issues and to validate substantive research findings the Digital Curation Unit (Athena Research Centre, Athens, Greece) is organizing an Expert's Forum (contact: experts.forum@dcu.gr) to be held on 10 and 11 June 2010 in Athens, involving a select group of leading researchers of scholarly information work and digital humanists. While it touches upon broader theoretical, methodological and technology issues, the forum will focus on receiving feedback, nurturing critical discussion and reaching consensus amongst participants on the empirical study and conceptual modeling work on scholarly information practices and requirements for scholarly e-infrastructure conducted by DCU as part of DARIAH. It will be structured in six two-hour sessions, each dealing with a particular question or set of questions relevant to the objectives of DARIAH process scoping (WP8.1) work, based on a combination of invited contributions and open discussion amongst participants.

The Experts Forum forms part of the work within the conceptual workpackage of DARIAH (WP8), based on a combination of scholarly information behaviour literature survey with qualitative research on how arts and humanities researchers interact with information. It contributes to the development of a process model of scholarly information work, and also feed into the specification of an object model for information resources and scholarly objects pertinent to humanities research, an important factor in determining digital infrastructure requirements for scholarship.
As part of process scoping work in DARIAH, interview-based, qualitative research was conducted on humanities researchers' actual information practices and opinions on digital information use. Its results concern questions regarding:

• the actual kinds of information work performed by mainstream and digital humanities researchers, as part of particular research activities, and their implications on the specification of digital repositories, services and tools for arts and humanities research; 
• the relationship between  research activities and particular kinds of information objects (including scholarly objects) for specific research fields; and,
• the relative importance of particular "scholarly primitives" for arts and humanities research and the way they are, or could be, supported by specific digital research methods, procedures, services and tools. 

Substantive research results were consolidated with findings from an extensive survey of prior studies on scholarly information behaviour in a conceptual model of scholarly information activity, which accounts for relationships between user requirements stemming from research information processes and relevant digital services and tools. 

Dates: Thursday, 10 June, Friday, 11 June 2010

Venue: Kostis Palamas Building, University of Athens, Akadimias 48 and Sina, http://old.uoa.gr/kkp/

Contact: experts.forum@dcu.gr