Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities: DARIAH

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Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and
Humanities DARIAH

• Sheila Anderson and Tobias Blanke
• Kings College London
• Edinburgh, November 2008

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ESFRI
Aurora Borealis
HiPER
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Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)

• European activities are until now funded on a
  project basis and carried out as voluntary
  activities within a local context
• Stable, pan-European data infrastructures for the
  humanities hardly exist
• Increasing internationalisation of humanities
  research puts new requirements for such
  infrastructures

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CLARIN
SHARE
EROHS Not funded
DARIAH
CESSDA
ESS
DARIAH content domains
Peter Doorn, DANS
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Two AH Projects fundedCLARIN and DARIAH

• Funded through EC Framework 7
• CLARIN is committed to establish an integrated
  and interoperable research infrastructure of
  language resources and its technology.
• Build on the successful DAM-LR project
  virtualising collection access and securing it
  via Shibboleth
• Contact http//www.mpi.nl/clarin/

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UK Involvement Kings College London, University
of York, and University of Oxford

• Strategic WP Sheila Anderson Seth Denbo
• functional specifications and strategic vision
• Technical Reference Architecture WP Tobias
  Blanke Research Associate
• together with the Conceptual Modelling WP
  responsible for developing a virtual repository,
  middleware, services and toolkit work with ADS
  at York
• Communications and Liaison with Clarin Martin
  Wynne
• ensure complementarity between the two
  humanities project

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DARIAH Vision

• to facilitate long-term access to, and use of,
  all European humanities and cultural heritage
  digital information

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• Just like astronomers require a virtual
  observatory, researchers in the humanities need a
  digital infrastructure to study the sources that
  are until now hidden and often locked away in
  cultural heritage institutions. (). The
  Research Infrastructure (RI) proposed here would
  seek to take significant small steps towards
  achieving this grand vision for European
  humanities and cultural heritage information.

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Challenges

• Nature of Developments to date
• Project based, highly dispersed, little or no
  long term funding
• National environments
• organisational contexts, legal environments,
  legacy systems, ...
• Heterogeneous usage
• communities and their scholarly processes, data
  types, ...
• Creating network effects
• storage pools, semantic interoperability,
  seamless access

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DARIAH Concept
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(No Transcript)
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So far, so good?

• ESFRI Definition'The term e-Infrastructure is
  used to indicate the integrated ICT-based
  Research Infrastructure in Europe. The
  e-Infrastructure viewpoint allows to join and fit
  all interrelated infrastructures together and
  start think of them as a system and optimize
  not for each individual part, but for the whole.
  The prime goal of the e-Infrastructure may be to
  support ALL KINDS OF E-s. Also from
  traditionally less computer-oriented areas such
  as the social sciences, the humanities and
  biodiversity there is a strong trend towards mass
  deployment of ICT to manage the large variety of
  decentralized data sources and find novel
  approaches to traditional problems. Key
  components of the e-infrastructure are networking
  infrastructures, middleware and organization and
  various types of resources.'

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But where is the Researcher?

• ESFRI Definition'The term e-Infrastructure is
  used to indicate the integrated ICT-based
  Research Infrastructure in Europe. The
  e-Infrastructure viewpoint allows to join and fit
  all interrelated infrastructures together and
  start think of them as a system and optimize
  not for each individual part, but for the whole.
  The prime goal of the e-Infrastructure may be to
  support ALL KINDS OF E-s. Also from
  traditionally less computer-oriented areas such
  as the social sciences, the humanities and
  biodiversity there is a strong trend towards mass
  deployment of ICT to manage the large variety of
  decentralized data sources and find novel
  approaches to traditional problems. Key
  components of the e-infrastructure are networking
  infrastructures, middleware and organization and
  various types of resources.'

and the user by supporting the whole research
life cycle in a digital age
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Placing the Researcher at the Centre

• What kinds of data do researchers produce and
  use? They use things like

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From the AHDS archives ...
Museum of London Archaeological Archive New
Survey of London Life and Labor, 1929-1931
London College of Fashion The Woolmark Company
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From the AHDS archives ...
Museum of London Archaeological Archive New
Survey of London Life and Labor, 1929-1931
London College of Fashion The Woolmark Company
Can there ever be one infrastructure to work with
all these data items?
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Placing the Researcher at the Centre

• What do researchers do to work with their source
  data? They build things like

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Virtual Workbench
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Virtual Workbenches
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Virtual Vellum
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Data Services for Associated Motion capture User
Categories - CultureLab
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An architecture of participation

• People, communities, organisations, content,
  tools, services, methods..

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DARIAH Vision Revisited

• to facilitate long-term access to, and use of,
  all European humanities and cultural heritage
  digital information for the purposes of research

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For Further Information

• See www.dariah.eu
• Talk to Sheila, Seth or Tobias
• For CLARIN speak to Martin