The PARTHENOS Training Suite: Empowering eHumanities and eHeritage Research(ers) with essential Knowledge and Skills

Brief Summary
In this long paper the main principles, insights, and results from the development of the PARTHENOS Training Suite will be presented to the international Digital Humanities community in order to stimulate the discussion of Digital Humanities pedagogy and to stipulate the further uptake of these resources.
PARTHENOS develops educational resources that focus on fundamental, interdisciplinary knowledge and skills that facilitate successful engagement and use of digital research infrastructures for digital humanities and cultural heritage scholarship in an increasingly complex, networked, and open environment. These resources are brought to the target groups and audiences in appropriate ways based on didactic and practical insights, using up-to-date means of communicating knowledge and information.

Background
Digital Research Infrastructures play an increasing role in the Humanities and in Cultural Heritage Studies (ESF 2011; Benardou, Champion, Dallas and Hughes (ed.) 2017). While some definitions of research infrastructures focus resources and tools provided, that is their “hard”, rather technical aspects, more and more their “soft” aspects, that is their function as networks of knowledge and people come into focus, with both aspects being in the service of aggregating resources to make us better connected and more informed (Edmond and Garnett 2017). Digital research infrastructures are relatively recent additions to the humanities and cultural heritage landscape; therefore, their transformative presence needs to be embedded in university curricula and beyond because the ongoing digital transformation of research affects not only (future) researchers, but also cultural heritage practitioners in the sense of lifelong learning. Those who use digital research infrastructures for their research and those who contribute to their development and their extension alike, need to acquire additional theoretical knowledge and practical skills to fully harvest the fruits of their resource-intensive development and sustenance and to make use of their potentials to advance research. This need for a broad implementation of data skills into curriculum frameworks and training for all disciplines was only recently underlined by the European Commission Expert Group on FAIR data (EU 2018).
Before the start of PARTHENOS, a cluster project that consists of important European eHumanities and eHeritage Research Infrastructures and institutions and is funded by the European Commission, eHumanities and eHeritage infrastructures already offered training events and contributed to the development, extension, and sustenance of platforms for online training materials or course overviews, e.g. #dariahteach or the DH Course Registry. However, many of these training materials and events are highly project specific or thematically or methodologically specialised and require prior knowledge that most potential new users often lack (Edmond et al. 2016). This knowledge gap not only prevents them from successfully engaging with the material, it often forms a barrier that prevents them from taking interest into infrastructural themes in the first place. PARTHENOS aimed to fill these gaps by developing educational resources that focus on fundamental, interdisciplinary knowledge and skills that facilitate successful engagement and use of digital research infrastructures for digital humanities and cultural heritage scholarship in an increasingly complex, networked, and open environment. These resources are brought to the target groups and audiences in appropriate ways based on didactic and practical insights, using up-to-date means of communicating knowledge and information (Spiecker et al. 2017, Edmond and Garnett 2017, Wuttke et al. 2019).

Developing PARTHENOS Training
The development of the cross-disciplinary PARTHENOS training materials is spearheaded by the PARTHENOS Training Team (lead by Trinity College Dublin, Dr Jennifer Edmond) with additional input from the User Requirements Team (lead by CLARIN, Steven Krauwer). Conforming to the results of the analysis of the user requirements carried out in the first phase of the project, PARTHENOS Training focuses on online-materials for self-study and for reuse by educators for teaching purposes in different contexts (synchronous and asynchronous) using the PARTHENOS Training Suite as its main carrier. Additionally, the training-portfolio encompasses (virtual) events to test the educational materials against users, such as the PARTHENOS eHumanities and eHeritage Webinar Series.
PARTHENOS Training develops on the basis of the wealth of knowledge inherent in the project through its project partners introductory, cross-disciplinary learning resources that address infrastructural metatopics and are suited to foster the skills and knowledge that empower and unleash the potentials of eHumanities and eHeritage research(ers). The focus is on knowledge transfer about the roles, functions, and potentials of eHumanities and eHeritage Research Infrastructures for researchers, practitioners, developers, data and computing centre staff, policy makers, and managers. During the first phase of PARTHENOS Training the focus was on more generic levels of information. The first modules were centred around the creation of general knowledge, skills, and abilities that foster the understanding what eHumanities and eHeritage Research Infrastructures are, how they can be of benefit for different communities, and what kind of knowledge and skills are needed to successfully work with them. After an intensive assessment exercise, the focus was shifted in the second phase to more specialized areas, especially highlighting how outputs and products of Research Infrastructures and particularly of PARTHENOS can help users to navigate successfully through the increasingly complex Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage research landscape. The modules created in the second phase address topics such as research data management, creating and assessing research impact, the use of community standards and ontologies, and how to develop research questions using Digital Humanities methods and tools from a broader Humanities and Cultural Heritage perspective. Additionally, all the materials of the PARTHENOS eHumanities and eHeritage Webinar Series (Drenth and Wuttke 2018) can be accessed via the PARTHENOS Training Suite for reuse.

Guiding Principles and Modes of Delivery
The educational resources produced by PARTHENOS address two levels of user needs: the ‘need to know about’ (awareness-raising) and the need to know how’ (skills building) and are presented online mainly via the PARTHENOS Training Suite Website, a WordPress-based eLearning platform. In contrast to print-based learning and teaching resources, the modules of the PARTHENOS Training Suite make use of up-to-date means of communicating knowledge and information, and technologies, allowing multimedia content and multimodal forms of acquisition and delivery of knowledge and skills by learners and teachers. Within the modules the range of materials consists of video-lectures, interviews, short (animated) explanatory clips, presentation slides, exercises and explanations of basic principles, case studies, collections of further links and reading suggestions, and brochures. The Training Suite consists of several modules that allow flexible access. The users are guided through the modules in a linear fashion for better orientation, but can also access specific points of interest via the side navigation menu. Through this they have full control over the learning process and can chose which materials they want to explore in more detail as well as different modes of mediation.
PARTHENOS provides its training materials as Open Educational Resources (OER). Thus, it takes up one of the foundational principles of the culture of the Digital Humanities that is based on sharing and reuse. It also adheres to the principles of co-creation during the development process, another principle of the Digital Humanities (“collaboration as creation”, Burdick et al. 2016, p. 84). There is an ongoing process of exchange with the PARTHENOS partners and beyond about the further development of the training materials. This intensive exchange aims to ensure the uptake of new developments in the ever-changing complex world of digital infrastructures and eResearch methods and tools in the Humanities and Cultural Heritage field. It ensures the direct integration of research communities into the development process (bottom-up approach) and enhances the innovation potential and quality.
PARTHENOS partners not only to develop materials, but also to facilitate their uptake, either by inclusion into other educational contexts (training modules devised by others, incorporation into in situ and virtual training events, and lately a try out at an HEI), but also by using our partners’ networks to spread the news about available new resources. For PARTHENOS training is an ideal means of communicating project outcomes and to reach its disciplinary and geographically diverse communities. It is thus closely connected to the project’s outreach and dissemination activities. For example, to extend the reach of the PARTHENOS Training materials, a short movie featuring two aliens who talk about standards (promoting the Standardization Survival Kit developed by PARTHENOS), taking a rather light stance to a seemingly difficult topic, and reflecting the linguistic diversity of the potential users by voices in different languages, has been developed. In this context, PARTHENOS has also launched in 2018 the highly successful “PARTHENOS eHumanities and eHeritage Webinar Series” (Drenth and Wuttke 2018). In this series of online seminars, international experts from PARTHENOS and beyond took the learners on a journey along the research life cycle, highlighting how using and contributing to eHumanities and eHeritage research infrastructures empowers research(ers) (Wuttke 2019).  

Outline and Proposal for a Long Paper
In this long paper the main principles, insights, and results from the development of the PARTHENOS Training Suite will be presented to the international Digital Humanities community in order to stimulate the discussion of Digital Humanities pedagogy and to stipulate the further uptake of these resources.     

Acknowledgements:
PARTHENOS Training is a cross PARTHENOS effort and includes input from external experts. We especially express our gratitude to past and present members of PARTHENOS Training that are not authors of this abstract: Elizabeth Burr, Stefanie Läpke, Rebecca Sierig (all University of Leipzig), Helen Goulis (Academy of Athens), Jenny Oltersdorf (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam).

Bibliography

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Edmond, J., Garnett, V., Burr, E., Läpke, S., Oltersdorf, J., Goulis, H. (2016).
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Spiecker, C., Oltersdorf, J., Wuttke, U., Edmond, J., Garnett, V., Läpke, S. (2017).
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https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2551475.

Wuttke, U. (2019). The “PARTHENOS eHumanities and eHeritage Webinar Series”: Webinars as a means to deliver successful research infrastructure training, in:
Liber Quarterly 29(1): 1-35. DOI:
http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10257.

Wuttke, U., Rothfritz, L., Edmond, J., Garnett, V., Uiterwaal, F., Annisius, M. (2019).
Final Report on Training and Education Activities (PARTHENOS D7.3), January 2019. DOI:
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