Sharing digital arts and humanities knowledge: DARIAH as an open space for dialogue

‘I realized that sharing information is one of the most important roles of a digital scholar’

(Irina Savinetskaya, CENDARI Research Fellow 2013, Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities)

1. Outline
The aim of this pre-conference workshop is to bring together arts and humanities researchers and research infrastructure professionals in an open space for dialogue. The development of coherent research infrastructures in the arts and humanities in Europe is currently in its infancy. With the launch of the Horizon 2020 work programme on European research infrastructures 1in December 2013, now is an ideal moment for researchers and infrastructure specialists to come together to shape the future of digitally-based research in the arts and humanities.

It is essential that the network of services offered by research infrastructures are developed by researchers, for researchers. Research infrastructure providers therefore need to ensure that they work closely with arts and humanities research communities to understand how they work, what challenges they face and offer solutions using appropriate digital technologies with a view to making their day-to-day research easier. Similarly, it is important that humanities researchers have a clear insight into the technological possibilities that research infrastructures could offer and understand the issues that research infrastructure specialists need to take into account e.g. security aspects, service level agreements, costs etc.

The controversy around research infrastructures in the humanities was one of the issues addressed during the Cologne Dialogue on Digital Humanities 2012 2. As a result, the organisers of this workshop would like to try using ‘Open Space Technology’3, which has already been successfully proven in the digital humanities context with THATCamp (The Technology and Humanities Camp 4. Open Space Technology is ‘effective in situations where a diverse group of people must deal with complex and potentially conflicting material in innovative and productive ways’ 5. This would therefore seem like a good methodology to use for this workshop.

The outcomes of the workshop are to increase understanding and encourage dialogue between arts and humanities researchers and research infrastructure professionals, with a view to jointly identifying concrete requirements for future developments.

The vision for DARIAH (Digital Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) 6 is to offer a portfolio of infrastructure-orientated activities centred around research communities across the broad spectrum of the arts and humanities. This pre-conference workshop at DH2014 is intended to be just one step in the process of making this happen and bridging the gap between humanities researchers and research infrastructure specialists.

2. Target audience
Researchers from across the arts and humanities, particularly those who use or are interested using digital methods in their research. Research Infrastructure specialists including librarians, archivists, curators, computer scientists, programmers, information scientists and research data managers.

3. Workshop schedule
We have invited an international ‘virtual’ Programme Committee who has agreed to assist the organisers in preparing this one-day workshop. At this stage, we anticipate that the workshop will use a blended approach of techniques, e.g. formal presentations, poster sessions and Open Space Technology, to help ensure maximum engagement of all participants. An outline schedule is included below as a basis for the Programme Committee to build on:

09.00-09.15 Welcome & Introduction

09.15-10.30 Dialogue I: Researchers’ interests

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-12:30 Dialogue II: Key note (15-20 min.) on the relation of research and infrastructure - an overview of the landscape with following discussion

12:30-13:30 Lunch break (and poster-session)

13:30-15:00 Dialogue III: Infrastructural offer

15.00-15.30 Coffee Break

15.30-16.30 Concluding Discussion

"Shaping the future of digital arts and humanities research in Europe”

4. Workshop Outcomes
During the workshop we will use collaborative tools, such as Twitter (Hashtag: #DARIAHdialogue), Etherpad and a wiki-space / blog to develop a collaboratively authored digital record of the workshop. After the event, this would be curated and published as an open access, community-reviewed publication sustainably archived in a trusted digital repository.

5. Number of participants
Based on several recent workshops conducted by DARIAH, we suggest a maximum number of 40 participants to allow for dialogue and close interaction.

6. Workshop organisers
Sally Chambers (DARIAH-EU)

Sally.Chambers@phil.uni-goettingen.de

00 49 551 39 20476

is a digital librarian, who leads the DARIAH-EU Coordination Office based in the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities, Germany. Before joining DARIAH-EU, Sally worked for The European Library, focusing on interoperability, metadata and technical project coordination. Her academic background is in literature, cultural studies and information services management.

Stefan Schmunk (DARIAH-DE)

schmunk@sub.uni-goettingen.de

00 49 551 39 - 20326

is a digital historian at the Goettingen State and University Library and currently working as project coordinator for DARIAH-DE and leading the cluster “Research Data Collections”. His main focus is on encouraging the research-oriented interaction and needs of digital academics and IT-specialists and enabling the methodical discourse in the field of digital history.

7. Programme Committee
The people who have agreed to participate in the workshop Programme Committee are:

Aurélien Berra is an Assistant Professor at Paris-Ouest University, where he teaches Rhetoric and Ancient Greek literature. He is also in charge of the seminar “Digital Humanities” at EHESS and involved in DARIAH, HASTEC and Hypothèses. His special interest in digital textual scholarship stems from his work as a classical philologist.

Arianna Betti is Professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of Amsterdam. After studying historical and systematic aspects of ideas such as axiom, truth and fact (Against facts, MIT Press, 2014), she is now trying to trace the development of ideas such as these with computational techniques.

Mirjam Blümm is a digital librarian at the Goettingen State and University Library and currently working as project coordinator for TextGrid and DARIAH-DE. Her main focus is on encouraging the discourse between digital humanities researchers, IT-specialists and information scientists. She is also active in education and teaching DH modules at Würzburg University.

Franz Fischer holds a position as research associate at the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH), University of Cologne and is currently coordinating the EU funded Marie Curie action “DiXiT – Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network”. He is a founding member of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE).

Emilano Degl’ Innocenti holds a Ph.D. in Antique, Medieval and Renaissance Studies and works in Italian research institute (SISMEL - Fondazione Ezio Franceschini) as Head of the Computing in the Humanities Department. He is involved in DARIAH-IT, coordinator of the Medieval Prototype for the CENDARI project and invited expert for COST Action IS1005, Medieval Europe - Medieval Cultures and Technological Resources.

Franco Niccolucci is the coordinator of ARIADNE, a research infrastructure for digital archaeology, at the VAST-LAB of PIN, Italy. A former professor at the University of Florence, he directed the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center in Cyprus. His research interests focus on digital archaeology and its semantic foundations.

Ruth Reiche holds an M.A. in Art Education, Art History and Philosophy (LMU München). In 2009 she started working on her PhD thesis about storytelling in multiscreen installation (advisors: Prof. Stemmrich - FU Berlin; Fabienne Liptay - UZH Zürich). Since 2011 she has been working as a research associate at TU Darmstadt in DARIAH-DE, focusing on digital research methods. She is particularly interested in Contemporary Art, Digital Art History and Data Visualization.

Eveline Wandl-Vogt is Senior Scientist (Austrian Academy of Sciences [AAS]) and Research Manager of European Projects, e.g. WG-Chair @ COST IS 1305, Co-Chair of the Virtual Competency Centre on eInfrastructure @ DARIAH-EU.
She is a data analyst, working on elexicography, geolinguistics, digital standards and encoding and has a strong practical expertise in DH and Interdisciplinary Humanities. She is currently working on building up the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) with her Colleagues at the AAS.

Lars Wieneke holds a PhD in Engineering from the Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany and joined the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE) in 2011 where he now works as a researcher in the Digital Humanities Lab. Lars is a work-package leader in the FP7-IST funded research project CUbRIK, a member of the NeDIMAH and DHBenelux steering committee and has been a co-chair of a Europeana task force on User-Generated Content.

References
1. ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/doc/call/h2020/common/1587756-04._european_research_infra_wp_2014- 2015_en.pdf

2. www.cceh.uni-koeln.de/events/CologneDialogue/Controversy5

3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology

4. thatcamp.org/

5. Owen, Harrison (2008). Open space technology: a user's guide. 3rd edition. San Franciso. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. (p15).

6. www.dariah.eu/