DARIAH Beyond Europe

DARIAH, the digital humanities infrastructure with origins and an organisational home in Europe, is nearing the completion of its implementation phase. The significant investment from the European Commission and member countries has yielded a robust set of technical and social infrastructures, ranging from working groups, various registries, pedagogical materials, and software to support diverse approaches to digital humanities scholarship. While the funding and leadership of DARIAH to date has come from countries in, or contiguous with, Europe, the needs that drive its technical and social development are widely shared within the international digital humanities community beyond Europe. Scholars on every continent would benefit from well-supported technical tools and platforms, directories for facilitating access to information and resources, and support for working groups.
The
DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop series, organised and financed under the umbrella of the DESIR project (“DARIAH ERIC Sustainability Refined,” 2017–2019, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program), convened three meetings between September 2018 and March 2019 in the United States and Australia. These workshops served as fora for cross-cultural exchange, and introduced many non-European DH scholars to DARIAH; each of the workshops included a significant delegation from various DARIAH bodies, together with a larger number of local presenters and participants. The local contexts for these workshops were significantly different in their embodiment of research infrastructures: on the one hand, in the U.S., a private research university (Stanford) and the
de facto national library (the Library of Congress), both in a country with a history of unsuccessful national-scale infrastructure efforts; and in Australia, a system which has invested substantially more in coordinated national research infrastructure in science and technology, but very little on a national scale in the humanities and arts. Europe is in many respects ahead of both host countries in terms of its research infrastructure ecosystem both at the national and pan-European levels.

The Stanford workshop had four main topics of focus: corpus management; text and image analysis; geohumanities; and music, theatre, and sound studies.  As the first of the workshops, the Stanford group also took the lead in proposing next steps toward exploring actionable “DARIAH beyond Europe” initiatives, including the beginnings of a blog shared among participants from all the workshops, extra-European use of DARIAH’s DH Course Registry, and non-European participation in DARIAH Working Groups.
The overall theme of the Library of Congress workshop was “Collections as Data,” building on a number of U.S.-based initiatives exploring how to enhance researcher engagement with digital collections through computationally-driven research.  In Washington, D.C., the knowledge exchange sessions focussed on digitised newspapers and text analysis, infrastructural challenges for public humanities, and the use of web-archives in DH research. As at Stanford, interconnecting with DARIAH Working Groups was of core interest to participants, and a new Working Group was proposed to explore global access and use of digitised historical newspapers.  A further important outcome was the agreement to explore collaboration between the U.S.-based “Collections as Data” initiatives and the Heritage Data Reuse Charter in Europe.
The third and final workshop in the series took place in March 2019 in Australia, hosted by the National Library of Australia in Canberra.  Convened by the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH), together with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and DARIAH, this event was co-located with the Academy’s second annual
Humanities, Arts and Culture Data Summit.  The first day of the event, targeted at research leadership and policy makers, was intended to explore new horizons for data-driven humanities and arts research, digital cultural collections and research infrastructure.  The two subsequent days focused on engaging with a wide variety of communities, including (digital) humanities researchers and cultural heritage professionals. Organised around a series of Knowledge Exchange Sessions, combined with research-led lightning talks, the participants spoke in detail about how big ideas can be implemented practically on the ground.  

This poster reflects on the key outcomes and future directions arising from these three workshops, and considers what it might look like for DARIAH to be adopted as a fundamental DH infrastructure in a complex variety of international, national, and regional contexts, with diverse funding models, resources, needs, and expectations. One major outcome of all workshops was the shared recognition that, in spite of extensive funding, planning, and goodwill, these workshops were not nearly global enough in their reach: most importantly they were not inclusive of the Global South.  Our new
DARIAH Beyond Europe community has a strong shared commitment to address this gap.