Digital Research Infrastructure for
the Arts and Humanities: DARIAH
Sheila Anderson and Tobias Blanke
King’s College London
Edinburgh, November 2008
ESFRI
Aurora Borealis
HiPER
www.dariah.eu
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
www.dariah.eu
CLARIN
SHARE
EROHS
Not funded
CESSDA
ESS
DARIAH
DARIAH
content domains
Peter Doorn, DANS
www.dariah.eu
Two A&H Projects funded:CLARIN 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/
www.dariah.eu
UK Involvement: King’s 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
www.dariah.eu
DARIAH Vision
to facilitate long-term access to, and use of, all
European humanities and cultural heritage
digital information
www.dariah.eu
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.
www.dariah.eu
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
www.dariah.eu
DARIAH Concept
www.dariah.eu
www.dariah.eu
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 eInfrastructure 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.'
www.dariah.eu
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 eInfrastructure 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
www.dariah.eu
Placing the Researcher at the Centre
What kinds of data do researchers produce and use?
They use things like …
www.dariah.eu
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
www.dariah.eu
From the AHDS archives ...
Museum of London
Archaeological Archive
New Survey of London Life
and Labor, 1929-1931
Can there ever be one infrastructure
to work
London College
of with
Fashion: The Woolmark
all these data items?
Company
www.dariah.eu
Placing the Researcher at the Centre
What do researchers do to work with their source data?
They build things like …
www.dariah.eu
Virtual Workbench
www.dariah.eu
Virtual Workbenches
www.dariah.eu
Virtual Vellum
www.dariah.eu
Data Services for Associated Motion capture User
Categories - CultureLab
www.dariah.eu
An architecture of participation
People, communities,
organisations, content, tools,
services, methods……..
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
www.dariah.eu
For Further Information
• See www.dariah.eu
• Talk to Sheila, Seth or Tobias
• For CLARIN speak to Martin
www.dariah.eu