International Expert Seminar
Building Communities in the Digital Arts and Humanities: Research
Practice and Research Infrastructures
24–26 November, e-Science Institute, Edinburgh
National collaborations:
eHumanities in Germany
Dr. Heike Neuroth
Max Planck Digital Library, eHumanities Consultant
Goettingen State & University Library, Head R&D
neuroth@sub.uni-goettingen.de
ToC
• Projects
– National
– International
• Activities
– eHumanities Institute / Center
– DFG Priority Programme
• Summary
Projects
• TextGrid - A Community Grid for the Arts and
Humanities [Federal Ministry of Education and Research
• eHum - National eHumanities Infrastructure project
[German Research Foundation, DFG]
• Dariah – Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and
Humanities (Sheila Anderson)
• Bamboo
(Chad Kainz )
TextGrid
www.TextGrid.de
• Establishment of a “Virtual Research Environment”
• Development of a Grid based eInfrastructure for
humanities
• TextGrid: a generic platform for scientific text data
processing
• Service Grid - Toolbox for collaborative work
– TextGrid Lab (Laboratory)
• Data Grid - Virtual archive(s) for research data curation
– TextGrid Rep (Repository)
TextGrid Lab
• Interactive tools (Eclipse-based)
• XML-Editor
• Research
• Graphical Editor
• Interfaces to dictionaries and reference material
• Streaming tools (Web Service-based)
• Collation
• Lemmatise
• Sort, tokenise, etc
• Open interfaces to enable other projects to plug in
TextGrid Rep
• Just at the beginning, at the moment “only” file system
• Globus-based data grid
• Formats: images, texts, just … etc. … any type of object
+ extensible metadata core elements
• TEI-based baseline encoding - enables semantic interoperability
between heterogeneous projects for research and reuse
• Within the WissGrid project (“Grid for Scholars”, BMBF,
4 Mio Euro/3 years, start probably spring 2009):
• Grid based data archives: Fedora/IRODS or Fedora/SRM
• Already in Goettingen: 220 TB storage for humanities including
tape replication
• Even closer interaction with scientific disciplines in all Germany
TextGrid Tasks
• Roadmap for community building (difficult!)
• Business/organizational model for sustainability
• Research infrastructure providing new functionality:
• new forms of collaboration and cooperation
• new, reliable standards like TEI
• easy exchange of data and research results
• new forms of linking up researchers, services,
infrastructure, and content
• …
Middleware/Architecture
• Globus-based grid infrastructure
with a specific middleware layer
and a service layer of specialised
functionalities for textual processing
• Service layer is conceived as an
open web service environment
• Eclipse-based interactive client as
workbench
• General public can access
published contents using a web
interface
• Openness and interoperability
through usage of standards (TEI
and the XML family, RDF, SOAP,
WSDL 2.0, GSI, WSRF, SAML,
LDAP, and BPEL)
National eHumanities Infrastructure
• Developing Germany’s eInfrastructure for the humanities
• Conceptualizing in 2008
– Analysis of over 30 initiatives, organizations, projects (e.g. Digital
Humanities, European Resource observatory for the Humanities
and Social Sciences, JISC e-Infrastructure-Programme 20062009 …)
• Goals and main objectives
– to explore the current provision of Germany’s eInfrastructure for
the humanities
– to help define its future development
National Project: eHum
• Overall objectives
– to create a strategy for the development of a research
infrastructure within the humanities in Germany
– to develop a roadmap for the building of collaboration and
partnerships between institutions and organizations for a
national e-Humanities infrastructure
• Specific objectives
– to analyze national and international merges in the field of eHumanities
– to gather information about current activities especially in Europe
and USA
– to creates overviews of such organizations to promote
collaboration and synergies at German level
Activities
eHumanities Institute / Center
• Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC) of Freie Univerisity
Berlin
http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/en/dhc/index.html
• Frankfurt: in future?
• Göttingen: eHumanities Center (GHC)
just in preparation, announcement probably spring 2009
Göttingen eHumanities Center
• Why?
– Göttingen Grid Resource Center (together with
medicine, computer science, particle physics,
humanities ..), Tier 2 Center of CERN
– Excellence University with a focus on humanities
(LichtenbergKolleg, fellow-ships)
so far only nine Excellence Universities in Germany
– Göttingen = „nucleus“ in Germany with many projects,
also cross-disciplinary (service/infrastructure)
–…
Göttingen eHumanities Center
• Members:
– Faculty of Law
– Faculty of Social Sciences
– Faculty of Economic Sciences
– Faculty of Humanities (director)
– Faculty of Theology
– State and University Library (director ex
officio)
Topics
• eResearch (new methods, new research
questions …)
• eServices (tools like text mining,
visualisation …)
• eInfrastructure (data curation, Grid …)
• Teaching, Education (MA, curricula …)
DFG Priority Programmes
• Digital Humanities : Research methods and
practices in the context of new infrastructures
• SPP 1442, just submitted
– about 12 Mio Euro for 6 years for about 50 projects
– Across all disciplines in humanities
• Goal: to stimulate the development of research
methods in the field of Digital Humanities in a
process complementary to the development of
infrastructure programs
Scientific objectives
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Reformulation of the established research patterns of the humanities
by using methods of Digital Humanities
Development of new research questions
Exploration of ‘risky’ empirical, corpus-based research methods
Addressing the challenge of new quantities of research data
Enabling synergy effects by bringing research methods from
different disciplines together which are working with the same
cultural objects
Co-evolution of research, services and infrastructure
Gap analysis of research methods across the heterogeneous
disciplines in humanities including services, tools, and infrastructure
Education and qualification of young scholars
Catching up with international developments in the Digital
Humanities to enable international cooperation and collaboration
…
Summary
• Human scholars are not easy & not really IT affine
• Difficult to encourage cooperation/collaboration across
disciplines (heterogenous data, formats, metadata …)
Change of culture/tradition?
• Sustainability? Who is paying after project end?
• Roles, responsibilities (tool developer, IT experts e.g. for
Grid, scholars, data curator, data host …)
• Not yet a tradition/workflow for curation of digital
research data
A lot to do …
TextGrid Summit, 21/22 of January 2009
http://www.textgrid.de/konferenzen/summit.html
Thank you
Dr. Heike Neuroth
Max Planck Digital Library, eHumanities Consultant
Goettingen State & University Library, Head R&D
neuroth@sub.uni-goettingen.de