DARIAH kick-off at Digital Archiving and Network Services (DANS)
Higher yields of research budgets in the arts and humanities by efficiently exchanging data, views and research tools within the European Research Space. Those are the expected benefits of the European project Preparing DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) that will be set in motion following a meeting in The Hague (The Netherlands) on Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 October.
'By storing them and keeping them available in a sustainable way, scholarly research data can be used many more times than just once, and for far more purposes. That’s an advantage. This project however, will considerably multiply that advantage, by enabling such reuse and communication throughout Europe’, says Peter Doorn, director of the Dutch Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), who is one of the founders of the project.
With the help of DARIAH, researchers will in the near future have access from their own desktops to a world of data, yielded by many researchers and research institutes all over Europe.
Together with three partners in Germany, France and the United Kingdom, DANS designed the first plans for the European approach. Other partners also acknowledged the huge possibilities of a European infrastructure for research data. The number of organisations involved expanded rapidly. At the moment of take off, next week, there will be fourteen partners in ten European countries:
A telescope for the humanities
Recently, the European Union granted a subsidy of € 2,5 million, to enable partners to develop a detailed and feasible plan over the next two years. It is the resulting project, ‘Preparing DARIAH’, that will be officially kicked off in the meeting to be held on the 27th and 28th of October. The annual budget of the DARIAH-project as a whole is expected to be 6 million euros. For the first time, the humanities are treated in the same way as astronomers or particle physicists, who are, of course, more used to building large research facilities such as telescopes or particle accelerators.
The benefits of the DARIAH project do not lie solely in the preservation, exchange and reuse of research data. By facilitating collaboration between researchers on the European level and offering assistance with preservation processes, the project will also increase the quality of data. Expertise will be shared, standards and best practices will be exchanged, and guidelines regarding the approach to and use of data will be made available, all by means of the infrastructure that DARIAH will produce. Furthermore, by enabling this kind of preservation and exchange, new types of research are being brought within reach, such as quantitative textual research of ancient manuscripts, historical studies of world inequality in development and dispersion of archaeological sites across Europe.
In the field of research methods and analysis tools, a considerable yield is expected from DARIAH as well. DARIAH will not only facilitate the development of new methods and tools, but will also make it possible to exchange these tools and make them available swiftly and easily, so as to have researchers in all participating countries share in the resulting profits.
