PART 1 – The Empirical Picture
4.5 DARIAH
Case Overview
What does the project do mainly? The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and
Humanities – DARIAH is a nascent project funded through the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).9 DARIAH is the collaborative effort of several data centres across Europe to plan and support a digital infrastructure to underpin research in the arts and humanities. The project is currently in development.
Motivations for setting it up: The DARIAH project is ambitious. It aims to provide an
infrastructure ‘for the entire field of arts and humanities and access to [the] cultural heritage of Europe’.10 It plans to create ‘a common understanding of the cultural diversity and its history in Europe’. The planned impacts are stated to be: the facilitation of comparative research over time periods, cultures, languages, or regions, and the triggering of novel research questions, that with traditional access to cultural heritage sources dispersed over a multitude of different sites and institutions could up to now not be approached. It also proposes to help enhance national infrastructures.’
Main goals of the project: To create an international digital infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.
Researchers will use DARIAH to:
• Find and use digital content from Europe and acquire tools to use and interpret it,
• Ensure the long-term preservation of data,
• Ensure that they work to accepted standards and follow best practice,
• Exchange ideas and knowledge of digital scholarship and seek advice, and
• Use DARIAH as a site of experimentation and innovation in collaboration with other scholars.
Archives, libraries, museums and other ‘repository agencies’ will use DARIAH to:
• Make their digital information known to a wider pan-European public,
• Ensure the long-term preservation of data,
• Get help with and advice on digitisation, curation and preservation of data,
• Use DARIAH as a site of data exploration and innovation in collaboration with other institutions.
Project maturity: Currently in a preparatory phase, called ‘Preparing DARIAH’, which started in September 2008. The aim of this stage of the project is to produce a blueprint for
construction of the DARIAH infrastructure.
Project funding: ‘Preparing DARIAH’ is funded by the EC. The preparatory phase is estimated to cost €6 million, with construction costing another €10 million. In order to secure the DARIAH project, annual funding of an estimated €6 million is required from national
governments and funding organisations. The aim is to create an infrastructure of at least 25 partners, requiring a funding commitment of €250,000 per partner, although it is envisaged that large countries will pay more and small ones less, depending on national priorities.
9 Number of informants: 1 totaling 120 minutes, several additional conversations.
10 ESFRI Roadmap Report (2006), p. 33.
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Organizational Structure
Size and composition: The organisational model for DARIAH is based on a three-tiered
structure. Firstly, at the local or thematic (domain) level, research and digitisation projects, resource centres, communities of practice and other subject coalitions will form the basis for DARIAH. Secondly, at the national level, DARIAH partners will provide services ensuring permanent access to digital resources. They will also contribute to stimulating best practices and standards. Finally, at the European level, DARIAH will have several key functions:
Enabling, coordinating and funding; Setting best practice and standards; Harvesting, harmonisation and combination of digital resources.
Governance: During the preparatory phase, DARIAH’s workflow will be divided between and led by six institutions across Europe, project managed by Data Archiving and Networked Services in the Netherlands.
Managing internal and external relations
Management of the project: The project currently has a workflow divided between six lead institutions, supported by a number of project partners. No management structure for the building phase of the project has been released at this stage.
Users: The main users will be on the one hand researchers, and on the other, archives, libraries, museums and other ‘repository agencies’. Researchers will find and use digital content from across Europe, deposit their own data (and work to common standards in so doing), use DARIAH to exchange knowledge and expertise and collaborate with other scholars.
Archives, libraries, museums and other ‘repository agencies’ will use DARIAH to widen access to their resources, ensure long-term data preservation, ensure best practice in the
digitisation, curation and preservation of data, and collaborate with other institutions.
User recruitment: The DARIAH project began with only 4 partners and has since increased to 14, representing 10 European countries and three types of partners: data centres, technical institutes, and humanities research partners. The project seems therefore to have united providers and users, with the latter group expressing a great deal of interest in digital applications. This growth was achieved ‘without much effort at all’: through speaking about DARIAH at conferences, sent around a letter to research funding organizations and that was it, more or less.
Drivers and barriers to adoption: A major early change to the project was the withdrawal of funding from the UK partner, the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) in April 2008. The AHDS had been funded by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Many institutions have committed to carrying on the work of the AHDS, but the withdrawal of this organisation from the UK’s national funding map was an unanticipated development for the DARIAH project, whose success depends on recruiting national support.
Challenges in interdisciplinary collaboration: The challenges to collaboration derive largely from disciplinary traditions: some areas of the Arts and Humanities remain the territory of the lone scholar, writing single-authored papers and attending occasional conferences. However, these scholars are increasingly turning to digital libraries and archives for research and teaching. Some areas of the Arts and Humanities are highly developed in terms of e-Research, with fields such as Archaeology and Linguistics at the forefront of digital technologies and collaborative working methods.
Collaboration with other organizations: DARIAH is currently collaborating with fellow ESFRI project CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu/), and with another large European infrastructure project, Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/), in order to ensure interoperability of their services.
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Technology
Main technologies, resources and services: overview of available resources, technologies and services: The general objective is to draft the technical reference architecture of DARIAH.
This architecture will consist of drafting engineering plans for the construction as well as small proof-of-concept prototypes for key enabling technologies. There are four major activities:
• A scoping study to identify already existing technologies that enable research infrastructures, survey the technological infrastructure at partner centres, and recommending technologies and standards for the primary building blocks of DARIAH.
• Building the technical reference architecture, demonstrating the validity of an approach that focuses on the development of an integrated middleware for supporting digital access to arts and humanities data and services in Europe through proof-of-concept studies
• Proposing a technical and functional roadmap which establishes a model and a methodology for a future DARIAH network, and defining tasks and roles of the partnering data centres and overarching DARIAH services.
• Construction of the proof-of-concept demonstrators, design studies that focus on specific problems of arts and humanities data, which need to be overcome to implement DARIAH as a research infrastructure. The developed system will integrate the access, archiving, and organization of electronic resources and will permit the harvesting of metadata.
Role of technology development: Technology development will occur in Work package 7 of the ‘Preparing DARIAH’ project. It is a crucial phase of the initial project to show that the technology can support the envisaged architecture.
Data sharing: DARIAH is unrestricted in terms of the types of resources it seeks to make part of the infrastructure. It is equally interested in texts, images, video, map data etc. It builds upon the work and resources of the original partners, all national data archiving centres.
Interoperability with similar or connecting infrastructures: The aim is to build an
infrastructure to ensure the interoperability of every collection within DARIAH, and to develop interoperability at an early stage with other EC projects such as CLARIN and Europeana (see above).
Contribution
Main contributions of project: The main contribution of DARIAH will be to facilitate the use of digital humanities and cultural heritage (DH&CH) information. Sharing of expertise, tools, and ICT methods for creation, curation, preservation, access and dissemination are key elements in the infrastructure.
Challenges: As with many of our case studies, one of the main challenges to the future of this project is the securing of sufficient future funding. In order to develop the main
infrastructure, the Preparing DARIAH project needs to secure national support from each of its partner institutions. As the project develops, further challenges, particularly relating to user recruitment, may well arise but are not foreseen at this stage.
Informants’ recommendations to policy makers
None stated.
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SWOT analysis
Table 4-9: DARIAH strengths and weaknesses
Strengths Weakness
Long-term funding
No. Initial phase is funded by the EC;
subsequent development is dependent on national funders becoming involved.
Sustainability The project is currently in a preparatory phase, with building due to commence in September 2010
No long term plans are available regarding sustainability.
User recruitment Strong interest in the project from prospective users.
Immaturity of the project means no results of user engagement are currently available
Involvement of current users
Prospective users are being integrated into the project from the outset.
As above, immaturity of project means no results available.
Organizational bedding
Yes, the project is well embedded, but… The variety of institutions involved in the project may be uncertain in future.
Institutionalized links
Some links being built with CLARIN and Europeana to ensure interoperability.
External use of software, tools
N/A N/A
Table 4-10: DARIAH opportunities and threats
Opportunities Threats
Yes, and through collaboration with other infrastructures is likely to stay ahead of these developments.
Competition with other
infrastructures or technologies
Scarcity of similar Humanities projects means that there is no fierce
competition, and more of a collaborative, integrated effort.
Currently working with other infrastructures but difficulties may arise if funding becomes scarcer
Security risks N/A N/A
Change of user communities and fields
Not known. Not known.
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