Jennifer Edmond and Frank Fischer will succeed Conny Kristel and Tobias Blanke as DARIAH Directors.
In its latest meeting the consortium’s General Assembly (GA) approved the nomination proposed by a selection committee earlier this month. The Chair of the GA, Jacques Dubucs, who was also part of the committee, described the selection process as inspiring and said, “we had many applications, and they were all ranging from very good to outstanding. Finally two exceptionally good candidates were picked”, Jacques concluded.
Growing importance of DARIAH
“I am thrilled to have been named to the Board of Directors of the DARIAH ERIC”, Jennifer Edmond commented on her appointment. “Throughout my long involvement with the organisation I have been continually impressed not only by the vibrancy of the community but also by the importance of the work it does. As technology becomes more and more a part of not just science policy but also lived experience, we will only see the importance of DARIAH grow. I look forward to being a part of this development over the coming years, and to helping DARIAH to extend its activities to support an ever widening circle of scholarship.”
Distributing technical know-how among digital humanists
Frank Fischer stressed the importance of DARIAH as a technical infrastructure, and also emphasized the community aspect of the DARIAH-ERIC: “I’m very much looking forward to working with my colleagues at DARIAH-EU, which is not only a technical infrastructure, but also a social one. Distributing practical know-how among present and future digital humanists is at the core of DARIAH, and I will seek to actively contribute to that.”
Background
This summer Conny Kristel and Tobias Blanke announced they will both leave DARIAH’s Board of Directors by the end of 2016. Following a decision of the 5th General Assembly (GA) meeting in May 2016, a call of applications was issued and a committee was formed to select two appropriate names among the candidates, preparing their formal appointment by the 6th GA meeting this November. The selection committee consisted of the President of the Board of Directors, Laurent Romary, the Chair of the GA, Jacques Dubucs, as well as volunteer members of the GA: Ursula Brustmann (AUT, Vice Chair of the GA), Tamara Butigan (RS), Alice Dijkstra (NL), Milena Dobreva (MT) and Chris de Loof (BE).
According to its statutes the DARIAH-ERIC has three part-time directors. Together they are responsible for the day-to-day operations of DARIAH. They consult the Senior Management Team and are supported by the DARIAH-EU Coordination Office. Jennifer Edmond and Frank Fischer will take on their new roles from 1 January 2017.
Jennifer Edmond
Dr Jennifer Edmond is the Director of Strategic Projects for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin and the co-director of the Trinity Center for Digital Humanities. She holds a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University, and applies her training as a scholar of language, narrative and culture to the study and promotion of advanced methods in and infrastructures for the humanities.
In this vein, she has developed a significant profile in European research and research policy circles in the past 5 years, having been named one of Ireland’s five “Champions of EU Research” in 2012. She coordinated the €6.5m CENDARI FP7 (2012-1026) project and is a partner in the related infrastructure cluster, PARTHENOS. Her other EU projects have included coordinating Researcher Night in 2013, Europeana Cloud the ESF Network NeDiMAH and the forthcoming ICT ‘sister project’ Knowledge Complexity (KPLEX).
For DARIAH Jennifer currently serves as one of the two heads of the Virtual Competence Center “Research and Education”. Additionally she represents the consortium in the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP), where she supports the European Commission in developing an Open Science Policy.
Jennifer has played a leadership role in numerous strategic developments at national and institutional level, including the creation of Yale’s McDougal Graduate Centre, the University of Nottingham’s 2005 revisioning of its graduate services provision, and, in Ireland, the foundation of the ‘Texts, Contexts, Cultures’ graduate training programme, the Digital Humanities Observatory and the Trinity Long Room Hub research institute. She has lent her expertise in the development of infrastructure to a wide variety of initiatives and agencies, from the food manufacturing industry through to the Korean national maritime agency, and is a strong proponent of public outreach for academic research, having presented her work to general audiences, live as well as through radio, television and video, including through the medium of stand up comedy.
Frank Fischer
Frank Fischer is Associate Professor for Digital Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He studied Computer Science, German Literature, and Spanish Philology at the University of Leipzig and at Middlesex University, London, and is an Ancien Pensionnaire de l’École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Frank received his PhD from the University of Jena for his study on the dramatic works of Joachim Wilhelm von Brawe and their contemporary translations into Russian, Danish, and French. As a student, he worked as a programmer for the Deutscher Wortschatz project and for TextTech, a company specialised in text mining.
After graduating, he was an editor for the Brockhaus encyclopedia and researcher at the Leipzig University Library. From 2013 to 2016 he was coordinator of the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities and staff member of DARIAH-DE. He co-founded a working group on the network analysis of literary texts (http://lina.digital/) and the Digital Humanities research blog weltliteratur.net (http://weltliteratur.net/).
For more information see the links below and / or contact DARIAH’s Communications Officer, Jakob Epler, jakob.epler@dariah.eu.
Further reading
DARIAH
General information: http://dariah.eu/about/dariah-in-a-nutshell.html
Board of Directors: http://dariah.eu/about/organisation/board-of-directors.html
Jennifer Edmond:
Jennifer Edmond at Trinity College: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/people/project-staff.php
Frank Fischer:
Frank Fischer at National Research University Higher School of Economics: https://www.hse.ru/en/org/persons/182492735
Working group on the network analysis of literary texts: http://lina.digital
Digital Humanities research blog weltliteratur.net: http://weltliteratur.net/
