The Standardization Survival Kit (SSK) is an open tool that supports researchers in choosing standards and best practices for the application of digital methods. Build up on the idea of providing research scenarios, it establishes a low-barrier entry point to get an overview on used standards in different research fields. Interested people choose one of the scenarios and are then guided through various steps, where recommendations on standards in use are given. The SSK is also a place to discuss and devise best practice processes in the Arts & Humanities. It is possible to create new scenarios from scratch or by combining existing steps from different scenarios, publish and share with peers, to ensure better visibility and reliability of standardized research methodologies.
While standards are no regulations, the implementation of them makes research data of projects reusable in other contexts. It also allows for an easier interchange of data between projects. In general, the adoption of community-agreed standards is one cornerstone for a workflow oriented on the FAIR principles (where FAIR stands for: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). The SSK approach relies on the help of experts who contribute their knowledge about digital methods. Their experiences go into the creation of new research scenarios as well as the update of already existing research scenarios.
Funded by the DARIAH-EU theme call 2018/2019, a series of workshops is organized to add new research scenarios to the SSK. The first of these workshops is hosted at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ACDH-OEAW), on 30.1-1.2 2019. For this, we focus on the acquisition of text from printed or handwritten sources (OCR and HTR), the processing of textual data in a corpus, and the modelling of lexical data. We welcome experts from Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Poland, and Serbia, as well as members of the ACDH-OEAW (Vienna) and the ZIM-ACDH (Graz). Laurent Romary will open the workshop with a keynote on the importance and challenges of standards. The organizers Charles Riondet and Klaus Illmayer will then give an introduction to the SSK and the goals of the workshop, before the attendees split into small groups to work on the development of new research scenarios for the SSK. These new research scenarios will then be available for the public on the website of the SSK.
The development of the SSK was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project PARTHENOS (grant agreement No. 654119).