At the DARIAH General Assembly, held on May 20t 2019, three applications submitted by the University of Exeter, Uppsala University and the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology, Slovak Academy of Sciences to join as Cooperating Partners were unanimously approved. Each of these institutions brings expertise, knowledge and diverse research streams into DARIAH.
The University of Exeter is the fifth institution joining as Cooperating Partner in the United Kingdom. Exeter’s College of Humanities is home to academics from a wide variety of different disciplines working on a diverse array of digital projects. The College has recently completed construction of a state of the art £1.2 million Digital Humanities Lab allowing academics to carry out exciting projects like curating digital exhibitions, creating digital facsimiles of historic objects, and taking high resolution photographs of ancient manuscripts to ensure their preservation. By joining DARIAH, Exeter’s College of Humanities will enter an invaluable network for sharing expertise, methods, and technologies to help address some of the big questions researchers are currently working on.
‘Joining the DARIAH ERIC community is excellent news for the University of Exeter. We are committed to working together with partners from around the world to tackle major research challenges and provide outstanding opportunities for our students, so joining a dynamic European network like DARIAH ERIC fits perfectly with our ambitions. Exeter’s recent investment in digital humanities places us at the forefront of research and teaching in the field. Our staff are already using digital methods to conduct cutting-edge research into cultural artefacts and preserving materials that might otherwise be lost to us. I have no doubt that Exeter can make a big contribution to DARIAH ERIC, whilst ourselves gaining immeasurably from the exchange of people, ideas, and resources that they promote.’
Prof Mark Goodwin, Deputy Vice Chancellor for External Engagement
Uppsala University is the second institution joining as Cooperating Partner in Sweden, following Linnaeus University. By joining DARIAH, both institutions aim to push towards forming a national consortium and towards a full membership. Digital Humanities Uppsala is a digital humanities research network positioned at the intersection of the humanities and information technology. The network brings together, supports and disseminates digital humanities research at Uppsala University.
Digital Humanities Uppsala sprang out of the University’s long tradition in the arts, humanities and technology. The network strives to initiate cross-disciplinary dialogue, to stimulate and support research within the arts and humanities as well as IT, from project stage to implementation. Digital Humanities Uppsala extends the rich DH landscape already present at Uppsala University, including areas such as game studies, digitization of artefacts and archives, text mining, semantic annotation and analysis, and GIS – just to mention a few examples.
The Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, is the first institution joining DARIAH as Cooperating Partner in Slovakia. The Institute was founded in 1946 as the Ethnographic Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 1994 it was renamed to the Institute of Ethnology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and later in 2018 to the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS), and, today, it is one of the leading institutions in the field of ethnological and anthropological research in Slovakia.
Cooperating Partners are institutions in countries who are not full DARIAH members (EU Member States or other Associated Countries), and offer a significant contribution to the study of digital humanities. As Cooperating Partners, the institutions can engage with DARIAH’s Virtual Competency Centres (VCCs) – clusters of thematic expertise around different digital issues – as well as gaining access to valuable training and education facilities, participating in research projects, and joining Europe’s largest community of digital expertise.
