DARIAH Theme is an annual thematic priority set by the Board of Directors of DARIAH-EU. The aim is to stimulate activities and events related to an important topic of research in the digitally enabled arts and humanities by issuing a call for funding.
In 2018, DARIAH focussed on the chronic problem of software and tool sustainability in the digital humanities, while also looking forward to the build phase of the Marketplace for data, tools and services. The call, entitled ‘Strategic Service Sustainability for DARIAH’ attracted a high number of well articulated and competitive applications in the area of training, standardisation, datasets, geolocation and annotation services, thesauri and vocabularies, among others. Six projects were funded in the context of this call having as starting date the end of 2018.
The funded projects
Here you can find a brief summary of their aims and work so far:
- DARIAHdocs as sustainable collaboration platform, Peter Gietz (DAASI International GmbH)
DARIAHdocs is an open-source alternative to proprietary online office venues. The service has been developed through the project and is fully operational since March 2019. The service is well documented and free to use. The developing team is aiming to further stabilise the service and offer it openly beyond the running time of the theme call so that researchers can have an alternative to commercial platforms.
- #dariahTeach PROTEUS: A Novel Model for Sustaining Peer-Reviewed Open Access Teaching Materials, Konstantinos Papadopoulos (University of Maastricht)
The #dariahTeach platform is currently transitioning into a new phase, harnessing and channeling previous investment by offering a one-stop-shop for peer-reviewed, quality assessed publication of training and teaching materials delivered within a homogenous framework.
This will enable the long-term growth and development of #dariahTeach towards the establishment of a novel organisational model for sustaining peer-reviewed open access teaching materials. The sustainability funding from DARIAH was used to facilitate the organisation of the initial #dariahTeach Publishing Board meeting as part of the annual DARIAH event in Warsaw in May 2019.
- Digital Humanities Course Registry Sustain – Improving Sustainability through Usability, Tanja Wissik (Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW))
The Digital Humanities Course Registry (DHRC) is an open online inventory of Digital Humanities modules, courses and programmes in Europe and beyond which aims to help students, researchers, lecturers and institutions to find, promote and connect to teaching and training activities. It is a joint initiative of CLARIN and DARIAH. The theme call funding received was used to update and modernise the user interface and strengthen the role of the API to enable better access to course data. A prototype has been presented to the boards of CLARIN and DARIAH with a planned release date in November 2019.
- Awareness, understanding and having fun. Fostering communities around the Standardization Survival Kit, Laurent Romary, Charles Riondet, Sally Chambers, Johan Van der Eycken, Klaus Illmayer, Paul Bertrand, Björn-Olav Dozo, Karlheinz Mörth, Olivier Marlet, Dorian Seillier, Lionel Tadjou (Inria de Paris)
The Standardization Survival Kit (SSK) is an open tool that supports researchers in choosing standards and best practices for the application of digital methods. Built upon the idea of providing research scenarios, it establishes a low-barrier entry point to get an overview on used standards in different research fields.
Funded by the theme call, a series of workshops was organised to add new research scenarios to the SSK (in Vienna, Tours and Liège). Another outcome of the funding was the creation of an on-boarding video for the SSK released in April 2019.
- Standard Sustainability: Improving the Usability of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Marjorie Burghart (CNRS-CIHAM UMR 5648)
This project will provide to TEI users a version of the JEdit XML editor especially enhanced for their basic needs. For this to happen, a study has been conducted to identify the plugins useful for basic TEI XML needs and the configuration needed for both JEdit and those plugins to obtain an intuitive, user-friendly environment for TEI XML (with especially Relax NG schema validation, XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, SVN and FTP). The second half of the project time foresees the actual development and is ongoing. The final package will be released, for Windows, Mac and Linux.
- Towards a Sustainable Annotation Tool: Integrating Recogito with DARIAH, Rebecca Kahn, Leif Isaksen, Rainer Simon, Elton Barker, Valeria Vitale (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG))
The funded project “Towards a Sustainable Annotation Tool” aims at bringing Recogito into the ecosystem of tools and services offered by DARIAH by addressing the issues of 1) technical interoperability, and 2) user-community support. Work has been delivered on simplifying system operations by enhancing the – previously skeletal – administration interfaces (for system maintenance, backup, monitoring, account administration, etc.) and documentation so that Recogito can be set up and operated more easily without the need for assistance from the Pelagios core team.
To address the second issue, a first Recogito training workshop for the DARIAH community took place at the DARIAH Annual Event in Warsaw in May 2019. Also, existing informal collaborations with DARIAH Working Groups have been strengthened by embarking on two projects with members of the GeoHumanities Working group aimed at using Pelagios technology for exploring historical sources.
These projects will be wrapping up their work at the end of 2019. We are looking forward for their final outcomes which we will be sharing in a future post.
