The General Assembly of the DARIAH ERIC recently voted unanimously to accept Czech Republic’s application for full membership in the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.
“We are delighted to officially welcome Czech Republic as the 19th member of DARIAH,” said Jennifer Edmond, President of the Board of Directors for DARIAH. “Following an excellent and fruitful collaboration in the DESIR project, the Czech Republic joins DARIAH with an ambitious national roadmap and a strong national consortium that we look forward to interacting with”.
DARIAH’s activities in Czech Republic will be coordinated by LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ project, the merged consortium for DARIAH (DARIAH-CZ) and CLARIN (LINDAT/CLARIN) national infrastructures.
“The LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ infrastructure brings together the most prominent institutions in the area of Digital Humanities and Arts, Linguistics and Language Technology to form a unique consortium serving the ideas behind DARIAH and Digital Humanities in general” says Martin Lhoták, National Coordinator for Czech Republic. “Joining DARIAH and building this joint national infrastructure has a lot to offer to the Czech as well as to the European research community, enabling access to the data and know-how of European researchers on the one hand while opening up access to the original and often precious Czech resources on the other hand, helping to spread our national cultural heritage internationally”.
The national funding for the activities of LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ has been secured until 2022 as part of the National Roadmap for Research Infrastructures. DARIAH-CZ and LINDAT/CLARIN currently have separate budgets for 2019 while from 2020 there will be one budget for both infrastructures merged under LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ.
The consortium
The core partners in the consortium are Charles University, the Institute of Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague), the National Library of the Czech Republic (Prague), the Moravian Library (Brno), National Gallery Prague, National Film Archive (Prague), Institute of Czech Language of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague and Brno), Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague), Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague), Masaryk University (Brno) and the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen.
One of the strengths of the Czech DARIAH consortium is the inclusion of libraries and other national heritage institutions as partners in the infrastructure, as well as the technology strength of the three technology-oriented partners (Charles University, University of West Bohemia and Masaryk University) in the areas of Natural language processing, Artificial Intelligence and multimedia processing.
“With Czech Republic joining DARIAH, we are welcoming one more member to the family,” says Jennifer Edmond, “opening up opportunities for further collaborations across Europe, gaining new cultural perspectives and strengthening our ties and voice on behalf of the arts and humanities in a technologically evolving knowledge society.”