DARIAH is closely monitoring the impact of the coronavirus on our own operations, and on the research community overall. This page will be regularly updated with important information related to forthcoming events and activities.
The arts and humanities, and DARIAH by extension as their research infrastructure, have much to contribute to the response to the pandemic. Boccacio’s Decameron, from the 14thcentury, provides us with a particularly apposite example of how arts and literature can sustain us in times of quarantine and social distancing, and the response of the arts community to the current situation has been truly heartening, giving many a means for inspiration, connection and self-expression. In addition, it has become clear that the historical example of the 1918 flu is becoming a historical touchstone for understanding what we may now face in the near future (as in this blogpost).
Funding opportunities
In DARIAH, we believe that this kind of activity can have a greater resonance in research, but that the incentives and context must be tailored to the strengths of our specific disciplines. We are therefore launching a call for proposals under our bi-annual DARIAH Theme funding scheme that will seek specific responses to the pandemic that engage arts and humanities sources, approaches and insight. One of the areas of emphasis in this scheme is on how we will collect, curate, preserve and interpret the heterogenous record of the experience of life and work in early 2020. This will be an important strand within the range of activities we will seek to fund. You can find more details on this call here.
Useful resources
DARIAH is ensuring at this time that our network is able to maintain the services our community relies upon, while also leveraging our expertise in open science, virtual tools and distributed research practices to lead by example, and assist others to adapt to the changed circumstances for research. Useful resources focusing on these aspects are:
- “Open Science and DH tools that come handy at the time of corona (and beyond)”, a blog post by our Open Science Officer Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra published on DARIAH Open
- Virtual summer term and digital research infrastructures, a blog post originally published at the DHd blog on the various digital training offerings by DARIAH-DE.
- Podcast on Zoom fatigue by the President of the DARIAH Board of Directors, Jennifer Edmond. Jennifer discusses zoom fatigue, why zoom it is far from perfect and how we make virtual meetings work better. This talk was from the ‘Behind the Headlines’ panel discussion Human+Technology Beyond Covid-19, you can listen back to the full discussion here.
Virtual events
As our DARIAH Annual Event 2020 has been postponed to November 2020, we organised a virtual event entitled “Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings” which took place on May 28. This event leveraged seminal digital humanities work on research practices aiming to explore the gains and losses we experience when we shift academic meetings to virtual spaces.
Visit the virtual exhibition launched ahead of the event here: https://www.virtualexchange.dariah.eu/
Visit the DARIAH YouTube channel to listen back to the event presentations and discussions.
This page will be regularly updated with more initiatives and activities related to COVID-19.
