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).
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 will be 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. More details on this will be published soon.
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. Our blog post “Open Science and DH tools that come handy at the time of corona (and beyond)” is a good example of this.
As our DARIAH Annual Event 2020 has been postponed to November 2020, we are organising a virtual event entitled “Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings” which will take place on May 28. This event will leverage seminal digital humanities work on research practices to explore the gains and losses we experience when we shift academic meetings to virtual spaces.
This page will be regularly updated with more initiatives and activities related to COVID-19.
