The DARIAH Theme is an annual area of focus chosen for investment by the DARIAH Board of Directors. For 2020, DARIAH selected two streams of funding ‘Arts Exchanges’ and ‘Arts, Humanities and COVID-19’.
“The DARIAH Theme 2020 topics couldn’t be more relevant. On the one hand, arts is a key community in our infrastructure and we long aimed to explore more our interactions and grow our understanding of the infrastructural requirements of this community with regards to the technologies they use. On the other hand, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways that arts and humanities, and DARIAH by extension, can contribute to the response to this global challenge couldn’t be more pertinent”.
Jennifer Edmond, President of the Board of Directors for DARIAH-EU, chairing the DARIAH Theme 2020 Evaluation Committee
This year’s call attracted a high number of well articulated and competitive applications, mainly addressing, perhaps not surprisingly, the topic of ‘Arts, Humanities and COVID-19’. After careful evaluation and consideration by the appointed Evaluation Committee, we are excited to announce that we have selected nine winning projects, three on ‘DARIAH Arts Exchanges’ and six on ‘Arts, Humanities and COVID-19’. These projects will receive an overall budget of 87.920 euros.
Winning projects
DARIAH Arts Exchanges
- Empty Mind, Ine Vanoeveren, Kristof Timmerman (DARIAH-BE)
This project aims to make contemporary (performing) art(s) accessible for an audience that normally is being excluded from a cultural and artistic experience, because of physical, geographic and/or economical disadvantages. Through artistic research, the project team will investigate new creative possibilities – lacunae that became apparent because of the drastic change in their cultural and artistic experience.
Read more on the project here. - Folk music groups: their artistic practice and infrastructural needs in the COVID-19 era and beyond, Magdalena Chudy, Ewa Łukasik, Ewa Kuśmierek, Tomasz Parkoła (DARIAH-PL)
This project aims to identify and understand infrastructural requirements of folk music artists with regard to the technologies they use through user needs assessment exercises and engagements. The feedback gathered from artists’ based on these exercises will be analyzed in order to draw conclusions intended to guide the development of technological solutions offered to this community.
Read more on the project here. - International Evening Class, Annett Busch (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
International Evening Class combines old and new ways of working and learning together, in synchronised asynchronous modes. Its structure is “light”, mobile and adaptive, there is no central building, only a virtual web, the “classes” take place in different cities making use of existing locations according to the “object” of study. The project team envisions a multi-local and virtual structure operating in-between, connecting various educational and cultural institutions, to create and display hybrid forms of research and knowledge. In collaboration with local artists, theorists, filmmakers, researchers, writers, musicians, students, manufacturers, craftsmen and craftswomen, entrepreneurs, journalists, critics, designers, programmers, and architects, the topic of the courses will be defined autonomously, depending on their interest and the urgency they sense in their place of residence, but in conversation with the curatorial project team.
Read more on the project here.
Arts, Humanities and COVID-19
- Contemporary collecting and COVID-19: barriers, bottlenecks, and perspectives in digital curation, Chiara Zuanni (DARIAH-AT)
This project aims to map current barriers and potential solutions in collecting, curating, preserving, and interpreting objects and memories of the COVID-19 pandemic by fostering an interdisciplinary discussion around the challenges of contemporary collecting in memory institutions, as well as to test potential solutions for the collection, management, preservation, and dissemination of collections related to COVID-19, in collaboration with a range of cultural stakeholders.
Read more on the project here. - DH in Transition: A mixed approach and a hybrid publication on the effects of COVID-19 in DH research and practice, Maria Ilvanidou, Agiatis Benardou (DARIAH-GR)
This project aims to design and organize a digital workshop in which the project team will reunite the Twitter Conference participants (‘DH in the time of virus’, April 2020) alongside further DH researchers who will be selected through an open call to revisit, reappraise and reevaluate considerations, remarks, and research outputs presented in April 2020. The outcome of the workshop will be a set of curated publications – printed and digital – of this material, which will revisit the Twitter Conference content and set it under the current perspective of the pandemic.
Read more on the project here. - Electronic Literature (e-lit) and Covid 19, Soeren Pold (DARIAH-DK)
How is the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting measures, and movement of cultural life online reflected in electronic literature and other digital narrative practices online? This project aims to develop an analytical research study, an open-access research collection, an online exhibition and a critical study of electronic literature and digital art produced during this time of COVID 19.
Read more on the project here. - Fitting inside COVID-19. Aesthetic Resilience of Contemporary Music facing a Pandemic Crisis, Marlies De Munck (DARIAH-BE)
In this collaboratively produced research, an interdisciplinary research team consisting of two musicians, a philosopher of music and a sociologist of art, will study the impact of COVID-19 on the aesthetic resilience of artistic production within the contemporary music sector. The central questions of this research project are: (1) How to improve the aesthetic resilience of music productions in the face of the coronavirus pandemic restrictions? And (2) how to improve the relationship with the public of contemporary music concerts in this new reality?
Read more on the project here. - Making the Pandemic Understandable Using Public, Hi-resolution Screens, Eveline Wandl-Vogt (Ars Electronica Linz GmbH & Co KG)
According to the social psychology of fear, individuals experience fear when they do not understand a phenomenon. This is also the case of the current pandemic: coronavirus is something that is invisible to the eyes, especially during its transmission. One way to deal with this fear is to make tangible a phenomenon that is invisible. The project team aims to make visible the massive scientific work that doctors, researchers, and academics are doing to fight the illness provoked by COVID-19, by making use of data visualization in public spaces to foster not only the understanding but also the conversation among viewers.
Read more on the project here. - Visualizing the Virus, Sria Chatterjee (IXDM, FHNW, Basel & Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut)
Seeing, or the inability to see something, is political. As the pandemic progresses, the coronavirus has exploded onto our screens and streets, claiming various kinds of visibility. Visualizing the virus has been both panacea and political tool – depending on who does it – and the processes of visualization are implicated in forms of care as much as they are in political violence, surveillance, xenophobia and institutional racism. Considering viruses as living processes that “often mix with and become part of other processes and hence contribute to a number of outcomes at the same time” (Güttinger and Dupre 2016), this project connects the artistic, scientific and the political through a multi-faceted and participatory study of the ways the coronavirus is visualized. The overall aim of the project is to create an online platform that serves as a repository of images and ideas that allow visitors to make the connections between art, science and politics in the context of Covid19.
Read more on the project here.
The projects will run for a year (December 2020 – December 2021) while the project leaders will be invited to present their results at the DARIAH Annual Event 2022 planned to take place in Athens, Greece.
Stay tuned for more information as we will be showcasing the projects, their goals and research outcomes throughout their funding period.
For more information on past DARIAH Theme Calls read here.
