The DARIAH Theme Call 2022-2024 on the topic of Workflows was open from late Summer to mid Autumn, inviting proposals and project applications that would explore, assess, analyze and embody the challenges of designing, implementing, documenting and sharing digitally-enabled workflows in the context of arts and humanities research from a technical, methodological, infrastructural and conceptual point of view. The DARIAH Theme is an annual area of focus chosen for investment by the DARIAH Board of Directors.
This year’s call attracted an exceptionally high number of well-articulated, diverse and competitive applications. After an extensive peer-review process, we are excited to announce that the Programme Committee has selected five winning projects. These projects will receive an overall budget of 46.500 euros.
“The winning projects represent a cross-section of the exciting and diverse work that gets done across DARIAH – in different countries and in different disciplinary and methodological communities,” said Dr. Toma Tasovac, President of the DARIAH Board of Directors and Chair of the Program Committee. “We’re looking forward to seeing the fruits of the DARIAH Theme Call and integrating various project outputs with the workflows hosted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Marketplace.”
Winning projects
1. Harmonizing Workflows in HTR/OCR Publication Pipelines of Textual Heritage
Coordinators: Anne Baillot (Le Mans Université), Mareike König (DHI Paris)
This project will mainly develop online tutorials on digitisation workflows. The tutorials, which will be in English and subtitled in English, German and French, will be short and accessible for a scholarly audience that is not able to dive into technical documentation and apply it immediately. They will be accompanied by a series of blogposts in the three languages which will provide a sense for and an orientation in the wealth of existing documentation.
This project’s goal is to foster a dialogue between initiatives and projects that strive to achieve a recognizable level of reusability of their digitization workflow, to provide a framework to contribute to standardized practices in this area and to facilitate that reuse for researchers who don’t have in-depth technological competences.
2. MobileGIS workflow in archaeological prospection: the case study of a rural site near the Roman city of Mustis (N Tunisia)
Coordinator: Julia M. Chyla (University of Warsaw)
This project aims to create a workflow for full use of mobileGIS in the archaeological surface prospection. To achieve this goal, the example of a specific site, site MR 3, has been chosen. This medium-sized rural settlement is located in the proximity of the Roman city of Mustis (northern Tunisia) and it is particularly threatened by robbing, uncontrolled development of the modern built environment and intense agricultural activity in the direct vicinity. While the project promises to offer a holistic approach to archaeological data, the intended activities will also include gathering information about artefacts visible on the surface, as well as documentation of archaeological features and remains of monuments which are located there.
3. MotiveR: a workflow designed to detect significant lexico-grammatical patterns for automatic stylistic analysis
Coordinator: Dominique Legallois, Laboratoire Lattice (Langues, Textes, Traitements informatiques, Cognition) – CNRS & Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle.
This project aims to enrich MotiveR, an already established open-source package for corpus-based stylistics, with new features that would allow users to have new views on the text. The funding provided by DARIAH will allow the team to introduce a new set of functionalities to the pipeline, such as the identification of non-linear patterns, identification of certain strong syntactic relations at work in the construction of patterns, t-SNE and UMAP algorithms for topological text detection clusters and use of deep learning algorithms (CNN, Transformers) for the automatic detection of complex patterns composed of mixed features.
4. Open Bibliodata Workflows
Coordinator: Vojtěch Malínek (Institute of the Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences)
This project aims to describe existing research and curatorial workflows related to bibliographical data (bibliodata) and publish them as the SSHOC Marketplace’s Workflows. The project plans to organise a workshop – in the form of a booksprint – for relevant experts that will result in the creation of workflows compliant with the SSHOC’s Workflow’s data model. In addition to the workflows, the project will deliver a collective paper with recommendations on workflow creation in the field of bibliodata.
5. White paper and podcast on workflows in digital projects
Coordinator: Vera Chiquet, Virtual Culture GmbH
This project aims to produce white papers and podcasts intending to help researchers get a quick understanding on reproducible digital culture project workflows. By developing and sharing guidelines on reproducible solutions and workflows, including interviews of people involved and their recommendations and learnings, the project team aims to inform and guide the community of workflows and options to follow in similar projects.
This project is inspired by the “DigitalesSchauDepot”, an initiative proposing a shift in the culture of digital projects. Should a new showcase be created, a white paper is the first thing researchers and curators should read in order to better understand the necessary chain of processes. White papers serve as guidelines and input for the various players and peers in a digital project, pointing out what kind of preliminary work is necessary, what are the hidden costs, and hidden problems and how to make the realisation of digitization projects with GLAMs and universities floating and replicable. The podcasts will share experiences and provide good-to-know things so that others can build their digitisation projects and optimise their implementation building upon shared experience.
The projects will run for a year and a half (December 2022 – June 2024) while the project leaders will be invited to present their results at the DARIAH Annual Event 2024 which is planned to be on the topic of Workflows.
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.
