The General Assembly of the DARIAH ERIC recently voted unanimously to accept Switzerland’s application for full membership in the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.
“Swiss researchers have been members of DARIAH Working Groups and have taken part in DARIAH activities long before Switzerland became an Observer in 2021,” said Toma Tasovac, President of the DARIAH Board of Directors. “Which is why Swiss membership in DARIAH very much feels like a natural progression. We’re delighted and look forward to continuing working with Swiss colleagues on developing digital methods and aligning infrastructural priorities across Europe.”
Swiss scholars have been active partners in DARIAH projects, including the #dariahTeach project (2015-2017) on developing open-source, high quality, multilingual teaching materials for the digital arts and humanities, the DESIR project (2017-2019) on strengthening the sustainability of DARIAH and firmly establishing it as a long-term leader and partner within arts and humanities communities, and more recently, in collaborations within the context of the OPERAS-P project (2019-2021) and the Open Science for Arts, Design and Music project in 2022. Finally, a fascinating project by Sria Chatterjee (Institute for Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland) on Visualising the Virus was funded in the context of the DARIAH Theme Call 2020 on ‘Arts, Humanities and COVID-19’.
The DARIAH-CH Consortium
Since joining as an Observer country, the preparations towards full membership were accelerated. In November 2021, a network of 8 Swiss academic institutions, supported by the Academy for Social and Human Sciences (ASSH), founded the DARIAH-CH Consortium. These institutions were the Universities of Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel and Zurich, the EPFL and the ASSH.
Currently, the DARIAH-CH Consortium has expanded and includes the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH), that is the national node coordinating the DARIAH activities in Switzerland, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Northwestern Switzerland. The consortium will likely continue to expand as there are ongoing negotiations for membership with other higher education institutions and the GLAM sector.
“For us, being members in European research infrastructures such as DARIAH is essential as it provides a solid and sustainable framework in which members of the Swiss scientific community in Arts and DH can take active part in European research, infrastructure programmes and flagship projects in DH. Furthermore, it allows us to exchange and collaborate with European peers in what concerns dealing with the specific challenges of digital methods and Open Research Data in the Arts and DH fields” said Rita Gautschy, the Swiss National Coordinator of DARIAH.
National priorities
The DARIAH-CH Consortium has the mission to build a strong and impactful DARIAH-CH community. Among its national priorities is also to manage the national coordination of DARIAH-relevant activities, work with the Swiss Arts and Digital Humanities community and support it in its research and infrastructural endeavours, and facilitate the access of the Swiss Arts and Digital Humanities community to national research infrastructures, as well as to the DARIAH-EU infrastructure and network.
These aims are reflected in a number of ongoing activities that DARIAH-CH has initiated. Such an example is the establishment of the DARIAH-CH Study Day, a one-day event organised annually since 2022 with the purpose of bringing together and strengthening the Swiss Arts and Digital Humanities community. The second edition of the event is planned to take place at the University of Bern in Autumn 2023.
The DARIAH-CH Consortium has also launched a number of initiatives with the aim of getting to know the community and understanding their needs on the one hand, and informing them of DARIAH’s services, activities and funding opportunities on the other hand. The latter can be seen in the organisation of the DARIAH & DARIAH-CH Information Session Tour de Suisse, which consists of visits to all Swiss members with an extensive information session about all the DARIAH and DARIAH-CH offerings to the scientific community.
Following the example of the DARIAH-EU Working Groups, the DARIAH-CH Consortium has been encouraging the establishment of Swiss Working Groups as a formal framework to bring people together. The Swiss Digital Editions Working Group is the first such group formed. Another initiative of the DARIAH-CH Consortium has been the SSH Research Infrastructures in Switzerland action. This initiative was launched in Spring 2022 by representatives of national research infrastructures in the SSH field (FORS, DaSCH), the national coordinators of international research infrastructures with Swiss participation (CESSDA, CLARIN, DARIAH, ESS, SHARE, GGP) and the representatives of the ASSH. The initiative aims to defend the interests of the SSH field with respect to access to RIs at a political level. So far this initiative has resulted in two events, a position paper and the interest in a SSHOC-CH project.
Finally, the Swiss consortium has been very active in contributing to the SSH Open Marketplace. Cristina Grisot, the National Coordination Officer for DARIAH-CH, is a member of the SSH Open Marketplace Editorial Board and ensures that contributions and resources on behalf of the DARIAH-CH community are increasingly added to the Marketplace.
