2023 has been one of DARIAH’s most successful years yet! In our round up of the past 12 months, we have welcomed new Cooperating Partnerships, expanded our network within Europe and beyond, and facilitated events, webinars, workshops and conferences, launched new features, received funding for exciting initiatives and prepared for another exciting year head as we build on the success of 2023 and look ahead to 2024.
We’ve selected twelve highlights from the past year to celebrate DARIAH’s successes on a European level and internationally, both within and beyond the digital humanities scholarly community.
1. In January, we welcomed the Multilingual Working Group to DARIAH, which aims at enhancing digitally-enabled research in under-resourced languages and dialects. It gathers scholars from diverse languages, who will assess the adaptation of existing tools to new languages and will develop tools to address the specific challenges represented by these languages.
2. In February, we celebrated the 2022 winner of the DARIAH Open Access Book Bursary, Erik Ketzan, who used it in support of his monograph, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities: Computational Approaches to Style (Bloomsbury, 2021). The Open Access Book Bursary gives a chance to scholars to publish their monographs in the field of digital humanities provided it is open access, thus creating great opportunities for the dissemination of research. In compliance with our eligibility criteria, this year’s award winning book will be made available Open Access retrospectively at the New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series of Bloomsbury Publishing.
3. In March, we celebrated one of the many new opportunities that a DARIAH Cooperating Partnership facilitated not just across Europe, but beyond: an opportunity for Digital Humanities scholars to connect across the field of Digital Hellenic Studies, a collaboration between the Centre for Digital Humanities at Princeton University and Athens University of Economics and Business.
4. Throughout March, April and May, we saw the successful completion of our popular in-house Friday Frontiers Spring Series. A diverse and exciting array of speakers delivered talks on a number of topics. The Spring Series 2023 line up featured Magdalena Wnuk & Marta Świetlik on “Queens of Humanities: Stories to Attract and Engage”, Anne Baillot on “How to learn and love digital text in four easy steps”, and Dr. Bahareh Heravi on “Data Journalism and AI: New Frontiers in Investigation and Storytelling”. Our popular webinars have allowed researchers, practitioners and stakeholders from across the broad DARIAH community, and now beyond, to learn about current research, best practice and social impact, and different tools and methods in digital humanities scholarly practice.
5. In May, we also signed three significant Co-operating Partnership agreements, and welcomed three fantastic institutions to our DARIAH community, which gave us an opportunity to expand our Members & Partners map even further. These partnerships were signed with the Institute for Literature, Folklore and Art at the University of Latvia (Latvijas Universitāte), The Centre for Research Data and Digital Scholarship at University of Colorado Boulder, and the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts in Iceland. Each Cooperating Partnership ensures that connection and collaboration with these institutions furthers the advancement of Digital Humanities scholarship.
6. Our sixth highlight of the year was the Digital Humanities Helsinki Hackathon 2023 which took place at the end of May, and brought together 60 participants from 13 countries to apply digital methods to a variety of datasets to solve pertinent research questions pertaining to the following themes: Epistolary exchanges, Interactional dynamics of online discussion, Early modern images, and Political polarisation in the Parliament.
7. Our seventh highlight of the year was the DARIAH Annual Event in Budapest, Hungary, which took place in June. We welcomed over 200 international participants to reflect on the theme of “Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data?”. Centred around three themes: 1) Sustainable workflows for data management and curation; 2) Imagining experimental data spaces for cultural heritage; and 3) Advancing digital methods for the analysis of cultural heritage, the 2023 event kicked off with meetings of DARIAH bodies, followed by three conference days with panels, papers, keynote speeches, performances and poster sessions. The opening keynote lecture by Thomas Padilla (Deputy Director at Archiving and Data Services of the Internet Archive) was entitled ‘A Mutualistic View of AI in the Library or a Continuation of Craft’ and the closing keynote panel entitled ‘DARIAH Data Spaces Dialogue: Imagining Experimental Data Spaces for Analysis of Cultural Heritage Using Digital Methods’, was chaired by DARIAH Director Sally Chambers.
8. Our eighth highlight of the year was #DH2024, the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations Annual Conference 2023 which took place in Graz, Austria in July. This year the theme focused on “Collaboration as Opportunity”, and DARIAH was well-represented across the week: DARIAH Director Toma Tasovac served as Programme Committee Chair alongside Anne Baillot, Director Agiatis Benardou chaired and presented several sessions, former Directors Jennifer Edmond and Frank Fischer also spoke, chaired and presented posters during the Thursday evening poster session, while the Bibliographical Data DARIAH-EU Working Group presented their recent findings in a panel entitled “Fostering Collaboration to Enable Bibliodata-driven Research in the Humanities”. Training and Education Officer Vicky Garnett chaired the Thursday morning panel on “Collaboration”, while European Project Officer Laure Barbot led the Tuesday pre-conference workshop entitled “Creating a DH workflow in the SSH Open Marketplace”, and DARIAH also shared a booth with CLARIN-ERIC in the breakout space.
9. Our ninth highlight of the year sees us celebrating two full Membership Agreements that we signed this year with Switzerland and Spain, bringing our total number of full member countries to 22. Both countries were already integrated into the DARIAH network through their various co-operating institutions. Switzerland officially joined in May, while Spain joined in September. Since joining as an Observer country, the preparations towards full membership for Switzerland 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. Spain also joined CLARIN ERIC as well as DARIAH, providing even more of an opportunity to align national and European priorities and helping arts and humanities researchers thrive in the digital age.
10. Our tenth highlight of 2024 was the much-anticipated launch of our Tools & Services Catalogue in September. After months of work, the Catalogue was updated and streamlined so as best to facilitate access to over 200 hundred tools and services, divided into both Core and Community Services. It features a diverse array of resources available to support teaching, research, and much more in the sphere of digital humanities and beyond!
11. Our eleventh highlight of 2023 was four more Cooperating Partnership Agreements we signed during October and November with institutions in Sweden and the United Kingdom. We were thrilled to welcome both Linnaeus University and Uppsala University as Cooperating Partners: both universities are at the forefront of DH in Sweden, developing their specialities in the digital humanities in parallel; they were the first two universities to have joined DARIAH previously as cooperative partners. We also welcomed King’s College London and the School of Advanced Study at the University of London as Cooperating Partners. The Digital Humanities Research Hub (DHRH) is the centre of digital research at the School of Advanced Study plays a central role in supporting the School’s national mission by promoting digital humanities scholarship across the UK and by providing infrastructure and support for the digital humanities community. King’s College London (KCL) has a distinguished reputation in the Arts and Humanities and a long tradition of research in the Digital Humanities, going back to the early 1970s with a strong focus on research infrastructures.
12. Our twelfth highlight of 2023 was the successful completion of the Autumn/Winter Series of Friday Frontiers! This season featured Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at The British Library, who spoke about “Curating the Digital Storytelling exhibition at the British Library”. Maria Goicoechea De Jorge (University of Madrid) delivered a talk entitled “New Readers for Old Texts: Sharing the Workflow of a Digitally Enriched Children’s Literature Edition”, and Nasrine Olson (University of Borås) spoke on “Bridging Sensory Gaps: Innovations for Inclusivity”. We had great attendance and engagement for this season’s speakers, marking another successful iteration of our popular in-house webinar series.
You can browse the highlights of our 12 DARIAHs of Christmas on our Twitter/X and LinkedIn. Happy Holidays and Season’s Greetings from all of us at DARIAH!
