In late 2023, DARIAH launched the fourth Working Groups (WG) Funding Scheme Call for the years 2023-2025. This scheme is dedicated to – and open only for – the DARIAH Working Groups, and is intended to support their activities, small-scale projects and innovative ideas to be put forward, implemented, or sustained.
In this call, which was launched in August and was closed in mid October of 2023, we received 6 applications overall. The evaluation of these applications was carried out by two reviewers for each proposal, concluding to a reviewers’ meeting in which the winning proposals were agreed among the whole evaluation committee as well as the Board of Directors.
This year, DARIAH awarded 6 WGs with funding to explore innovative ideas, build up their expertise or sustain existing tools and services, dedicating an overall budget of €40.000 to the call.
“The Working Group funding scheme is a great opportunity for Working Groups to expand on their goals with the support of the DARIAH infrastructure. Additionally, it’s a tool that can allow Working Groups to collaborate on a joint project that may otherwise be infeasible,” says Kim Ferguson, Integration Officer for DARIAH. “At the DARIAH Coordination Office, we are consistently impressed with the initiatives of the Working Groups as well as how enthusiastically they embrace their role in strengthening the pillars of DARIAH’s strategic plan”.
The winning projects:
Enabling city dwellers to better understand and valorise intangible and built heritage together: Digital tools and practices – WG ARCHETIPO
The ARCHETIPO Working Group – ARChitectural HEritage Thesaurus through Integrated digital Procedures and Open data – intends to organise a 5-day workshop titled “Digital based integrated strategies to safeguard heritage construction technologies” to be held in Ortigia (IT) on May 13-17, 2024.
The project seeks to establish an interdisciplinary community in architecture and Digital Humanities. By uniting diverse disciplines, stakeholders, and authorities, it aims to integrate local expertise on traditional building methods into a digital platform. Recognising the need to document and preserve traditional techniques, the project employs digital technologies for research. These tools not only process images and geometrically represent construction but also acquire architectural information historically transmitted through computational methods.
During workshops and field training, the project explores digital methodologies to systematically document construction principles in specific European contexts. Utilizing tools like 3D laser scanning and geospatial data collection, it emphasizes HBIM modeling for architectural management and restoration. The project defines a knowledge domain describing buildings, their materials, and structures, employing ontologies and dictionaries. Adhering to DARIAH’s principles of self-organisation and knowledge sharing, the project ensures the conservation and adaptive revitalization of heritage.The results of the proposed workshop will be used as a first step towards the creation of innovative contributions to the Education & Training pillar of DARIAH and will collectively be exploited by both ARCHETIPO and UDigiSH Working Groups.
Metadata-based research in art, humanities and social sciences. Work in progress workshop – WG Bibliographical Data
The Bibliographical Data Working Group will organise an event called “Metadata-based research in art, humanities and social sciences. Work in progress workshop”. This interdisciplinary research meeting is aimed at bringing together researchers from different fields of metadata-based research to share their early stage ideas for research projects and investigations.
The Bibliodata Working Group hopes that such a meeting will facilitate the creation of joint research questions which could only be answered through collaboration between researchers coming from different backgrounds and possessing unique skills and competences. This two-day hybrid event aims to form a new community of people interested in collaboration on large scale research projects which aim to provide a better understanding of European cultures and societies through metadata-based approaches.
Empowering Future Scholars: Supporting PhD students’ training needs – WG Community Engagement
In the previous funding cycle, the Community Engagement Working Group undertook a comprehensive survey to investigate the training needs of PhD students (link to the report). With this coming project, the findings of this study will be put into practice to develop and deliver training materials, showcase best practices and enrich existing catalogues of tools and workflows.
The Community Engagement Working Group is going to host one in-person and three online workshops to help PhD students from different humanities disciplines without much prior experience get started with DH methods. The online workshops are based on the requirements and expertise of PhD students that were addressed in the workshop in 2023: They will offer beginner-friendly workshops on 1) text analysis tools, 2) visualization methods and 3) Python for Humanists.
Furthermore, previous research has shown that PhD students rate in-person workshops as very helpful for learning about specific tools provided through DARIAH. At the same time, general levels of awareness about DARIAH services are low amongst PhD students and no selection of training materials specifically designed for PhD students are available.
Therefore, the WG will host another in-person workshop for joint evaluation of existing training material (e.g. Textgrid and Topic Explorer). This will help to develop an even more complete picture of the training needs of researchers in this phase of their career. The developed education and training materials will increase intercommunity collaboration and provide a valuable resource for emerging scholars. Through the integration of the developed material and workflows with the SSH marketplace, the project will be an addition to existing tools and services.
Emerging job profiles for DH Graduates: Bridging gaps between Industry & Education – WG Community Engagement + DH Course Registry
The provision of postgraduate programmes in (digital) humanities has grown considerably in the past two decades. However, it remains unclear to what extent these programmes prepare graduates to become digital humanists (either in academia, public sector) or take on more data-oriented jobs in the industry.
This project has been motivated by the interviews conducted with Spanish employers in 2021(reported in Humanidades Digitales y el futuro del empleo) and it builds on further investigations conducted by the applicants with DH Programme Coordinators over the course of 2023. This project will be conducting a more thorough pilot study to find the means to bridge the skills gaps between DH student training and the needs of different job market sectors.
The main outcomes of the project will consist of a white paper outlining the needs of the DH programme coordinators, overview of emerging job profiles for DH graduates, and a self-reflective ‘quiz’ for DH graduates to determine key industry areas that may best match their skills and interests.
These outputs will be informed by a survey and interviews phase in the first year of the project, and workshops at the DARIAH & CLARIN annual events. The survey will take a two-pronged approach, garnering responses from both educators in Digital Humanities, and from different job sectors where DH graduates may find employment. The workshops will build on these survey responses, bringing together the voices of DH masters course conveners, prospective employers, and graduates themselves.
This project is a joint effort between the DH Course Registry and the Community Engagement Working Groups to best exploit the skillsets and expertise within each. The DH Course Registry has an oversight of the current provision of DH postgraduate programmes across the entire DARIAH and CLARIN community, with an established audience of prospective students. The Community Engagement Working Group is well positioned to conduct outreach to industry members.
Creating, Managing and Archiving Textual Corpora in Under-resourced Languages – WG Research Data Management + WG Multilingual DH
Inspired by the DARIAH-CAMPUS “Introduction to Corpus-Based Lexicographic Practice” (Tiberius et al. 2022), this project will organise a 3-day hybrid workshop combining theoretical discussions and practical training in corpora building. The workshop will aim to generate a workflow in the SSH Open Marketplace, promoting and enabling the sharing of methodologies and best practices when compiling FAIR and machine-readable corpora in a multilingual context or with languages beyond English.
Having well-prepared corpora constitutes the basis of digital text analysis; however, most languages beyond English and particularly non-Latin scripts, are significantly underrepresented in this regard. Thanks to trainers like Dr. Jonas Müller-Laackman, arabist and former coordinator of the research project “Closing the Gap in Non-Latin Script Data”, and Merve Tekgürler, PhD candidate working on Ottoman Turkish, one highlight will be working with the Arabic script. A second focus will be on multilingualism and data challenges in the linguistics domain, exploring how researchers preparing non-English corpora can better cite and attribute sources which may be sensitive, particularly where language relates to historically marginalised cultures.
To create a fully open-science workflow, the workshop will promote the use of open-source tools for:
- editing texts, like Atom;
- transcribing written sources, like Tropy;
- exploring and finding corpora from a meta-catalogue like Closing the Gap;
- managing and publishing thesauri, like VocBench, Vocabs and SKOS Play;
- planning and documenting corpora creation and management via RDMO and DMPonline;
- publishing, sharing and archiving FAIR and CARE-compliant corpora as datasets via Zenodo and DARIAH-DE Publikator.
The subsequently created workflow aims to provide much-needed guidelines towards the diversification of existing digitised corpora.
THEATRALIA / Performing Arts: Navigating through Digital Knowledge Models – WG Theatralia
The proposed project builds upon the previous work done by the Theatralia Working Group, funded by the DARIAH-EU from 2021 to 2023, under the project title “Performing Arts: Transitioning to the Digital Age.” This earlier project laid the groundwork for advancing performing arts research in the digital realm and identified critical areas for exploration in this epistemological shift.
The Theatralia WG highlighted the need for a standardized digital language to describe and represent the field of performing arts, addressing issues with existing schemas like the Dublin Core set. The project aims to enhance knowledge exchange and data sharing while adding scientific value to performing arts research. By providing a common computerized language, the project will improve access to collections and archives maintained by performing arts and heritage institutions.
This funding scheme will run from January 2024 until May 2025. The funded projects will be invited to present their project results during the DARIAH Annual Event 2025. Keep an eye on our news section as we will be posting more information on their development.
