The General Assembly of the DARIAH ERIC recently voted unanimously to accept Sweden’s application for full membership in the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.
“With each new member, DARIAH grows stronger, more diverse, and becomes better equipped to serve the digital needs of arts and humanities scholars across Europe,” said Dr Toma Tasovac, President of the DARIAH Board of Directors. “We are delighted to welcome Sweden on board and very much look forward to the contributions and collaborations that will come from this partnership.”
The DARIAH-SE infrastructure
Sweden began developing a formal infrastructure for the Digital Humanities in 2022, with the funding of Huminfra by the Swedish Research Council (SRC). Huminfra is a national infrastructure supporting digital, experimental, quantitative, and qualitative research in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. It has now been funded by the SCR and the participating organisations through 2028.
Lisbeth Olsson, secretary general for research infrastructure at the Swedish Research Council, said: “The Swedish Research Council is delighted that Sweden is now a full member of DARIAH-EU. Swedish membership in DARIAH-EU will stimulate internationalisation and collaboration with European partners in the humanities through the mutual access to Swedish and European tools, data, and resources.”
Led by the Lund University Humanities Lab, Huminfra is a distributed infrastructure in the form of a consortium consisting of twelve nodes located at eleven universities and organisations at eight geographical sites. These nodes hold vital and complementary expertise in Digital Humanities and experimental humanities with a focus on e-scientific/digital materials, tools, and critical interpretative perspectives, but also experimental and quantitative approaches, the use of sensor-based data, and real-time analyses for the study of human behaviour. Visualisation and simulation is common to all nodes. There is additional expertise on speech and language technology, on library and archiving of digital collections and scholarly publishing, research data, metadata, and information processes.
The national DARIAH consortium for Sweden will be hosted by the existing Huminfra infrastructure but will be open to any other university, cultural heritage institution or entity once established, in order to promote further growth of collaborative research in the field.
National priorities
Marianne Gullberg, Director of Huminfra, said: “Huminfra is thrilled to host DARIAH-SE. This marks a vital step forward for Swedish scholarship in the humanities.” Koraljka Golub, new national coordinator of DARIAH-SE, also expressed excitement. “Joining DARIAH-EU opens up tremendous opportunities for researchers in our fields. It allows us to participate more fully in the European research community and to leverage cutting-edge digital resources”, she stressed.
Planned areas of collaboration between the DARIAH-SE consortium and DARIAH-EU include providing information from DARIAH to Huminfra’s web-based information platform (huminfra.se) and also to the Huminfra training module and the development of tools and outreach modules. Following the example of other member states, a survey of needs for new knowledge at Huminfra’s nodes will also be undertaken to identify further needs for training and tools developments.
DARIAH-SE will also make the Swedish resources available to DARIAH via the SSH Open Marketplace, the DARIAH Tools & Services Catalogue, and will disseminate information on current DARIAH-SE matters and events via the relevant Working Groups, the DARIAH newsletter and related channels.
Aiming to further strengthen collaborations nationally and regionally, Swe-CLARIN via Sprakbanken will work with DARIAH-SE, as a natural extension to the existing collaboration within Huminfra. Finally, collaborations with Danish and Finnish colleagues will be pursued as part of the Nordic Hub of DARIAH-EU.
By joining DARIAH-EU, Sweden aims to link and align Swedish resources to international resources and provide Swedish and international scholars with mutual access to resources, tools, and training, while increasing the capacity for international collaboration.
