DARIAH in a Nutshell
DARIAH ERIC: A research infrastructure that enhances and supports digitally enabled research and teaching across the Arts and Humanities.
DARIAH is the European Digital Research Infrastructure for the arts and humanities. DARIAH was established as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in August 2014. Since then, DARIAH has been enhancing and supporting digitally enabled research and teaching across the arts and humanities by offering training, data, tools and services.
DARIAH is a distributed infrastructure connecting people, expertise, information, knowledge, content, methods, tools and technologies. Today, DARIAH brings together 24 member countries and an important number of cooperating partners comprised of research institutions and universities in eight non-member countries in Europe and beyond. DARIAH develops, maintains and operates an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices and sustains researchers in using them to build, analyse and interpret digital resources.
Working closely with communities of practice, DARIAH connects leading digital arts and humanities initiatives and scales their impact across Europe. We preserve, share, and promote the research emerging from these collaborations while fostering the adoption of best practices and common methodological and technical standards.
Mission and Vision
Our mission
DARIAH’s mission is to empower research communities to use digital methods to create, connect, and share knowledge about culture and society.
We develop infrastructure that supports researchers across the diverse arts and humanities community in building, analysing, and interpreting digital and hybrid resources.
Through its network of people, expertise, content, methods, and tools, DARIAH promotes the sustainable development of digitally enabled research and teaching.
Our activities focus on ensuring that humanities researchers can:
critically assess the impact of technology on their work;
access the data, tools, services, knowledge, and networks they need through seamless and context-rich digital and human environments; and
produce high-quality digital scholarship that is reusable, visible, and sustainable.
Our vision
Our vision is that the arts and humanities are at the centre of an evolving, technology-driven knowledge society.
DARIAH exists to support excellent research in the arts and humanities. The challenges and opportunities arising from the intersection of long-established research methods and technological innovation lie at the heart of DARIAH’s strategy.
History of DARIAH
DARIAH began its journey towards becoming a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in January 2006, when representatives from four European institutions active in the digital humanities joined forces to support their research communities. Their shared goal was to create a sustainable infrastructure for the arts and humanities with a strong voice at the European level.
That same year, DARIAH was included in the first roadmap published by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). It subsequently became a European project through funding from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for its preparatory phase, Preparing DARIAH (2008–2011).
In February 2011, DARIAH entered a transition phase that built on this preparatory work and laid the foundations for its establishment as a permanent research infrastructure.
In August 2014, the European Commission established DARIAH as an ERIC with 15 founding members: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Serbia.
DARIAH was recognised as an ESFRI Landmark in the 2016 roadmap, acknowledging that it had reached the implementation phase and had become a pan-European hub of scientific excellence.
Today, DARIAH brings together 24 member countries and several cooperating partners from eight non-member countries.
2006: DARIAH at the ESFRI Roadmap
2008-2011: Preparatory phase – Project Preparing DARIAH
2011-2013: Transition phase
August 2014: DARIAH is established as an ERIC
August 2014-August 2019: Implementation phase of DARIAH ERIC
Since September 2019: Operational phase of DARIAH ERIC