Cooperating to Improve Research Capacity in Europe: DARIAH’s Work in Cooperative Contexts

What is the activity?

DARIAH cooperates systematically and strategically with a wide range of partner institutions with the aim of delivering significant added benefits for its users and stakeholders in terms of the provision of access to tools, knowledge transfer and opportunities.

What kind of impact does it have?

Our wide network of goal-driven and carefully-chosen partnerships allows DARIAH to improve and support organisational efficiency, build human capital, target the needs of specific communities and enhance sustainability of resources. It also promotes innovation and the development of novel, shared tools, services and policy responses.

Who benefits?

DARIAH’s research community, funders, staff and direct contributors; the community of research infrastructures and research policymakers.

Rationale for and Overview of the Activity

Cooperation is central to DARIAH’s conceptualisation of both optimally efficient and scientifically useful infrastructure. Wider integration produces, in the long run, greater strength and coverage, but this integration has its limits, as the specific needs of a given community cannot always be met through broad spectrum development. The spectrum of cooperative efforts DARIAH engages in is therefore multifaceted: at one end of this range, we engage in largely bilateral relationships with key organisations, in particular other ERICs, often reflecting the rich interweavings of infrastructures in the national consortia that feed into DARIAH-EU. We also maintain small and larger group cooperative efforts as well as field-wide community participation on key macro-level issues.

Description of the Impact

The following three examples illustrate DARIAH’s cooperative range:

1. Targeted Cooperation with CLARIN ERIC:

DARIAH’s long standing programme of activities in cooperation with CLARIN [1, 2] is overseen by regular bilateral meetings of the two organisations’ Directors. The two ERICs have launched specific cooperative ventures, from service launch and stabilisation to funding proposals, across fields of shared interest and activity, including training, communications and policy ventures. Between us, the most mature output of our focussed cooperation is the Digital Humanities Course Registry, originally an ad-hoc project of a DARIAH Working Group, now a well-maintained and active resource, funded and governed under a shared MOU between DARIAH and CLARIN.

The DH Course Registry website had 2424 visits from 78 countries in 2017 and 3607 visits from 90 countries in 2018. From January 2019 to May 2019 the website had 1911 visits from 103 countries.

I found your website, the DH COURSE REGISTRY, not very long ago, and I think it’s really a great job! I’m wondering if the manager or founder of this website would be interested in writing a report on digital humanities education based on these data? … Since there are more and more DH programs in China recent years, scholars and librarians in China would be very interested in this kind of message and report.
Peng Xiao, Associate Research Fellow in Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China speaking about the DH Course Registry

2. The DARIAH Marketplace: Building (cooperatively) at Home, Sharing Abroad:

The longstanding vision of a DARIAH Marketplace for tools, services and data is finally being realised in cooperation with the full group of SSH ERICs via the SSH Open Cloud project, in particular the ‘First Tier’ meetings of all SSH ERIC Directors (plus LIBER and the SME Trust IT). This initiative has also been an opportunity to address an international infrastructure gap through links with the legacy project Bamboo DiRT (University of Berkeley and Stanford University, US) and active project TAPoR (University of Alberta, CA). International connections are of particular interest in some ways, so we do explore them actively (as via our ‘DARIAH Beyond Europe’ meetings of 2018-2019), but where we maintain a relatively high bar regarding further cooperation, recognising that the costs to deliver and maintain such connections can be particularly high.

The DARIAH Beyond Europe event series created three rare and precious opportunities for deep, strategic engagement between DARIAH and our counterparts in the US and Australia.

First DARIAH Beyond Europe hosted at Stanford University

This workshop is a great opportunity to engage … Without an event like this we would be stuck on our own, devising our own modes and methods of sustainability in infrastructure.
Glen Worthey, Digital Humanities Librarian in the Stanford University Libraries

This event, and our collaboration with DARIAH, is really fundamental … it’s really an exchange about opening up new avenues of enquiry for research.
Joy Damoussi, President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities

3. Towards a Stronger RI Sector:

DARIAH contributed to the RITrain curriculum and training programme for research infrastructure managers, ensuring that the perspectives of non-science RIs were represented. It was also a founding signatory of the ERIC Forum in 2017. The RITrain Executive Masters in Management of Research Infrastructures has produced two cohorts of qualified graduates, including DARIAH’s own Secretary General. A textbook featuring the curriculum is currently in press with Springer. DARIAH is also one of the founding members of the ERIC Forum, of EASSH (the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities), and the EOSC Association, which will oversee the roll out phase of the ambitious European Open Science Cloud development.

To date DARIAH has featured in the curriculum of three cohorts of EMMRI students, and will be featured in the chapter on strategic planning in the forthcoming textbook.

[DARIAH’s] participation is always inspiring for all participants [in the EMMRI programme], and I would really be happy to have you on board again.
Eliabetta Marfiotti, University of Milan Biccocca, Lecturer, EMMRI Masters Programme speaking about the DARIAH’s contribution to RI Train

Evidence of the Impact

[1] The Digital Humanities Course Registry: https://dhcr.clarin-dariah.eu/

[2] Data Reuse Charter Poster: https://www.dariah.eu/activities/open-science/data-re-use/

[3] Data Reuse Charter Mission Statement: https://datacharter.hypotheses.org/77

[4] “Research Infrastructure Management: Governance, Strategy Development and Operations: Effective leadership and management for a new type of scientific organization.” Ed. Enrico Guarini, Markus Pasterk and Marialuisa Lavitrano. Springer ‘Management for Professionals; Series (Open Access). Forthcoming

[5] Press release (May 2017), Better Access to Digital Humanities Training: DARIAH and CLARIN Relaunched DH Course Registry https://www.clarin.eu/news/better-access-digital-humanities-training-dariah-and-clarin-relaunched-dh-course-registry

[6] Press Release (March 2017), LIBER and DARIAH-EU Signed Cooperation Agreement: “Advancing Digital Research Is a Joint Effort”https://www.dariah.eu/2017/03/30/liber-and-dariah-eu-signed-cooperation-agreement-advancing-digital-research-is-a-joint-effort/

[7] DARIAH ERIC Website, ‘Communications between ERICs’ https://www.dariah.eu/about/initiatives/communications-between-erics/

[8] RI Train. http://ritrain.eu/

[9] OPERAS https://operas.hypotheses.org/

[10] EOSC Association https://www.eosc.eu/

[11] ERIC Forum https://www.eric-forum.eu/

[12] SSHOC First Tier. Internal working documents and closed consultations only, available upon request.

[13] EASSH https://eassh.eu/

[14] E-RIHS DigiLab http://www.e-rihs.eu/access/digilab-2/

[15] Bamboo DiRT https://digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu/projects/dirt-digital-research-tools

[16] TaPoR http://tapor.ca/home

[17] DARIAH Beyond Europe blog https://dbe.hypotheses.org/

[18] SHAPE-ID https://www.shapeid.eu/

[19] Heritage Data Reuse Charter https://datacharter.hypotheses.org/

Contributors

Lead Author: Jennifer Edmond

Cite as

Edmond, jennifer. (2021). DARIAH Impact Case Study series: Cooperating to Improve Research Capacity in Europe. DARIAH's Work in Cooperative Contexts. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7311431