TaDiRAH – The Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities
What did we do?
In close exchange with the digital humanities (DH) research community, TaDiRAH was developed to describe and organise research activities in the field. Recently, this taxonomy of digital research activities was completely revised, visualised and formalised to improve scientific reuse, interlinking and interoperability across projects and disciplines.
Why did we do it?
The taxonomy responds to the need of DH to describe and define itself. TaDiRAH enables the linking of content and enriches it to make it more visible in the long term. At the same time, it brings together the multilingual DH community, contributing to reflecting and shaping DH terminology.
Who did we do it for?
The beneficiaries are primarily DH researchers who use the taxonomy to access DH resources and contributions or reflect upon DH on a disciplinary level seeking a cross-disciplinary understanding.
Genesis of TaDiRAH
TaDiRAH started as a transatlantic cooperation that dates back to 2014*, including DARIAH, as well as Digital Research Tools (DiRT), DHCommons (now TaPoR) as well as the Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH). The institutions involved had the common goal of developing a taxonomy that would allow systematic description and categorisation of DH content in order to enrich resources and render them more visible. DARIAH has continued to accompany the development of the non-funded initiative ever since and has become its institutional backbone.
TaDiRAH is usually pronounced "ta-DEE-ra" and stands for Taxonomy of Digital Research Tools in the Humanities. The name of the taxonomy also refers to the initiators, who are alluded to here as partial anagrams.
*For a list of TaDiRAH publications visit https://tadirah.info/pages/Publications.html
Description of the Impact
The taxonomy has become well established, as can be seen from the fact that it has now been widely translated by researchers and research groups looking to promote its adoption. Although TaDiRAH was initially conceived in English, further languages, e.g. German, Spanish, Portuguese and Serbian, were quickly added. Italian and Japanese versions have recently been added [1,2]. TaDiRAH is now available in a total of 8 languages.
This multilingualism makes it possible to better interlink international DH research and to integrate research in languages other than English into the research discourse.
Since its original release in 2015 TaDiRAH has been used in a variety of contexts to categorise bibliographic data (DARIAH Zotero bibliography “Doing Digital Humanities”), research projects (in addition to DHCommons also in AGATE, the European Science Academies Gateway for the Humanities and Social Sciences), pedagogical resources (Digital Humanities Course Registry), conference abstracts [3,4,5], research tools (TAPoR Text Analysis Portal for Research), and contributions to modelling.
The taxonomy has also become a popular tool among scholars and researchers. For example, Swantje Dogunke claims to be “a big fan of the taxonomy” and counts it among the useful things when it comes to modelling research processes [6,7]. Silvia Gutiérrez from The College of Mexico tells us that “the TaDIRAH taxonomy proved to be a helpful common vocabulary for research processes” [8] and stresses its unifying qualities when she confirms that “[e]xplanations are understandable for computer scientists, DHers & humanities scholars” [9]. The community also uses TaDiRAH in workshops [10] or when presenting projects for third-party funding [11]. The taxonomy was also used to conduct various surveys [12,13] and has even been employed in a dissertation.
Due to the interdisciplinary awareness of the model, TaDiRAH is currently being used among others as part of several NFDI consortia like Text+. In NFDI4Culture it is used to develop criteria for sustainable and interoperable software aiming to develop a certification process as well as part of the recommendations of the “Consortium 3D for Humanities”. Furthermore, the use of TaDiRAH is also evaluated within the framework of BERD@NFDI.
It is thanks to DARIAH’s initiative that the taxonomy has recently been taken to a new level. The harmonisation of DARIAH-DE and CLARIN-D and the integration of various tools to the Language Resource Switchboard (LRS) required a more formalised and standardised version of the taxonomy to be developed. The redesign included a transformation into a standardised, machine readable version (achieved with SKOS). This ‘skosification’ was acknowledged as a ‘huge achievement’ on Twitter [14] and enables listing TaDiRAH on the SSH Open Marketplace [15,16] and the European Language Grid (ELG). The redesign also facilitated release of the taxonomy under a CC0 licence within the Vocabs service at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and an alignment with Wikidata that facilitates the suggestion, definition, discussion and translation of further terms. Since this work was completed in 2020, the taxonomy has been accessed well over 1000 times.
We can only expect the impact of TaDiRAH to continue to expand. TaDiRAH is currently being used to develop a Skills & Capability Framework identifying the roles, required key qualifications and levels of experience along DH research activities. The resulting matrix will be able to facilitate citizen scientists to participate and actively contribute to scientific research in DH, determine qualification gaps along the DH role spectrum and create learning pathways and opportunities.
Evidence of the Impact
[1] Tweet on the Portuguese version of TaDiRAH following its Spanish translation, Gimena del Rio, https://twitter.com/gimenadelr/status/1279865628552200192
[2] The existing language versions are implemented to varying degrees in Vocabs: https://vocabs.dariah.eu/tadirah/
[3-5] German Digital Humanities Conference (DHd) uses TaDiRAH to classify its conference abstracts, see i.e. Patrick Sahle (February 2018), “Einreichungen zur DHd 2018”, DHd-Blog, retrieved from https://dhd-blog.org/?p=9001; Armin Hoenen (March 2019), “Einreichungen zur DHd 2019 – II”, DHd-Blog, retrieved from https://dhd-blog.org/?p=11418, and https://vdhd2021.hypotheses.org/137
[6-7] Swantje Dogunke on Twitter (@swagunke): https://twitter.com/swagunke/status/1326111330047299584 and https://twitter.com/swagunke/status/1400368944838582273
[8] Silvia Gutiérrez on Twitter: https://twitter.com/espejolento/status/1381722397636628481
[9] Silvia Gutiérrez on Twitter: https://twitter.com/espejolento/status/1501913689519280128
[10] Annika Rockenberger from the University of Oslo Library on Twitter https://twitter.com/ARockenberger/status/1326100771507728384
[11] Georg Hohmann on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GeorgHohmann/status/1235204160368279555
[12] “The LIBER survey uses the TaDiRAH research taxonomy of digital research [activities]”: Wilms, L. (2021). Digital Humanities in European Research Libraries: Beyond Offering Digital Collections. LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries, 31(1),1–23. https://liberquarterly.eu/article/view/10884
[13] Chris Alen Susa, Sarah Hackney and Phillip Cunningham (2015). A Survey of Digital Humanities Curricula at the Present Time. http://chrisalensula.org/project/a-survey-of-digital-humanities-programs/
[14] Twitter user @FrueheNeuzeit: https://twitter.com/FrueheNeuzeit/status/1311003148388044801
[15, 16] Matej Ďurčo (2020), DARIAH: main requirements and best practices, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8_57eGlvew; Stefan Buddenbohm (May 2020), “What’s in it for you? How the SSH Open Marketplace will be populated with content”, DHd-Blog, https://dhd-blog.org/?p=13729
Contributors
Lead Authors: Luise Borek, Canan Hastik
Cite as
Borek, L., & Hastik, C. (2024). TaDiRAH – The Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13818437
