Researchers face numerous (and often contradictory) demands for making data publicly available and reusable as articulated in various research policy recommendations and funding requirements. At the same time, researchers struggle with a multiplicity of factors that hinder data sharing, including those of a legal, cultural, infrastructural, and managerial nature. Although there is increasing pressure from policy makers to make data openly available, in reality, only a small fraction of datasets are reused and very few scholarly publications include references to datasets (Borgman and Groth 2024). The FAIR guidelines have been developed to address this situation to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets. In effect, creating FAIR data is the overarching goal of research data management:
research data management is an explicit process covering the creation and stewardship of research materials to enable their use for as long as they retain value.
The DARIAH Working Group on Research Data Management (WG RDM) aims to support humanities researchers to address these challenges. Efficient data management practices ensure the accuracy and reliability of research findings and the long-term accessibility and usability of data. This is crucial for preserving research outputs and data for future generations so as to avoid losing valuable information. Begun in April 2020, its founding chairs were Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (at that time the DARIAH-EU Open Science Officer) and Marta Błaszczyńska (Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences – IBL PAN), who heard the call for more coordination in this fast-changing environment. At that time, many European countries, as well as many European institutions, were drafting new guidelines or policies on this topic (see for instance the seminal Turning FAIR Into Reality, issued by the European Commission in 2018).
Five years on, the expertise that the WG RDM offers is a domain-specific focus on data management practices for the humanities which we argue is a key to research practice in the digital age:
We […] sustain a dialogue with the DARIAH communities about research data management to strengthen our community practices and will showcase how different disciplinary communities can take advantage of open scholarly infrastructure and tools that are available for the DARIAH communities.
As with other DARIAH working groups, the WG is comprised of volunteers, hence it is important to stress the WG members’ generosity in so many collaborative undertakings.
The first project of the WG was in 2020, the year the WG was founded, the development of the bibliography ‘Data Management Best Practices in the Humanities’, available from Zotero. From the outset, the bibliography has been interdisciplinary, multilingual, policy-oriented and tool-based, mirroring the expertise in the WG. It is also updated by WG members. Another key deliverable of the WG was the publication DARIAH Pathfinder to Data Management Best Practices in the Humanities, written in 2019 by E. Tóth-Czifra, which embeds the WG’s rationale: Research Data Management is to be understood as the combination of open science, FAIR principles, high-quality data and metadata throughout the whole data lifecycle.
After having collaborated remotely for more than two and a half years, the WG gathered in June 2022 for the first time at the Warsaw Institute of Literary Research (IBL PAN) for a two-day hybrid writing sprint (see: https://dariahopen.hypotheses.org/1447), which was made possible by a grant from the DARIAH Working Groups Funding Scheme Call (2021-2023). Here the team drafted what became “Research Data Management for Arts and Humanities: Integrating Voices of the Community”. The report consists of three chapters:
EU policy on RDM as well as case studies on RDM policy in several European countries;
Biographies of the WG members, which showcase how dynamic and diverse RDM and its professionals are;
Problems with — and solutions for — humanities data: Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Authentication and Authorisation (AA), Personal Data Protection, Data Archiving and Multilingualism a.o.
After several iterations, the report was issued a year later in three different formats:
a static publication hosted by Zenodo, Europe’s biggest Open Research Repository, available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8059625.
a dynamic, navigable publication hosted by the University of Hamburg GitLab instance, accessible at https://gitlab-ce.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/uahh-digitale-dienste/rdm-for-arts-and-humanities/;
a contribution to the DARIAH-DE Working Papers, a collection managed by the Göttingen State and University Library at https://doi.org/10.47952/gro-publ-218.
Thanks to a second DARIAH Working Groups Funding Scheme grant (2023-2025), the topic of humanities data and multilingualism was further explored through a collaboration between the DARIAH Working Groups RDM and Multilingual DH. The project, ‘Creating, Managing and Archiving Textual Corpora in Under-resourced Languages’ began as a workshop at University of Hamburg in August 2024, and included, in addition to WG members, CLARIN ambassadors (see: https://www.clarin.eu/content/clarin-ambassadors-programme) and other scholars (see: https://dariahopen.hypotheses.org/2024). The outcome of the three-day hybrid workshop was the development of four workflows published in September 2024 on the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Marketplace (SSHOMP). The workflows describe the process of:
From an Open Science perspective, workflows stress the central position of corpora documentation as well as the structure of the metadata: both of which are key to the subsequent findability and interoperability of the resource. Such workshops where workflows are shared and formalised are precious as they allow researchers and institutions to collaborate in an international environment, and to give a greater visibility to their research, particularly in languages other than English. The workshop proceedings are to appear in the 2025 issue of Transformations: A DARIAH Journal.
The WG hugely benefited from these modest grants. On the one hand, they allowed multi-day face-to-face sessions that complemented the WG’s usual online meetings; on the other hand, they attracted new members to the WG, along with their skills and knowledge. This vibrant group is positioned to overcome future challenges of a changing research landscape by remaining welcoming, cohesive and proactive.
Five years after its foundation, the WG RDM continues to be, at least in the view of its co-chairs, a lively, albeit mostly virtual, place where early-career and renowned scholars, data stewards, digital humanists, and GLAM professionals meet in what is now the (only?) pan-European platform for sharing and discussing best practices in Research Data Management for the arts and humanities.
Everybody is welcome to join the WG by sending an email to wg-rdm@dariah.eu.
