Category Archives: oa.dariah

 Reflections on research assessment #1: Samuel Moore on ”Research assessment in the university without condition” – DARIAH Open

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Is social sciences and humanities scholarship well served by the current and nascent academic reward mechanisms? And if not, where our options and power lie to change this for the better? Recognized as crucial for the future well-being and flourishing of humanistic scholarship, such questions have been repeatedly raised and discussed on DARIAH Open both in opinion pieces, in declaring commitments or policy reflections. In support of the ongoing European research assessment reform, we are extending this ongoing thread of discussion and invite expert perspectives from the social sciences and humanities fields to further explore the issues and opportunities our research domain face in the brave new world of research assessment. We hope in this way to spark a discussion in the arts and humanities on what we can hope to gain, and what opportunities we have to move forward.

In the first post of the series, Dr. Samuel Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist at Cambridge University Library, and Research Associate at Homerton College, Cambridge invites us to take a step back from the actual performance indicators and revisit the research assessment discourse in the contrasting lights of the realities of the academic job market versus the unconditionality imperative of humanistic scholarship. His thoughts deeply resonate with the #IchBinHanna movement and other initiatives who, above any other kinds of reforms, call for improving the labor conditions in academia.

 

Call for projects – DARIAH Theme 2022: Workflows | DARIAH

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Arts and humanities researchers tend to be multitasking heroes and versatility buffs. This is probably not a matter of choice. Whether we work on digital editions of literary works, analyze historical events by creating and exploiting corpora of digitized newspapers, or model archaeological sites in 3D, our research processes are often quite complex: they involve multiple steps, different tools and a combination of methods. We are no strangers to heterogeneous datasets, modular system architectures, metadata crosswalks and software pipelines. And we are increasingly aware of the importance of data sharing and the notion of reproducible research in the age of Open Science. A scholarly process may start with identifying and collecting data and end with the publication of some research outputs, but the very beginning and the very end never tell the full story of the research data lifecycle.  

In this year’s DARIAH Theme Call, we are looking for proposals and projects that will explore, assess, analyze and embody the challenges of designing, implementing, documenting and sharing digitally-enabled workflows in the context of arts and humanities research from a technical, methodological, infrastructural and conceptual point of view.  

What is the state of the art in research workflows in the digital arts and humanities? What are we doing well, and what should we do better? How can we evaluate the appropriateness of a workflow or assess its efficiency? What makes a workflow innovative? What does it mean for a workflow to be truly reproducible? Are there modeling or standardization frameworks that make this job easier? What kind of documentation is necessary and at what level of granularity? What are the hidden costs of our workflows? What should DARIAH do – in addition to treating workflows as a particular content type on the SSH Open Marketplace – to help researchers develop, deploy and disseminate better workflows?

 

What does Open Science mean for disciplines where pen and paper are still the main working methods? | Impact of Social Sciences

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Open Science and its wider application to the social sciences and humanities, is predicated on the idea that research can be reproduced and shared across digital platforms, but to what extent do researchers actually use digital tools a part of their work? Commenting on a recent study into the workflows of social scientists and humanities researchers, Deirdre Watchorn argues open science policies should adopt more nuanced approach to these different kinds of research.

Bringing arts and humanities perspectives to the redefinition of ”what counts” in research(er) evaluation | DARIAH Open

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by Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra

Research assessment (i.e. decisions on allocation of research funds, academic career advancement, and the hiring of staff) has been recognized as the Achilles heel of firmly grounding Open Science practices in research realities for a long while now. In academia scholars are still facing conflicting injunctions and have to walk on both paved and unpaved paths while advocacy and research policy efforts repeatedly point out enormous complexities, systemic impediments and failed attempts in upscaling thoughtful, alternative proxies that could replace the the current harmful system dominated by publisher prestige. 

As an example of the many voices urging and supporting this change, in DARIAH’s response to the the stakeholder consultation on the  Future of scholarly publishing and scholarly communication  European Commission report in 2019, we argue that the vicious circle  in which research evaluation is lingering can only be broken through a set of urgent and harmonized actions and call for a new social contract between  on the European level involving funders, research performing institutions and their ministries, university networks, disciplinary communities and research infrastructure providers (including publishers).

Reimagining the past and future of academic books: interview with Janneke Adema, author of Living Books | DARIAH Open

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At DARIAH, recognizing and even celebrating the complexities of humanistic and artistic research practices has always been a heart of our interest. This includes connecting DARIAHns with fair Open Access players and showcasing, discussing innovations that are pushing the boundaries of what we can conceive as the scholarly monograph in the 21st century. The conversation below with Janneke Adema, author of Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities had started out as a twitter exchange that later we continued in the margins of the book. In this post, you can read its remediated, recontextualized version where the questions are not directly anchored in the introduction chapter of the book. We discuss how blogging helped her to rethink book publishing (of her own and of others); the fetishization of print books and how it relates to Zoom background, dynamic forms of publishing and many more. Enjoy!

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DARIAH Virtual Annual Event 2021: Interfaces. Sept 07-09, 2021 | Sciencesconf.org

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Digital interfaces enable communication between humans and machines, especially computers, by translating signals and providing capacity for the interpretation of information. They facilitate work in digital environments and can take on many different forms, ranging from command line interfaces (CLI) to 2D graphical user interfaces (GUI) or immersive 3D (Augmented/Virtual/Mixed Reality) approaches. 

Modern interfaces as access points to information have been discussed at least since the 1960s, with Marshall McLuhan as one of the first to focus on them. Practitioners and designers after him have developed his most famous sentence “the medium is the message” into “the interface is the message”. The first GUI was introduced by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), while Timothy E. Johnson used an input device to interact with a computer in 1963. Today, we are seeing new approaches, such as Mitchell Whitelaw’s “generous interfaces” that offer more diverse, more visual, more intuitive access to digital cultural collections. Digital platforms enable online interfaces to virtual worlds, federated content and artworks, creating new modalities, reaching new audiences, as well as building communities that may never have interacted before.

It is the aim of this year’s DARIAH Annual Event to discuss the role that interfaces play in the arts and humanities. To what extent do they enable new research, and at the same time, do they also limit research possibilities? How is content/information changed while being transmitted by interfaces? How do interfaces reframe the roles of those using them, their roles as producer and/or consumer of interfaces?

Recording: boOkmarks session with Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra about a DARIAH bursary for ERCs (23.03.2021) @ YouTube

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The OABN’s boOkmArks session with Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra talking about the newly-established DARIAH bursary for OA monographs for Early Career Researchers in Digital Humanities.

Read the blog post: https://openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons.org/2021/03/17/adding-a-digital-humanities-bit-to-the-oa-book-funding-landscape-dariah-is-launching-an-annual-oa-monograph-bursary-for-early-career-researchers-in-digital-humanities/

What is in the EOSC for Arts and Humanities researchers? | DARIAH Open

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by Erzsébet Tóth Czifra and Laure Barbot

EOSC (staying for the European Open Science Cloud) is a big acronym, representing the bold vision of enabling all European researchers to deposit, access and analyze scholarly resources beyond borders and disciplines. Over the past years, it has become a central component of European science policy and, since its launch in October 2018, a reality as an infrastructure too. Still, due to the scale, the complexity and the multiple dimensions of the endeavor, it is not easy to gain an accurate overview and translate the offerings of the EOSC into one’s own institution or research setting. In this series of blog posts, we outline concrete ways in which scholarly and service provider communities around DARIAH can interact with the EOSC and the value it holds for them. We also summarize the many ways in which DARIAH already contributes to the EOSC. 

To kick start the series, in the first post we have a look at what the EOSC holds for researchers and, in particular,  Arts and Humanities researchers.

Save the date: DARIAH Open Access Book Bursary Q&A session

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In May 2021, DARIAH-EU launched an annual Open Access Monograph Bursary for the publication of one’s first monograph within the domain of Digital Humanities. This initiative aims to support early career researchers to openly disseminate their first monographs in book series relevant to their field, and thus pave pathways to open research culture for arts and humanities disciplines. The bursary will fund the Open Access publication of one monograph (or other long form of scholarship) per year. 

The call for the 2021 DARIAH Open Access Monograph Bursary is currently open. The deadline for applications is December 6, 2021.

Q&A session – Bring Your Questions

To support applicants and interested researchers, we will host a Q&A information session on the eligibility criteria for participation in the call on the 25th of June at 10:00-11:00 CEST. 

SSHOC WEBINAR: How to improve the quality of your repository? SSHOC and certification of repositories | DARIAH

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“Certification is a sign of trust that benefits a data repository in many ways. How can your repository achieve certification? The SSHOC webinar will focus on the certification of digital repositories and how your repository can apply for the CoreTrustSeal. The webinar will also touch upon how SSHOC can support repositories seeking certification.

CoreTrustSeal is a community-driven certification framework with over 80 past certifications. The certification consists of sixteen requirements for which applicants are asked to provide self-assessment statements along with relevant evidence. CoreTrustSeal certification is sufficiently stringent for data repositories within the social sciences and humanities but significantly less costly and labour-intensive than formal audit against ISO/DIN standards. Certification requirements for the CoreTrustSeal are also reviewed every three years in comparison with every five years for ISO/DIN standards. CoreTrustSeal is open to feedback and continuously considering the widest possible range of certification candidates….”

Bringing Scholarship Back to the Heart of Scholarly Communication

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“What are our chances of better aligning the paved and unpaved routes, or, in other words, what are our options to reduce the gap between established, ‘paved’ practices of scholarly communication and actual, evolving research practices? My thoughts are situated in the contexts of arts and humanities research, but similar phenomena are surely present in other disciplines as well….”

Bringing Scholarship Back to the Heart of Scholarly Communication

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“What are our chances of better aligning the paved and unpaved routes, or, in other words, what are our options to reduce the gap between established, ‘paved’ practices of scholarly communication and actual, evolving research practices? My thoughts are situated in the contexts of arts and humanities research, but similar phenomena are surely present in other disciplines as well….”

Open Access in the humanities made concrete: highlights from the ‘How to make the most of your publications in the humanities?’ workshop – DARIAH Open

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“With all things changing for the open in both research policies and practices, there is a growing demand for support enabling humanities scholars to get open innovation rooted in our everyday research practices. To this end, DARIAH and FOSTER Plus brought together humanities researchers from different fields and at different career stages and Open Science experts with domain-specific knowledge to spend a foggy winter day in Berlin and engage in dialogues about trends, innovations, and present-day challenges in opening up scholarly communication in the humanities….”

Leveraging Concepts in Open Access Publications

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Abstract : This paper addresses the integration of a Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) service within a group of open access (OA) publishing digital platforms and considers its potential impact on both research and scholarly publishing. The software powering this service, called entity-fishing, was initially developed by Inria in the context of the EU FP7 project CENDARI and provides automatic entity recognition and disambiguation using the Wikipedia and Wikidata data sets. The application is distributed with an open-source licence, and it has been deployed as a web service in DARIAH’s infrastructure hosted by the French HumaNum. In the paper, we focus on the specific issues related to its integration on five OA platforms specialized in the publication of scholarly monographs in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), as part of the work carried out within the EU H2020 project HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure). In the first section, we give a brief overview of the current status and evolution of OA publications, considering specifically the challenges that OA monographs are encountering. In the second part, we show how the HIRMEOS project aims to face these challenges by optimizing five OA digital platforms for the publication of monographs from the SSH and ensuring their interoperability. In sections three and four we give a comprehensive description of the entity-fishing service, focusing on its concrete applications in real use cases together with some further possible ideas on how to exploit the annotations generated. We show that entity-fishing annotations can improve both research and publishing process. In the last chapter, we briefly present further possible application scenarios that could be made available through infrastructural projects.