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?