The Centre for Data, Culture & Society is delighted to announce a new Cooperating Partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU).
DARIAH is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) whose mission is to empower research communities with digital methods to create, connect and share knowledge about culture and society. In addition to having 22 Member states, DARIAH has also established a network of cooperating partners in non-member countries.
Edward Gray, DARIAH’s Officer for National Coordination, said:
“We are very excited to welcome Edinburgh to DARIAH. Edinburgh has a proven track record in digital humanities, and the Centre for Data, Culture & Society supports work at the forefront of issues relevant to society, such as responsible AI and how digital scholars can understand the climatic impact of their research.”
Building capacity in the Digital Humanities
The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) aims to enhance and support digitally-enabled research and teaching across the arts and humanities. DARIAH is a network of people, expertise, information, knowledge, content, methods, tools and technologies from its member countries. It develops, maintains and operates an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices and sustains researchers in using them to build, analyse and interpret digital resources. By working with communities of practice, DARIAH brings together individual state-of-the-art digital arts and humanities activities and scales their results to a European level. It preserves, provides access to and disseminates research that stems from these collaborations and ensures that best practices, methodological and technical standards are followed.
The Centre for Data, Culture & Society, a specialist hub within Edinburgh Futures Institute empowers researchers in the arts and humanities to engage with data-rich and digital methods. The Centre offers training on computational research methods, prototyping, seed funding and technical guidance, as well as hosting a wide range of research events. The Centre also plays a role in supporting national and international projects and initiatives such as hosting TEI-by-Example, collaboratively leading the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition, a community interest group aligned with the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association, and providing training for the UK’s Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering community in collaboration with Kings College London, Cambridge University and the Turing Institute.
The Centre’s Director, Dr Lisa Otty, who will act as scientific co-ordinator for the partnership comments:
“Building capacity for digital humanities research is a core element of our mission, which aligns perfectly with DARIAH membership. We’re excited about the collaborative opportunities that joining DARIAH will open up, and at the prospect of working more closely with other digital research hubs and centres of expertise across the UK and Europe. With our focus on training and skills development, we also look forward to contributing to DARIAH-Campus and to a range of related working groups and initiatives in the coming years, and would welcome contact from other DARIAH members with shared interests.”
Founding Director of CDCS, and current Director of Creative Informatics, Professor Melissa Terras said:
“Success in the data-led approaches to the arts and humanities depends on developing communities, best practice approaches, and shared infrastructure. We are delighted to become members of DARIAH, formally connecting with many of our valued colleagues across Europe in the digital research hub space. We hope the large-scale data innovation projects currently underway at Edinburgh will also contribute expertise to this joint endeavour.”
The University of Edinburgh is delighted to be joining DARIAH and becoming part of the growing network of UK cooperative partners. Building on existing networks and relationships, the Centre for Data, Culture and Society will work in close collaboration with these partners to strengthen the integration of the UK’s digital humanities community within the DARIAH community.
“Beyond welcoming a world-class institution, it is really important for us to obtain a diverse geographic spread amongst institutions in the United Kingdom as we look to build a DARIAH-UK consortium,” said Gray.
