DYAS: The Greek Research Infrastructure Network for the Humanities

DYAS: The Greek Research Infrastructure Network for the Humanities

Panos Constantopoulos Costis Dallas

Athens University of Economics and Business & Athena Research Centre

Toronto University & Panteion University & Athena Research Centre

Presenter: Dimitris Gavrilis CHNT 18 , Vienna, November 2013

New realities for arts and humanities scholarship

• Increasing multi-disciplinarity

• International, distributed communities of knowledge

• Rise of digital scholarship

The promise of a virtually unified digital space

• “Primary” digital collections resulting from large-scale digitisation

• Distributed, heterogeneous information assets on the Web

• Digital communication for scholarship

Yet…

• Technical, intellectual and social barriers

• Continuing dependence of scholarly research on paper- and collections-bound primary resources

Digital information in the arts and humanities

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Digital information in the arts and humanities: levels of understanding

Object level

• Dealing with tangible and intangible cultural objects

• How are such objects constituted from an information viewpoint?

Process level

• Dealing with information use

• How are arts and humanities information objects created, accessed, used, modified?

Discourse level

• Dealing with knowledge system and practices

• How does the information system function, at the level of pragmatics, as a knowledge system?

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Some current issues

• Accumulation of vast amounts of disaggregated, digitised and born- digital information, some not from traditional collections

• Digital cultural assets not just about ‘primary’ cultural objects (texts, artefacts, art works, etc.), but increasingly about object histories, interpretations, narratives

• Significant loss of context and interpretation in the course of moving from paper-bound to digital information practices

• Emergence of diversified interpretive communities, with different frames of reference, goals and information affordances

• Multi- and inter-disciplinary research, multilingual audiences, the Internet generation, …

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A virtually unified digital space

• Due to unified access to autonomous digital collections

• Value multiplier

• Pre-condition: syntactic and semantic interoperability

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Interplay between scholarly and information lifecycles

Source: UC Curation Center / California Digital Library, Merritt: An Emergent Micro-services Approach to

Digital Curation Infrastructure, Rev. 0.6 – 2010-03-25

Actors in information processes

After D. Bearman & J. Trant, http://www.archimuse.com/papers/ukoln98paper/index.html

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Digital resources

Kinds of digital resources:

Data, primary and secondary

Models

• Guides for interpreting and associating data

Terminology

For all digital resources one should ensure:

quality

preservation

usability

digital curation

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Digital curation

A set of activities aimed at:

• producing good quality, trusted digital assets;

• organization and archiving;

• preserving the assets, as well as their conceptual foundation and context;

• enabling the generation of new knowledge from those assets; and

• enabling access and use

Interdisciplinary

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appraisal

context management

ingestion knowledge

enhancement

classification

indexing

cataloguing

presentation

publication

dissemination

preservation repository management

authority management

goal and usage models

domain models

usage experiences

digital resources lifecycle management

digital curation

Digital curation process model (DCU)

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Major challenges

Support multiple interpretation and context

• Interpretive communities: by language, cultural identity, scientific tradition, …

• Alternative interpretations: authoritative interpretation challenged

Evolving semantics:

• Research induces re-interpretation

• Collections are conceptually re-organized and symbolic representations renewed

Support scholarly discourse and knowledge process

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DARIAH

The grand vision for DARIAH is to facilitate long-term preservation of and access to arts and humanities research data.

Scholars can use DARIAH to:

• find and use a wide range of digital content from across Europe

• find and use tools that aid data interpretation

• participate in experimentation and innovation with other scholars from across multiple domains

• seek advice, and exchange ideas and knowledge on all aspects of digital scholarship

• ensure that they work to accepted standards and best practices

• ensure the long-term preservation of data

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DARIAH Virtual Competency Centres

VCC1 : e-Infrastructure

VCC2 : Research & Education Liaison

VCC3 : Scholarly Content Management

VCC4 : Advocacy, Impact & Outreach

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The Greek National Digital Infrastructure for the Humanities – DYAS / DARIAH-GR

Construction phase: 2013-2015 Objective To support the Greek communities of humanities researchers in advancing

their work using ICT and in exchanging knowledge and working practices; to broaden the scope of and opportunities for research through the

interconnection of various distributed digital resources; to promote the access, use, creation and long-term preservation of research

data, both primary and secondary, in digital form. DYAS also operates as DARIAH-GR , i.e. the Greek component of DARIAH, the

European Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities.

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Specific goals Offer a mechanism for sharing digital resources developed by the research community

and for facilitating the development of those resources.

Support the creation of mechanisms and systems for the trusted management of research data.

Ensure the creation of a dynamic unified information space for the humanities through the interoperability of data and systems.

Spread the use of open tools for research and collaboration.

Contribute to the spreading of knowledge and skills for the effective use of digital resources and ICT in the humanities.

Contribute to the development and adoption of mechanisms and systems for rights management.

Explore and promote ways for social exploitation of the digital resources of the humanities.

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C

ura

tion s

erv

ices

DYAS architecture

Computational services (cloud)

Repository services

Preservation services

Inte

ropera

bili

ty s

erv

ices

Resource sharing services

DARIAH services

Digital Humanities Observatory

Portal Resource development services & guidelines

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Resource sharing services

Data source and collections registry

Metadata registry

Ontology and terminology registry

Software services registry

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Resource development services and guidelines

Data collections development

Metadata development

Terminology development

Standards and best practices

Rights management

Training

Content management

• Guidelines for content management, repository development, and long-term preservation

• Systems for small users

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DARIAH services

Coordination with the activities of DARIAH-EU

Accessing DARIAH services

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Digital Humanities Observatory

Activities • Continuous monitoring and recording of the advances in the field of Digital

Humanities • Qualitative and quantitative analyses • Focus groups • Dissemination actions

DYAS consortium

Academy of Athens, co-ordinator

Athena Research Centre

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Athens School of Fine Arts

Institute for Communication and Computer Systems, National Technical University of Athens

Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas

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DYAS organization scheme

DYAS is designed as a distributed infrastructure with members at distinct levels of involvement and procedures for admitting new members. The levels of involvement are reflected in the hierarchy of roles:

Members:

• Management nodes

provide the services of the infrastructure and set the specifications for digital resources

currently, the Academy of Athens and Athena Research Centre

• Curators

responsible for specific collections and added-value repositories

• Affiliates

provide selected metadata for ingestion by the management nodes

External users:

• subscribe to specific services of the network, thus widely offering the benefits of DYAS and DARIAH services to researchers, educators and collection managers.

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Infrastructures

Best practice networks

DYAS links

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CARARE

DARIAH - EU

DYAS /

DARIAH - GR

ARIADNE

EHRI

3D-ICONS Europeana Cloud

CLARIN- GR

Lo Cloud

Conclusion : A digital infrastructure for scholarship

Central for scholarly research

Scholarly processes grounded on the needs of specific epistemic communities, e.g. in art history, or archaeology

Integration of contextual information on form, function, provenance and cultural-historical interpretation through event-centric representation methodologies

Accounting for domain knowledge in specific disciplinary domains

Accounting for needs of dynamic evolution of knowledge through social semantics, annotation, versioning etc.

Attention to requirements for current and emerging methodologies in humanistic research

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The development of the DYAS infrastructure is funded by the National Strategic Development Framework (ΕΣΠΑ) 2007-2013 through the

projects DARIAH-ATTIKH and DARIAH-ΕΠΑΕ.

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